Monthly Archives: April 2011

Does your website really sell your products and services?

Posted on by thecolchesterseocompany

SEO, Social Networking, Training and Website marketing at The Colchester SEO Company, Essex

Perhaps you’ve read up a bit recently and had a good hard look at your website and found it wanting a bit on a number of fronts. Perhaps you’ve realised that it needs a little bit of “renovation”, a new look, some new content etc.  If that’s the case then you might want to consider getting a quote from a web designer. We can help with that at Colchester SEO.  We work with some wonderful designers and when you use us you know we’ll be giving a fair bit of priority to the SEO, so you won’t just get a fabulous new look website, but you’ll get one that hasn’t lost all it’s Google ranking because of the changes you’ve made.  Because this is exactly what can happen when you “redo” your website without paying attention to the SEO.

If your website isn’t working for you, a redesign might be a great idea!

If you are feeling flush, then you could consider redesigning your website entirely.  Like everything in life you pay for what you get and you’ll see a lot of adverts for cheap websites, but if you really want it to look good and certainly better than your old one, then do your research and get a good “designer” i.e. someone who designs website as opposed to someone who builds them. There is a difference and not so many so-called designers actually have graphic design qualifications.

Designers and developers can work together to create/redesign websites but they often forget the SEO

Designers frequently work in conjunction with developers to design and build websites. Developers might be able to build you a website but perhaps the design will not be quite as slick as you would like.   So look at other people’s websites, look at your competitors’ websites, there will usually be a credit for the designer so you can find the sort of thing you like this way.  Also, do some research on the internet just to get ideas and finally consider designers that friends or business colleagues recommend. Most web designers will have a portfolio of their work on their own website. It pays to do your research and in the early stages, ask about the impacts on SEO and how to remedy these, as there are impacts on redesigns particularly.

Renovation can be cost effective but has SEO implications

If you can’t afford a completely new website then perhaps consider a “renovation”, again you still need to do some research to find a good designer who can tidy up and improve what you already have. In some cases what you have might be impossible for a designer to “dress up” your webste and then your only option could be a new website.  The way your website looks is really important though and a good website not only looks attractive but functions in the way you want it to and therefore needs to be built well and optimised well.  It’s a balance really between three different factors, good website design, good web development and good SEO and you need to pay attention to all three with new websites and redesigns.

SEO is a very important factor if you redo or refurbish your website

So the next two points on my checklist are things you need to think about if you have now come to the conclusion that your website needs a new look.

3.  Look at the Search Engine Optimisation whilst you’re doing this.  If the designer doesn’t offer SEO services then find someone who can do the SEO in conjunction with the designer/developer.  There are now lots of designers who offer in-house SEO and this works well as everything is under one roof.  When you are getting a new website or renovating your old one, SEO should be considered at the planning stage, i.e. layout, keywords, tags etc, news updates and future social media planning if you are not already doing something there.  Think ahead, not just about what you want to do now.  Remember when you redo your website, you will lose a lot of the ranking it has built over the years, so you need to have a plan to make sure the impact is minimal before you go ahead and that means working on the SEO whilst the website is on the dev server and a programme of SEO boosting afterwards.  Otherwise you could lose all your traffic.

4. This is a good time to think about how your website is updated and who is going to do it.  One of the things that search engines don’t like is seemingly dormant sites, where nothing changes for months on end.  If you rely on someone else to update your site, you will often find that it doesn’t happen.  So y9ou need to think about a Content Management System for your website so you or a member of staff can update it in-house.  You can get this done as part of a package with an SEO provider or developer but you do need to think about it in advance otherwise you’re website becomes another static site that slips down the ranking.

If you require further information on Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design or Social Media contact  sue@thecolchesterseocompany.co.uk

Posted in SEO

If you’re not using social media marketing to get more value from your marketing, you’re missing out

Posted on by thecolchesterseocompany
 

Should you get involved with social media marketing? The answer is emphatically YES!

There are now more than 2.8 billion Facebook users worldwise, 2.29 billion YouTube users, nearly 1.4Social media marketing, SEO and Social Media at Colchester SEO Company billion people using instagrm and 1.6 billion people on WhatsApp.  I remember back in the 2000s when people thought that social media was something only young people would do and therefore probably wasn’t much use to modern business. Times have changed and advertising on social media is huge as the audience is enormous.  Most companies know they have to have some kind of social media presence these days.

Are you still relying on old marketing techniques like mail shots and cold calling?

Are you still relying on 80’s style sales techniques to give your business the edge on sales?  Still employing telesales people/agencies to find you leads.  In this day and age, people are fed-up and jaded with the old sales approaches.  Whether you’re selling to individuals or businesses when it comes to the “heavy sell,” we’ve all seen and heard it all and we don’t want to be sold to in that way and more to the point, we now know how to to say no!   I often hear from sales people how difficult it is to close a deal the way they used to and I think it’s because most of us are just resistant to that sort of approach.  There’s a new breed of customers out there and these days most of them are researching what they want on the internet via blogs, comparison sites, engaging with friends and other businesses on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube and they know what they are looking for and they can find it themselves.  So if you are not involved in Social Media you could be missing out on the customers because that’s where many of them are today.

Knowing which social media platform would suit your company is often difficult to know

The big snag is you may not know anything about it and perhaps if you do know a bit about it, do you have the time to put it into practice in a sustained and effective way.  It’s no good opening a twitter account, setting up your Facebook page half heartedly and then not having the time or the inclination to post anything, tweet anything or engage with anyone.

It takes effort and a bit of know-how to build a social media following

It takes time to build a following on social media platforms.  A lot of people set it up and then find it’s just too much hassle to continue because let’s face it, you have a business to run.  This is probably a worse approach than doing nothing at all.  Some businesses find they don’t have the technical knowledge to set up branded pages/accounts wither.

Get a joined up approach to social media marketing and your website

Finally you need a joined up approach to social media marketing i.e. have a goal, target customers in mind and a strategy.  You can link up your social media with various platforms like Hoote Suite (now quite expensive) and Meta and minimise the time you spend on it to grow your following via getting your blog out through social media and sharing interesting content.  Remember social media has a number of benefits, including brand awareness but also marketing your website and bringing customers to it.  Platforms like Instagram are particularly effective for ecommerce sites.

The downside is it does take time, some knowledge of how it all works and a strategy to get you up and running, which is where I come in.   If you really want to get a handle on this yourself then I can help you set things up and train you how to use it.  If you just want somebody else to set it up and run it all, I can do that to.  What you will get in either case is a strategy, a joined up approach to your social media marketing and regular reports on what’s happening, so that it’s working for you.   If you still find it confusing then I am happy to explain further but this is something you really should be getting involved with or you will start to feel that you’ve missed the boat.

If you require further information on social media please contact sue@thecolchesterseocompany.co.uk

Image courtesy of Alex Pace.