James Cope

My long promised guide to Business Website Success is on its way, thank you for being patient while I found the time to construct my thoughts!

I doubt that this is the most comprehensive of guides, I am only scratching the surface. Hopefully it will act as a quick guide for busy small business site owners to help them cover the main issues, and discover help resources and information points and tools to aid them along the way.

First two sections covering planning and keyword research have been written. The keyword research section will hopefully keep you busy enough until I have written the next section that will cover Design & Usability. Once written I hope to revisit the sections and bring in case studies so please do check back occasionally.

You can visit the guide to successful business websites here.

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If your’e signed up to as many newsletters as I am you will no doubt have received numerous predictions of what will be hot or not this year.  One good thing from getting a number of these is it appears there is a general consensus of opinion on what to look out for in 2010!

It’s good to see that some of these are old friends that businesses should have considered, if not been actively engaged in, a few on the other hand are going to have an effect and businesses may need to adapt their strategies to keep up.

In my view the following are going to be the most relevant for small businesses in the coming year.

Top 5 hot topics in Search Engine Optimisation

1. Personalised Search Results
2. Research
3. Real Time Searches
4. Local Results
5. Inbound Links

Top 5 web topics for this year

1. Video Video Video
2. Undertstanding Your Visitors
3. Increased Conversion
4. Twitter et al.
5. 80/20 Marketing

Not sure what I mean by some of those? Then read on I will cover them to some extent to give a rough outline of the issues, if you would like to discuss how these apply to your business as usual just give me a shout.

SEO
Personalisation – this has been the subject of a number of posts from SEO guru’s and is attracting quite a buzz. Google is introducing a mechanism that may skew the search results to bias the sites you usually visit, thus making it harder for site owners to appear in the number 1 spot. It is not all doom and gloom though, this might actually help site owners focus their sites and achieve results in their target market. Web Pro News cover this in more detail.

Reseach – Nothing new here, but many sites are still getting it wrong. Do your homework and choose the battles you can win. Focussing on the terms your visitors use, and trying to get to niche terms that will send your site targeted customers, this will help reduce bounce rate and increase enquire rates.

Real Time Searches – It’s no secret that the main search engines have been talking to social sites such as Twitter to try and integrate the content of tweets into its search results. You will probably have all seen various examples of the power of viral tweets, and Google continuing on its quest for better user experience is right to look at integrating these. Another article from the Web Pro News covers the possible twitter ranking factors.

Local Results – I’ve blogged a couple of times on this subject and whenever I talk to site owners about their market segmentation some sort of geographical element comes to the fore. Including these considerations in your optimisation and getting a Google local business entry are at the core of this strategy as more and more map results appear above optimised entries. Revisit my article on local search for more information.

Inbound Links – now widely accepted that its not all about tweaking your own site elements but relevancy of other sites linking to your site. This technique is often overlooked by small businesses, but still plays an important role in achieving success according to Google.

Web Topics

Video Video Video – the smart money this year is on video as an aid to increase web site conversion rates and attract visitors. We are seeing more video results blended into our search results and Google did not acquire youtube just for fun! With the increase in broadband speeds and visitors demanding a richer and better browsing experince, why not put your best sales person online and let them do the talking. From viral campaigns that have become famous such as Blendtech with their own youtube channel, to accountants using video testimonials I would suggest that there is opportunity for every business here.

Understanding Your Visitors – so important this appears in both SEO and Web sections! With personalisation, and the ongoing trend of businesses trying to covert more of the visitors that arrive to their sites, understanding who, what, and why has never been more important. I still see lots of sites that do not provide statistics, and those that do are rarely looked at. Using a free package such as Google Analytics to understand who your visitors are, what they are looking for and why they are staying on or leaving a site should be the goal of all site owners. If you can determine those factors you can tweak and adapt your content and structure to capture and engage your target audience. Here is just one article on bounce rate to give you an idea of what can be looked at.  Here is a video on how to set up Analytics.

Increased Conversion – this was a big topic last year in my meetings with businesses and featured as one of our Business Link seminar topics, with budgets still tight for this year coverting sites to lean mean lead/sales generation machines is set to still be high on site owners wish list. With video techniques and the data available from Analytics making up the foundations, I think sofware such as heatmaps and visitor tracking will start to be employed by more sites. The podcast on the topic is available in our seminar archive for those interested.

Twitter et al – Twitter grew and grew last year, and some users have new years resolutions to reduce the amount they tweet or give it up altogether. Love it or hate it, the social site seems to be firmly settled into web culture. As discussed in the SEO section with twitter results being integrated into standard search results I would suggest businesses need to consider social networks. My post on social media last year covered the basics, but guys I would suggest looking at this a fresh for 2010.

80/20 Marketing – back to basics with this one, often overlooked by site owners busy trying to bring more and more new traffic to their sites and working hard converting them, they forget the potential goldmine that is their existing customer base. Dust down those spreadsheets of orders, profile your customers and start looking at email marketing for repeat business. Many site owners who do this well, relax their focus and reduce spend on new business, keeping regular customers informed and happy is definitely a strategy not to be overlooked.

If you have any comments on the above, or opinions on how you think 2010 will shape up feel free to share. If you have any concerns or would like to talk to be as usual please do get in touch.

My top tip to compliment all of the above – attend the Business Link seminar on Great Website Copy – don’t miss it!

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Back in June I covered the importance of capturing location based traffic searches for businesses that operate geopgraphically. Local search is still important but with the appearance of Bing and predicted increase in search market share, I would suggest including this in your strategy.

The basics are the same, think about where your customers are and monitor your site statistics to determine which location areas you wish to optimise against and include those in the meta and site content. Just as you would include a Google local business entry, complete similar for Bing Local Listing Centre.

Bing has a supplemental website area to the listing, which can be used for link to subpages, a hotel for example might link to tripadvisor ratings, online booking page, or seasonal offers.

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