Posted on 27 August 2009 by jamescope
Tonight I will be running a search engine check workshop for delegates at Business Link’s open evening in Fareham.
The session is aimed at giving attendees the tools and techniques to be able to perform a basic search engine assessment of their website. For search engine success it is widely accepted that onsite optimisation accounts for only around 20% of the activity required, with the other 80% contributed by offsite online activity.
With that in mind to assess your onsite optimisation follow these basic steps:
- Measure current visitor levels
- Undertake search phrase/keyword research
- Select search phrases per page
- Check that those terms appear onsite
- Tweak & measure
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Tags: search engine optimisation workshop
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
Posted on 13 August 2009 by jamescope
Our Business Link email marketing and website conversion seminars are now in full swing, and early feedback from attendees is showing that it is a really valuable event.
The first session covers email marketing and how small and medium businesses can use it to drive new and repeat business back to the site to make it a success. The old marketing rule of 80% of your sales coming from 20% of you customers can be realised by using email marketing, moving away from the constant need to attract new customers to a greater emphasis on increasing spend from your exisiting customers.
By profiling your database to identify your best and worst customers you can use considered and targeted campaigns to reward those that are more likely to buy and become better long term customers than those that will take the special offer and run. Seth Godin, who is world reknown says ‘Focus on share of customer, not market share – fire 70% of your customers and watch your profits go up!’. While im not suggesting you do that, I would suggest looking at your database, profiling your best customers and use email marketing to target them.
There is some useful information on the newzapp website on how to conduct B2B email marketing campaigns, but the lessons also translate equally to B2C.
If you’ve not yet attended one of the seminars there are some places left at some of the venues however dates are running out, book your place at the Business Link website .If you do not manage to make it to one of these, we will be podcasting them and will have an online seminar version for you to be able to catch up on. I will post details as soon as we have it produced.
Tags: business link, email marketing, website conversion rate
Posted in Emarketing | 1 Comment »
Posted on 10 July 2009 by admin
I often talk to businesses about how they spend lots of time and money optimising their website but they still struggle to get good search engine rankings. After we have looked at their onsite optimisation elements I usually ask the question ‘what’s your inbound link strategy?’
Usually businesses are plagued with calls from perhaps less reputable companies offering to get them onto page one by building links for £200-£400 pcm without any thought for relevancy. Some website owners have built their own thought through plan, however more often than not it is an area that is overlooked and unclear as to the approach to take.
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Tags: inbound links, Search Engine Optimisation
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, Small Business, Website & eBusiness, business link | No Comments »
Posted on 1 July 2009 by admin
Website owners often invest a lot of time and money into optimisation of their ecommerce or business website, but find that it fails to generate sales, leads or enquiries. This usually hints that either the optimisation is being targeted incorrectly so the wrong traffic is coming to the site, or the site is not convincing enough to convert visitors to customers.
My previous post looked at how small business owners can improve their content with to put the basic building blocks in place, if you thought that topic was useful then I bring news of a new free Business Link seminar! This session will cover conversion, taking the basic ideas from our previous Google Analytics session, getting more involved in measuring visitor behaviour on the site, giving tips on how you can use tools to assess which version of a page is more powerful, watch where visitors click on your site and the path they take.
This Business Link seminar on website conversions is a must attend for anyone who is serious about their site generating sales leads and increasing enquiries. We are joined by Adrian Durow an experienced conversion specialist from Refreshed Media, I’ve seen the run through of the presentation and think it will be a really good session. To book your free place at one of our sessions in the South East visit the Business Link events page at http://www.innovationevents.co.uk
Posted in Google, Seminars & Events, Small Business, Website & eBusiness, business link, ecommerce | No Comments »
Posted on 24 June 2009 by admin
Hopefully anyone interested in improving their site has checked out the subject of my previous post, and now has a little more of an understanding of how to structure a site and the elements that are important from a search engine perspective.
I attended a presentation run by Intergage back in May, and have been meaning to mention it ever since. The session included a really good slot from Roan Fair their Digital PR Manager. He has years of experience of copywriting working at one point as the Business Editor of the local Echo, and speaks really well on the topic.
The subject is an area of focus of the Business Link website reviews, and is commonly an area that is weak in small business websites. His basic principles are really easy to follow, and echo a lot of the points that I make when meeting customers.
He takes a simple 5 step strategy:
1. What is your readers’ biggest headache? Feel their pain!
2. Why have others failed to solve this nagging problem?
3. Why is your solution different? Prove it works!
4. Tell them how much better their lives will be with your solution
5. Calls to action – tell ‘em what they need to do!
The presenation, attached for anyone who is interested, has some really good tips in there that can be implemented to improve the effectiveness of business websites. Perhaps it’s time to ditch the company history from the homepage and think customer focussed!
Intergage Presentation Copywriting May 2009
Would be interested to hear from anyone who has made or is making similar changes to the site and the impact that it has to improve conversion rates. If you found that useful and feel that a Business Link run seminar would be worthwhile to learn more leave a comment and we will see what we can do.
Roan has a useful twitter feed for anyone who wants to keep up to date with the topic http://twitter.com/roanfair
Tags: business link, copywriting, ebusiness, website
Posted in Web Design | 1 Comment »
Posted on 18 June 2009 by admin
Getting a site right that will promote its core services and products to meet the objectives of the business and all in a search engine friendly approach is the holy grail for many website owners. Business Link has its ever popular website review service that attempts to help businesses get to grips with the issue, which is by far the most in demand service of the team.
Matt Cutts of Google has recently released a video of a session he ran which is a lot more search engine focussed of course, but gives a really good insight into the balance between good site techniques to please your visitors and how these can benefit your search engine rankings.
You can watch the video at Matt’s blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/webmaster-site-reviews/
Tags: matt cutts, search engine techniques, website review
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimisation, Website & eBusiness | No Comments »
Posted on 18 June 2009 by admin
Good to see you all at the seminar last night in Gosport, thanks to Charles of ICG who gave a cracking presentation. It is available online at http://www.internetconsultantsgroup.co.uk/
Below are the links that I mentioned that you may also find useful.
Search Engine Optimisation
There is a great tool that checks to see if you have the basic onsite elements at http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/
Business Link has a couple of guides as well http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?topicId=1081852287
The Google Keyword Tool that can help you determine which phrases to optimise against is at https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
From the eCommerce session
The payment gateway comparison which can help you decide which is the most cost effective can be found at http://www.electronic-payments.co.uk/
The shopping basket software comparison which is a sister site to the above is at http://www.ecommerce-comparison.com/
Tags: ecommerce, gosport, Search Engine Optimisation, seminar
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimisation, Seminars & Events, ecommerce | No Comments »
Posted on 10 June 2009 by admin
Great to see nearly 70 of you at the Business Link Search Engine event last night at Green Park. The evening had a really good buzz to it and there seemed to be some useful networking taking place. Good to see so many familiar faces in the audience.
Feedback from you all was greatly appreciated, it is always hard to pitch content to appeal to as many as possible, on the whole feedback scores are really good and a number of excellents so thank you for that. We will be making a couple of tweaks to the presentation to take into account a couple of comments given, as we have another five events around the South East to go.
The questions at the end of the sessions were really interesting to hear, and hope you all got a chance to raise your own. If you didn’t or have thought of any since please do use this as a platform to ask or to keep us updated on how your efforts are going, and tricks or tips that you find along the way. You can also email me at my Business Link address or find me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesccope
Technology permitting we will be podcasting the event so that you can recap on the presentation when you need too, my colleague Sarah will be putting the note round when this is up and running. I would expect this to be availble early July but don’t hold me to that. In the meantime you can download the presentation from http://www.internetconsultantsgroup.co.uk/internet_resources/seminars.html
One of our delegates, Nigel Woods, has also give me details of a Chartered Institute of Marketing event this Thursday on Web 2.0 and social marketing if anyone is interested. They will open up the event to any of you that wish to attend, details of which can be found on my events page.
We are currently developing the August/September seminar which will build on the basics of this seminar to look at website conversions and email marketing tp help develop your web presence a step further so what this space!
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, Seminars & Events | No Comments »
Posted on 3 June 2009 by admin
Have been busy this week meeting the presenters to put final finishing touches to Business Link’s June seminar series. This time it’s an update on search engine optimisation with the presenters take on SEO 2.0, youve all heard about web 2.0 well this is the next step for search engine success.
Also falling under the spotlight is Google Analytics, by far one of the most widely used stats packages the presenters show some common KPI’s that website owners should be looking at and how to get clever with the package that will save you time and money, gain more customers and bring your website visitors behaviour to life.
If you are a small or medium sized business in the South East you can come along to the seminar free of charge, visit the site http://www.innovationevents.co.uk for more details and to book your place. See you there.
Tags: Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimisation, small medium business
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimisation, Seminars & Events | No Comments »
Posted on 3 June 2009 by admin
A number of the small businesses I talk to work within a specific geographic location, but often over look the power of local searches.
My tips here are usually to make sure you include mentions of the area you operate in within the usual meta data of the site, and within the body copy.
Keep it local by including testimonals from any well know local clients, people will have more confidence in your services if they are supported by a good comment from a peer in the community, a business they have heard of, or perhaps someone they know.
Add your business to Google local, its free and easy and as more and more searches seem to be including local search results its a really good technique. More information on that at http://www.google.com/local/add/splashPage?hl=en-gb&gl=GB
Local business directories and council directories are good sources of traffic, consider tripadvisor.com if you are a B&B or a hotel, checkatrade if you are a service company. Also get links from any local businesses websites that you can build working relationships with whose customers may find your own services useful.
Those are a few to start with, feel free to chip in on any that are working well for you.
Tags: Local Search, Search Engine Optimisation, Small Business
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimisation, Small Business, Website & eBusiness | 1 Comment »
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