10 Awkward Questions to Ask Your Web Designer

January 22nd, 2010 by Murray Cowell

Spring’s a great time to take a fresh look at your website. But how do you know if your web designer’s any good? Here’s 10 Awkward Questions to help you find out.

Who owns the code?

You paid for the site, you should own it. You should be able to move the site wherever you want at any time, and your web designer should co-operate to help you do that. Holding your site hostage is no way for your web designer to win your loyalty!

Is it “Open Source”?

Open source code is free, yet some companies write their own. That’s more expensive and usually not as good. Open source code is well supported, stable and secure and benefits from free updates.

An in-house CMS is expensive for your developer to maintain and support, and may be subject to instability and security risks. Someone has to pay for that in the end – usually you!

There’s no need to take chances with so much good quality, free software about. If your web developer’s not using open source software, they are carrying an overhead that they could do without.

Do you get a Content Management System (CMS)?

Websites used to have a fixed number of pages, and you had to pay your designer to make changes. Today, quality websites allow you to update your own site with a CMS.

If you haven’t got a CMS on your site, your web designer will usually charge you every time you want to make a change to your site. A competent web designer should be able to fit a simple CMS to any 10-page website for less than £100 (unless your site is designed entirely from Flash, in which case you’re stuck with it!)

Is it modular?

Developing functions like booking systems or quote generators from scratch costs thousands. With modular sites, you can add them without spending a fortune.

Ask your web designer how much it would cost to add an e-commerce module or a calendar that users can log into to upload their own diary entries. If the answer’s in the hundreds, chances are your system is modular.

If there’s much sucking of air through teeth and theatrical cheek-blowing, and the quote runs to four figures, your developer is using laborious methods to write everything from scratch. Very expensive!

Is the code certified?

Search engines give higher rankings to code certified to W3C standards, so certified code is essential.

Where will the site be hosted?

Sites hosted abroad are subject to data bottlenecks, and search engines get confused about where the business is based. Support is in a different time zone, and money leaves the UK economy. A quality UK host is the best option for UK business.

Will it be designed in-house?

Some designers outsource to India or Eastern Europe. They add their profit margin, and so does the company arranging the work. It costs just as much, but with a fraction of the control.

Can you personally brief the designer?

It’s important to speak directly to the person designing the site. Otherwise, how can they possibly know what you want?

If there’s a chain of people between you and the designer, there will inevitably be misunderstandings and to-ing and fro-ing before they get it right. If you can brief the designer personally, you can tell them exactly what you want.

Is it custom-designed from scratch?

Some designers use cheap templates or site-building software. Quality designers create your design from scratch. If your designer tries to restrict you, you’ll get a site just like everyone else’s not the site you want.

Has everyone involved got real business experience?

Designing a website that sells is a marketing challenge, so real-world experience running an off-line, non-Internet  businesses is essential.

Can your designer advise on email marketing, blogging, SMS text marketing, social media, pay-per-click marketing and search engine optimisation?

Your website’s just the start. For it to be found, a structured Internet Marketing campaign is essential. Your web designer should be able to advise you on how to do that properly, otherwise you’ll waste time and money.

Summary

If your designer answers these questions well, you’re in safe hands. If he shifts uncomfortably, makes excuses or stares at the floor, it’s time to look elsewhere.

Being able to trust your web designer is so important. Pick the wrong one, and you’re in for trouble. Get it right and your web design hassles will be over.

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Posted in Internet Marketing, Web Design | 8 Comments »

UK Online Business Hits New Record – Offline Sales Can't Keep Up

October 9th, 2009 by Murray Cowell

Whilst High Street sales continue to suffer with low single digit growth, online sales hit a new record this July, with UK consumers spending an incredible £4.2bn on the Internet, according to recent figures from the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG).

Almost 1 in 15 of us made a purchase online during the month, and all the signs are that this trend will continue. While the first six months of 2009 were static for High Street sales, online retailers clocked up £23bn in sales.

Year-on-year growth in July in online sales was an incredible 16.8%. Where else in the UK economy can you find that sort of growth in today’s climate?

There can be no doubt that online shopping is here to stay, and retailers are gearing up for the biggest ever online Christmas

This is good news for UK business as a whole, as online sales lead the economy out of recession.

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Posted in E-Commerce, Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »

Why UK businesses need UK hosting

September 1st, 2009 by Murray Cowell

It often can be tempting to use US hosting services to host your website.  They might be cheaper, or have a flashy site themselves.  Or they might claim to be a UK solution, but actually be renting servers overseas.  But it is vital that UK businesses have a truly UK based hosting solution.

Firstly, search engines might conclude that US-based sites contain American content – and that’s hardly unreasonable.  But this means that customers searching specifically for UK sites (as I’m sure you will have done from time to time) will find it harder to reach you.

Furthermore, making your website travel under the Atlantic means it could be subject to bottlenecks due to the large flow of information between the two countries.  This could slow your website down.  And if you do start experiencing problems, all your technical support will be based in a different timezone.

Finally, isn’t it better to keep money in the UK economy while we are in an economic downturn?

Posted in Web Hosting | 3 Comments »

Timing email newsletters to perfection

August 3rd, 2009 by Murray Cowell

One of the crucial decisions to be made when running email marketing campaigns is when during the week to send out your newsletters.  With so much focus on the ‘to’, subject, and content of emails, timing is a factor which is easy to overlook.

So what makes for good timing?   It really depends on whether your emails are business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2c).  If they’re B2B, then there are a couple of rules around which there is broad consensus.  Firstly, you should not send on Mondays or Fridays.  On Mondays, inboxes have not been checked since Friday and are therefore pretty full.  People are more likely to be ruthless when it comes to deletion.  And on Fridays, people are too busy looking forward to the weekend and being able to finish work to be that responsive (and they may not even be there – there will be many who take Fridays off).  The other rule is not to send overnight.  Again, there is a problem with inboxes being full with other emails in the morning, but in addition most SPAM is sent overnight.  Your email might be mistaken for it.

Between Tuesdays and Thursdays, and regarding time of day, there is less consensus.  Some will argue that Thursdays are the best, as people have begun winding down towards the weekend and are therefore more responsive.  But seems to run opposite the reasons I mentioned earlier for not using Fridays.  Tuesdays and Wednesdays are likely to be the safer bet.  And what about time of day?  Well, between 10 and 2, when people are not dealing with full inboxes and may have the time for a quick coffee break or lunchtime read, are often regarded as the best times to send.

If your emails are B2C, then timing depends much more on what you are trying to sell.  In this case, Fridays and weekends may be much better times to send, for obvious reasons.   Sunday evenings is when the largest number of people are online – although remember that this might not make them more responsive.   On Friday evenings many will be in a good mood – although you have to catch people before they go out.  Think about who your market is and when they will be interested.  There may not be a set perfect time - it could be subject to seasonal change depending on the industry.

Mark Brownlow suggests some interesting innovations with email newsletter timing, such as sending emails at the time that the person registered for the email.  However, as is pointed out in a comment, this might be putting too much long term emphasis on one event.   People’s behaviour changes, and it is vital that you adapt.

As with all things, it is important to test what works for you.  Try different times, and see the response rate.  Do split-testing of your newsletter.   Remember to keep updating your research and responding to changes in behaviour.  If too many other firms agree with you that a certain time is the best one to send, then inboxes may fill up then and your response rate may go down.   You therefore have to balance the need to build trust and expectancy by sticking to a regular newsletter time with the need to keep ahead of changing behaviour.  And remember; although perfect timing is good, getting your email read is only the first step.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

Why it is essential that UK companies use UK servers for email marketing campaigns

July 22nd, 2009 by Murray Cowell

 

The two biggest bulk emailing services, iContact and ConstantContact, are both based in the United States.  However, this has several disadvantages for UK based businesses.  Aside from the inconvenience of having to do business with those across the Atlantic who work on different business hours, there is also the issue of SPAM filters.  Surveys have estimated that 86 percent of all spam comes from the United States, with some saying that as much as 95% of all spam originates there  (this is a little odd, by the way, as the US has far more restrictive regulations in the form of its CAN-SPAM legislation, although perhaps we should give it more time to deal with the problem before we point that out).

But anyway,  what does this mean for email marketing?  Given that most spam comes from the US, it is hardly surprising that SPAM filters are harsher towards email originating from there.  Marketing emails from US based servers are statistically more likely to be unsolicited, and are therefore more likely to be identified as junk by spam filters.  The answer?  A UK based service with strong anti-spam credentials means increased deliverability.  And that means better communication with your customers.

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Posted in Email Marketing | 1 Comment »

How to Fine Tune your Google AdWords Campaign

January 17th, 2009 by Murray Cowell

 

Google AdWords is simple to set up and easy to use.  You can get a campaign up and running in a few minutes, and bring new visitors to your site minutes later, subject to Google’s approval of your ads.

You have a lot of control over how much you want to spend and when and where your adverts are displayed.  Google AdWords is a revolution in advertising, providing a quick, simple and easy method to advertise to millions of people online.

However, there is one thing that Google AdWords does better than anything else, and that’s to shovel money out of the pockets of advertisers and into the Google coffers.

Yes, AdWords is simple, but deceptively so.  In reality, there are 10 straightforward actions that every Google advertiser should be taking, but which very few actually are.

If you are not taking these actions, one thing can be guaranteed – your AdWords campaigns are underperforming, costing you too much money and not getting you as many clicks as they could.

If you do take these actions, you can increase the response rates of your AdWords campaigns and reduce your bid costs, resulting in more clicks for less money.

So here are the 10 Most Important Google AdWords Actions.

1.           Carry out extensive keyword research.  Don’t just go for the keywords that you think are most obvious.  There is no need to guess when Google provides free tools to find out exactly what people are searching for.  An ideal keyword is one on which there are many searches but little competition.  Use as many relevant keywords as you can find, it is better to bid on many low cost keywords than on a few high cost keywords.

2.           Include negative keywords.  These are keywords that some users type into a search that have no relevance to your search terms.

For example, if you were selling Apple products, then you would want people who searched on “Apple”.  By inserting negative keywords on words like “pie”, “crumble” and “turnover”, you would avoid displaying your ads to people who were looking for recipes.

If you do this you will preserve the relevance of your ads. Google rewards relevance, and this is measured by the click-through-rate (CTR). 

This is the number of times the ad is clicked divided by the number of times it is displayed.  Google combines this figure with scores for the relevance of your ad to give a Quality Score.  The higher your Quality Score, the less you have to pay compared to other advertisers.

3.           Set up different Ad Groups for different groups of keywords.  This is vitally important.  The closer the match between your keywords, your ad text and the landing page (see below), the higher your Quality Score and the lower your bid costs. 

4.           Point each Ad Group, or even each separate keyword, to a specific page on your site.  For example, if you are selling a particular brand of trainers, make sure that the keyword for those trainers goes straight to the page on your site where the customer can add the trainers to their shopping cart.  This will increase the likelihood of making a sale.

5.           Use “landing pages” wherever possible.  A landing page is a mini-website, usually just one or two pages, to which a visitor can be taken instead of the main site. 

One of the benefits of doing this is that the landing page can be tightly themed to the particular Ad Group, thereby improving the Quality Score. 

Another benefit is that you can use the landing page to capture a visitor’s email address for future marketing purposes, as long as you follow the proper anti-SPAM opt-in procedures.  A landing page used in this way is called a “squeeze page”.

6.           Run two versions of each ad in each Ad Group.  Rotate them evenly, and observe the CTR for each advert.  Cull the advert that does less well, then write a new one to try and beat your “control” (the remaining advert). 

This is called “split testing”.  It is at the heart of any successful direct marketing activity, and if done consistently will ensure incremental improvements to your CTR and Quality Score.

Google rewards high Quality Scores by giving your ads higher rankings, enabling you to rank higher than other advertisers who bid and paid more money for their ads than you did for yours.

7.           Ruthlessly cull underperforming keywords and Ad Groups.  Don’t be sentimental!  Even if it’s your favourite keyword phrase, if it doesn’t get the clicks it is costing you money!  By taking out keywords that don’t work, you can keep improving your CTR and lowering your bid costs.

8.           Experiment with changing your Max CPC bid.  Increasing it will give you a better chance of ranking higher, and may improve your CTR, but it won’t necessarily bring you more clicks.  You can sometimes get more people to your site by lowering your Max CPC bid.

AdWords allows you to experiment with these values in the Traffic Estimator in the “Tools” section.  This gives you an indication of how many clicks you would get and at what cost for the new values.

9.           Use conversion tracking.  AdWords can place a cookie on the users computer and then match that up with final results, so that you can not only see which keyword phrases get the most clicks, but which result in the most sales or conversions.

In fact, the most relevant statistic that you can use from a Google AdWords campaign is Profit per Impression – in other words the total amount of profit made divided by the number of impressions.  This statistic combines CTR and conversion tracking into one number.

10.      Spend time every day learning more about how to use AdWords.  The Google AdWords Help Centre has some excellent training that you can do in 5 minute chunks at your own pace in the AdWords Learning Centre, and online webinars, all totally free.

The best book on the subject is “The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords” by Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd.

FURTHER ADVICE

If you would like some further advice on optimising your Google AdWords campaign, email Belmont Internet Marketing at service@belmont.uk.com, and we’ll be pleased to conduct some FREE keyword research and provide you with a summary of how your campaign could be improved.

Best Wishes

Murray

 

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Posted in Improving Conversion Rates, Internet Marketing, Pay-per-Click Advertising | 12 Comments »

Search Engine Optimisation Tips

January 2nd, 2009 by Murray Cowell

 

Optimising your website to do well in the search engine rankings is a difficult and complicated task requiring diligence and constant attention.  However, there are things that you can do that will make the job easier and improve your rankings.

This blog explains the 5 most important things to do to improve your website’s ranking in the search engines.

Five Essential Actions

1. Add regular content.  Search engines give preference to sites that are updated frequently.  The more often you update your site, the more often it will be indexed by the search engines.  A great way to do this is by incorporating a blog or a forum into the site.

2. Get high quality inbound links.  These can come from reputable directories, or from high quality articles posted on authority sites relevant to your business.  You can write and post these articles yourself, or engage the services of article writers to do it for you.

However, be very careful in your choice of consultant.  Some companies use dodgy techniques such as buying large volumes of poor quality links, or posting articles on sites that the search engines don’t trust.  At best the results from these tactics will be temporary.  At worst they can harm your site or even get it permanently blacklisted by the search engines.

3. Conduct thorough keyword research to establish the best keyword phrases to use.  Don’t make the mistake of jumping straight in with what you think your keywords should be.  They may be highly competitive phrases.

The more competitive the phrase, the harder it is to get a high ranking.  Better to look for less popular keyphrases for which there is less competition.

Google provide some excellent free tools for conducting this research, or you can subscribe to an online service such as Wordtracker.com, which aggregates data from several sources.

4. It is helpful to make sure that your site url (web address), page description meta-tags and content on the page are all related to the keyword phrases for which you want your site to receive higher listings.  This makes it easier for search engines to determine what your site is about.

Use your keyword phrases naturally throughout the text on the site.  Stuffing excessive repetitions of your keywords is called keyword spamming.  The search engines hate it and your site will be penalised for it.

5. Read up as much as you can on how to do SEO.  There are many good guides online, and for a very reasonable sum you can buy training courses that will show you in great detail how to achieve better rankings.

If you follow these tips, you can boost your website’s ratings considerably.  In a future blog, I will set out the important questions to ask when hiring an SEO consultant.

 

Good luck!

Murray

 

 

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Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | 2 Comments »

The Really Important Thing that Most Internet Marketers Miss

November 29th, 2008 by Murray Cowell

Talk to people about Internet Marketing and most people will think that you’re talking about websites. That’s because the website is the most visible, tangible part of a company’s Internet presence.

But the website’s only part of the overall mix, and the principle mistake that most website owners make is that they think it ends there. They get a site built and publish it on the Internet and wait for the business to come rolling in.

But developing a website and doing nothing else is like printing a brochure and leaving the only copy in your desk drawer. If you did that, it wouldn’t suprise you if you didn’t get any business from it, and yet many people publish a website and then wonder why they didn’t get anything out of it.

In the worst cases, they then blame the Internet. Do you know, even this day and age I still meet people who think that the Internet doesn’t work?! Or that you can’t do business on it?!

Some people think that it won’t work for their particular business. Well, that’s baloney, frankly, you can market anything over the Internet, any business, any product, any service, any idea. And you don’t even need a website to do it.

Internet Marketing is the process of promoting a business, product, service or idea using the Internet as a tool. A website is one way to achieve this, but the best website in the world is useless if nobody visits it.  So there’s also the important question of how to bring your lovely website to the attention of your customers.

Internet terminology has a lovely word for people who visit your site – “traffic”. That’s you and me, as we browse around the web, that’s what we are, ”traffic”. Triffic innit?

Internet marketers, web designers and SEO consultants will tell you that you must increase traffic to your site, and companies spend thousands of pounds, sometimes millions of pounds, driving “traffic” to their site. This is only part of the truth.

Actually, there are two very effective ways of wasting money driving traffic to your site, and to illustrate these techniques for squandering your hard-earned I find that it often helps to visualise something physical.

So imagine that your website is a shop. You’ve spent an awful lot of money getting the inside of the shop exactly how you want it to look, but you haven’t got any customers. Why? Well, your shop is up a side alley, off the main road, and nobody can see it as they walk along the pavement.

So you need to “drive traffic” into your shop. How do you do that? Many techniques that are used on the Internet to “drive traffic” are a bit like standing on the main road and diverting every person who is passing by down the side street and through your shop.

Of course, that would be crazy – thousands and thousands of disinterested people traipsing through your premises, irritated that they have been sent there and hardly anyone buying anything. And if I asked you to pay me money to bring vast volumes of disinterested people into your shop, you would think I was mad.

Same goes for your website. It’s crazy to spend money sending untargetted traffic to your site. Amazingly, though, people do it.

OK, so what’s the second great way to waste your marketing money? Let’s go back to the shop, you’ve now got a steady stream of interested people coming into the shop, and the things that they want are there.

It’s just that they can’t find them. Some of them are on shelves that are out of reach and not labelled. Some of them are behind row upon row of fancy displays that look great, but just get in the way. Some of them are in the store room out the back.

Soon, half your interested customers have left the shop. Those who persevere, and finally manage to pick up what they want, then can’t find a till, can’t find a shop assistant, or have questions that nobody can answer. Only the most determined customer will remain.

Worst of all, the shop keeper doesn’t even know how many people came into the shop, how many people stayed and how many people left. He only knows how many people bought something. He has no idea who walked out, and not only that, he has no idea why they left.

Many website owners today are beginning to realise the importance of driving traffic to the site, and are starting to invest in SEO, pay-per-click campaigns, email marketing, banner advertising, forums and blogs.

What is far less common is taking the time to understand how people behave on your site, and investing time and/or money in improving the conversion rate.

(The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to the site who take the desired action, whether that’s buying something, filling in a contact form, using an online tool or picking up the phone).

Why is this important? Well, the profitability of a website is the product of a simple formula.

Profit = Traffic X Conversion Rate X Lifetime Value of the Customer

So there are three ways to improve the profitability of your website; increase traffic, improve conversion rates and increase the lifetime value of each customer.

Returning to the shop example, if you could stand out in the traffic and identify who out of the people passing by might be interested to visit your shop, they would be pleased to come. Your shop would then be filled with interested customers, glad that they had found you.

When they arrived in your shop, if it was easy to find what they were looking for, service was quick and efficient, their questions were answered and the till was where they expected, fully manned and easy to go through, sales would go through the roof.

And if the shopkeeper carefully observed how people behaved, and gathered feedback about what people liked and didn’t like, he would have some really useful information. If he knew why people bought what they did, and why people left without buying anything, he could use that information to improve the shop.

So one of the big mistakes that internet marketers make is thinking that more traffic is better by definition. The truth is that it’s targetted traffic that makes the difference. Another big mistake is thinking that it’s all about traffic, and not paying enough attention to conversion rates.

Typically internet marketers will talk a lot about SEO, and encourage customers to spend a lot of money on that, but not give a moment’s thought to conversion rates. Many don’t even know how to monitor your visitor activity, beyond Google Analytics, which although useful can only tell you part of the story.

And as for web designers …. well, a lot of them will design your website to look nice, when actually what you need is not just an attractive site, but a functional site that achieves your objectives.

So if you’re marketing your business on the Internet, remember the magic formula:-

Profit = Traffic X Conversion Rate X Lifetime Value of the Customer

If you’re engaging an Internet Marketing company to do the work for you, ask them how they intend to monitor and improve your conversion rates. If they can’t answer or they waffle, politely bring the conversation to a close and move on to the next marketer on your list.

And if your web designer doesn’t start off by getting a thorough understanding of your business objectives, and then ask you what specific action you expect from each and every page on your site, then the person you’re talking to is really a graphic designer with a few HTML skills.

(They may still be useful, because this kind of web designer will often produce great looking sites – just be sure to involve an internet marketer before you finalise the design, to make sure that the site will work and not just look pretty.)

In a future blog, I’ll write about how to increase the lifetime value of each customer. Meanwhile I hope you have found this post useful, and please feel free to comment and come back again sometime.

Cheers!

Murray

PS – If you want to study the REAL experts in improving conversion rates, visit www.conversion-rate-experts.com. Make sure that you read their world famous report about website optimisation, and sign up for their newsletter.

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