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5 Key points for your business website

07/13/202105/15/2013 by scmarketing

Business tips from Smart Cow

You should very much look at your online business in the same way you look at a physical presence for a business.

As much as a physical shop needs a good foundation and architectural designs, a website needs also to be built with a good foundation and structure.

You can pick up or create a website in no time these days and it will probably look nice and appear to do the job that you want. But as with almost everything in this world you get what you pay for. If a website or a stall is sold at a bargain price that is probably a reason for it. The real store may be in the wrong location, may not be set up properly, have never been marketed and therefore has poor trading. Just the same with the website, if you do not invest in the initial infrastructure the site, although looking nice, will not be found by potential customers searching for your services.

Here’s five key points that a business owner must be aware of when commissioning reviewing your business website. The list could have gone on and on but these are some of the key points you should be aware.

If you’re unsure on any of these, contact your current web developer or give us a call at Smart Cow Marketing on a 020 3137 1826 alternatively email at saymoo@smart-cow.com.

Below are our top five tips with links to the Association articles provide more detail to help you and your business.

1. Sitemaps (Why your website needs a Site map) give the search engines an understanding of the layout of your site to make it easy for them to give web browsers and understanding of where to find your content.

2. url structure (Why the URL name and structure is important to the success of your site) give the search engines the best chance possible to help out your business by naming pages correctly and structuring the site accordingly.

3. Bot accessibility (What is bot accessibility and how It affect how your site is seen by the search engines) make sure that none of your hard effort goes to waste and search engines can find the content within your site and that it is not hidden from view.

4. Unique Content (Why you have to have unique website content and what happens if you don’t) always make sure your content is unique and relevant to your target audience by copying and using other people’s content is not true to the values of your business and will be marked harshly by the search engines. Your clients must see you as a true expert in your field.

5. Server response code (what are server response codes and why are they important) what happens when wrong in your site? Make sure that errors are managed appropriately so that even if a visitor has a bad experience it can be recovered easily.

Don’t forget to visit the full articles of each one of these top tips and we would love to hear your comments of the top tips needed when building a website.

Happy online marketing from all of Smart Cow.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

An inbound marketing overview for SMEs

06/14/202104/12/2013 by scmarketing

Inbound marketing should be at the cornerstone of any business that has an online presence. This is where you can build your reputation and authority by placing content and building links into your site.

Gone are the days where having a website alone would be good enough for your business no matter how small. Search engines such as Google are always working to provide the best content for their search results. So, if you look at it logically and imagine yourself as a search engine how high would you rank your site against your competitors?

Does your site have useful and informative content that directly relates to your products and services and will make you stand out from your competitors? If your site is regularly updated with content the search engines will recognise this and will reward you accordingly with a high-ranking.

This is of course based on the content being relevant original and interesting. The search engine algorithms such as Panda, a highly intelligent tool, and can tell how spammy your content may be. If you overload it with keywords this will be noticed, also if the content is poorly written without authority this too will be noticed. The search engines are able to tell whether or not you use industry related terminology in your content so sites can rank highly even if the keywords are not often used the related and relevant ones are.

The other way to see if the content is relevant and has authority is how well it has been received by readers. Visitors view the page and then bounce straight back out it will be noticed and recorded by the search engines and markdown appropriately. However, if a page is visited and then promoted through social media channels or links from their own blogs this will be seen as a sign of authority and will be ranked accordingly.

In summary, never try to trick the search engines, just be true to yourself and your business and post good relevant content on the Internet. If you try to trick the search engines then sooner or later you will be found out and pay for it.

Use your personality and your expertise to promote your business and you will reap the rewards.

Inbound marketing agency in Surrey

For more inbound marketing tips, browse our website or contact us today.

We hope you found this useful and if you want to leave a comment please do.

Business need to knows about inbound and outbound marketing

06/14/202104/10/2013 by scmarketing

As previously addressed in the Smart Cow blog we’ve mentioned there are two main types of online marketing. These are inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

Outbound Marketing

Starting first with outbound marketing this is seen as the more conventional way to market. Through the more traditional ways of paid adverts and email marketing, this reflects very much old school marketing prior to the Internet, where people would place ads in magazines and drop leaflets through letter boxes.

These are really useful if you have a new product, new website or are in a very competitive market and currently are unable to get good organic results for your keywords. Outbound marketing can be targeted by precisely to your potential clients through data that you or your media channel has acquired. You may have an email list for your email campaign or you may rely on demographic information collected by social media channels to manage your pay per click campaigns.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a much better long-term strategy to promote your business. As we all get very savvy about magazine adverts, and leaflets posted through our front door the same is said for some email campaigns and online advertising. Most of us these days are very media savvy and can quite easily filter out unwanted marketing material. Reflecting back into the real world, a lot of what you will buy will be through recommendation, whether this is a product or service if one of your friends has recommended it you are quite likely to do the same. This is where inbound marketing holds the key, if you have people promoting your products through you to their social media channels, online blogs, forums or any other method you are more likely to pay attention and if you had seen an advert embedded in a website.

But to build this trust and authority that will get many people to recommend you, your services or products takes a lot of time to invest. Think of being original and using your own personality within your content you place on the web as well as making sure it is appropriate for your target personas you have created.

Summary

Look at where your business is now online and where you would like it to go plan your marketing campaign now. If you’d like more help and advice on how to do this do get in touch, we would be more than happy to help.

As an inbound marketing agency in Surrey, we specialise in digital marketing for accountants as well as providing digital marketing services and web design for local businesses within Croydon.

All the very best from the cowshed we hope you found this useful.

Stick men indicating link building for SEO

Creating personas

07/13/202104/10/2013 by scmarketing

We have talked before when starting an online marketing campaign about the importance of creating a buyer persona. This provides you or your marketing team with a representation of who your target audience is. This is based on either data you have acquired or through creating a fictitious character of your ideal client(s).

These personas bring to life an individual that you are marketing to and so can make the campaigns more personal and realistic as opposed to just using marketing jargon that is inappropriate and not targeted. Just as much as you will use different language in talking to friends and relatives, business partners, people in authority, new clients, existing clients etc. You will need to adapt your marketing campaign appropriately.

You may feel that you get the majority of your business by going through personal assistance (gatekeepers) rather than going direct to the managing director, therefore you should think about their goals and motivators and words your marketing campaign appropriately.

Goals

For your fictional persona identify a couple of goals they may have personally such as growing the business, getting a promotion, looking good in front of the boss.

Challenges

Now imagine what challenges they may present you that your product or service may be able to assist them with, also looking at the challenges such as budget and timescales. With these identified you can then create a list of ways that you may be able to help your potential client.

Where possible, collect real quotes from clients that most resemble this made up persona that relates to your product and service which helps build a conversation in your own mind is how best to promote your services to them. Look at what their common objections may be and write these down, capturing these now will allow you to present a case that compels them to use your product.

Marketing message

Once you have built this personality and can picture them in your mind you’re ready to build your marketing message. Just a few words of what you can do to help your potential client.

Elevator pitch

Then expand on this and create the so-called elevator pitch. Create one or two sentences that would sell your services to client as if you were stuck in an elevator from the first to the 10th floor and this is your only opportunity to sell yourself to them. By the time you get to the 10th floor they must have enough information to say yes.

Summary

Create a persona, or many personas to bring to life your potential clients. As awkward as this may seem the first couple of times it is key to ensure that you have a personal message that will be warmly accepted as opposed to a cold marketing message that will be ignored.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.