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8 ways to refresh your website

03/11/202103/05/2021 by scmarketing

Online presence is vital today more than ever and your website should be at the heart of all that you do online. Whether you create social media posts, distribute email marketing or run a PPC campaign, all these digital marketing tactics should lead to one place, your website.

The more links back will help you in search engine results pages. However, you need to take stock and check whether your website is as up to date as you think it should be?

Here’s our tips and quick fixes for an effective website refresh to help engage with visitors and keep them on your website for longer.

1. Is your website easy to navigate?

Check your menu and whether it is easy to navigate. Since you created your website you may have introduced new services and products so does your menu reflect this?

Take a step back and look at your website through the eyes of your target audience, If you find that you reach a few dead ends when you move from page to page now is the time to think about adding in more internal links, calls to action and updating your menu.

2. Review your content, contact details and links

It may sound obvious but is your website content up to date? Does it truly reflect your service offering to your target audience? If you’ve streamlined or added services or products then you need to update your website.

Make sure that all your contact details including social media handles are up to date.

Check that any links you have on your website are working.

3. Add content to a blog

If you already have a blog then great. But when was the last time you added content? A blog or news web page is a great way to add fresh content to your website – which search engines love!

Creating fresh, unique and relevant content for your target audience is a key tactic in any long-term search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. So, get creating!

It may seem a little daunting at first so stick with what you know and talk about how your products and services can solve a challenge for your target audience. Read more on how to write a blog to help you with your content.

If you don’t already have a blog page you should easily be able to create a new page especially if you have a content managed system (CMS) website.

4. Add new images

Are your images a little dated and impacting on your brand? A simple change of banner images is a quick way to inject colour for a visual refresh. And, adding video content can really help with engagement.

You can purchase stock imagery which is a cost-effective solution and ensures that you adhere to copyright rules (do not use Google images as your source, any images online will all carry copyright and you could incur penalties).

5. Backend updates

A website redesign or refresh is all about attracting potential customers to your website and keeping them on your site for longer. So, your SEO strategy is important to help your business be seen online. With that in mind, make sure that you have completed your meta descriptions, H/H2 headers and alt tags to help with website optimisation.

6. Mobile optimised

If you created your website sometime ago, check that it is mobile optimised. View your website on your smart phone and see how it looks. Is the menu visible and contact forms easy to fill out? A website must be mobile friendly as that’s where a lot of web traffic originates so if your site isn’t mobile friendly it could impact your results in organic search.

7. Update and add calls to action

A bold call to action stands out on your page. It guides a prospect in what to do, whether that’s ‘call’, ‘complete our form’, ‘book a meeting’, ‘sign up to our newsletter’, ‘download our eBook’. All these actions not only aid navigation but encourage website users to engage further by taking action.

8. Free website review

Take advantage of Smart Cow Marketing’s free website review to help you on your road to refreshing your website. If you need a hand fixing any issues talk to us and we can provide a quote for a web refresh or discuss options for a new website design.

Web design Croydon

We provide website design services for local businesses in Croydon and across Greater London helping to create high quality responsive websites as well as online marketing services for lead generation.

We create responsive, optimised, Content Managed System (CMS) websites. This gives a lot of flexibility for future blog uploads through to landing page creations for new products or services.

Tips for being on camera

08/19/202201/20/2021 by scmarketing

If you’ve read our Think virtual in 2021 blog then you’ll know that there will still continue to be a lot of emphasis on online events and video for your digital marketing activity throughout 2021 and well into the future.

With this in mind, we thought it a good idea to revisit some tips for working with video so that you can produce a great looking piece of content marketing for your business.

Video is perfect for content marketing. Not only is it a great way to bring products and services to life, it also keeps people engaged for longer on your website and provides content for sharing on social media and email marketing. With one-third of online activity spent watching video, is it time to add this to your digital marketing strategy?

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Tips for video

Adding a face to your brand is a fantastic way for making your marketing more personal. With so much technology at our fingertips, it’s still nice to know that there’s a person dealing with orders and enquiries. So, here is our tips for when you do a piece to camera.

Look at the lens.
Keep your hands away from your face.
Try not to fidget.
Avoid looking at notes when you’re talking. You don’t need to be word perfect. You want to come across as natural.
Smile or make sure your face is animated. Be expressive, much more than normal.
Keep the message concise. Stick to one point.
Speak slowly. This helps make the piece authoritative, easier to understand and easier to edit.
Try to stick to under a minute for an informative soundbite.
Practice, practice, practice.
Above all – be natural.

Tips for video set up

Appearance: Check your appearance, hair, collar etc.
Background: Keep this as clear as possible. It also provides a great canvas to then add text post-production.
Lighting: Soft light to the face, also a light to the wall behind works well, if possible.
Sound: Make sure there is as minimal background sound. Reduce the hum of your PC, fans, air conditioning, switch of the ringtone of mobiles, and your messages on PC/Laptop etc.
Check your sound recording is good.

It’s not just about sharing your videos on social media and adding to video channels such as YouTube. Remember that you should be adding the video to your website. Placing a video higher up the page, above the fold, is much better for engagement with website visitors. and therefore an incredibly useful tactic for lead generation.

Digital marketing Croydon

If you would like help with creating video content for your business, get in touch with us.

Smart Cow is a digital marketing agency in Croydon. If you’d like a free website review to look at how your website is performing in search to find out how a digital marketing campaign can help you in local search results, complete our form and we’ll take a closer look for you.

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3 steps for website improvement

06/01/202109/01/2020 by scmarketing

While you may find that you fixate on the website design initially, you must always consider the look of your site alongside the overall user experience at design and development stage.

When working with a web designer take a collaborative approach, have your ideas for the website appearance, but be open to tips about website structure and navigation that will come from years of experience.

Here we provide three areas of focus that will help you create a winning website whether it’s a new site or you’re embarking on updating your current website.

1. Understand your website user

Your web content needs to be of interest to your target audience. A website today is not just about nice pictures and text, it’s much more than a brochure site. It’s a place where you want to send all web traffic, whether from links on social posts, online advertising or guest blogs. So, you need engaging content to keep visitors on your website. You can only do this by understanding the challenges and demands that your clients and prospects are facing to ensure that your content gives them answers to their questions.

Whether you’re selling products or services, help them to find information and pricing simply. We understand that in some sectors, such as accounting, it may not be a one size fits all approach to pricing as services are tailored to each client. However, a call to action offering a free consultation to discuss requirements can be helpful. But, where you can list baseline prices such as ‘starting from’, this can help push that initial engagement.

Your content marketing strategy should include regular writing for your website for a blog/news page. We work a lot with professional services firms such as accountants and this is such a key area to always contribute to as it helps with website optimisation your position in organic search engine results pages (SERPs).

Video content towards the top of the page is also an engaging way to keep a visitor on your site. But again, the content is key and needs to be focussed to your audience.

Read our blog about creating an online persona for your business as this will help you with tailoring content specifically for your audience.

2. Ease of navigation

Once you get people to your website, it needs to be a smooth journey for them to move from page to page. Having a website that is easy to navigate will help people stay on your website for longer and give more chance of a sale.

Have a look at your website and check the menu and homepage, are you covering the questions that your target audience will ask? Is it easy for them to find contact details and get in touch with you? Is your menu offering the right options and is it clear?

Ensure you have bold call to actions and white space that can lead the visitor simply around the page – avoid too much clutter.

If you’ve written a blog add in internal links to relevant pages that can help further guide a visitor to other pages of interest.

3. Be mobile responsive

Globally 52% of web traffic comes from a mobile. This will only increase as the world conducts more transactions online and uses search on their mobile. If your website isn’t already mobile friendly, then now is the time to look for a new website design. If you are already mobile friendly, then always check how updates look on your mobile. As you constantly add blogs, new call to actions of pop up boxes, taking a quick look to that it functions correctly will help the user experience and prevent people from moving quickly from your website.

Website designer Croydon

Smart Cow is a web design company in Croydon . We build bespoke websites for accountants and local businesses which are search engine optimised. We offer a free website audit which can highlight areas that need improvement and guide you on what to update.

We also provide a suite of digital marketing services including social media management, PPC, email marketing and ongoing SEO. Book a free consultation to discuss our website design services and online marketing.

6 SEO tips to improve search ranking

07/07/202005/05/2020 by scmarketing

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the key digital marketing tactic working invisibly and effectively in the background to help improve your visibility in search engines.

Incorporating SEO into your overall marketing strategy is important right now especially as we’re reliant on the virtual world to shout about our business attributes. What’s key is about generating leads. You don’t want just anyone visiting your site, it’s about quality leads.

To help you achieve this, we’ve gathered together our top tips to kick start your SEO campaign and some refreshers for those businesses who need to revisit this.

1. Review website navigation

To have any success in Google search your website needs to be easy to navigate. This is not just about your menu, it’s the internal links that you include on web pages to help the search engine crawlers to use links and understand the content of your page. Conduct a review of your website to see if you have good quality links directing visitors around your site.

2. Fix broken links

Make sure the internal links on your website work. Think of a search engine as your visitor, it doesn’t want to be sent to a ‘404’ page as much as an actual visitor. It won’t be marked well for you. We can conduct a FREE Website review which will indicate errors such as broken links that you can then fix.

3. Keywords

If you don’t already have a list of words that you want to be found for, then now is a time to conduct keyword research. Spend some time really thinking about what your target audience is searching for to find you. What’s your business offering? How are your services solving a problem for your customers? These types of questions can help you get to those keywords and phrases (longtail keywords) that you then use to create content to optimise your web pages.

When you review your current content against this new list of keywords, there’s a few tips and tricks to implement that will help you stand out in search engines. Use the keyword in the title of your page and if possible, the URL – however this may be too difficult if you have a lot of backlinks already to the pages so you may not want to change them. We would usually aim to place a keyword within the first paragraph.

It’s also key to have your meta description completed and with keyword included. This is the short phrase that you see below the website URL in search results.

4. Review web page URL

Don’t be clever with the name of pages on your website. The URL of your pages should in effect ‘do what it says on the tin’. If you’re an accounting firm and one of your pages is about tax advice, then that should be the URL. It’s the keyword you want to be found for.

5. Link building

You may have articles or comments on other websites which include a link back to your website – in other words a ‘backlink’. Google monitors links reviewing quantity and quality. This helps build a websites’ authority. However, be careful, you don’t want links placed on any website, the emphasis is on quality and relevance to your website.

6. Local SEO

Local SEO can help you target local clients and prospects. Create content that includes information about the specific geographical areas you’re targeting. Also complete your Google My Business page. It helps Google verify your business.

Digital marketing agency

This is just a short overview of just some of the search engine marketing tips you can conduct for website optimisation. If you need help from a digital marketing agency to kick start your SEO strategy and improve your online presence then get in touch with us for your free consultation.