SEO

SEO archive by Smart Cow Marketing, digital marketing agency offering the best lead generation services in and around Croydon.

website design and development

4 tips for successful website design and development

by

Look at your online business in the same way you would a shop. Traditionally, as much as a physical bricks and mortar location needs a good foundation a website too needs to be built on a solid foundation and structure.

If you don’t invest in the initial infrastructure of the website, even though the design may be top notch, potential customers searching for your services may have difficulty finding you.

Here’s four points to be aware of when embarking on a new website design for your business. While there’s lots more to consider about the design and functionality, these are your vital starting points to build that robust foundation so that your website structure is optimised.  

1. Sitemaps

A sitemap is basically as you will have thought – a list of pages of your website. This is in addition to your main visible menu designed for the website. Clients often ask us ‘why a website needs this specific site map’. The reason being is that it gives both users and search engines an understanding of the layout of your site.

The site map makes it easy to return pages in search engines as it has a clear understanding of where to find your content on your website. This is the start of you creating a solid foundation to build your website.

2. Bot accessibility

Make sure that search engines can find the content within your website and that it is not hidden from view.

Your structured list – your site map – is also meant for web crawlers. This is an important visitor that you want to attract to your website!

Make it easy for the web crawlers (bots) to access and move around your website. You want to do all you can to get your website seen by the search engines.

Our blog on link building for improved website optimisation will also give you some tips on driving traffic to your website.

3. URL structure

The URL name and structure are important to the success of your website. By naming the page closest to what the page is about and what you want to be found for will give the search engines the best chance to find you. Naming pages correctly and structuring the site accordingly is key to your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy.

4. Quality content

Content is key for the success of your website. Knowing your target audience means you can tailor the content for them including keywords that you want to be found for in search engines. Keep it simple, easy to read and insightful. Be the thought leader in your field.

Take a look at our blog with SEO tips to improve search ranking. It includes an overview of keywords, link building and local SEO which all fall under your content marketing strategy for improving SEO.

Web design Croydon

We’re a Croydon web design agency, with years of experience, building bespoke websites for accountants and local businesses which are mobile friendly and designed to attract, engage and convert prospects.  

Once we build a website clients can take advantage of our range of design services where we build a marketing campaign around your target audience. With a mix of digital marketing tactics such as pay per click advertising, social media marketing, email marketing, video or blogs, we build an ongoing content marketing strategy to attract good quality leads to your business. 

If you’re looking for web design company to update your website or would like a brand new website developed, then get in touch with us for your free consultation.  

If you’re unsure about the state of your website then why not take advantage of our FREE Website Review. This will highlight areas that may be impeding your website being successful in search engine rankings.

If you’re looking for a web design company in Croydon, we look forward to speaking with you soon.

Website design and development

Where can I find the best web designer in Croydon?

by

Your website is your sales pitch to potential clients. The look and feel of your website are therefore vital to attract the target audience for your business. So, once you’ve ascertained that your website may need a little update, how should you go about finding a web design company in Croydon to help your business stand out in the online world?

Here’s our advice of what web design services you should cover off with your developer so that you can build a great website.  

CMS

Build a bespoke website with a good Content Managed System (CMS). This means that once the website is built and with a little training, you can manage the upload of content yourself.

Easy navigation

Make sure the navigation and menu of your website are easy to read and navigate. Any page of importance should be no more than two clicks – preferably one click – from the homepage.

Using pillar pages will help you structure your site map. The titles of these pillar pages will also be the names of the URL. Really think about these as this is what you want to be found for. So, think carefully about your core offering so you can get this menu right at design stage.

Call to action buttons, strategically placed on pages will really help with engagement and your visitor’s movement around the website. As will white space. Don’t be too cluttered.

Content marketing

Web Design CroydonWhen you embark on creating your website it’s a great time to review your current collateral and what should be on the website and what shouldn’t. It can also highlight gaps that you need to fill. If you look at your competitors – how are they talking about their services? What’s missing from your website?

Optimise your website

Any agency you work with will tell you about Meta Descriptions, Alt Tags and H1/H2 headings. A web designer can provide you with simple training on this once your website has been developed. Or you can engage a digital marketing agency to manage this for you moving forward to improve your search results. This means they can keep an eye on your keywords for you. But this is for another blog. You can read more about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Be visual

Images must not only be relevant, in focus and look good, they must also be optimised for your wordpress website. A developer should be doing this for you when they upload the images. This means they are the right size for the website and will help with the site speed by not being too large. These will also help with viability when sharing on social media such as Facebook and twitter

Research indicates that marketers using video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users (Source: Wordstream). Video is therefore great for engagement. Placing video toward the top of a page, so that it is seen straight away, has been known to keep visitors on pages longer.

Back up your website

Most CMS provide modules to allow you to back up and to make safe against hackers. Unfortunately, with web robots (automated programs) checking thousands of websites a second for weaknesses to exploit the owner it’s important to do as much as you can to make it safe. Talk through the options with your web developer such as the SSL certificate and captcha forms for your website.

Get your website seen

This is just a short overview. If you’d like to chat about your current website if you’re looking to design and build a new one or generally about design services in Croydon, get in touch today and our website designer and developer can look at the best options for your business and how we would work closely to get the best results for your online presence.

Web Design Croydon

Smart Cow is a top online marketing and web design agency in Croydon that fully understands your requirements and provides user friendly websites and professional web design for accountants and local businesses at affordable prices.

Accountants digital marketing plan

Digital Marketing for accountants in London

by

Is your accounting practice looking to attract more quality clients and qualified leads? Digital marketing for accountants is key.

A digital inbound marketing strategy could be the answer to help you reach potential Clients and retain existing ones.

Attract and retain clients

With the top 15 accounting firms in the UK based in London alone, having a search engine marketing strategy in place to help your website stand out is vital to lead generation.

Ultimately you want to generate traffic for potential customers, nurture those leads and then convert to a client. This journey is very rarely a one-stop shop. Your prospects will have done their research, checked out you and your competitions services and read online reviews.

But first things first, to generate traffic you’ll need to take a few steps for your firms website to be found using online marketing.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Through optimisation of your website and a good digital marketing strategy you can help generate traffic and attract good qualified leads from business owners who are interested in your services.

Read our blog post about what SEO agencies should offer London firms to help you review your current website and implement some quick win optimisation tricks.

Content marketing  

As part of your accountant website review, take a look at the content. Is it easy to read, to the point and simple to navigate? Offering tips on accounting services and advice on new regulations helps position you as a thought leader to your client base. With fresh blog content, search engines have new content to find you for and that can easily be shared on social media.

But one review you can make is your use or keywords – are they relevant? For instance are you using such phrases as ‘accountants in London’? This all helps search engines find you and show you in relevant search results.

Pay Per Click

This digital marketing tactic offers a truly targeted way to reach potential prospects.

Pay Per Click campaigns (PPC) mean you can focus on geographical areas, pinpointing areas of London and Greater London as well as choosing demographics to fit your target audience.

Be succinct and to the point in your ad messaging as you only get a limited word count to play with. Test out your messaging too. The beauty of a PPC campaign is you can tailor and continue to tweak ads depending on results. In doing so you can really begin to see a Return on Investment (ROI) with a Google AdWord campaign.

Our blog on tips for setting up and running PPC campaigns will give you more insight to set up a specific campaign.

While a remarketing campaign provides that all important brand awareness as those ads will follow visitors around the web. Understanding how remarketing can grow your business has more helpful tips for you to consider for your accounting firm.

Lead nurturing & automation

Even if you have a good conversion rate, you’ll still need to be managing hundreds of leads through the life cycle. To make this efficient, you may want to consider applying several automation tools. From email campaigns, sequences and workflows, automating repetitive tasks can help free up time.

A good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution can also pull teams together to work effectively on leads and clients.

Looking for leads?

There’s no doubt that optimising your website will help create stand out and help you be found for your services. However, as you’ve read, there’s a whole host of ideas to consider, and more. So, if you feel you need support in attracting leads to grow your accounting firm, then get in touch with Smart Cow, a digital agency for accountants, and we can look at creating a digital marketing plan specifically for your practice.

Book a Free consultation.

Digital marketing inbound strategy

8 tips on how to build an inbound marketing strategy

by

At the core of your digital marketing campaign is the product or service that you want to sell or promote. Your offer should not only be something that your industry wants but also offering a point of difference. Truly understanding what you core offer is will help you to develop an inbound marketing strategy that will ‘wow’ your prospects. 

Here’s some tips to help you structure and create your inbound digital marketing plan.

  1. Understand your brand identity – it’s key for business growth: One way to start building and understanding your brand identity is by thinking about your business as a person. What characteristics does it have? Is this person professional, an expert in their field, knowledgeable, creative – you get the idea. Start to jot down your thoughts and you’ll start to build a profile for your business. This will need to be translated to your website design and blog posts.
  2. Review the collateral you already have so you know your starting point: Here’s a few questions to consider – Do you have a company logo or brand guidelines? What are your company values and vision? What are the strengths of your team and what hidden strengths can they bring to the table? Having this background information to hand will help you form a well targeted marketing plan as messaging will be aligned to your values and visions.
  3. Create a persona of your target audience: For small businesses especially focus on the target audience, no matter how micro that niche is, and you will fly. Try to grab the whole market and you will end up getting nothing or, at best, poor fitting clients. Your knowledge in your niche will grow and will position you as the expert and the go to person. Think about the goals or challenges of your target audience and create a persona. If you start with their job role, imagine their personal goals such as business growth, saving the business money or a future promotion. Then imagine what challenges they face and start to note solutions for these. So, already you can begin to see a personality form in front of you. Then think about how your service or product can help them.
  4. Research your competition: Before setting out on your inbound marketing campaign, draw up a list of key competitors and the services and products they offer. This can help you make your offers and services stand out.  
  5. Develop keywords and phrases for your business: Think about what key term you would like to be found for. The more content you produce using keywords the more your website is recognised by search engines and improve you search engine optimisation. This means your website will make its way up the organic results pages. Find keywords that work with your business goals and target the areas you’re looking to promote. But finding out which keywords have the most traffic or competition isn’t widely available, this is where working with a digital marketing agency can help.
  6. Create a content plan with these overarching keywords at the core: Content marketing is a key focus for a successful inbound strategy. Create and align your content plan with any new product launches, service updates or industry report launches. You’ll then begin to get a picture of when to plot campaigns throughout the year and through what channels to be most effective. Develop specific content for your website to incorporate key phrases if you haven’t got relevant pages already. If you do, then they are likely to need updating. Also use backlinks to key pages on your website to help lower bounce rate.
  7. Tell search engines you exist: One of the first things you need to do when you’ve created your website, or if you’re embarking on a digital marketing campaign to grow your business, is to make sure you’ve told search engines that you exist. The most popular way to do this is initially is by populating Google My Business with your company details. It’s FREE to do. The very basics to complete are your website URL, opening times, address, contact numbers and email addresses and a short paragraph about your company. But it also allows you to upload blog content, images and videos, therefore another place that you can be found online to help SEO and your company to rise in the search rankings.
  8. Review results: With all the technology in the world at your fingertips, this alone is not going to be effective in getting a return on investment. Become data driven and review results of your campaigns will help you tailor, target and be relevant to the audience you want to reach. Through social media insights, PPC results or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, there’s tools at your fingertips to help you really tweak your campaign for the best results.

If you’re looking for more quality clients, become a lead generation magnet with a targeted inbound marketing strategy. Get in touch with us today or find out more in our handy resources. We are also a digital agency for accountants so check out our marketing services for accounting firms.

Digital marketing resources:

Facebook Linkedin Instagram Youtube Envelope X-twitter