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New Year, New Website!

08/18/202201/04/2022 by scmarketing

It’s the new year and a time for resolutions. For small business owners now is the time to set your goals for your business growth plans. As part of your new year’s resolutions perhaps it’s time to refresh your website?

At the centre of your digital world is your website, but so often we hear that website’s are difficult to navigate and visitors leave all too quickly before a lead capture form is completed. So, is it time for a website refresh? Here’s our top tips for a review of your current site to understand what you need to consider for creating a quality website that will be found in search engine results pages.

1. Build your website with a good CMS

You need a good framework to build your website on. These days that means using Content Management Systems (CMS). Once the website is designed and developed, it enables easy upload of information so that content updates can be managed inhouse.

2. Simple and engaging content

Review all your marketing collateral and decide what you’ll use on the website and what needs to be cut out. For an accountancy firm, think about the services you offer and provide clear, precise information about each. If you think of who your target client is, then write content that speaks to them.

3. Easy website navigation

When you design the menu and site map, think about the layout and whether it’s relevant and easy to navigate. You want visitors to find things quickly to help reduce the bounce rate and to keep them looking through your website for longer.

4. Call to action

It’s not just about a clear menu, but it’s also about adding clear call to action buttons. These are often used for inbound marketing campaigns to drive visitors to take action such as download a form or ebook or sign up to a newsletter while collecting an contact email address to build your database.

5. Imagery

This forms part of your content too. It makes the website more engaging and easier on the eye. But don’t forget to use the right size as too large and this could impact on the speed of your website loading. Does your current website have good imagery that reflects your brand well?

6. Blog

Does your website have a blog? A blog is vital for a business website to be seen in organic google search. Why? Because it provides a dedicated space for uploading fresh content regularly. This keeps the website up to date and engaging for prospects, current clients and also the search engines.

7. Website optimisation

When it comes to digital marketing, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is probably something you often hear about, but why is it so important for your website? Optimising your site can help your website be found in search engine results pages (SERPs) such as Google or Bing. 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. You can read more about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) here.

8. Back up your website!

If you’ve not already been regularly backing up your website, add this to your new year’s resolutions. If you’ve worked thorugh this list of considerations for your website and feel that you need to create a new site then make sure that your web designer incorporates regular back ups as part of their process and ongoing management fee.

Is it time you had a new website?

If you can get all this working yourself, then you will be off to a great start. However, if you need help with your website design and development book a consultation with us.

9 web design tips

08/19/202205/04/2021 by scmarketing

Your website is your shop window for your prospects and existing clients. It should attract and engage visitors to keep them on your website for as long as possible.

Clear and bold call to actions with simple messaging and an easy to navigate menu is a solid foundation to build your website on.

If you’re looking for a new website to be designed and developed to help grow your business as part of your wider marketing strategy, here’s our top web design tips for businesses to consider.

1. Build your website with a good CMS

2. Simple and engaging content

Review all your company information including your ‘about us’, case studies, product information, contact details and pricing. No is the perfect time to update everything. Read your content and ask yourself is it clear, accurate and informative. If you think of who your target client is, then write content that speaks to them.

Make sure that your URL for these pages says exactly what’s being talked about on the page as this help with SEO. So, if you’re an accountancy firm talking about Corporation Tax or Self-employment tax, name the specific URL just that.

3. Easy website navigation

4. Calls to action

It’s not just about a clear menu, but it’s also about adding clear call to action buttons. These are often used for inbound marketing campaigns to drive visitors to: ‘download ebooks’; ‘sign up to a newsletter’; ‘book a consultation’.

5. Images

This forms part of your content too. It makes the website more engaging and easier on the eye. But don’t forget to upload the right size as too large and this could impact on the speed of your website loading and affect your SEO. Resize images so they are under 1200pixels wide. You can also install a plugin that means that whoever uploads an image to your CMS website it will automatically be resized.

6. Should websites have a blog?

Absolutely! A blog is vital for a business website to be seen in organic google search because it provides a dedicated space for uploading fresh content regularly. This keeps the website up to date and engaging for prospects, current clients and also the search engines.

The one job of a search engine is to get the best result for the person searching for a particular term. Therefore, providing content with helpful tips, advice and links, will help your website rise in the search rankings.

7. Be targeted

Your website needs to appeal to your target audience. We refer to this as an online persona which is a made up stereotypical customer. So, this is where a blog page can allow you to create specific content which answers the challenges of your audience.

8. Optimise your website

Any digital marketing 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.

9. Back up your website

Most CMS websites provide modules to allow you to back up and to make safe against hackers. Do what you can to make it safe. A digital marketing agency that designs websites will usually incorporate regular backs ups into their ongoing management fee, so make sure you ask about this when you look to engage a web developer.

Web Design Consultant Croydon

If you need help with your website design and development book a free consultation with the Smart Cow marketing team. As an inbound marketing agency in Croydon, we create and design websites for accountants and the local businesses.

Digital marketing resources

Beginner’s Guide to SEO

08/19/202203/09/2021 by scmarketing

With over 4.6 billion internet users worldwide, and over 7 billion searches on Google a day, making sure your website is noticed is a must. Which is why it’s important to consider using a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign to improve your online presence and make your website visible.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimising your content to improve its ranking on search engines results pages (SERPs), increasing your website traffic.

Search engines use bots to ‘crawl’ pages to gather information and place these pages in an index, where various factors are analysed to determine where they rank on search engines.

As a business, it’s important that you have a clear outline of what your objectives are before implementing an SEO strategy. Having an idea of what you’re striving towards will help formulate an SEO plan and the steps you’ll take to reach those goals.

If you’re unsure as to what your SEO objectives may be, think about what your business objectives are and how implementing an SEO campaign can help you reach those objectives.

Target audience

Your target audience are the people looking for your business’s services online.

Understanding your target audience is crucial to SEO, as you’re essentially tailoring your website to reach this audience.

A great way to better understand your target audience is to create an online persona. Think of your ideal customer and create a character based on that person – this will become your online persona that helps you tailor your marketing material including website content to target that person.

A few tips to help you create this persona include reflecting on the person’s goals and the challenges they may face trying to achieve them. Think of how your products and services may be the solution for those obstacles. These steps work together to help form a personality that gives you a better understanding of how your audience thinks and how you can market to them.

Our blog has further information to help you create an online persona.

Keywords

Once you have your target audience agreed and in mind, you can start to think of content for your website which will include keywords which will form a vital part of your SEO strategy.

Keywords are words and phrases that search engines use to determine what is on your website. When used properly, keywords can help boost how your website ranks on search engines, driving more traffic to your website.

With keywords it’s all about being specific to your business. With 53% of website visitors coming from organic search, thinking about what your target audience would type in the search engine function is a great place to start to help you create a list of the keywords for your audience.

However, a word of caution, excessive keyword use on a webpage can have an adverse effect on your rankings – this is known as keyword stuffing. So, high quality content should be fresh, unique and relevant to your target audience. Use your researched keywords within your web page which will help search engines understand what is on that page. Using the relevant keywords will ensure that visitors are getting the content they came for and not leaving too soon.

There are a number of keyword research tools online to help you work out what your keywords are, such as the Wordstream and Moz keyword research tools, and our how to improve onsite SEO with keywords blog also provides further insight on keywords.

Meta-descriptions

Another great SEO tip is to improve the quality of your meta-descriptions. The meta-description is a small snippet of text that appears under your webpage on search engines, to act as a summary of what the audience will find on your page and help boost click through rate (CTR) on SERPs. On search engines such as Google, the meta-description appears as a short paragraph below the web page title.

Good meta-descriptions are up to 160 characters and include targeted keywords.

Image optimisation

The optimisation of images on a website is also important and can be done in different ways. One way you can do this is by ensuring that every image has alt text – a written version of what the image contains. This helps:

When the image fails to show up for any unknown reason, as the alt text will be used as a substitute,
Screen readers as they read out the alt text to help the visually impaired better understand the page
Allowing search engines to crawl and rank your website

You should always try to include targeted keywords in your alt text as they’re another indication to search engines that your page is relevant to that search.

Optimising your images also includes making sure that they’re not too large, as the larger an image is the longer it may take to load. This may slow the load speed of your website and increase the bounce rate, the percentage of visitors that visit a page and leave instead of visiting other pages too. Research carried out by Google has shown that 53% of mobile users leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load, further proof that you need to manage image size and load speed.

Link building

Link building is the process of having internal and external links throughout your website content.

Internal links to other pages on your website help by:

Easing navigation around your website
Enabling search engines to crawl your website more easily
Guiding traffic to specific pages
Improving engagement and time spent on your website

While internal link building focuses on connecting pages on your website, external link building is all about your website URL being on other websites which then direct back to your website – also known as a referring domain.

Search engines look at the quality of the links and the quantity to help give you a domain authority score. The domain authority is a report of how relevant your website is in any specific area or market. Websites with a high domain authority score will be seen as a more trusted source and rank higher than those with lower scores, so it’s important to increase your score where possible.

The best way of getting your website on another domain is through online directories and Google My Business is perhaps the most important online directory for you to be on. For more details on Google My Business, visit our Setting up Google My Business blog.

We’ve also listed some alternative directories to help you grow your list of online directories to be featured on.

Web design

How your website is designed has a larger impact on your SEO than you may think. Search engine bots emulate the behaviour of visitors, so if they see that users are leaving your page quickly due to bad user experience, your page will get ranked down. The opposite also applies if visitors have a good user experience your website ranking will increase.

That’s why having a well-designed website can be a strong contributing factor in your SEO strategy. The best websites:

Are easy to navigate
Have fast load speed
Create brand consistency
Are responsive

A responsive website is a website that adjusts its appearance according to the device it’s being viewed on. Websites are not only being viewed on desktop devices, mobile devices account for half of website traffic. This makes it clear that having a responsive website is crucial, as you can’t guarantee what device your website is going to be viewed on. Also, responsive websites load much faster, this improves user experience and helps your website rank higher in search engine results pages – Google certainly favours websites with faster load times.

As a digital marketing agency, we offer web design services tailoring a website to the needs of the business.

Landing pages

An SEO landing page is a specific page on your website used to convert visitors into leads. Landing pages usually have the following:

Succinct content with keywords relevant to your target audience
Bold calls to action (CTA)
Forms – for lead generation
Thank you pages – to continue the conversation and market something else to your leads

Landing pages are a great way to gather data whilst also generating leads. When creating landing pages, it’s important to pay attention to how visitors interact with the web page. For example, if you see that your page has a lot of visits, but the conversions aren’t matching this could mean that the layout of your page needs to be reworked. We would always recommend creating a specific landing page if you progress with a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign.

SEO agency Croydon

There’s a lot to consider but we hope this guide has given you a good overview of the type of activity you can implement to kick start an SEO campaign for your business.

By incorporating SEO into your marketing strategy, you can enhance brand perception and online presence as it helps your business rank better in search engines. This can help generate a better rate of enquiries due to improved visibility.

If you feel you need support in getting your website optimised, then get in touch with Smart Cow Marketing to discuss your SEO needs further.

Web design guidelines

06/16/202102/10/2021 by scmarketing

Whether you have a website already or are looking for a web developer to create a brand-new website for you, here’s some of the key considerations to think about to ensure that your website is doing what it should – engaging with visitors and being a lead generator.

1. What functionality should your website have?

A website will be developed to your brief. Therefore, think about what you would like first before you speak to a developer. Look at other websites to see what type of functionality you would prefer. Keep a note of these so you can chat with your chosen web developer about your preferences.

Having a Content Managed System (CMS) gives you the ability to update content yourself once the website is created. Therefore you have the choice to maintain the website yourself or work with a digital marketing agency to manage this for you. A CMS website gives you a lot of flexibility for the future for regular blog uploads through to ad hoc landing page creations for new products or services.

You also need to consider the functionality. Do you need an e-commerce website or will a brochure website be suitable for your requirements?

2. Website design

Now you know the purpose of your website and understand your target audience, you need to ensure that your web design will appeal.

Work with your web designer so that they understand your company values, branding and target audience.

A web developer will usually create a mock design for you on a wire frame – check this out when you ask for a website quote.

This mock design will give you an idea of what the homepage will look like providing you the opportunity to feedback on any likes or dislikes. Sometimes it’s easier to do this once the design is in front of you.

If in doubt, keep your website simple.

Keep colour to a minimum and ensure they are in keeping with your brand. Sometimes the more space on the page the better on the eye.
Keep font consistent across your website and ensure you can read it – there’s some lovely different styles out there but some offer design over functionality!
Use images to help break up space.
Use bold call to actions to encourage website visitors to ‘contact’, ‘get a quote’, ‘download an ebook’.

Above all it’s about ease of navigation, this is where a sitemap comes in.

3. Sitemap

At design stage your web developer can help create the sitemap with you. This will be something you agree at initial stages. The structure of the website hinges on this. Most importantly you need a website that is easy to navigate, easy on the eye – as this helps guide you around the website, and you should always have the purpose at the back of your mind.

4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Establish up front with your web designer what content you already have, whether you need content edited or written from scratch.

Usually content is transferred from the old website. Or you can provide new content at design stage, indicating where copy needs to be placed.

Check with your developer that the website will be optimised and mobile friendly. SEO includes activity such as completing the meta descriptions. alt tags and H1 headings.

As SEO is a long-term strategy, you will need to keep up with adding fresh content to your website with keywords to help it rise in search engine rankings.

Help potential customers find your website with a digital marketing strategy for lead generation. Link building is a key part of this so activity would include adding links into social posts, completing your Google My Business page, inclusion in email marketing with ‘read more’ call to actions with links to your website.

If your website is new you might want to consider a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign as this can help give your site a boost in search engine results pages (SERPS).

5. Security

Get security sorted at early stages such as with an SSL certificate as well as an updated privacy policy. Captcha is another security measure to determine whether users are human which you can add to forms or logins. Captcha helps to prevent bots from accessing these areas.

Website design Croydon

Your digital marketing activity should have a consistent look and feel to help brand awareness and encourage loyalty.

We are a web design company in Croydon. Our digital marketing services include creating bespoke websites for accountants, SEO, social media marketing and PPC for accountants in Surrey.

Further resources for web design and development: