Website optimisation

Website design and development

5 questions to ask your web design company

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Now is a great time to be updating your website to improve your online presence and make sure you’re ticking all the boxes for what your leads and clients are looking to find.

So, we’ve compiled 5 questions on what you need to ask your web design company when you look to take that step and update your website.

1. CMS

Ask your web designers about a Content Management System (CMS) website such as WordPress. This means that once the website is built, and with a little training, you can manage the upload of content yourself. Basically, you want to have control to be able to add content once your website has been created.

So, ask your website designer and developer what access you will have and if it can be a CMS website. If you go to a web developer, you are likely to have the website handed to you after completion to handle yourself and manage the day to day upload of content into the future.

If you work with a digital marketing agency you can ask them to quote for services once the website is live such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and content marketing such as writing blogs and handling Social Media channels.

2. Be responsive and optimised

Make sure your website is responsive. What do we mean by that? It means websites can change structure depending on what device you are viewing it on. For example this means when you look at a website on your mobile phone you can view it as you would on a PC.

Google certainly ranks a website if it is mobile friendly so it will help you in search. With 60% of searches made on a mobile device, being mobile friendly is not a nice to have, it’s essential.

You also should be aware of 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. But, as it’s being developed, they should have already implemented these on the content and images already uploaded for you.

3. Integration

Sales and marketing go hand in hand. A website is at the core of your inbound marketing campaign as any marketing you do you want to lead your prospects back to your website.

So, make sure that your professional web design has the same consistency look and feel as any other sales and marketing you conduct. Therefore, there needs to be cohesion between email marketing, social media, Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, marketing automation and CRM. You need to align channels so that your clients and prospects have a smooth sales journey. 

4. Be secure and compliant

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 your website safe. Talk through the options with your web developer such as the SSL certificate and captcha forms for your website.

Ensure you have a privacy policy in your footer. This can be transferred from your current site but if your site is old, you may not have this up to date. So, ask your web developer if they have a template you can use. They should have an example template to hand to help you.

5. Talk design

Don’t be afraid to talk about how you want the website to look. While you are employing an expert, the look and feel of the website still needs to fit with your brand vision. Choose to work with a web designer or agency that you feel understands your company goals and what you want to achieve from the site. It needs to be tailored to you.

Your web developer needs to be a collaborative partner. Here’s some pointers to remember when you talk through the design. It’s not just about the site looking good but about practical needs to ensure a well optimised website.

  • Be image led: Ensure that images will be incorporated into your design. If you need new imagery, you may need to agree up front whether you need to pay extra or if images are included in your quote.
  • Don’t be afraid of white space on your website. It aids site navigation and is easy on the eye.
  • Add bold calls to action buttons throughout the website.
  • Agree up front the site navigation. Ensure that it’s easy for visitors to move around the site.

Ask your web developer to create a wire frame of the design. This way, after you have had your initial discussions, the designer will create a mock up allowing you to see the overall look of the homepage and a typical page on the website.

Website design Croydon

Improving your website can help user experience and, in turn, generate more quality leads. By creating a website and content tailored to your audience will help you with your overall inbound marketing strategy. If you’re embarking on a new website or looking to refresh your current one, hopefully these tips have given you some steer to help you create a fantastic experience for your clients and prospects.

Smart Cow Marketing is a web developer in Croydon, London. Our expertise in website design and development means we can provide you with a brand-new bespoke website or provide advice on ways to update your current site.

Get in touch to talk about your web design requirements.

Business ruler

Attract the right online enquiry to convert leads

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Maintaining good quality leads through your website is key to business growth. For a professional services firm, such as accounting, this is vital to continue business through the current COVID-19 situation and ongoing service to your existing clients.

But to get quality leads to your sales funnel in the first place is the trick. So, here we give a little overview of some of the digital marketing tactics you can employ to help with online lead generation. 

Download The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing to help you create your inbound marketing strategy to attract quality leads. Read on for a quick summary to get you started.

Quality content 

You’ll be hearing quality quite a lot from us. If you want quality leads then you need to attract clients with quality, tailored content.  

During this time of uncertainty, your content needs to be offering advice to your clients. Keep them informed of legislation, company changes and support through your blog, email marketing, social media channels and webinars.  

Email marketing  

Whilst you may feel that new business is not happening right now, maintaining presence is vital to be certain you will be remembered in the coming weeks when society picks up its pace to the next stage of ‘normal’. 

So, if you don’t already have a newsletter sign up box on the homepage of your website then add that. Capture email addresses and keep in touch with these people who have opted in with regular email marketing campaigns. They clearly want to hear from you so make the most of it.  

Just remember to be GDPR compliant and ensure that you tell people what they are signing up to and make it easy for them to opt out of communication.   

Get quality leads in your sales funnel  

But what should you do to attract the right type of enquiry? 

Make sure you have created a positioning statement about your company, your goals and target audience.  

Create an online persona of your target audience. This simple document will give background to a typical client of yours and provide answers to their challenges.  

Through targeted and relevant content you attract your audience to your website through blogs, optimised website (SEO), social media marketing and Pay Per Click (PPC) ads. It’s worth noting that 89% of online consumers use search engines when making a purchase decision. 

Once a visitor reaches your website, it’s about engaging with your target audience. From the initial landing page with bold calls to action or forms to download ebooks. To close the deal, it’s again about relevant emails and nurturing contacts through a well-managed CRM system.  

Reviews 

Once you have secured a contract with your new client, asking for a testimonial to add to your website or to your Google My Business page can help with gaining further quality leads. With 88% of consumers having read reviews to determine the quality of a local business, it makes sense to add this action into your marketing plan. 

Smart Cow is a digital marketing agency in Croydon. Whether you’re looking for a complete digital marketing strategy or standalone PPC campaign with Google adwords management book a free consultation and we can discuss our marketing services with you.

Digital marketing Croydon resources 

Word in dictionary illustrating keywords

Link building for improved website optimisation

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One of the most important steps in an efficient search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is link building. You can boost your presence in Google and maximise your Bing results or beyond with a marketing strategy that encompasses link building.  

Online results are all about lead generation and therefore traffic to your website. Links on other websites help to drive traffic back to your website. 

You may be thinking that your social media posts also have links so is that not enough? While it’s a good start as social media channels provide quality links back to your blog page or service information, having more quality links back from other reliable and trustworthy websites helps add further to your domain authority.   

As a business owner, this is something you can start to make headway on during this time of change as we adjust to our different working environments.  

Benefits of a quality link building strategy

Here’s an overview of the main reasons you want to implement a link building campaign within your SEO marketing strategy.  

  • Getting lots of useful and relevant links for your website will help search engines position your website in a higher level in the search engine results; 
  • Traffic on your website increases due to the presence of high quality links that point and refer to your website; 
  • Generate more leads if your website is targeted to your audience  
  • Prospects search for your services helping business growth, quality leads and improved customer retention.  

Tips to start link building for website optimisation  

To create a successful link building campaign to drive traffic to your website you need to take a considered and coordinated approach. It’s not about placing content anywhere. Key link building techniques to consider include: 

Create quality content 

Quality content is essential to attract your target audience. You need to solve their challenges and provide value. Achieve this through engaging content. Include noteworthy statistics (reference your source where you do), advice, tips that will help their business. It’s about quality over quantity. Make sure the website’s you target are relevant to your target audience and sector. 

Be targeted 

With content being key to your link building, knowing your target audience is essential. This way you can provide the quality content that they will want to read. Find out about creating an online persona for your business which will help you create engaging content for your target customer.  

Be relevant 

This is important for search engines. Their goal is to deliver the most relevant results for an enquiry. So, make sure your links point to the most pertinent information on your website. If visitors – your prospective customers – need to click more than once when they reach your web page  you’re likely to lose them. Make sure you evaluate the landing page that you will use as the link to your site so that it has relevant information and easy website navigation to help reduce bounce rate.

Quotes and resource lists 

Often websites create lists of resources at an end of an article, blog or for key topics. If you have a relevant comment that you think could add to the story or perhaps an article with top tips that you think would be a beneficial resource for the authour’s article then you can contact the authour to ask about being included in the article or offer a guest post. It’s of mutual benefit for both parties if it is relevant information for their audience as long as it’s not salesy.  

Guest blogs 

Keep an eye on relevant articles and blogs written by people in your industry. Can you add comments to support the story and show your appreciation? This can then lead to you asking if they are interested in a guest blog from you. Research who the key influencers are in your industry to make sure you follow on social media to keep an eye on what they are writing about.  

SEO to action now  

Link building is a long-term SEO strategy. If you’re embarking on optimising your website now that we are all working more closely with the virtual world, here’s a few resources at the end of the article with some top tips that you can implement now before setting out on the longer link building strategy.  

Initially check the internal links you have on your website already. You may find you need to add more links to keywords – words and phrases that you want to be found for. Make sure that these links lead to your core ‘pillar’ pages. Think of it this way, if you visit a website you want seamless navigation so by placing relevant links throughout the page will help you find things quickly.

Also, ensure you have completed as much detail as you can on your Google My Business page. Continue to add images and blog content to it moving forward.

What you’ll find by actioning things like reviewing the content on your website, creating an online persona and completing any missing technical SEO on the backend such as meta descriptions, you will have set yourself up exceedingly well to get link building further.  

Search Engine Optimisation resources:  

Website design and development

10 useful tips on websites for accountants

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This post provides 10 crucial tips to look at for websites for accountants.

Your website is in effect your brochure for your prospects and existing clients. It should be appealing to not only attract but engage visitors to keep them viewing pages on your website for as long as possible.

For an accounting firm, clear and bold call to actions with simple messaging and an easy to navigate menu is a solid foundation to build your website on.

Top tips for your website

If you’re looking for a new website to be designed and developed to help grow your business as part of a holistic inbound marketing campaign, here’s our top website tips for an accountancy firm to consider.

  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 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 and what they are looking for in an accountancy practice, 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 to help your site become fully optimised for the search engines. So, if you’re talking about Corporation Tax or Self-employment tax, name the website page just that.
  3. Easy website navigation: During the design build stage pay a lot of attention to 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: ‘download useful HMRC forms’; ‘sign up to a newsletter’; ‘book a consultation’.  
  5. Imagery: This forms part of your content too. It makes the web sites 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. You will also need to make sure that the imagery is mobile responsive so provide a great user experience whatever the platform.
  6. Is a blog relevant for an accountancy firm? Absolutely! Don’t be fooled by the influencer lifestyle type blogs and social media feeds you so often see. A blog is vital for a business website to be seen in organic google search and ultimatley being a lead generator for your firm. 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. 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 you rise in the search rankings and help make it a lead generating website.
  7. Be targeted: For an accountancy firm, while you want a professional feel, as that’s what people will expect, you also need to make sure that the website design and content reflects your accountancy firms brand and appeals to your target audience. We call this the persona – a made up stereotypical client. 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 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. 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) here.
  9. Be a disruptor: When it comes to AI this is the buzz word of the day in the accounting world. Recent reports from EY has revealed that 77% of respondents say that AI is expected to turn into an essential business driver across the financial services industry (Transforming Paradigms: A Global AI in Financial Services Survey). Therefore, if your firm is creating a new website, then should you be incorporating AI functionality? A simple chatbot is a great way to start, before embarking on an integrated CRM system for your practice.
  10. Back up your website: Most CMS websites provide modules to allow you to back up and to make safe against hackers. Unfortunately, it’s an everyday occurrence around the world where thousands of web robots (automated programs) check thousands of websites a second for weaknesses to exploit the owner. 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.  

Stand out with your website

If you can get all this working yourself, then you will be off to a great start. Smart Cow is a digital agency for accountants so, if you’re in need of a web designer for accountants and web development book a consultation with us.

Digital marketing resources:

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