Trendy Golfers Watch This Space
I had to write about this company who are going great guns. They have really taken the world of golf clothing by storm and design and manufacture trousers, shirts, shorts, belts and accessories for the ultra trendy golfer. Its a real positive story of business owners making things happen in ecommerce. Not to mention they rank on page one for the term golf clothing!
Click here to find out more
Payday Loan Lender Goes For Gold Online
Early Payday Loans is a company who knows what they are doing online. They have embraced the world of online marketing and are really looking for a joined up approach. That means using all the internet has to offer in generating leads and sales for their payday loans online business.
We are working tegether to improve their online presence which includes helping them to get the new website optimised, build quality links and get them some good PR. We will return soon with the fruits of all our labour and report on the effects of them investing in their online business.
We very much look forward to helping them succeed online.
Homeless International Challenge – Namibia 2012
This blog post is a not so shameless plug for charity! I know its that season where many charities up the ante on their fundraising and Homeless International is no different. They help some of the poorest communities in the world who literally have nothing. It’s very humbling.
This particular project is in Namibia and its my wife Ursula who is raising the funds herself and then going to Namibia to help with some vital building projects for very deprived communities. I am very proud!
Anyway, its not until next July but it would be fab to get some publicity as well as raising additional funds. Ursula is paying half of the £3000 required herself and we need as much as possible for this great charity and an amazing project. She is doing it through First Wessex, her employer who support this charity.
You can find out more about the Namibia Community Challenge 2012 on this handy pdf or you can donate if you wish on the Challenge Website.
You can also visit the Homeless International website.
External Decorator – Marketing Genius in Southampton
I had to share this. I stumbled upon one of the most compelling marketing exploits from a local company I have seen in a long time. Now to give you perspective, within 5 minutes of coming home and finding their flyer I had booked their services! This guy had no expensive marketing materials, hadn’t employed marketing experts and hadn’t done any kind of marketing course or seminar… It was very simple, but very effective….
What did he do?
I came home to find an A4 sheet of paper with a headline, a few pictures, a price and a great testimonial. Actually, you could tell it was printed at home and was not professionally crafted, but it really didn’t matter. It simply had a before and after picture of a house in my road showing the guttering that had been painted. It stated the house had recently been done and therefore you could go and see.I did.
What did I do?
With leaflet in hand I walked the few doors down and stood and admired the work. The next thing I did was to call Johnsons Decorating Services in Southampton (07807 356 840) to book in and to congratulate him on his marketing. (no commision for me – Just rewarding great initiative!)
Why did I call?
Well he had done a couple of key things. He identified his market. (My gutters clearly needed work). He showed me it was clearly a good job he does. Crucially, his pricing was carefully thought about and was at a price point where I could see it was a no brainer. I didn’t want to do it. It was too dangerous (Mrs T did not like the idea of it) and he could do it much quicker than I could.
What happened next?
I’ll update this bit as he’s booked in this week. I just wanted to share how marketing can be simple AND effective (as well as cheap). Don’t spend too long getting your marketing perfect, its better to have something good that you send out than something perfect that you don’t!!
Good luck.
Solatricity Choose Mercury!
We are delighted that a new solar panel supply and installation company have asked us to work with them on their Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimisation.
Solatricity are leaders in their field in the solar panel supply and installation industry. They have an ISO9001 quality management approval and only employ approved installers who also meet requirements for quality and service.
We very much look forward to an ongoing relationship with Solatricity and helping them achieve great success online.
Get Your Comms in Check!
Just received one of those calls asking me if I would like to save money on my BT phone bills. We’ve all had them, and I have to say normally handled quite professionally. Here’s pmne I had earlier….
Caller from Comms Firm: “We can save you lots of money off your bill, with our packages and streamline your telephone systems to be more effective in running your business”
Me: “I would like more information please but can I call you back as I am quite busy right at this moment”
Caller from Comms Firm: “Erm, we have just moved office, erm, hang on”, (shouts to colleague). “Shirley. What’s out number?”
Superb!
Google Has a Sense of Humour?
I had to post this. It’s high risk as it may highlight, firstly my age, and secondly my mental age!
While carrying out some keyword research, I popped into the Google Keyword Research Tool. You are often asked to enter a security capture to prove you’re a a human. Captures are supposed to be random words, but this is what I found:
For those of you who don’t understand… Nevermind…
But here is a picture of Pingu if you just wanted to be reminded:
So as it turns out Google has a sense of humour – So look out for any amusing captures and feel free to post them if you have any!
Testing Testing 321!
I thought I would write a post based on something that happened today. It highlights the importance of testing your website. I was asked to review a site that had recently changed some landing pages. These pages were important because they are the destination pages for their Pay Per Click Campaigns. The pages themselves are actually very nicely put together and have the necessary elements that are important for landing page optimisation.(Call to Action, Sign up boxes at top and bottom of page, copy broken up in to easy to read sections and so on)
The issue:
These pages had everything that you would expect would achieve a great conversion rate, certainly better than before – However, they had significantly dropped in the number of forms being submitted. Now it could have been due to August being a holiday month and it would have been easy to assume that.
The solution:
I didn’t think it was the holiday season as the impressions and click through were still good – This was a problem with the landing page! It took me a few minutes to discover that the reason was one of the nice new email sign up forms was not working properly. Had this been tested when it was uploaded there would have been many more sign ups.
So, make sure you test all the actions on your site that are important to you. If its an ecommerce store then buy one of your products or get someone else to do it. You can even zero rate a products to test the buying process.If it is email sign ups, check that it works – Do you receive the emails?
Think about the following:
- Is the process unnecessarily long?
- Do all pages or forms work?
- Is there a clear call to action that matches the action required?
- Are the pages easy to read and navigate?
- Let the buyer know where they are in sign up process
- Be clear on what they will receive
So have a look at your site and don’t wait until something looks wrong and don’t assume why it may be going wrong!
Search Engine Optimisation Made Easy!
Advanced Web Ranking
Creating a successful website takes a great deal of time and effort. You spend hours making sure you have a logical structure, easy navigation, an appealing design, compelling copy and some really cool images. This is after making sure your services or products are likely to sell online. At this stage you are to be congratulated. Anyone completing these steps has truly done a magnificent job. However, it is where the bulk of the work starts if you want the website to get some traffic.
It is very important to have a great website but you also need traffic to make it work, and lots of it. One of the best ways to do this is to get your website a high Search Engine Ranking. Doing this requires as much thought and effort as creating the site in the first place but it can be made easier with the right tools in your tool box.
Advanced Web Ranking is a software package you should not be without. It allows you to find the right keywords, promote your site and analyse its progress, three elements which will get you well on your way to dominate the search engines with a high Website Ranking and drive huge levels of traffic to your site. It does this though some pretty cool tools that will allow you to see how your site is doing and compare it to others in your industry.
Keyword Research
This is one of the most important aspects of improving your site to increase visitors. Choose the right keyword and you could get lots of traffic. Combining the power of research and analysis can help refine your pages. Keyword Builder is a Keyword Research Tool that will allow you to identify the best keywords starting from your own seed list and Keyword Suggest will do the rest taking the hard leg work out of the equation.
Keyword Analyzer will enable you to compare your site to others that perform well in your niche. Having this information can help you beat the competition.
Website Promotion
Advanced Web Ranking will submit your site to hundreds of search engines so they can rapidly crawl your site and add it into the index. This will save you many hours of laborious submissions.
Advance Link Manager will identify potential sites in your niche you can gain links from to boost your site authority. This will ensure that your site is seen and an authority site as relevant web owners are prepared to link to you. Once Advanced Link Manger has found the sites you will need to negotiate with the site owner which will save you bulk of the time this activity requires.
Website Analysis
The phrase you cannot manage what you cannot measure is very true especially when it comes to search engine optimisation. Advance Web Ranking will check the positions of your keywords within the major search engines. This will ensure you can react when things are going the wrong way and see what is working.
You can create a schedule so that reports are ready when you want them. These will show where the keyword is ranking in each search engine you have selected and you can create profiles for a number of different projects.
This software is invaluable to search engine marketers as they can see their clients websites gain positions and correlate this with their traffic statistics. It can also be used for website owners to really drill down into their own sites performance on the web.
Advanced Web Ranking is such a comprehensive internet marketing system that allows you to easily improve your website through analysis of your own site and that of others in your niche. This gives you an amazing advantage and could see you bringing in huge levels of traffic. With a 30 day free trial you have nothing to lose as you can start to see the benefits for yourself.
Advanced Link Manager
Inbound links are one of the most important factors in the success of websites in the search engines. As each link is seen as a vote by the search engines it says a lot about your site if you have a high level of links coming in. Many Search Engines will place high importance on Link Popularity. If these links are from high page rank sites that are relevant to your niche then you could see high web rankings for years. This can result in a very successful online business. It is also one of the hardest and most time consuming elements to improving your website for increase search engine rankings. You find yourself with the problem of how to gain these links and how do you allocate your time to gain the most effective and quality links.
Advanced link manage has the answer.
Link Popularity Analyzer
Link Popularity Analyzer helps to determine the strength of your inbound link profile and can give you insight of the way the links are built over time. This will enable you to see the effects of your link building campaign as you can compare your link popularity now with previous months. This is a very important feature as it allows you to assess if submitted links are being approved and is not simply a case of wasting time.
Another really useful feature is to analyse the profile of your competitors and the current leading sites in your industry. Doing this can give you the ability to mimic link profiles and really boost your rankings. There are many ways to analyse the links of other sites but none work so effectively as Link Manager as it makes it so simple to identify where the competitors sites have gained their links from. Inbound links also provide traffic which is from a relevant source as internet browsers landing on the page where your link is can easily navigate to your site. You can never underestimate the importance of link building and tools that make it easier are well worth the investment. Buying software that will save you time and benefit your website and that of your clients will be a very sound investment returning its original spend many times over for years to come.
Finally
Companies of all sizes around the world are using these software packages including multinational organisations as well as individual website owners. This demonstrates the powerful features are just too good to ignore whether you are in the business of analysing sites, marketing them or both.
So you should now have an idea of how to turn your nicely designed, well-crafted site into a traffic generating machine. But don’t take our word for it – take a free trial of Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager and see for yourself.
Good Luck.
Get Listed on Google Local Business Centre
Recently I have found myself advising business owners to get on to the Google Local Business Listing more and more frequently. I have been amazed at the number of people who have a business that operates in a specific location that is not listed. The great thing about this is that it appears near the top of the search results in Google for location specific searches. you can include multiple entries if you are based in several locations.
For example, a search for Carpet Fitters in Southampton, looks like this: (I need my new carpet fitted!)
As you can see it is high up on the page, above the natural search, but just below the pay per click adverts. The beauty of this listing is it is free. To get your business listed you need to vist the Google Local Business Centre and enter your company details. There is a verification process where Google will send you a pin but this is really easy to do.
The next thing is to make sure the right keywords are placed as categories. In the next post I will reveal a few tips on how to get your listing to appear higher on the local listings. But first I have to go and find my local carpet fitter!
