Let’s look at Google search, there are other ways to direct traffic to your website but Search is still the most common and Google has 90% of the UK search market.

1 Get found

• Organic Search-You want to appear towards the top of page 1 of the organic results for your search term. People will very rarely go past page 1 when searching.  How do you do this? Rather by conducting a search engine optimisation campaign or targeting a niche market that the competition is weak in.
• Google local business- Register it is free, quick and simple to do. It is highly effective and is the source of many of our customers website traffic for the first few months of their website going live
• Adwords- Lots of people are worried about the effectiveness of Adwords, wasting money on clicks that come to nothing, competitors clicking and wasting their budget etc.  Virtually every major company in the world use Adwords many buy their own name, if these companies, who have full marketing departments and measure the effectiveness of every piece of marketing they do use Adwords, then this is a convincing endorsement to me! My advice, get a professional company to set up your campaign and monitor it closely.

2 Click Through Rate
Once you appear on page one you still need to actually be clicked on to get the customer to your website. By targeting organic, local business, and sponsored searches you are increasing your chances of having multiple listings on the first page. Multiple listings obviously multiply your chances of being clicked.

• Organic- Make sure your title tags and meta description are formatted well, descriptive and inviting to encourage click through.
• Google Local Business – Fill out as much information as possible! Where appropriate opening times, payment methods, photo’s etc. Try to get customers to leave reviews.
• Adwords- Follow Google’s advice on how to structure your advert, this advice will make a big difference to you click through rate.  

3 Conversion
What is a conversion? That is what you need to decide when constructing the web page! If it’s an enquiry via E-mail or phone these need to be in clear view with a call to action I.E 0800 000 000 CALL NOW! If it’s a purchase the checkout procedure needs to be obvious and simple to do. The page needs to have a simple clear message if people cannot find what they are looking for quickly and easily they will go somewhere else!

4 Monitor, Analyse and Adjust
Google offer Analytics free of charge. This is an accurate and comprehensive tool for monitoring the visits to your website. Analytics can show you how many visits you’ve had each day, how long they stayed how many pages were viewed, what search term was used to find you, bounce rate etc etc. Your website should be a constantly evolving and adapting entity. Monitor the results in analytics and make changes where appropriate to get more work from your website!

Keyword

Choosing a keyword or search term is the number 1 thing to do when planning an optimisation campaign.  Picking your battle at this stage can make success more likely. Look for a popular long tail searches (easier said than done!).

Top Tip: Don't worry too much about Meta tag Keywords. Google has not used this for a few years now.

Title Tag

Title tags appear at the very top of the screen when you are on a website. They are also the bold blue line of text that appears in search engine result page.  Try to keep the title tag to 9-12 words for optimum results. Use the most important keywords first. Good title tags can be enough to get page one listings for lots of un competitive local search terms.

To tip: Don't try and target too many keywords on anyone page. All this does is dilute relevancy.

Meta Description

The description should be 18-24 words - it usually appears on the search engine results page under the hyperlink text. It should be a keyword rich summary of the web page, . It should be descriptive and compelling to invite more clicks

Top Tip: Make sure you have a different meta description for every page on your site.

Links

This has to be the most powerful factor for determining search engine positioning.  One way Links are needed from multiple relevant websites using the appropriate keyword in the anchor text.

Top Tip: Don’t bother with reciprocal links! One way links are what Google are looking for.

Content

This is the most obvious and often over looked particularly by people obsessed with optimisation.  Relevant, unique, interesting copy  that is keyword rich is the most straight forward way to obtain good search results.  The whole idea of search engines is to return the most relevant website for the search term used. Having a website with unique relevant content ensures this.

Top tip: Don’t fill your page with spam! Don’t just repeat keywords over and over.

Over the last 3 months we've been involved in a consultancy role which has seen us independently review the websites of around 30 companies in the Midlands. During this time we've noticed the same issues time and time again which are preventing companies from realising their online potential. This post will outline the most common issues we come across.

Domain Ownership

With domain name prices so low, many people don't realise the value of them - we have noticed a worrying trend that some domain names have been registered in the name of web design agencies, free website providers or individuals rather than the company which should have ownership of them. This could cause problems if the company wishes to change provider in the future, or if one of these "upstream" providers goes bust, as you may not be then legally entitled to it. Domain names may only cost a few pounds, but have you considered what would happen if you no longer had ownership of yours?

No Visitor Data

If you are not monitoring and reacting to the way users interact with your website then you could be missing opportunities. Are sections of your site receiving a lot of views but not converting into enquiries or sales? Is one particular page causing users to drop off? Which keywords are bringing visitors to your site via search engines? Google provide a fully capable Analytics suite for free, so there is no reason you shouldn’t know the answers to all of these questions!

Legislation

Limited companies, as part of The Companies Act 2006, must display the following on all official documentation, including their website:

• The part of the United Kingdom in which the company has its registered office (i.e. England and Wales, or Wales, or Scotland, or Northern Ireland)
• The company’s registered number
• The address of the company’s registered office

It is also a requirement for VAT registered companies to display their registration number on their website – even if it is not being used for e-commerce transactions

Sites which capture user information should also have a privacy policy which states what personal information the site is collecting and how the company will disclose, retain, process and purge this information.

Accessibility

A Company has to ensure that it complies with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA). The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) makes it illegal for a website provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide a service that is generally available, providing a service of a lower standard, or failing to comply with a duty to make reasonable adjustments.

Blind and partially sighted people use software called “Screen Readers” that attempts to identify and interpret what is being displayed on the screen and re-presented to the user with text-to-speech, sound icons, or a Braille output device.

For these devices to work correctly a website must be correctly structured and coded. Many websites have sections which do not adhere to this standard, in particular contact forms are quite often none compliant.

Tables based layouts

Sites rendered using HTML tables were the norm in the late 90's, as this was the only reliable way of producing the layouts required by graphic designers - but since Internet Explorer 6 brought CSS support to the mainstream in 2001 this practise has been declining, and with good reason. A tables based layout is difficult to maintain, slow to render, incompatible with many screen readers and can produce inconsistent layouts between different browsers.

Outdated Content

Search engines and users love fresh content. Having your Christmas opening hours displayed in May might be the sign of a highly efficient and well prepared company – but in reality it is likely to make visitors doubt the validity of the rest of the information on the site or even wonder if you are still in business, and search engines will re-index your site less often if every time they return there is nothing new to index.

A web content management system allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages or HTML mark-up languages to create and manage website content with relative ease. Many companies still do not have access to a CMS to enable them to manage their own content, and are either still paying a web developer to do this, or not doing it at all.

Poor Document Structure

The HTML specification has specific tags for various purposes - and one of these is a set of header tags. These tags range from <h1> to <h6> which descend in importance. These headings can be styled and also image replaced to follow company branding – rather than using normal images for this. A document with well written and meaningful headers will keep your reader interested, help them navigate the sections of a page and also improve rankings in search engines. Some sites that don’t follow this don’t even rank for their own company name, let alone any general terms likely to bring in new business.

None Descriptive Title Tags

Title tags are one of the most important parts a website. They contain the text that is displayed at the top of the web browser window, but also more importantly as the clickable links in search engine results. The search engines also pay close attention to the words in these tags, and these are a big part of the ranking algorithm. Many sites we are seeing have the same title on each page, usually just the company name – by changing these to include keywords you can make them more likely to appear in the search engines and also be more likely to be clicked.

Duplicate Content

Search engines have implemented filters to try and remove pages from their indexes that are exact replicas of other pages, as these have usually been created to try and receive higher rankings. If you wrote your content from scratch then you don’t need to worry about this, right? Wrong. If your site is being hosted incorrectly then you could still be being penalised by the duplicate content filter.

If your website is being hosted on two domains then this is a real possibility. The content will be indexed on both domains, but only the first instance found will count – so the total value of all of your content could be shared between these two domains. We’ve seen sites move up 10’s of positions in search engine results after fixing these sort of errors.

Does your website fall foul of any of these? Are you not sure? Contact us to see how we can help you turn your website from a brochure into a sales tool that delivers.