Category: Digital

Sure, there are plenty of website-building tools out there, allow you to design your own ‘online shop window’. And you’ll save yourself lots of cash in the process. But you’ll pay for it later. Why? Well, here’s a handful of reasons right here – just for starters:

5 reasons not to self-design your website

1. You don’t know anything about SEO so search engines will have a hard time finding your website
2. It looks – and reads – a bit like a dog’s dinner. And that’s hardly a recommendation for your business…
3. You’ve no idea how to make it mobile-enabled – and yet that’s how most of your potential customers use the internet
4. If there’s a problem with your website ie it gets a ‘bug’ or ‘hacked’ you won’t know how to fix it
5. You’ll spend your time envying competitor’s websites whenever you go online

Having a great-looking, fast-loading, user-friendly website is undoubtedly the way to go these days. But it’s only part of the plan. In order to really harness the marketing power of the internet, you need to combine it with your social media pages.

Through the likes of Facebook and Instagram you can ‘signal’ potential customers to your website via other online channels. You can also make buying your company products or services easier for them by having your own company app designed.

These days it’s all about having a ‘web presence.’ Certainly, a business without a website, looks unprofessional – and even a bit ‘dodgy’ these days. A company which isn’t using any social media channels seems a little ‘old-fashioned’ and, if your website isn’t mobile-enabled well, really, what stone have you been hiding under for the past few years?

And if the above haven’t already convinced you of the necessity to hire a professional web designer, well maybe these statistics will. They’re from a survey conducted by one of the country’s largest SEO companies:

• It took 50 milliseconds for a web visitor to make up their mind about a website
• A total of 38% admitted they would simply leave a site if they didn’t like the look of it
• A huge 85% of potential customers said they would never buy from an online company until looking through their website to give them ‘a feel’ for the business

Useful skills your website designer has

• Your web designer can upload images, change text around, add a blog page and basically update your website whenever you ask him or her.
• He or she can hone your website using SEO techniques so that it gets picked up highly on internet search engines.
• Unlike you, they have endless patience with your website. If something goes wrong they will persevere until they get the problem fixed. They won’t be throwing anything around the room any time soon!
• And talking of patience…they can help you navigate your way round your own website. They built it for you after all. If you want to write and upload your own blog, for instance, they’ll explain how.
• Your web designer will know how to add those user-friendly payment buttons and fun graphics that your competitors have on their websites – not to mention a complicated shopping cart.
• They’ll have a whole bunch of copywriters and marketing experts at their disposal. Certainly, they’ll have worked with people in these fields and be able to recommend individuals to you.
• He or she will stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry, meaning your website will too.

Get in touch!

Need a website? Looking for an overhaul of your existing web layout? Desperate for more web traffic? Then get in touch with us here at Doctor Media. Tel: 07756 649 700 or email: info@doctormedia.co.uk.

Like the shop window of yesteryear, your website is where you explain your wares. It’s often the first point of contact for new clients and is confirmation for existing ones that you’re still around.

Your website also lets speculative clients know you are a legitimate business, along the lines of ‘if you don’t have a website then, er, do you actually exist?

So, your website is a showcase of all you can offer your clients. Doesn’t it make sense then to ensure it’s ‘the best it can be.’ If it’s not then it’s time for an update. Here are various reasons why that might very well be the case:

• It’s old-fashioned. Business owners can be guilty of neglecting their website because they’re too busy getting on with the ‘day job.’ But time moves on, and so do web design trends. No business wants to appear as if its stuck in the Noughties.
• It’s not mobile-enabled. This is a biggie. Not only will potential clients click off your website when checking it out on Smartphone because it’s all over the place, but your website won’t be picked up by Google search engines for mobile websites.
• It’s not optimized. Search engines aren’t picking up on it because you haven’t put in tags, categories, key phrases and words for content etc. You’ve never even heard of a meta-description. In fact, you though Yoast was just a mis-spelling of toast…
• It’s taking too long to load. If you find your website excrutiatingly slow to load up and navigate, then think how visitors to it feel – some of whom were potential customers until they got fed up waiting and moved on…
• It’s too ‘wordy.’ We’re forever being told our attention spans as a human race are falling. Past research shows that the average visitor to a website stays an average of just 15 seconds. If they can’t even get through your intro paragraph in 15 seconds then you need something to catch their attention. Quick.
• It’s not giving you leads. In fact, you can’t even remember the last time you had a client say they signed up because they loved your website. Maybe it’s time to get it working for you again?
• It’s hard to understand. You avoid updating content and images etc on your website because you don’t know how to. You did, once, but you’ve since forgotten and it takes ages anyway to get your head round it all.
• It’s all your own work. When you first started out in business you didn’t have much cash for ‘extras’ so you built your own website using Weebly or some other low-cost design service. And it shows.
• You have website envy. You find yourself checking out your competitor’s websites and admiring them. You’re thinking of getting a friend to ring them anonymously and ask who designed the site for them.

The above is all reason enough to consider getting your website redesigned and up-to-date, but what should really make you stop and think is that one look from a visitor is all you’ll get. Very rarely do visitors return to a website that bored them.

So, how about getting it right this time round? If so, get in touch with us here at Doctor Media. We’ll be happy to help get both you – and your website – noticed. Tel: 07756 649 700 or email: info@doctormedia.co.uk.

So you have invested your time and money to create that stunning website that you’ve always dreamt of. You made sure it has all the bells and whistles of modern design-you know the cool little things everyone is talking about; responsive layouts, web fonts, smooth transitions, chatbots, micro-interactions, glitch art-the list is endless. You also spent a good chunk of your resources ensuring the website is populated with high-quality content. This content will rank you higher on search engines leading to more traffic.

At the end of the day, your site needs to earn some money. You may have a lot of traffic and lots of loyal visitors but still miss out on sales. So how do you convert your visitors into leads that will eventually become customers? Read on to find out.

Your website is like a traditional storefront for your business. A good design will draw people inside; you have to be prepared to make casual visitors into customers. Let’s assume for a moment that you were running a brick and mortar gift shop. Some of the strategies you would deploy include things like excellent customer care, banners, clear and prominent price tags for items on sale and even loyalty cards for returning customers. Believe it or not, most of these strategies still apply online.

In web terminologies, the term conversion is used to refer to the action of a visitor positively interacting with elements on your site. This leads them to initiate a mutually beneficial relationship with the site owner. This could be by filling out a signup form, clicking a banner AD, purchasing an item, sharing a post on social media or even making a call.

Here are some tips to improve your site’s conversion rates and make those casual visitors into real customers.

Relevant Content

This is a no brainer. Make sure that visitors find what they are looking for in your content. Your banner ads, social media snippets, titles, and thumbnails should be a reflection of what is contained on your landing pages. Happy visitors will spend more time on your site. They will interact with your content more positively and come back for more. These type of visitors end up filling contact forms, enrolling to your mailing list and even making a purchase on your site. The same applies to E-commerce websites. Make sure your product descriptions are clear and accurate.

Attract People with Attention-Grabbing Headlines

This is one of the most important aspects of conversion rate strategies. We simply cannot stress this enough. Visitors to your site will see the headlines first! Attention-grabbing headlines do not have to be clickbait, misleading or obnoxious to attract attention. Ensure your headlines are tailored towards your value proposition to the reader. A user should be able to tell what they will gain from a post just by reading your headline.

What Is On Your CTA? (Call to Action)

Just by changing the text on your call to action button from the default “click here” to something like “Get your offer” or “download your brochure”, you will see a significant improvement in that CTA’s effectiveness leading to better conversion rates!

Test Different Strategies, See What Works and What Does Not.

This is probably the best piece of advice we can give with regard to conversion rates. Every website has its own unique audience and what may work for you may not work for another person. The most important thing is to expose your audience to different experience and learn from the experience. There are numerous tools out there that will evaluate your site and show you how different users interact with your website.

Tips to Maintain a Good Ranking On Google

Google is the single largest source of traffic to websites today and has been for quite a while now. Social media has emerged as another source of traffic but still contributes a small percentage of all types of traffic to other websites. A lot of social media platforms have policies that limit the amount of outbound traffic for obvious financial considerations. This means that Google still remains the dominant player going forward. It is therefore very important to always ensure that you stay in the good books of the giant search engine’s revered search algorithm.

Engineers at Google are continually tweaking the search algorithm to improve search. These improvements are meant to help Google’s loyal customers find relevant content in the sea of information available on the web. Some of the changes are quite minor and may go unnoticed yet others are major changes that significantly shift the ground in the way sites are ranked. One such update was the panda update that introduced significant improvements in Google’s ability to reward relevant and valuable content and send the bad ones to virtual obscurity.
We all know how painful it feels when an algorithm update sends months and years of work creating original content to the grave. This can be avoided by observing the changes and reacting appropriately. Below are some tips that you can deploy in your strategy to stay on Google’s good books.

Focus on the User, Create Value, Not Quantity

Google is always trying to guide its user to the most relevant content that gives them the answers they are looking for. Therefore, it comes as a no brainer that creating lots of low-quality content today is an exercise in futility. You may enjoy a short period of success with bulky low-quality post. However, soon enough, Google will catch up with you by observing how users interact with such posts and send you down the drain. Good quality content is that which answers the user’s questions and hence keeps them reading to the end.
Bad content will see visitors navigating away as soon as they get bored trying to find what they were looking for. For example, a cupcake recipe should guide the user on how to cook cupcakes and not digress into a review of kitchen appliances.

Eliminate Duplicate Content.

Google’s Panda update hates duplicate content. This may have been a reaction to the use of content automation tools that churn out fake content. Make use of site audit tools to identify duplicate content and remove it. This also applies to plagiarized content from external sources.

Avoid Thin Content.

This is another major issue addressed by the panda update. Thin content refers to pages or posts that only contain a few lines of text that do not tell Google what your website is all about. These can also be rooted out using site audit tools.

Keyword Stuffing

A few years ago, people used to make sure targeted keywords appeared several times (sometimes unnecessarily) on posts in order to rank higher on google. This is no longer encouraged as new updates to the Google algorithms can detect when certain keywords are overdone on a post.

Conclusion

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of negative triggers that may affect your ranking with each algorithm update. The best thing is to always watch out for these changes and continuously audit your site to see how they affect your rank.