SEO Ideas For Small Businesses

Small businesses always begin at home and then grow and expand with time. As your market scope and span increases, the need to reach out to a larger base of customers also increases. SEO could be a new word for many but if you are hoping to get the maximum out of your small business, you need to get on top of your game by providing your services on the internet. One needs to use powerful SEO ideas to optimize profits from a small business.

Content Cache

The content on your webpage is vital to the user. One must have all relevant details pertaining to your small business on your website. Ensure that your content is clear, error-free and in utilitarian English. One must also keep refreshing the content and add new data to the website as that keeps the reader coming back to your website and enthusiastic about knowing more.

Link Farms And Sweeping Promises – Beware

Search engines can mislead a client by promising to put forth your site to infinite search engines. While it differs from market to market, there are just less than hundred that would show up as top search engines in any part of the world. If your business targets specific markets and you want to tap just a niche market, submitting your website to a dedicated search engine would benefit your business. Beware of link farms as giving your websites to numerous search engines could land one there.

Ideas Galore

One must beware of copying your competitor as it tends to happen with small businesses. If one sees that the competition has a webpage full of keywords and title tags, employ the use of a PR checker and figure out and assess their website. Do not try to use the black hat trick on the search engine as eventually they must just have to remove your link from their search index altogether. Ensure that all links on your website work and are useful to the user.

If you would like to know more about SEO  contact Berry Burgess on 0191 257 8380 or visit www.armadillo-creative.com

The evolution of 2 great company logos

Apple: Probably few remember the original Apple logo, which featured Sir Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with the inscription ‘“Newton … A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought … Alone.” Thankfully, within a year, Jobs was introduced to Rob Janoff, a young designer based in Palo Alto, California who was assigned to help market the clunky Apple II, a  far cry from today’s sleek MacBook. “For inspiration, the first thing I did was go to the supermarket, buy a bag of apples and slice them up,” recalled Janoff in an interview with Sync Magazine. “I just stared at the wedges for hours.” Eventually, Janoff created the polychromatic Apple logo which survived until 1998.

Did You Know? More Interesting Digital Marketing Facts

1. An average person sees 625 messages per day.

2. Yahoo collects around 10 Terabytes of data on its customers each day, which is roughly as much as Tesco collect from their Club Card customers in a year.

3. A recent survey showed surprisingly 44% of Twitter users were happy to be alerted about special offers and new products. 48% had responded to an advert they had received and most startlingly of all 44% had actually referred a product alert onto a friend.

4. 90% of adults use mobile phones, 73% use the internet and 89% watch digital television.

5. In a survey of the top 26 UK retailers, it was found that every £1 spent on online advertising yielded £3.44, a fantastic ROI. Television advertising yielded £2.15 per £1 spent.

6. Over 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over the New Year

7. There are 55 million tweets per day, approx 640 tweets per second

8. 10pm -11pm is the most active hour on Twitter

9. The average person spends 15 minutes on YouTube a day

10. The average time browsing via a mobile device is nearly 3 hours a day

Planning Your Mobile Strategy

Planning Your Mobile Strategy

In planning your mobile strategy, you’ll want to consider:

1. How will you deliver your mobile experience? Will you create a mobile-optimised version of your website, or offer an application for customers through application marketplaces for smartphones?

2. Will you offer the full functionality of your website, or focus on the critical elements for mobile commerce? 
Here are some considerations based on the feedback from current mobile users:
 UK users prefer to access the mobile internet using a browser rather than an application (70% for mobile versus 55% for application), according to a study by Orange.

3. Speed is more important than full-featured functionality. Faster m-commerce sites have better response rates when compared to more full-featured, but slower, sites. Users want a rich experience, but not at the sacrifice of speed.

If you would like to find out how we can help you contact us on 0191 257 8380 or visit www.armadillo-creative.com

Which online payment provider?

Which online payment provider?

When you’re venturing into the world of selling online, the first major choice is over which payment provider you will use. Much like choosing a payment provider for card transaction in a real store, online payment providers offer various setups to suit different needs.In the UK there are several big players in the market, which I will outline shortly. At Armadillo we will generally look to use either Worldpay or Sagepay due to their ease of setup and competitive pricing. However, the choice still falls to the client and we are not averse to any in particular.

What to bear in mind when choosing?

Will you be processing high value transactions or a high quantity of transactions, or both. Are you happy for the user to leave your site to complete their payment securelyWill you be taking a single payment or will there be payments at set intervals over time i.e. a subscription service.Some payment providers require certain criteria before they are able to be integrated. Commonly this will either be the requirement of a merchant account with your bank (these carry a separate cost which varies with your bank, most business bank accounts will already have this facility), or the site will be required to have an SSL(secure socket layer) certificate which allows for secure transactions. An SSL certificate can cost anything from £50 to £300 depending on what level you require and where it is being hosted. The SSL certificate is required by payment providers that don’t jump the user out of the site to their secure server. For example Paypal Payments Standard sends the user to the Paypal site BEFORE taking any card details. This ensures no card information is passed over an insecure connection. If you want the user to stay totally on the site when checking out, it will need to have an SSL certificate and an appropriate payment provider.

Some of the main players:

Worldpay

A subscription based provider that charges a £75 setup fee, £15 per month subscription, 15p per transaction plus 1.95% of the transaction total. Worldpay does not require an SSL certificate as the user is sent to the worldpay gateway on their server before inputting card details. These pages can however be branded to look more like the actual site to increase customer confidence. Worldpay also offers a bolt on to take subscription services on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. This carries a separate setup charge of £100 but nothing else after that. Worldpay also requires a merchant account for the funds to be processed back to.

Is eMarketing Part of Your 2012 Plan?

What’s on your marketing plan for 2012? Most businesses have an idea of how important eMarketing (also called internet marketing) is, but many either don’t have a clear strategy or a concrete plan. Putting the time in to plan for activities that can produce results now will yield results for the year to come.

Before diving into the possibilities for your eMarketing plan, let’s briefly touch on marketing plans in general. Not having a written marketing plan, regardless of the size of your business, is a plan to fail. Marketing plans must act as both a plan for the months to come (I prefer a 12 month plan) and a business intelligence tool to report on what’s worked, to what degree, and what should be changed.

Plans should include a healthy mix of marketing strategies that you know to work from past efforts and new strategies you are testing. They should list the pertinent details like:

Are Computer games bigger than the film industry

Everyone knows Hollywood, so how can we get to a point where a Hollywood blockbuster making less than half the profit of the latest games releases? The answer as ever is about the money. New games retail at between £45 and £50, yet the game will inevitably cost less to produce than the latest film. These production costs can still be in excess of £100 million but that is small change when your unit price is £50 and you sell 6.5 million copies on release day in the UK and US alone. That’s a 350% ROI on release day alone.

So why does this happen? Well it all revolves around the human desire to win. These high grossing games have detailed competitive multiplayer modes, each with it’s own idiosyncrasies that require hours of practise from the player to perfect. This means that even if a game drops in price from £50 to £20 after 3 months, the vast majority of players will still pay that £50 release day price tag just to get those few extra weeks practise. Thus ensuring they can get to their potential as quickly as possible and keep on winning.

Unfortunately, it is a trait that the film industry has no answer to. With the increasing number of plots being taken from the story lines of the latest ‘great read’. People are more than prepared to wait for prices to come down or take advantage of offers when going to see a film. They already know the story line so there is no desire to find everything out on day one. Waiting a few days ‘til Wednesday just to get 2 for 1 seems much more logical than paying double the price to see a film with a plot you already know.

Utilising Facebook Pages for Businesses

Why would a business want to get involved with Facebook? For starters, they have over 500 million active users, with 50% of them logging in daily. Their users spend 700 billion minutes per month on the site, and they share 30 billion pieces of content per month. Chances are, your customers are on Facebook, and if you aren’t then you may be missing out on a great opportunity to connect with customers and build your brand. Also, pages (unlike profiles and groups) are indexed by the search engines, and the search engines love Facebook. It is the epitome of fresh content they look for.

Pages vs. Profiles

The first concept you need to understand is the difference between pages and profiles on Facebook.

A profile is for a person, and businesses cannot have profiles.

A page can be for a business (or a band, product, or about anything else).

Facebook also has groups, which can be set up by anybody for any purpose. These are nice if you want to restrict access, but are limited in functionality.

So to start creating a page, you’ll first need a profile. This could be an administrative contact or anybody in the company, but be sure the company doesn’t lose control of the page if the person with the profile leaves. The profile really doesn’t need to be used or filled out with every detail, it really acts as a user account which is necessary to set up pages.

Create Your Page

Once your profile is set up, you can create a page by going to Advertising -> Pages -> Create a Page or by using this link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Choose your category and make sure to fill out the form completely.

Set Up Your Page

Your page can be set up to operate much like any other web page, and can be enhanced with;

• Content you create elsewhere on the web (like feeds of RSS or Twitter)

• Custom FBML, Facebook Markup Language (patterned after HTML for websites)

• Facebook Applications – many useful and many distracting apps allow custom functionality, but don’t go crazy and keep your goals for the page in mind

You may want to focus as much on cleaning up the clutter around the page as adding to it. Then decide if you intend for the page to be an online representation of your business and way to contact you, a place to share content with your customers, or even a lead generation source (by embedding a ‘squeeze page’ in your page to collect emails).

Grab Your Username

The last step in setting up your page is to grab a custom URL for your page. Facebook will give you a URL for your page that looks like http://www.facebook.com/yourusername/. Get yours by going to: http://www.facebook.com/username/

If you would like to find out how we can help you contact us on 0191 257 8380 or visit www.armadillo-creative.com

6 Tips for Investing in Your Online Brand

Your online brand tells customers who you are, what you do, and how you do it. Whether you’re a small business, internet start-up, or a large corporation, online brand building is crucial in an era where the internet is many customers first point of contact with a business. Your online brand also gives you a key point to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

1. Know Your Customer

Defining your target audience is the first step in being able to connect with them. You may need to segment your audience in able to speak to them more personally.

2. Establish Your Presence

Focus on clearly stating what you do. The internet is full of searchers with short attention spans, and if a visitor can’t determine what you do and of what benefit that is to them, you’ll likely lose them before you get a chance to win them over. While businesses frequently lead with their name (who they are), focus instead on what you do. Instead of ‘Daily Grind Coffee Shop’ try something like ‘Fine roasted organic fair-trade coffee beans for coffee lovers with a conscience.’

3. Give Your Brand a Voice

Having a brand spokesperson will allow customers to connect to your brand. Customers respond to brands who are conversational more than corporate.

4. Always Be Consistent

Creating an online brand requires consistency across your messages and online presences. With the explosion of social media, brands now have many points of contact with their customers. Be sure that wherever you interact with customers, your message and image remain the same.

5. Determine the Channels You’ll Use

One goal in online brand building is to be constantly in front of your customers wherever they are, such that when they become ready to make a buying decision you’re the first company they think of. People buy from people they know and like. Balance your branding across as many channels as make sense based on your customers’ presence there, and your ability to deliver quality content and a consistent message.

6. Plan How You’ll Integrate Social Media into Your Branding

Social media gives you an opportunity to interact with your customers in the places they’re spending time. It also gives you an opportunity to put a personal face on your brand. Decide where you’ll interact, which tools you’ll use, and who will be the voice of the company?

Also recognize that this is not an opportunity to be overly promotional, as that behaviour is not tolerated well in the social media circles. Instead, take the opportunity to interact with your customers.

If you would like to find out how we can help you contact us on: 0191 257 8380 or visit www.armadillo-creative.com

The Importance Of Search Engine Optimisation

Nearly 16,000 searches are conducted in the UK every minute, which is a huge opportunity to attract customers, who are already interested in your products or services, to your website. A recent Google study revealed that 88% of UK searches use Google, and only 7% of users go on to the third page of results. This highlights the importance of achieving the highest search engine placements possible. If your business has achieved the number one ranking on page one, 100% of your potential customers will find you, but if you are on page 3 only 7% of your potential customers will find you, dramatically decreasing your exposure.

Armadillo Creative offer dedicated SEO solutions which will help your business achieve the desired ranking and increase your site traffic and hopefully business.

If you would like to find out how we can help you contact us on 0191 257 8380 or visit www.armadillo-creative.com