Josh’s Blogs

Digital Marketing Trends for This Year

Admin 10th March 2021

Digital Marketing Trends for This Year

So far, digital marketing trends revolve around two distinct but contradictory concepts. The first is a general humanisation, addressing real issues and tweaking content for more personal engagement. This is instead of targeting content to a larger group of people. The second is much mechanical and technical optimisation, which is fine-tuning the behind-the-scenes, including SEO and how you structure your campaigns.

Below I am going to go through a few trends that you will see throughout the year.

Featured Snippets and No-Click Searches

For a while now, the goal for SEO has been getting your website to number one on Google search. Now one of the huge plans for this year is getting your website to position zero. Ranks Zero on Google is a featured snippet. The SEO marketing trends are making position zero a priority.

The featured snippet works differently than any other search result. It is a small box that is located at the top of the search results. This box displays extra, relevant information in the attempt at answering the user’s question without them needed to click on it, prompting the nickname “no-click search.”

Sustainability

People love the environment, and they want to make sure the brands receiving their money are just as concerned about the planet as they are. With over 80% of consumers feeling that companies should help the environment, we are starting to see companies and brands getting very popular. Especially for younger customers.

Any brand can benefit from broadcasting its sustainable practices.

The best way to do this is by communicating your sustainability through your branding and make environmentalism a part of your brands’ identity. There are multiple ways to do this. You can display a banner on your site or post about it on social media. If you want to go a step further, you can show this off in your brand’s visual identity.

Image and Video SEO for Visual Searches

You already know you can search for images and videos by typing in keywords, but you can also submit existing images for a search. As more people discover this Google feature, it is going to change the overall layout of your SEO in general.

You will need to make sure your images and video SEO campaigns are the best they can be. Start to apply the basics:

always include alt text in your image descriptions
add images to your sitemap or create a dedicated image sitemap
include your target SEO keywords in the file name of your image
use top-quality pictures and videos, including HD

Start to familiarise yourself with Google Lens, especially if you are an eCommerce brand. This will give you an edge over your competitors.

Interactive content

This trend has been around for a while now but is now becoming very popular. Interactive content doesn’t just promote more engagement, and it improves the persons’ enjoyment.

Having interactive content like quizzes, open-ended questions, surveys, contests, giveaways, and polls can help you build your brand. It also increases your engagement with your users.

For an updated list, please read our blog on the digital marketing trends for 2022.

Marketing Strategies to Grow your Business

Admin 1st March 2021

Marketing Strategies to Grow your Business

Most businesses will eventually face this issue which is visibility. However, for companies to get more visibility and increase their sales, they need to spend more money. But when that money has been spent, what do you do after that?

Most people think that to get better visibility, you need to spend loads of money, but sometimes this isn’t the case. Even having a small budget for marketing can still improve your visibility. However, time is an essential thing if you don’t have the budget that you want you to need to make sure that you have plenty of time to action the marketing plan you want.

Social Media Marketing

No business today can ignore social media, no matter who you are. Some businesses have built their visibility just on social media and have gotten the rewards for doing so. Social Media marketing at first can be intimidating at first, but as you start to get the hang of things, you will start to get the hang of social media.

If you have the money, you could hire a social media manager, but if you don’t, that’s ok. Just be yourself and authentic. Make sure you post your products or your services on social media and anything else that will help your audience learn more about you and your business or the industry you’re in.

Create Tutorials

One of the most effective easy to get your business visibility is to create good video tutorials. Step-by-step tutorials are all great at giving people a better insight into why they should buy your product or service over anyone else. The better you are at this, the more value you give to your customers, the quicker you get better visibility and eventually an increase in sales.

The hardest part of this is hearing and seeing yourself on camera. If you don’t want to be seen, that’s ok, but you will need to be heard. You will get used to it over time, but you can’t ignore the visibility and reach of YouTube.

Start Writing Blogs

If you don’t have a blog for your business, then you need to start one. The good thing about writing website blogs is that you don’t have to do it on your own. People think that blogging is a waste of time, but I can tell you now that it can one of the best tools you can find if it is done right.

This is not just writing about your ideas; you should start authority blogging. You can use platforms like medium to post your blogs. LinkedIn’s publishing platform is a great place to post your blogs to its vast audience.

Get to know SEO

This is personally one of the best marketing strategies that you will find to date. You might find it confusing, but you can use it to your advantage as soon as you know the basics. With SEO, you cant take any shorts cuts because every day, the search engines are getting smarter, and you will have to put in the time and effort for SEO to work.

Make sure when you are creating content for SEO that people can use the content as well. Google wants to give its users the best experience possible, and so should you. Create content that is insightful, engaging, unique and has a good amount of value.

Josh's Blogs, Marketing Tips, Web Development, Websites Tips

Updating your website for 2021

Admin 24th February 2021

Updating your website for 2021

The new year is the perfect time to look at your website. Whilst you work on your website every day, it’s good to take an extra bit of time to look at your website design and see what it needs.

At first, you need to ensure that everything is up to date on your website and is functioning correctly. You could also have a look at what primary keywords that your site targets and make some changes.

Make sure that your site is fully functional and up to date

The first thing you will want to do on the backend of your website is to check if it is working properly, no matter how big or small it is. This means conducting a thorough audit of your site and going through each page if possible.

You will need to check;

Plugins or themes that need to be updated.
Missing and poor-quality images.
Incorrect and outdated user information.
Broken links (you can fix this using a plugin).
Broken features and plugins.
Formatting and style issues.
Missing and out-of-date content.

This is a lot to go through, but every page must make a strong impression. Whilst doing this, it is a good idea to have a look to see if your content is adequately organised. Make sure you make a backup before making any changes.

Perform A/B testing

After you have checked that everything is up to date, you need to see if your site is as useful as it could be. A/B testing is one of the best ways to do this. A/B testing merely is creating two versions of something and then testing them against each other.

For example, you might want people visiting your home page to sign up for an email list. You could then create two versions of the same page with a different type of call to action. You could have visitors randomly sent to one page or the other and track which gets the most clicks.

Get feedback

Along with performing your own testing, you will want to find out what your existing audience thinks of your site. When you have spent a lot of time looking at the front and back of your site, you can forget what it feels like to use your site as a new user. So it’s a good idea to solicit direct feedback from your regular visitors to help you update your website.

Research on your competitors

It is easy to spend so much time and effort on your site that you lose track of what your competitors are doing. This is the perfect time to see what your competitors are doing. Some tools can help you to conduct this, and most are focused on helping you compare your site to others via specific metrics.

For example, SimilarWeb displays traffic information for any site, and BuzzSumo lets you see which pieces of your competitors’ content were the most successful. You can also check out Ahrefs, which provides details on exactly what you need to do to outrank similar companies.

Josh's Blogs, Marketing Tips, Websites Tips

Website Marketing Strategy to Increase Conversions

Admin 24th February 2021

Website Marketing Strategy to Increase Conversions

The internet has been drastically changed how businesses build and promote their brands because more consumers are engaging with brands online before making a purchase. Over 40% of consumers are now going to Google to get more information about what they want to buy before purchasing.

If you don’t have an integrated website marketing strategy in place that includes an effective website and SEO strategy, you won’t have the edge over your competitors. Follow these steps to help you create an effective website marketing strategy for your business.

Conduct a website analysis

By actioning a website analysis audit for your website, you can better understand what you are doing well and improve your website. Looking at website design, you will want to consider the user experience. You should have an easy to read and easy to navigate website. You can find this on our website.

Take a look at your navigation bar and site map to make sure your visitors can easily find what they are looking for. Ensure that the font you are using is readable, the right size, and does it work well with your site’s colours. Can you see all of your images?

You will also need to make sure that your website is viewable on multiple devices, not just a Mobile device.

Optimise your website for SEO

After you have taken a look at your website and made sure it has been optimised for User Experience, then it is time to make sure it is optimised for Google. SEO is the process of making changes to your website design and its content to make it more attractive to Google.

Here is what you need to do:

Keyword Research – You can use various tools for keyword research, but the Google Keyword Tool is a great place to start.
Content – Once you’ve developed a list of potential keywords, you will need to plan and write content around these keywords and phrases.
On-Site Optimisation – In addition to using the keywords in the body of content, you’ll also want to pay attention to other on-page elements of your website, such as titles, meta descriptions, images, and image tags.
Link Building – Search engines look at how many pieces of content link back to your site as a way of understanding whether your site content is valuable.

Start content marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and publishing useful and relevant content that relates to you and your customers. Creating content that your customers engage with will help you build a stronger relationship with your customers.

Before you start creating your content, you will need to make a plan. You will need to think about;

What types of content you will create
What topics your content will focus on
Who on your team will create content
How often you will publish new content
What channels you will use to promote your content

When you have done this, you can then work on a content calendar. This will help you publish content regularly.

Build your social media presence

When it comes to building your social media presence, people usually overlook it. Social media marketing can help you expand your reach online to help you drive traffic online. You need to think about what social media channels are best for your business to engage with your audience. Don’t think you have to be on every social media platform. Find the platforms that your target market are active on the most.

Josh's Blogs, Web Development, Websites Tips

Is Responsive Design or Adaptive Design Better for Mobile?

Admin 1st February 2021

What is better for mobile: responsive design or adaptive design?

Is Responsive Design or Adaptive Design Better for Mobile?

You must know by now that Mobile Responsive development can not be ignored anymore. More and more people are using mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to go onto websites. Your website should be easy to view on mobile devices; otherwise, you are going to start losing visitors and get less traffic to your site.

Both adaptive and responsive can help prepare your website for mobile use but in different ways. You will need to look at which one is best suited for your website, budgets and goals. Always contact a professional London web design company for assistance when dealing with website project such as responsive or adaptive websites.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design gives the user the best viewing experience of your website on any device you use. This makes the website easy to read, navigate with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling across a wide range of devices.

This is done by using fluid grids. This is a term for a design that works no matter what the screen size is. So no matter how much you resize the screen, the same layout will automatically respond to that size.

Adaptive Web Design

Adaptive Web Design is the more difficult format to use. It requires extra attention to the sites CSS and organisation to make sure it functions well at any possible size. It is easier to make a few specific layouts for your website, instead of creating one layout that can work in any screen size. This means that each adaptive design needs a bit of flexibility to work on several screen sizes. It is easier and quicker to make just one layout that works for all device screen size.

Adaptive sites are Less Flexible

The one drawback of adaptive designs is that they dont always display the best for a wide variety of screen sizes. Whilst responsive website designs are going to work well on any screen size; adaptive designs only work on as many screens as its layouts can. So if a new device has a different screen size than any of your layouts, you may find that your website won’t fit with the device very well.

You will have to add a new layout or edit one of your layouts. Responsive sites are flexible enough to keep working on their own, but adaptive site are most likely news some maintenance.

Responsive Sites Load Faster

In 2021 load time is so important. An adaptive website needs to load all possible layouts while responsive websites will only need to load one layout that works across all devices. All of the extra layouts on adaptive sites will take extra time and resources so they will be slower than responsive sites.

This won’t always be the case, but when you have a site with a large number of pages compared to an adaptive site which only has a small number of pages, the adaptive one might be faster.

Josh's Blogs, Marketing Tips

How to Sell More to People Who Want to Buy Now

Admin 25th January 2021

How to Sell More to People Who Want to Buy Now

Knowing how to sell online can be daunting. You have to figure out what are the best products to sell and where to source them from.

In this blog, I will give you a guide on how to:

Work out a strategy for selling online
Sell through your store, a marketplace like Amazon and social media
Find products to sell online
Attract customers and turn browsers into buyers

I will also go through what you need to start selling online. If you are worried about it being too technical, take too long, or it will be too expensive, don’t worry I will go through this here.

Choosing how to sell online

Figuring out how to sell online can be overwhelming. We are here to help you to find the right choice for so you can start selling online. Here are the top four ways to sell online:

Ecommerce store builders like Shopify
WordPress with the WooCommerce Extension
Marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy and eBay
Social media sites like Facebook

What you need to remember is that you don’t have to choose between them. You can sell across multiple platforms without hiring more people to manage them.

Ecommerce store builders and web developers in Manchester have apps that allow you to integrate your online selling with amazon, Facebook and anything else you need. Linking your online site with your social media or marketplace can be done with a click of a button. This is for when a customer visits your Facebook page; they will see the products that are listed on your site.

Selling on your eCommerce site

By running your store is the best way to sell online because you are in complete control. You get to decide the look and feel of your store and how your products are presented. This makes you not vulnerable to external factors. Such as algorithm updates.

An algorithm update means a platform like Facebook has changed how it decides which pages and content to favour. This can be a challenge for anyone who sells on the internet.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

The abandoned cart gives you the chance to send an email to customers who have reached the checkout page have left their order. This can be due to a few reasons. By having the abandoned cart recovery, you can remind them that they went and give them a chance to purchase their order without filling out all the details again.

Mobile Responsive

Nearly 50% of people have purchased an order online with their mobile phone or device. So by your eCommerce, being responsive is so essential today. This is why eCommerce platforms work in your favour by being designed to work on mobile devices. So now it doesn’t matter how big your customer’s screen is, browsing and buying products will be so much easier.

Josh's Blogs, Marketing Tips, Web Development

eCommerce Trends That Will Be Big This Year

Admin 11th January 2021

Big eCommerce trends we will see in 2021

Ecommerce Trends that will be big this year

Over the past year, there has been a considerable increase in the eCommerce industry. We have had a number of new and previous clients to take their shop online. This is all due to the pandemic but showed eCommerce sites were the best option especially when developed by a professional team from a Warrington website design company.

We manage a few eCommerce sites, and we saw a massive increase in sales which also made us look into eCommerce in more detail to get the most out of it. In today’s blog, I will go through the different trends that will be huge this year.

Being Environmentally Friendly

Over 50% of people are willing to pay more if a product is sustainably produced. This is an older trend but expects it to be essential this year. People want to know how does your eCommerce company reduce its environmental impact.

You could try:

· Using alternative shipping materials like shredded paper.
· Reducing packaging as much as possible.
· Checking with manufacturers you work with what their processes are.

Make sure if you do something for the environment that people know what you are doing because this could be the difference between you and your competitor.

Voice eCommerce

In 2018 only 3% of smart speaker owners used their devices to order products online. This year we can see that this will increase to 18%. Keep in mind that even if people don’t use voice assistants to order, they might use them to search for products.

This means you might want to make your site voice search-friendly which is not as hard as you thought it might be.

Prepare for Google Marketplace

It makes sense for Google to start its marketplace. For the Google marketplace, you will need:

· A Google account.
· To register as a Google merchant.
· To sign up with Google ads.
· Create a Google Analytics account.

Google market place will list your products on Google, so when someone googles a term related to your product, your products will be shown to them.

Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality could be the most significant thing for eCommerce stores since secure payment options. One of the biggest reason why people won’t buy online is that they can’t physically see or touch the product. This is where VR and AR can help overcome those issues.

Yes, you wouldn’t be able to touch the products, but a well well-developed app could let them see what it would look like. Ikea and Amazon have used AR so people can see what furniture will look like in any chosen room.

Josh's Blogs, Marketing Tips, Web Development

Why use Shopify?

Admin 6th January 2021

Why use Shopify?

Choosing the right eCommerce solution can be tedious and time-consuming. We have been there before. We have been comparing shipping options, payment processors, SEO performance, costs, to make sure we are using the right eCommerce platform. Shopify does excel in some areas but is it the right one for you?

With this review on Shopify find out if this is the right platform for you. Make sure it is suitable for what you want to do or look at alternatives such as WooCommerce or Magento.

What should you expect?

Shopify allows people with no eCommerce experience and people with experience to create online stores without the need for code. There is no need for software installations or hosting services are required. Shopify features plans range from £29-£299/month, and there are no other transactions that it might give you after your monthly payment.

What is Shopify?

In 2006 someone decided to sell snowboards online in Canada. He created his own eCommerce solution and soon realized others could also use the same platform to sell their own products.

Over the past seven years, Shopify has become the best platform for eCommerce sites and has more than 800,000 online stores. It has currently made £63 billion of sales and 3,000 employees.

How does Shopify work?

Shopify is not only just an easy way to launch and manage your eCommerce store. It is also tooled for supporting online store owners in crucial areas like opening additional channels, such as Amazon, eBay or Facebook. It can also offer customer support tools, such as live chat, or by taking care of the technical hassles.

Pricing for Shopify

Basic Shopify: For £26, you can sell unlimited products while Shopify will charge a 2% transaction fee unless you use Shopify Payments.

Shopify £71: With more eCommerce features like gift cards and abandoned cart recovery. Transaction fees are 1% unless you use Shopify Payments.

Advanced Shopify £266: Get advanced reports and automatically calculated shipping rates. Transaction fees are 0.5% unless you use Shopify Payments.

Other plans are the lite plan. This is so you can sell on social media which cost about £10 a month. Shopify also offers an enterprise plan which is for a huge online store which starts at £2000 a month.

Having a domain name does cost you an extra £14 per year for a .com, but can be added through Shopify or any external registrar. It is recommended that you use Shopify’s own payment gateway as this will save you additional charges.

Shopify Pros and Cons

Pros

It is easy to use. You dont have to worry about any technical stuff, and nearly everything can be done with a few clicks. Shopify provides great beginner guides and detailed documentation.
Design is the main feature. No matter what design you choose, your eCommerce site will look great on the desktop and on mobile.
It is flexible. The main system and templates are great, but if you want to add your own code, you can.
Scaling, it is great for big and small companies.

Cons

The URL structure. Blog post and other regular pages have URL structure that is not ideal for SEO.
Multi-language store. This is not a standard feature, there are templates available, but they are expensive and are very limited.
Transaction fees. Unless you use Shopify’s Payment method, you will be charged a fee for every sale that you make.

Josh's Blogs, Marketing Tips

Update Your E-Commerce Website for the New Year

Admin 5th January 2021

How and why you should update or revamp your eCommerce website for the new year: 2021

Update Your E-Commerce Website for the New Year

The New Year is the perfect time to give your e-commerce site the refresh that it needs. With Christmas now behind us it is now time to prepare for the year ahead of us. Not only should you likely need to update products or service offerings but making small changes can have a significant impact.

For example, we have updated one of our client’s e-commerce sites, and they have found an increase in sales. All we did was update the check out page making it easier for customers to purchase their products.

Revamp displays and features

The graphic elements of a website are crucial for one main reason. Over 50% of people who visit your eCommerce site are visual learners and are more likely to retain the information they see. It would help if you kept in mind when you are modifying a product or a landing page. You need to consider all types of imagery, including videos, graphics and images.

Having a simple product video on your site can increase your sales, so why not give it ago. It makes your site more trustful and authentic.

Optimize your Checkout page

Around 30% of people abandon their order whilst they are at the checkout stage. This can be due to a lengthy, complicated or inefficient process. This has been the case when we have worked with eCommerce customers. This means that your checkout process needs to be easy and user friendly. This will get people to purchase on your site.

As you are updating your checkout process, consider the following:

Make sure your checkout page works on Mobile and Desktop.
Allow customers to buy multiple items in the same transaction.
Make free shipping when you can and when it is not making sure your customers know the price when shipping applies.
Send automated cart abandonment emails, so if consumers leave without finalizing their purchase.

Increase your site speed

Aesthetics can draw people to come to your site, but efficiency is what makes people stay on your site. Most people will leave your site if it takes around three seconds to load.

This will affect your profits. We have had this situation before when it came to a clients site. It took at least 10 seconds for the site to load and they also had a 75% drop off rate on their landing page. This also affects your SEO. If people come onto your site and instantly leave Google will read this and see your site as invaluable.

Start to test your site on Google Page Speed Insights which will show you your site speed and also what you need to do to your site help increase the speed. Work with a developer to fix the issues.

Try new discount tactics

The start of the year is a great time to start testing new discounts and promotions. Start by putting discounts, coupons and offers on the most visible areas of your home page. Try to use banners, pop up ads and opt-in ads. The main goal for any e-commerce site to convert as many customers as possible.

Josh's Blogs, Marketing Tips, Staff Blogs

How to improve your eCommerce store ready for Christmas

Admin 23rd December 2020

How to improve your eCommerce store ready for Christmas

For online shopping sites, Christmas is a great time to get those extra sales. This is why it is so essential to make sure your store is ready for one of the busiest times of the year. If you don’t know where to start to take some time to read this blog to find out the best way to increase your sales over the holidays.

Let people know what your delivery times are

It is always a good idea to let people who come onto your eCommerce site know what your delivery time is like. This shows people that you are active over Christmas and it also stops them from messaging you, asking when their parcel will arrive.

This can be done by adding a temporary message to your website. There are a number of places where you can put this message, but it is best placed where all your customers will see it on your website designed by London website designers. So the best place might be under your web slider/banner. Make sure you don’t forget to inform your customers if any of your delivery times change to keep them up to date.

Have a welcoming Christmas message on your site

By having a Christmas banner or even changing a few icons to Christmas related items will make your website have a festive feel when people come on to your site.

This is a straightforward and easy thing to do. You can use a platform like Canva to design a festive banner if you dont have a graphics team. Canva has a range of templates that you can use to so you can add your own branding on the template.

Create a Christmas promotion

Christmas promotions are a great way to boost your sales over the holiday. If you are not doing one, your competitors certainly are. Here are a few ways to create offers on your site;

Creating a coupon – By doing this, you will be able to see how many times the coupon is used. We have done this to keep track of where our social media sales
Offer Free shipping – If you charge people for shipping, try offering free or discounted shipping.
Buy one get one free

Create a gift ideas section

We know it can be difficult for people to find the right gift for that special someone. This is why it is a great idea to promote gifts for him and her. This is easy to do. All you have to is add a stack to your homepage that contains a selection of recommended products. This just doesn’t make it clear that your site is ready for Christmas, but it makes it easier for people to find the perfect gift.

Don’t stop there

While Christmas is busy get a head start of the competition ready for next year. You can use these methods all year round as long as they stick to a theme such as Valentines Day, Easter or even Halloween.

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