Web traffic, like highway traffic, generally comes from a number of different directions – or in this case sources.  Typical sources are Google, Yahoo, Bing, Referral sites, Direct sources, article directories, forums, social media sites, bookmarking sites, blogs and so on.  So your goal must be to determine what sources are more successful than others and where you should be putting your focus and financial investment.  The truth is the only way you can find this out is by tracking and measuring each traffic channel and analysing the results.

Tracking Your Traffic Sources is a post from: SEO | PPC | Website Design | Reading Berkshire London – QUINTEMA.com

The same can be said for the keywords that your visitors use to arrive at your web site.  This represents your secret treasure check – but you need the key and the knowledge to be able to unlock it.  To unlock the potential locked in your vault you need to know what keywords are converting into the actions you desire and which are not.  Especially if you are spending money on PPC or have any plans at all to optimise your website better search engine rankings.

You will need to set up conversion measuring tools and goals to track key words and key phrases to positive actions.  Positive actions are things like, sign up to your marketing emails, filling out a quote form, downloading a brochure of PDF document or making a sale.

Conversion and goal tracking are both achievable with Google tools and they will help you to track and measure the effectiveness of specific keywords that your prospects are typing in to arrive at your web site.  Using carefully configured conversion tracking methods is the only way possible to even start to dominate your sector – and may also be the only way to ensure that you are running a profitable campaign online.

Here is an example:

Imagine that you sell green fluffy bunnies.  You spend an equal amount of money on the following five terms:

1. Green Fluffy Bunnies
2. Green Children Toys
3. Fluffy Children Toys
4. Fluffy Green Toys
5. Green Fluffy Toys

Now, let’s just say that after detailed tracking and analysis you discover that you sell, or generate leads in the following proportions:

1. 8% Green Fluffy Bunnies
2. 11% Green Children Toys
3. 5% Fluffy Children Toys
4. 69% Fluffy Green Toys
5. 7% Green Fluffy Toys

Imagine what would happen to your online campaign if you directed all your available budget to Fluffy Green Toys.

Here is what would happen – say you spend £1000 per month and generate 100 leads or sales.  This is not unusual.  A lead or sale cost you £10 each. If your gross margin before advertising or marketing costs is £5 on each sale you are losing £5 per sale and every month you are losing £500. Now the chances are you’ll continue to lose because business owners just don’t seem go understand loss on the internet and hey, you really love those Fluffy Green Toys and all your child’s friends know that you sell them online.  So quitting is just not an option.

So how do we make this profitable?

If you were to divert all your budget to ‘Fluffy Green Toys’ you would sell an extra 4 x 69 items.  So instead of selling 100 items for £1000 we would sell 345 items.  So it cost £2.89 to make a sale and now we’ve turned a loss making business into a massively profitable business where we make £2.11 profit on every sale.

The only way you can do this is through the right type of tracking and measuring and analysis.

Keyword Tracking is a post from: SEO | PPC | Website Design | Reading Berkshire London – QUINTEMA.com

How do you know who how many people have been looking at your website, what pages they have looked at?  Where they went next and whether they done what you wanted them to do?

This is the role of analytics.  Not web stats that give you an overall count of how many hits you’ve had in a defined period of time.  Analytics gives you the whole information and covers at least the following:

1. How many visitors you had
2. What geographic region they came from
3. What type of browser where they using
4. What pages they looked at
5. What search engines or sources they come from
6. What key phrases they entered into the search engines
7. What the most popular paths that people took through your site
8. Where they left your site
9. How any people only looked at one page then left (bounce rate)

The information a good analytics tool provides is almost limitless, but most importantly it is priceless.  But what tool should you use to get such information?

We use Google Analytics.  We use to use Urchin which was not cheap but gave us all this information.  Then around March 2005 Google acquired Urchin.  Now we get it for free!  We trust the tool, we like the interface and we find it invaluable.

Every website that is used for business must have Google Analytics or something as thorough installed.  But just like statistics they are only as good as the person interpreting the results.

Installing Google Analytics on your web site is a relatively simple task. Whether you are able to analyse the information yourself or not, we recommend that you sign up for a Google Analytics account and install analytics on your web site today.

When you are ready to engage with a Google Certified Analytics consultant we will have all the information available to advise you on how your site is performing and what you can consider to make improvements.

Web Stats & Analytics is a post from: SEO | PPC | Website Design | Reading Berkshire London – QUINTEMA.com

What can you sell online?  Have you ever asked yourself what product can you find to sell online?

One of the most valuable things that you can do is to find something that you can sell online that once sold doesn’t need you to do anything else at all because it’s self fulfilling.  It represents something that can continue to make you money while you sleep.

Surely this is fantasy?

Well here is the truth.  There are thousands of web sites that sell products directly online 24 hours a day seven days a week.  These websites are the ultimate businesses and often require a very delicate balance of right product, great positioning, sufficient traffic and expert fulfillment.

We have created many sites that sell products online. Some have made sales before the payment system had actually gone live.  When it comes to creating an online business we have helped many of our clients to achieve just that main objective – and we have some businesses that do over £1,000,000 in sales every year.

So if you are thinking about selling your product directly online or creating an online only business then you may want to talk to us first. We think we can help you to achieve your goal.

Selling Online is a post from: SEO | PPC | Website Design | Reading Berkshire London – QUINTEMA.com

What do you do when you get lots of visitors coming to your web site but none of them buy your product or even leave their details?  How do you convert those visitors to actions that you want them to take?

Well the honest truth is that there is no silver bullet, but this is where research, analysis and testing, all of which will move you closer to the truth.

Most websites do a poor job of converting their visitors into business and this can be for a number of reasons:

• The nature of the business is such that prospects need to be educated about the business and this takes time
• The industry is very competitive and your price range is far off the norm and you have not done a good job in persuading people of your core benefits
• You don’t have a unique proposition
• Your web site is just poor at converting business
• Your bounce rate is extremely high
• The wrong type of person arrives at your web site.

The reasons may be numerous and these all fall under the main banner of website conversion.  The ultimate goal of any web site is to persuade your prospects to carry out the action that most benefits your business¹.

When conversion is the problem then your only option is analysis and testing.  This is the action plan that we would follow to determine your next best course of action:

1. Determine whether this industry is a search-to-sale or research based industry.  So we ask the question – do we expect people to contact us for a quote or buy our product?  Do our competitors get leads or sales at this point during the online interaction and are we missing out?
2. Next we analyse the actual search terms that are being used to drive traffic to this site – or the terms that people are using to arrive at this site.  Then we ask the following questions:
   1. i.      Are these terms going to convert into enquiries or sales?
   2. ii.      Have these search terms been tested in any way to determine whether they will turn into enquiries or sales?
   3. iii.      Do we believe from our experience of this type of industry that these terms should result in sales or enquiries?
   4. iv.      Does the web site cover the main aspects of what is required to make a conversion?
   5. v.      Is there a compelling reason for the prospect to make an enquiry or sale?
3. Then we consider the web site and the way it implements the basic persuasion tenets – to convert a suspect from browsing to enquiring.

The above core questions give us a starting position.  They indicate what may be wrong and what should be tested.  Once this is determined we devise tests, make changes based on our experience and test.  Then we start to see an increase in conversion.  Often you can increase conversion by doing a few very simple things that we will spot immediately. And naturally, we’ll do them.  We call them quick wins.

So if you are struggling with conversion on your web site carry out the above actions or call us for a consultation.

Converting Visitors is a post from: SEO | PPC | Website Design | Reading Berkshire London – QUINTEMA.com

Web development is that process required to produce the end result – as web site.

The design is taken and converted into program code that works.  Clicks, words and images that communicate a message about your business.  This content represents the message that you want to promote online.

This code, normally PHP code is the technical stuff that does what you want it to do.  By the end of development you will have a web site that looks and feels exactly like the design you initially viewed with all the functional aspects in place.

The only stage after this is review and then to set the site live.  Depending upon how we have created your web site it will normally involve installing the code onto a server and then changing a DNS server to reflect the new location of your web site or simply removing your existing web site and replacing the new site in the same position.

Web Development is a post from: SEO | PPC | Website Design | Reading Berkshire London – QUINTEMA.com

Why should pay for a custom design rather than just buy a template direct from one off the shelf?  What is the benefit?

To be honest with you there are some great templates out there and if you find a template design that you feel precisely represents the image that you want to portray of your company then perhaps that is the right thing to do.

The problem comes when you want to make changes, maybe slight changes, perhaps big changes. Unless you have the correct technical resources it can cost you what you would have paid for a new clean fresh custom design that is unique for your company.

We have never implemented a template system for a client.  Everything that we do, with respect to design, is original and unique.  Naturally we use the web for ideas and inspiration, as well as the competition to gauge what we thing will be right for a particular industry.  But ultimately what we produce is a design that is right for your company.   We create a look that is unique and original and dedicated purely to your company and your specific needs, tailored to your exact requirements and specification.

The process of web design is involved and considers the following aspects:

1. The nature of your business
2. Your brand
3. Your competition and the market in general
4. The specific aspects of the information you want to portray online
5. The different ways we plan to present that information
6. Your user and the actions that you want them to perform

Our Simple Three Point Design Step

First : We normally start of with an initial set of designs that we think portray the theme and nature of your business and define things that we believe will work online.

Second : We select the most appropriate theme and elaborate the design.  This means designing additional pages that are going to be used to represent different types of information online

Third: We consider the user and how they will navigate through your site.

At this stage we have a design theme that we are ready to share as the starting point of a great new website.

Custom Designs is a post from: SEO | PPC | Website Design | Reading Berkshire London – QUINTEMA.com

We have considered the overall benefit of SEO, we have also talked about inbound generating links, article marketing and adding fresh content to your site.

A Blog is an important part of the SEO mix.  The benefit that a Blog provides are as follows:

1. Add new fresh content to your site on a regular basis
2. Increase the page number of your site in a controlled manner by adding a new page for each blog entry
3. Enable your content (Blog entries) to get syndicated and distributed throughout the internet that anyone interested can find you and your content – inbound links
4. Creates internal links that come in to your important pages
5. Tell people about your business, what’s happening, what’s new and what you want them to now – stimulate social media and social bookmarking

So a blog is a must!  There are still unanswered questions:

1. • What software should you use for your blog?
   • Where should you set it up, on your site, off your site, as a sub domain?
   • What plug-ins do you need?
   • What about design, should you pay particular attention to design
   • How should it be configured for best use?

There are lots of other questions that you need the answer to when you implement a Blog as part of your SEO strategy.  We can go through this in detail but the first thing that you need to know is that we always use Wordpress.  We design a Wordpress theme specifically for your website.  So whatever your web site looks like now the blog will look like a natural part of that site.

Sure there are times when you may develop a blog off your site and there are very good reasons for doing this and we review them too during the implementation stage of the project.

Blogging for SEO is a post from: SEO | PPC | Website Design | Reading Berkshire London – QUINTEMA.com

Link building is a primary component of SEO.

In fact the majority of SEO activity is largely to generate links.  A link is like a vote and the more links that you have coming in to your web site is like having a lot of votes.  So the more votes you have the more likely you are to appear higher in the search engines as your competitors.

But unlike an election campaign all votes are certainly not equal.  A vote from a site that is already deemed as an authority site on the internet is a lot more beneficial that getting a link from a directory that has say ten thousand links on the same page where your link is.

So how do you get authority links coming in to your web site?  The answer, unfortunately, is not easily.  But an effective SEO strategy will involve a reasonable amount of reverse engineering of your competitors.  This analysis will indicate the following:

• how many links you need to achieve your objective
• the quality of those links – quality meaning how much value do they have
• the age of those links – have they been there for years
• The number of pages you may require
• The social media activity you need to undertake
• And  other key SEO parameters

Armed with this information you can define and execute an SEO strategy that will start to position you on the same level as your competition.  The only thing you need to consider is that they have been there for a long time and you will be the ‘new kid-on-the-block’. So they may already have more authority than you and you will need to increase your efforts to overcome them.

Link Building is a post from: SEO | PPC | Website Design | Reading Berkshire London – QUINTEMA.com

Article submission is all about telling the world lots of things about your business right?  Well no!

It may be that the world just isn’t interested in knowing about every little thing about your business or alternatively there just may not be that much to say.

So why would you need an Article marketing strategy and what does it really do for you?

Well a major part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about getting inbound links.  Links that original somewhere else apart from your web site and point directly to your web site.

Inbound links!

One very effective way to get a lot of links is through Article marketing.  But the goal is not to just write about your business but to write about what your audience may be interested in – not just about you but perhaps about the product of service that you may be offering and how they can benefit.  Here is a selection of questions that you can ask to determine the themes that you can base your article creation on:

1. What is the best way to use your products/service
2. Where can get your product/service
3. What are the common mistakes people make when selecting your product/service
4. What are the common mistakes people make when using your product/service
5. How do people know how to select a good provider for your product/service
6. What is the price range of your product/service out there in the market
7. What’s new in your industry

Always use Article marketing and event PR to tell people about new things that happen in your business – new product/services that have been created, price changes.

We could continue and when we are creating an article marketing strategy we often do. We try to create as many logical themes about a business as we possibly can and you can easily see that hundreds of article titles can be produced from the above list alone.

The goal is to create as many titles and articles as you possible can and start working with your article marketing strategy.

Having the content is key – and if all you done was distributed your content you would have some success with article marketing and generating inbound links.  However, the real benefit is to get as much impact as you possibly can from each piece of original content that you produce.  That is often the difference between article marketing and an effective article marketing strategy that is going to work as part of your SEO success.

Article Submission is a post from: SEO | PPC | Website Design | Reading Berkshire London – QUINTEMA.com