How to Keep Visitors on Your Website Longer

By Peter Brittain on May 18, 2020 in Conversions, Website UX

Here are 5 Ways To Ensure Your Website Visitors Stay Longer.

Within the SEO and online business communities, a lot has been written about Google’s continuing mission to make its search engine results exactly match the intent of the person entering the search. In fact, a lot of what has been written has come from Google itself.

They have moved from simply ranking websites based on how relevant they are to the search term to them giving higher rankings to websites where the evidence is that user experiences will be greater than on other websites.

As it is impossible for Google to survey every single person to ask them about their experience, Google instead tries to establish it using data it receives back from the destination website.

There are numerous data points that all feed into Google’s ‘user experience’ score. These include bounce rate, which checks whether visitors take one look at a site and then click away, whether a website gets bookmarked by visitors, and dwell time, which is what we are going to focus on.

Dwell time tells Google how long visitors stay on each page of the website, with logic telling them that if dwell time is high, the visitor likes the site, and if it is low, maybe not so much.

For website owners, this means that they need to do all they can to encourage visitors to stay. Here are 5 simple ways it can be done…

Using Video As An Integral Part of Your Marketing and SEO

By Peter Brittain on April 22, 2020 in Video SEO

If you own a local business and you are looking for ways to gain a marketing advantage over your competitors, then you must consider using video. Video, and its ability to give SEO for your website a huge boost is something that most businesses are completely unaware of.

The truth is Google absolutely loves video and given it owns the biggest video website on the planet, YouTube, it is little wonder that videos rank very highly in their search results. But it is not just for Google’s benefit and your website’s rankings that you should be using video, it is due to the fact that your customers and potential customers love video too.

To prove this point, the next time you are in a busy area of town stop for a moment and look around to see what everyone is doing. It is an absolute certainty that many of them will be walking, standing, sitting or even having a conversation whilst at the time looking at a mobile device such as a phone or tablet.

This is the world we live in today where handheld devices have almost become as much a part of us as the hands that hold them. While there will be all sorts of different reasons for looking at one of these devices, the primary ones will be social media, communication, and entertainment, with videos often being the main source of that entertainment.

How To Increase Visitor Activity and Sales Conversions On Your Website

By Peter Brittain on March 8, 2020 in SEO

No matter how much you have spent on your website, and regardless of how awesome your website looks, one thing you must remember is, it is nothing more than a bauble if it doesn’t help to generate revenue for your business.

Now it’s true that some websites are not built specifically for selling and are seen merely as a corporate hub designed to promote the company’s brand. There is nothing wrong with this, especially for large corporations and multi-national organisations; however, for local businesses, websites serve a much different purpose, which, sadly, they often fail to fulfil for a variety of reasons.

Rather than go through a whole list of things that local business websites get wrong, instead let’s take a look at some of the key functions that a local business website should be performing if it is to help that business generate leads, sales, and revenue in order to sustain it.

Now, we want to be very careful with this one, which is to create a good first impression. Please do not think that is the starting gun for you to run off and completely redesign your website into a multi-coloured kaleidoscope of flashing images. The phrase less is more is very prevalent when it comes to the look of a website so don’t use colours and graphics for the sake of it.

What is more important about the visual elements of a website is whether it gives visitors a good first impression and does it look like a website that is going to be easy to navigate. Menus and buttons saying, ‘Click Here’ to the left, right and centre are confusing, and a confused mind always says ‘No’, which means they are out of there.

Funnels and Why They Are So Effective

By Peter Brittain on February 21, 2020 in Lead Generation

If you keep a keen eye on online marketing, SEO, and website development, you must surely have come across the term ‘funnel’ in a blog post, article, or even an online ad.

If you have never heard the term, we’ll explain what they are compared to normal websites. For those who have come across funnels, we will explain further why they are going to play an ever-increasing role for local businesses as part of their online marketing strategies.

Websites as we currently know them come in all sizes and with multiple reasons for their existence. Some have only 4 or 5 pages; others have hundreds. Some websites exist to inform, others to entertain, and if you are a local business with a website it is safe to say that you want it to generate leads and/or sales for your business.

The problem that is increasingly becoming a problem is that the way in which the internet is used today doesn’t always lend itself to large-scale websites. The days of computer users sitting at desks, staring at their screens as they surf for hours on end through websites are coming to an end. Nowadays, with super-fast broadband and the majority of internet usage happening on mobile devices, users’ attention spans are diminishing.

How SEO Can Help Small Businesses Compete on Google Search

By Peter Brittain on January 15, 2020 in Local SEO

It is an obvious fact that small businesses do not have the financial resources of large national and international companies and that means that their marketing budgets are going to be much smaller too. This might suggest that the chances of smaller businesses being able to compete on Google for search traffic are slim, but thanks to SEO, that is not the case.

The first fact we need to outline is that when it comes to Google’s ranking algorithms it does not know how big a company is, how much profit it makes or how big its marketing budget is. When crawling that company’s website and analysing everything else that contributes to ranking the currency isn’t cents and dollars, it is links and optimisation.

You could argue that because of their substantial budgets, large companies can afford to pay marketing teams or outsource to large agencies, and that is true. It is also the case that those resources will afford them the means to build up their backlinks, content and social media profiles quicker, and to a greater degree, than a small company that only operates in one city.

However, it is also the case that larger companies tend to veer their marketing budget more towards paid advertising than small companies do, meaning that they often ignore many of the actions and optimisation that could improve their organic rankings. This often mean a small company with a properly optimised website and an ever-increasing number of backlinks, can outrank bigger companies, especially when it comes to ranking locally.