By Claire West
Wifi is now as important as ‘atmosphere’ in Britain’s pubs, it has been revealed. With technology on the tips of our fingers, many can’t bear the thought of being offline- one in seven insist Wifi access is now ‘crucial’ for them to even consider entering a café, bar or restaurant.
Google+By Abby Hardoon, Founder & CEO Daily Internet
As online business continues to expand at record levels, websites facilitating digital power players are growing ever larger, more complex and more sophisticated. These days, businesses rarely stop. Business never does. Somewhere someone is always looking for a product or service and the omnipresent nature of the online world means that there is always someone ready to supply it.
The time it takes to go back from an unresponsive link and select the next result from a search engine can be measured in nanoseconds and the truth is, the world’s most creative and intuitive website may as well be a bricked up window to a company if it is unavailable. Account advisors, sales team, dispatch and shipping are all supported by what a business has in place to keep their website up and running. Continue reading
Google+By Mike Flynn, CEO, Fast Web Media
In 2009, Jay-Z rapped about the ‘Death of Autotune’. While controversy about this pitch-correction technology continues in the music world, a different type of autotune is growing in importance in the online world. That’s the ability of your business website to auto-detect and adapt to the device and browser that it’s being viewed on. Continue reading
Google+By Christopher Hamilton, development manager at Inviqa
On the Internet nothing causes people as much grief, anger and aggravation than a slow loading website.
If a website does not load within the critical first 2 seconds, 50% of viewers will simply click away and most of them won’t return, according to surveys by Akamai and Gomez.com. This means lower conversion rates, lower rankings on searches and anaemic traffic.
And this rule is not only applicable for small websites. Google saw a drop of 20% traffic because a page loaded half a second slower than normal. Amazon experienced substantial revenue losses because page load speed increased by 100 milliseconds.
Blimey!
So how do you make your website load super-fast? Get started with these recommendations: Continue reading
Google+By Simon Griffin, Director of Design at Etre Ltd
Businesses have adapted their websites to our personal interests and behaviour for some time (the most obvious example being Amazon, with its “Customers who bought this item also bought…” recommendations). But such tailoring has, to date, been rather basic and too expensive for smaller businesses to implement. This year, however, a “perfect storm” of technological conditions means that personalisation could be set to explode. Continue reading
Google+By Chris Liversidge, founder of Queryclick
The festive period is already well upon us and with thousands of shoppers set to take to the web to make last minute festive purchases, now has never been better for businesses to take advantage of the extra retail interest.
Leading online marketing company QueryClick is encouraging businesses to take a closer look at their websites and ensure that they are optimised in order to attract last minute shoppers and secure extra purchases. Here are a few tips to help increase your website’s performance.
While businesses should be looking at their Christmas Strategy months in advance of the festive period, there are still some last minute tactics they can put in place to attract shoppers right up until Christmas day.
When starting a search marketing campaign this late in the game it is all about making the most of the tools you have immediately available to you.
Usually it takes months to set up SEO foundations to drive visitors to your site but there are a few simple steps you can take in order to ensure you at least get a portion of the extra web traffic which is circulating at this time of the year.
One of the quickest ways of doing this is through regular content updates. Search engines such as Google love constantly updated content as it indicates that your website is well maintained. Make the most of any blog or news section you have.
If you have an old page from a previous Christmas promotion hidden away in the depths of your site, update it with new content and link to it from your homepage. It may have historic value and links pointing at it and can potentially rank for key phrases quickly.
It also gives you an opportunity to highlight key products, services or promotions that you are offering and help raise awareness among your target consumers. Businesses should use social media to provide real time updates to customers as well as provide valuable links back to the website, attracting even more traffic.
With rival companies also fighting for search engine visibility, there is no guarantee that you will reach the elusive number one spot, but by doing everything you can to ensure your site gets in front of as many people as possible, you will certainly move further up the search engine rankings and stand a greater chance of receiving extra sales during the Christmas period.
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Getting visitors to your website is just a small part of the search marketing process and that in order to really reap the festive rewards, businesses should ensure that their sites are optimised in order to promote the unique and quality services they offer.
The home page should be designed to shout loudest about the products or services you wish to promote the hardest. This may be a special offer or a delivery guarantee and they should direct customers towards the checkout.
Design should be simple and clear, make it easy for visitors to navigate and use content or tools to help the visitor convert into a customer. There have been a few sites this year that have lost out on my trade due to barriers at the checkout that could have been easily solved.
Just like in a store, where the added extras are strategically placed at the checkout – up selling is also essential when it comes to the checkout. Ensure that your extra services or special offers are not only made visible to the customer, but that it is also easy for them to add to their virtual shopping basket.
Following these simple steps, will ensure that users have an enjoyable and stress less experience increasing the chances of repeat purchase. We worked with a Christmas Hamper company in their busiest period recommending a number of technical and content updates to secure top 3 rankings for their most important key phrase.
Many businesses are turning to search marketing as the competition for visibility heats up and this is just one example of how a successful online marketing campaign can reap benefits. Search marketing campaigns usually take a few months to demonstrate results, but by taking simple steps, no matter how close to Christmas it is you can have an impact on web traffic and customer conversions. Providing long term benefit into the January sales period and beyond.
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Ten years ago, perhaps even as little as five years ago, a business owner would have a website designed, and then promptly forget about it and let it do its own thing. Perhaps a certain amount of search engine optimisation would be built into the initial design, but, after that, very little effort would be made to update or amend. To be honest, very little updating was needed. For one thing, there was less competition, so many websites ranked well just by their mere existence. Secondly, there were none of the strict SEO rules which exist today, so even the lowest quality sites could squeeze into that number one position. How things have changed!
Business owners are realising more and more that the website is where their future lies. Even some of the biggest businesses do most, if not all of their business online these days. Online shopping is becoming more and more popular, and customers are getting more computer savvy, meaning they have very little patience for poorly constructed or badly written websites.
When instructing a web designer, there are a number of questions which you must ask. Firstly, the initial design. It needs to be clear, immediately obvious what it is you do as a business, not too fussy, easy to navigate, and have a good use of colour and design.
Search engines are desperate for good quality content. You may have some fantastic photographs to put on your site, but please, please, accompany the photos with some explanatory text. Don’t be tempted to fill the whole screen with photos. Google, won’t be impressed. Try to come to a compromise. A bit of both is the best bet. Of course, on the other hand, nobody wants to look at a whole screen filled with only text. BORING!
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It is surprising how many website’s there are out there which don’t ever really get to the point. Don’t try to sound too clever on your site. You must keep in mind that many of your visitors may know nothing or very little about the products or services you are selling, so make it immediately obvious. If visitors cant find what they are looking for within the first 5-10 seconds, they will generally leave the site promptly.
Ensure your site is easy to navigate. Visitors will want to be able to find exactly what they are looking for from the first page, so don’t make the process of finding information too complicated. That isn’t to say you should limit the amount of pages you have, but just make it obvious where each page is.
We all know that content is king, so make sure that your site reads well. Google is very much of the opinion that well written content with good grammar and no spelling mistakes is of the utmost importance, so, if needed, employ a copywriter to write the content, even if you can only afford them for the main pages. It will make a difference and make you stand out from your competitors.
Finally, ensure that SEO is built into your site as much as possible. Ask your web designer about title tags, meta description tags, alt tags etc. It will save you money if your designer can incorporate this information into the site at the time of its build. Also, ensure your site is linked to your social media pages. Its not just about your website, its about your digital marketing campaign as a whole. Your website, is just one, albeit very important, part of your online presence.
Google+By Ben Austin, MD of Digital Marketing Agency SEO Positive
Press release distribution sites are constantly being adopted by online marketers up and down the country as part of their SEO strategies and it’s not hard to see why.
As well as being one of the more affordable approaches, web masters are likely to see their work ranking highly within Google’s search pages.
However, this is only half the battle won, you still need to persuade people to read it and in order to do that you need an interesting well written press release:
A company’s web presence today is no longer a nice-to-have; it is core to an organisation’s brand, whether the site is used to sell products or simply to provide a window to the business. Yet the average organisation is surprisingly blasé about their choice of web hosting provider – until there is a problem. A significant percentage of companies running transactional websites don’t even know where their data is hosted. Given the sensitivity of much of that data, this is quite alarming.
Often the selection process when choosing a hosting partner, particularly for small businesses, comes down to cost; little thought is given to whether the resulting service is appropriate and geared to the company’s specific needs. Alternatively the web hosting service may have been recommended or even brokered by the company’s web design agency, lulling the organisation into a sense of security that may not be warranted.
The risk is that a poorly thought-out web hosting decision can cause all sorts of problems down the line, as a business becomes more reliant on its online presence for new leads, or to provide support to its customers. If the site doesn’t function well, is plagued with performance issues and/or is difficult to update readily, this will reflect badly on the business and have an impact on the customer experience, harming sales.
Given the speed with which complaints about companies now go viral via social networks, companies can’t afford to subject their customers to hiccups in online service, unacceptably slow site performance, or the display of incomplete or out-of-date content. Customers have been so spoilt into having any information they want served up to them instantly that they have almost no tolerance for a sub-standard web experience. Research by market analyst firm Aberdeen Group has found that just a single-second delay in web page load time results in 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction and 7% loss in sales conversions.
Yet, oddly, many smaller and mid-sized businesses will put up with an underperforming web site. Given what’s at stake, this is quite mystifying.
Fear of change
Fear of change and disruption is a big part of the problem. Too often organisations feel tied into their existing service provider. Rightly or wrongly they worry that their web domain name, email addresses, customer data and other critical assets could be held to ransom if they threatened to move to an alternative hosting company. Of added concern is the risk of downtime as web content is moved from one hosting service to another. And how can a company be sure that the new service will be better?
Combine these doubts and it’s easy to see why so many companies stay put, preferring ‘the devil they know’ to the risk of the intangible.
Another contributing factor is that many small hosting companies, or resellers of hosted services, are difficult to contact – both in the event of a service problem, and as the company tries to make enquiries about what’s involved in changing provider. It may be that the direct contact is merely a third-party, a one-person outfit running a web hosting business as a secondary job, tapping into an ISP’s data centre and selling on the service for a small commission. In situations like these, it is no coincidence that a phone number is not provided for support and that the only form of communication is via email, usually with a long delay.
Or perhaps, to keep costs down, support is being provided from overseas. Companies may not realise this until it’s too late. They may be equally unclear about the terms and conditions they’ve signed up to – whether there are service-level agreements to underpin web site performance or guarantee the responsiveness of remedial action in the event of a problem, or how enforceable these terms are. Even if they tried to take legal action, the risk of web downtime as a case is brought to court would be too great to most businesses to justify the process.
And so companies learn the hard way that a cheap and ready web hosting service can cost them dearly in the long run. It’s easy for anyone with basic IT skills to set themselves up as a web hosting provider, selling on someone else’s service as a sideline. While the attractive resale prices they offer look attractive to the frugal, austerity-conscious business owner or IT manager, this is when caution needs to be applied.
In addition to a good solid service, backed up by positive online reviews which are easy to look up on the Internet, companies should look for a number of other important qualities in a hosting partner:
Companies should also consider which qualities of the service are most important to them, and ensure these are adequately provided for. There is a reason that hosting services can range from several pounds to several hundred pounds a month – you get what you pay for. At one end of the spectrum, the service will be pared back to the bare essentials much like a no-frills airline; at the other extreme will be an all-you-can-eat proposition including comprehensive managed ICT services.
The best-case scenario for the discerning purchaser is a menu of options, ensuring transparency so that a business can set its own priorities and see exactly what it is getting for its money. If phone-based support, a super-fast response time or top-of-the-range security is important, they may have to accept that this will cost extra, but at least they will be making an informed decision.
The problems arise when terms aren’t set down at the outset or companies overlook the small print. As ever, the devil is in the detail.
Google+By Abby Hardoon, CEO & Founder of Daily.co.uk
With worldwide e-commerce on the rise year after year, experiencing website downtime can be an expensive problem for business. But what are the real costs and is there anything that can be done to avoid it?
While perfection may well lie all around us in the natural world, unfortunately in the world of electronics, wireless networks, computer hardware and software, we all have to acknowledge that ‘perfection’, in its truest sense, will, alas, always remain unobtainable.
That’s not to say it’s not close. Take the web hosting industry. In order to keep websites up and running, commonly, every possible precaution is taken, emergency power generators on standby in case of power failures, the most technologically advanced hardware stored in the highest security facilities imaginable, backups taken of backups and so on, but yet the facts remain that for a website owner, there can only ever be the promise of 99.99% uptime. Anyone who says they can offer 100% is but a glitch in the unreliable network between the client and server, away from eating a large slice of apology pie.
And downtime can be costly. For the biggest web retailers such as Amazon, who reportedly had a turnover of just over $34 billion in 2010, if we make an assumption that traffic is uniform over a 24 hour period just 1 hour of downtime equates to $3.88 million in potential lost revenue alone.
The pain doesn’t stop there. After a 2 hour glitch taking the site offline in 2008, not only did Amazon suffer the lost sales but the share price then tumbled 4.1% by that afternoon. For a company valued at $78bn, that 4.1% equates to $3.12bn being wiped off their value within a matter of hours.
Other web goliaths for which just a seemingly insignificant .01% downtime can mean millions of dollars slipping from their fingers are the search engines, biggest of which undoubtedly remains Google. So what happens if Google’s potential customer types their address into a browser only to get nothing but that sad black and white message telling them it’s unavailable? Do visitors wait patiently until the site is back up and running? Given the tolerance of many of today’s web users, they might hang around for another 4 or 5 feverishly annoyed seconds, but the likelihood is that they will then simply go to another rival search engine and go about their business.
Search engines derive their revenues by pay-per-click or cost-per-impression advertising. If the site is down, the clicks or impressions don’t occur. With Google’s revenues from AdSense alone at $2.48bn in the second quarter of 2011, again making an assumption that traffic is uniform over a 24 hour period, a .01% downtime would equate to a staggering $24.8million in lost revenue – and that’s just for one quarter!
It’s not just lost sales that need to be considered. Downtime can lead to lost customer confidence or, worst of all, customers being forced to try out competitors and liking what they find. When food retailing giant Sainbury’s website went down in 2008, web traffic analyst Experian Hitwise recorded a massive 8.36% of their traffic going directly to their biggest competitor, Tesco.com, and a further 1.38% going to ASDA.
While these figures are obviously based on a fair few assumptions and approximations, it’s worth noting that they are also specific to particular areas of internet business.
Companies providing products or services which have few competitors, or don’t sell directly to customers over the internet, wouldn’t expect to see such direct dips in revenues during and after a website failure. For example, those wishing to peruse the Bentley Motors website are unlikely to be so bothered by the website being unobtainable that they would instantly go and buy a Mercedes – although of course it’s not impossible!
And the same applies for companies which inspire high levels of brand loyalty such as, for example, Swedish one-stop furniture provider IKEA, whose customers would likely ride out website glitches, so keen to deal with IKEA that they would keep trying (within reason) until the site was back on its feet.
So what is a normal SME, whose income comes in part or wholly from their website, to learn from the downtime horror stories of the internet’s biggest players? Downtime can haemorrhage precious brand loyalty. It can be disruptive, disturbing and expensive.
What can you do about it? Well, the short answer might unfortunately remain ‘not very much’.
The longer answer is that while you may well never experience downtime on your website, it is worth being sure that those protecting it are taking every possible precaution they can – using emergency power supplies, technologically advanced hardware stored in the highest security facilities, the backups of backups. And then it’s worth remembering that 99.99% uptime, while not perfect, is pretty darn close.
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