A common issue faced by our clients is that they need to find an effective way of targeting potential clients online who are situated in a particular local area. 

If this sounds like you, here’s a checklist of several effective ways to target your local customers online:

• Make sure you have created a listing on Google Maps. If you’re listed already (as many businesses are) then take control of your listing by creating a new entry on Google Places that exactly matches the listing you see for your business on Google Maps (even if the details are wrong). If you’re not listed already then it’s very straight forward to create a new listing.
• Don’t be lazy with your Maps listing. By including lots of keyword-rich text, adding pictures & video, adding your business to relevant categories and making sure you get some reviews from friendly customers, you can improve your position in the listings.
• Don’t forget that you can target Google AdWords campaigns to a specific geographical area – so that when anyone within a defined radius of your chosen location searches for your chosen phrases, your ad is displayed.
• And of course, you can target your local area through organic search too. Make sure you mention your geographical location plenty of times on your website, and work it into your title tags in particular. You can even target surrounding areas with some careful thought – for example, mention that your business serves x, y and z areas in addition to your own.
• Facebook pay per click advertising allows you to advertise only to specific geographical areas, and indeed to particular demographic groups.
• Twitter is also, of course, an excellent place to find your local customers online and build relationships with them.

Need to target a local audience online? Contact Helen for more details about how Ascendancy can help.

As we work on our clients’ websites, we often see the same issues recurring across multiple projects. One particularly tricky issue that we frequently come up against is when a client is suffering from what we call ‘KFS’, or Keyword Fixation Syndrome.

I asked our optimisation specialist Geoff about Keyword Fixation Syndrome – how to recognise the signs, and how to overcome it!

• Keyword Fixation Syndrome can be diagnosed when a business attaches out-of-proportion importance to a particular keyword or phrase that they want to target in the search engines.
• Out of proportion? What we mean by this is that the keyword is not as important as the business owner thinks it is. Often a client will have an assumption that a keyword is crucial to their business – that by obtaining a top ranking for that phrase, their business will be revolutionised overnight, when in fact the evidence suggests that this would not be the case.
• Why would this be so? Sometimes your potential customers aren’t using the same terminology as you, and aren’t in fact searching for your chosen phrase at all. Sometimes the keyword is overly general and unlikely to convert well into sales. And sometimes the phrase would indeed revolutionise your business if you could achieve a top ranking – but the rankings are dominated by high-powered sites that have been around a lot longer than yours and have a lot more search engine ‘clout’ – meaning that in the short term you may be better off targeting other phrases, saving this target for a later stage in the campaign.
• Can KFS be treated? A keyword fixation can be very difficult to treat – patients are sometimes too emotionally attached to their ‘pet’ keywords for treatment to be effective. However, with a healthy dose of realism, keyword research can be effective as a treatment. By looking at the evidence – which phrases attract the most traffic, which are least competitive, and which tend to convert best into sales (running a pay per click campaign can help you test which phrases convert best if you have no other data on this), a full recovery – and website success – can be effected.

Not targeting the right keywords? Contact Helen for more details about keyword research and search engine optimisation.

Increasingly, we take over Google AdWords accounts that our clients have set up for themselves and subsequently found the system more difficult to make pay than they had expected.

Google AdWords makes me think of the phrase ‘A minute to learn, a lifetime to master’ which was on the box of the Othello board game which I used to play as a child. Google have done an excellent job of making the AdWords setup process easy to use, so that clients can get an account set up (and start giving Google money!) in less than five minutes. The trouble is that many of them are not quite sure what to do next.

I asked our AdWords whizz James about the mistakes he sees time and again in the self-managed accounts that we take over:

• Keywords which are too general – advertising on a single word such as ‘hotel’ or, even more bizarrely, an adjective such as ‘quality’ – it’s highly unlikely that someone who’s searching for the word ‘quality’ on its own is going to buy your quality handmade jigsaws. Be realistic about the phrases that are likely to bring buyers to your website.
• Only one Ad Group – A lot of inexperienced AdWords users will select a number of keywords on a range of topics and put them all in one Ad Group. Keywords should be arranged into groups according to logical themes – different Ad Groups for different products, for example.
• Ads pointing to the home page – Instead of to a relevant landing page
• No negative keywords used – Negative keywords stop your ads showing for irrelevant phrases, saving you money and improving your clickthrough rate
• No awareness of the Quality Score – We could write a whole separate article about Quality Score. In a nutshell, good Quality Scores enable you to buy clicks at the best possible price. If you use AdWords and don’t know about the Quality Score, you should!
  Ads that don’t include the target keywords – By including your target keywords in your ads you could raise your clickthrough rate and your Quality Score (see above!)

If you’re looking to improve the return on investment from your AdWords account, we can help – contact us for more details.

The words that you use on your website are crucial not only for attracting visitors to your website via search engines, but also to convert your visitors into paying customers or clients.

Even if you consider yourself a good writer, you may not know about writing for the web and how it differs from writing for print.

Jakob Nielsen, usability guru, starts an article on “How Users Read on the Web” with the phrase “They don’t.” Users will scan content for key points and then move on.

So how can you write effective web copy that will achieve your objectives? Here are some brief pointers:

• Don’t use ‘marketing speak’. Keep your content factual and simple wherever possible, using plain English.

• Make copy scannable, using bullet points, highlighting key points, and keeping things short and to the point.

• Check your ‘WeWe’ score! In other words, how often do you talk about yourself on your website? You should be focusing on the customer, not on your own company history. Check your WeWe score here: http://www.futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm

• Keep jargon to an absolute minimum – even if you think all your visitors will understand your industry jargon, why complicate things any more than necessary? The quicker the visitor can skim your copy and reach the conclusion they need you, the better! Tell it like it is, in simple language. Check your readability score here: http://www.addedbytes.com/code/readability-score/

• Know your limitations! If you’re not a good writer, be aware of that fact and get help from a specialist – if you need a copywriter to help you convey your message effectively, then use a copywriter – it probably won’t cost the earth and you may reap the rewards many times over by improving the enquiry rate from your website.

If you’ve recently redesigned your website, or made some major changes to its content or functionality, you probably didn’t give a second thought to what happened to the ‘old’ version of the site.

After all, you probably didn’t like that site very much and couldn’t wait to see the back of it. Maybe you didn’t like the design, the content no longer fitted with your vision for the business, or perhaps the site had a poor conversion rate. Why on earth would you ever need that website again?

Let’s stop for a moment and think about why you wanted a new website. I think it’s true to say that the vast majority of redesigns or redevelopments have, as their fundamental goal, to grow your business in one way or another. So you’re trying to make your new website ‘better’ than the old one. You’ll probably be measuring the success of your new website in terms of how many website visitors you get, how long they spend on the site, or how many sales or enquiries are generated, for example.

But what if the unthinkable happens? What if your ‘better’ website is actually worse? What if you get less traffic than before, your visitors look at fewer pages and are less likely to make an enquiry?

The first thing you’re going to want to do is to analyse why the new site isn’t performing as you hoped. And you’re going to need a record of your old site in order to do that. You’ll want to compare your old enquiry form to your new enquiry form, for example, to try to figure out why more people are visiting it but fewer are filling it in. You’ll want to compare the copy on the old home page to the copy on the new home page to analyse why more visitors are being turned off and bouncing straight back out of your site.

What a shame you’ve fallen out with your old web developer, not thought to keep a copy of the old site, and the Wayback Machine doesn’t have a copy of your site for the relevant date period!

So what should you do before hitting the delete button on your old website? There are various options, some or all of which may be open to you depending on your circumstances:

• Make sure you get a copy of all the files from the old website on a CD

• Print out copies of all the pages on your website (or create PDFs if you don’t want an actual physical copy)

• My favourite – Use screen recording software to create a video of your interaction with the website. We’ve used CamStudio in the past to good effect. Set the software running on your machine and then simply use your own website – hovering over dropdown menus to show what happens, filling in forms, and showing your website ‘in action’ rather than as a static document.

• Also make sure you have kept a copy of any analytics data related to the old site.

And your New Year’s Resolution…?

Keep a log of any significant changes made to your website that may have an impact on its performance. If you notice a sudden upturn or downturn in traffic, conversion or bounce rate, for example, you can use your log to try to identify any changes you’ve made that may have caused it.