Screenshot from our SiteLab reporting service

47% of all business websites have none or very basic levels of SEO

Over 70% of companies with less than 50 employees have none or very basic levels of SEO

74% have no basic website analytics software for tracking site visits

12% of all business websites are not indexed in any search engine

0.6% of business websites are under construction

Only 3% of all business websites could be considered to have advanced levels of SEO

82% have no HTML sitemap

75% have no XML sitemap

69% have no Robots.txt file configured

35% do not have unique Page Titles

56% do not have unique Page Descriptions

So what does this mean for you?

Well, firstly it suggests that having a website for you company is only part of the story.

It means that you can have a great looking website, but if it is not optimised then you are missing out on attracting new clients online. It means that your competitors who have seen the benefits of optimising their website on a contiual basis, are reaching more targeted visitors through the search results than you are.

However it also highlights that there is an opportunity for you to attract and convert new clients through search engine optimisation.

How do you improve your online presence?

Well the first thing you need to do is to get your website tested to see how it currently is performing. This is something that we offer through our SiteLab service at no cost.

Just complete the SiteLab form below, and we will get in touch with our insights!

DotDot | New Company Brand | Website Redesign 

Estelle Rowe, Managing Director of Northstar-Strategic, contacted us at Seabrook Associates to help with a company rebrand, which included a new company name, a new company brand, a new company website, and new corporate stationery – phew! We were happy to oblige, and the results can be found here: www.dotdotco.co.uk

Find out how we can help you by emailing us here. or take a look at our website redesign process for further information.

Bluebell Wood | Website Redesign | Ecommerce Development 

Bluebell Wood required a new ecommerce website, so that they could sell all of their gifts online. Seabrook Associates were asked to help with both a fresh design, plus a fully integrated system that allows them to manage all of their products and categories.

Find out how we can help you by emailing us here. or take a look at our website redesign process for further information.

The Modern Caterer | Website Redesign 

The Modern Caterer have been providing the North West with quality local produce for several years. What they didn’t have was a website that matched both their high calibre service, and business ambition. Panic over.

Find out how we can help you by emailing us here. or take a look at our website redesign process for further information.

Find out how to create the perfect questionnaire by reading our top tips.

1. Every client needs project questionnaires because:

a, You’re more likely to get what you need and what you want: By having an in-depth interview, you will be able to ascertain whether you understand the design process, what services / features you want, and what is needed to help improve your business.

b, It helps you to write a contract that will aid you in your efforts: When you have completed your questionnaires you will be able to write a project contract that will include details of what services are being provided and which ones you’re not. It will also include an agreed number of amends, a disagreement procedure and much more. This contract will set deadlines and breakdown the project so both party’s will know how the project will be carried out so there is no miscommunication.

c, It gives you a thorough brief to work from over the duration of the project: After you have answered the questions we will be able to create a detailed project brief that can work as a check-list so you know exactly what needs to be provided during this project.

2. Your questionnaire should focus on these topics:

a, What the design / website is supposed to do for your business: This information is key to your satisfaction. By discovering the design / site’s main aim we can then pin down the costs for the project.t

b, What ideas you have about how is should look: Obviously not every client knows what elements make up an interesting, professional and balanced design. However, it’s a good idea to for us to learn about your tastes, the designs you admire and sector in which you operate. It shows that qw respect their opinion and its means that we’re more likely to create something that you like.

3. Your questionnaire should include all of the following questions and a few of your own:

a, Why do you want to have a new website / design, or a redesign?
b, What will happen if you don’t have a new website / design, or a redesign?
c, Please describe your organization / product in a few sentences? (This can help you with a tag line or website content)
d, What’s your company’s unique selling point?
e, What problems do your customers have that your business solves?
f, Do you have a slogan or tag line that clearly outlines what your company does?
g, Please describe your potential customers. Pay special attention to their income, interests, gender, age, even type of computer they use.
h, What is your budget for this project? (Often this goes unanswered so take the initiative and give a fee range for the potential services.
i, Who are the decision makers on this project? What is the turnaround time for making a decision?
j, Please list the names of five other designs / sites that you like. Why are they attractive to you?
k, Who are your main competitors and what do you think of their designs / site?
l, What do you NOT want on your site?
m, If you were using a search engine, what words or phrases would you use to find your site ?
n, Other than what search engines will produce, what methods do you have in mind to spread the word about your website?

For those of you who don’t know what foursquare is, it is a mobile app for both Android and iPhone that allows users to check in where they are. Sounds pretty basic right? Well it also allows them to find restaurants, boutiques or whatever they’re into that are near to their location and share their adventures. As a business you can be part of this experience.

But why is foursquare so good?

One, Numbers Don’t Lie:

Here are some vital statistics:

• 1, Foursquare has a community of about 15 million people across the globe,
• 2, It has had more than 1.5 billion check-ins – this number is increasing by millions every day,
• 3, And more than 600,000 businesses use its Merchant Platform.

Two, Building Customer Relationships:

Millions of people check in to millions of businesses everyday through foursquare. This app can show you who your regulars are, help you to open-up new conversations and  inform them of your current news and offers. Foursquare also can help you to find new customers as your popularity grows. Essentially, it’s free friendly marketing.

Three, Super Special Specials:

If you want to raise the profile of your business utilise the specials function on foursquare to give your customers a unique experience and encourage people to talk about what you’re doing. According to the foursquare site you can do much more than offering discounts. You can offer things for free if people log in a certain amount of times within a set period of time or you can give them special treatment (foursquare uses the example of a zoo who said: “check in on foursquare for private access to the penguin feeding”). Foursquare encourages you to get creative with your digital PR.

Four, Useful Stats:

Every entrepreneur loves discovering statistics about how their business operates and foursquare delivers these details to your business account for free. This real-time data includes the total number of check ins at your business, who your most recent visitors were, the gender of your visitors, the time of day that they checked in, and the number of check ins that are shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Five, Brand Pages:

If you’re an established company with an online presence you need to build a brand page on four square. There are three good reasons why you should do this. Firstly, a brand page encourages people to follow your business so they can hear all about your latest news. Next, if someone is following your brand page they can also then access your foursquare tips. These reveal your local recommendations when they’re out and about. Finally, when your site’s users read of an event happening or a review of something they can add it to their foursquare to-do list by clicking on the ‘save to foursquare’ button.

So there you have it, Foursquare is great for digital. Official.

Plugin One: NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is an image display plugin with a slideshow feature. It’s a good gallery tool because it is easy to customise its design, it’s not intrusive and it is user-friendly for our clients. It can also to be tailored to be as simple or as complex as needed.

Key features of NextGen Gallery include; the ability to add custom templates to your WordPress theme, being able to copy or move images between galleries and  sortable albums. You can also watermark images, get tag support for images, and meta-data support.

Why not contact us to see how we can help

Plugin Two: WP e-Commerce

With 1.3million downloads (according to WordPress), WP e-Commerce is a shop plugin with “unparalleled experience”. The Seabrook Associates team like it because it’s easy to use (if you know your PHP) and it allows us to design the shop in anyway we want because it can be built into bespoke templates. This plugin saves both us and the client time and money.

Key features of WP e-Commerce include; 15 types of payment gateway can be integrated, marketing tools such as free shipping and flexible coupon options and it is 100% search engine friendly. The plugin also has international currency transactions, built-in shipping rate calculators, secure checkouts, extensive admin control including catalogue management, and basically it has more cool features than we can bothered to list.

Why not contact us to see how we can help

Plugin Three: Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools does what it says on the tin. It integrates the client’s WordPress CMS with their twitter account. This is particularly useful if the client isn’t social-media savvy, if they’re lazy, or if they’re absent-minded. We like Twitter Tools as it automatically updates a client’s twitter account when they publish something on their news / blog page – making self-marketing easier.

Key features of Twitter Tools include; an archive of your tweets, the option to create a daily or weekly post of your tweets and you can also post tweets directly from your sidebar and your WP Admin screens.

Why not contact us to see how we can help

Plugin Four: WordPress SEO by Yoast

We like Yoast because it provides our clients with the comprehensive search engine optimisation (SEO) service. It takes care of all the technical elements of SEO like urls and meta tags but mainly it focuses of helping users to write properly keyword optimised articles. It also shows them how posts and pages will look in the organic search engine results and makes sure that meta tags make sense.

Key features of Yoast include; page analysis to check you’ve included your keywords in your article and meta description, analysis of whether your posts are long enough, XML sitemaps functionality, social-media integration and a multi-blog function which only needs setting up once.

Why not contact us to see how we can help

So, there you have it – our 4 best free WordPress plugins. Enjoy.

Set Site Objectives:

It is easier to identify that you (the client) need a new site than to plan what you want to use it for. The process of creating a site map can help you to determine what you really want to get from your website because it shows you how your site will be structured in a heirarchy.

Improve SEO:

Site maps plan your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO) tools. They state which key words should be used in each page’s written content and plot how these words will be used in url links.

Streamline Your Conversions (Navigation):

Using a site map you can strategically plot the easiest path for your customers between browsing your products / services and making a purchase. Your site map will help you to eliminate any unnecessary elements of your site that might cause a potential customer to become disinterested and click away from your site, which is the last thing you want.

Get Everyone Working From the Same Page:

There can be a number of people working on a website development project. Designers, coders, art directors, copy writers, the client, animators – the list goes on. A site map outlines which sections of the site each person is responsible for and acts as jobs checklist.

Cost Effective:

Drafting a site map can highlight some potential problems before you reach the main design and build stages of the website. Spotting any difficulties at the earliest point in the project can save both the designers and the client money. Later amends can be expensive, time-consuming and can seriously alter the website’s design.

Without a site map a website can be disorganised, in-effective, expensive and difficult to navigate. It’s worth taking the relatively short-amount of time it takes to create a site map as it can save everybody a lot of time and money and create a better site.

So, site maps improve the design process. Fact.

The whizkids at Seabrook Associates, Manchester-based graphic design agency, have developed their own email-marketing software called KnowledgeMail, but we won’t go on about it you can read for yourself why email-marketing is so great:

Global Reach: 

It goes without saying that emails are brilliant because you can contact your customers from all over the world in an instant.

Lower Cost:

Obviously it is far cheaper to send emails than paper-based mail but did you know that it can be up to 80% cheaper to design and distribute a professional email-marketing campaign than a printed one. You can contact thousands more readers more quickly while using far fewer materials.
TEST

Design Mailer Templates:

Your e-newsletter can look professional with very little effort. Email-marketing systems like KnowledgeMail have email templates built into their software which you can adapt for free to suit your campaign.

Interactive:

Your subscribers can interact with your emails by playing videos, viewing links and responding to questionnaires – you can’t do that with printed advertising.

Opt-in: 

A good quality email-marketing software, like KnowledgeMail, will enable your website’s users to sign-up for your newsletters. This is a great way to build a database of contacts that are genuinely interested in your products, projects, news and offers. These contacts are far better than bought lists as you are much more likely to get a response from them.

Easy Contact Uploader:

When you’re setting up your email-marketing software you can upload all of your contacts for your email accounts in one go via CSV file.

Round The Clock Marketing:

With top-of-the-range email-marketing software you can carefully plan when to distribute your news and implement your campaign when you’re away from the office.

Highly Personalized:

Email enables you to personally greet all of your contacts and tailor your campaigns to specific groups of customers. You can create custom-built lists so you can market to people based on sub-groups like their age, location, interests or average spending amount etc.

Measurable Results:

Like Google Analytics, decent email-marketing software like KnowledgeMail will tell you who has read your newsletter, where your subscribers are reading your letters, what time they opened the email and which links they have clicked on. These statistics can then be used to plan future campaigns so they can be more effective.

Faster Response:

Email campaigns have a quicker customer reaction time than printed marketing. Email campaigns generally have the largest response on the day that the newsletter is sent out but printed campaigns can take between between seven and 12 days to garner any response. People can respond to an email immediately simply by clicking a few buttons. It’s a far more lengthy process replying via letter.

There you have it – our 10 benefits of email marketing. Good stuff.

1.  Clarity

This might sound like a glaringly obvious point but your written content tells your website’s visitors who you are, what you do and how you operate so it is important to get it right.

It’s amazing how many sites I have seen that have content that does not actually tell the website’s user what that company does.

2. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation):

Your written content also helps you to be found by search engines.

Webspiders or bots from search engines crawl the net looking for key terms about the topic their searcher is interested in. If your copy is written well it will be infused with carefully planned keywords which will help search engines to find your site and rank higher in their organic results.

Incidentally, a good organic ranking is far better than a bought ranking as 85 to 90% of all clicks on Google are on organic results.

3) Referrals

Good quality website content is also a great way to build a following of interested people who want to hear what you’re company has been working on and what resources it is interested in.

If your blog or news copy is original (copied content is useless for SEO), insightful , useful, funny, newsworthy or controversial your followers will post links to it on their sites and on social media. This will also bolster your SEO credentials, increase number of hits on your site and ultimately bring in more business.

Well written website copy is not the be all and end all of online digital marketing but it has an essential role to play and can offer a very good return on relatively little investment.

Now, we are not the first agency to use and integrate WordPress into the business model, however we have produced an abundance of enterprising websites for our clients, using WordPress as our content management system of choice.

We do continue to develop our own software platforms and cloud-based systems (for accountancy practices, CRM services etc) although for content rich websites, we focus purely on WordPress.

So, what we thought would be a good idea (for you and for us) is to list each month 3 great reasons why we love WordPress, starting with our November choices:

1. Open Source

WordPress is open source, which means that it has been developed by a growing community of programmers from around the world – not just one company. These developers contribute their own time to help make the platform stronger for everybody that uses it. So when we integrate WordPress into your company website, you will be using one of the most reliable content management systems available to you (helping to make your online presence reassuringly dependable).

2. Fantastic Plugins

There are thousands of ‘plugins’ (16,970 and counting) that can help to make your website even more innovative. You might want to create your own social networking platform, or even start to sell products online for example. Using WordPress plugins, we can help to kick-start your new concept at an affordable rate.

We will be reviewing these Plugins in more detail in the upcoming weeks.

3. Cost Effective

Running a business in these challenging times means that you are looking harder at what you are spending your budget on. By using WordPress for your content management system, it means that what we charge you for is the integration and customisation of the software into your website – instead of paying for a bespoke content management system from scratch. This has the potential to reduce a standard development time substantially; and as it is WordPress, you will be getting a better product too. Excellent.

We hope that this helps you to consider the immediate benefits of using WordPress with your new or existing company website, and if you would like to discuss your thoughts further, then please contact us on 0161 860 7010 and we can talk through your ideas. 

In the meantime, here are some examples of websites that we have recently created, that use the fabulous WordPress content management system:

www.biasi.co.uk
www.eventcrockeryhire.co.uk
www.twothousandtreesfestival.co.uk

Now you can understand why we love WordPress for websites!

1. Strategic communication

PR skills are becoming central to digital marketing because onsite content is increasingly important and websites are now the focal point for all online conversations about a brand or business.

Public relations professionals manage conversations between a business and its audience and the profession is well placed to help web designers to create an online narrative for their clients.

2. Content led SEO

After the most recent Google Panda update, good quality content is more important than ever – all at the expense of SEO spam.  At the heart of PR is content. Relevant, interesting and commercially focused content.

3. In-bound links

A key part of PR is generating press and blog coverage for clients that, more often than not, will include links to a client website or domain.  By incorporating a PR into a digital marketing campaign, web designers can help their clients naturally build authoritative inbound links to a website.

4. Incremental revenue

Clients should see genuine commercial return if they action the three previous points, be that in terms of increased site traffic, lead generation and conversions.  As custodians of the client relationship web designers can use PR to build an ongoing income stream, long after initial fees for designing and building the website has been ended.

www.pragencyone.co.uk