Working in Windsor

We are so lucky to live and work in Windsor. It really is a fantastic place.

Great travel links with the M4 just across the river.

Great heritage, with the big house at the top of the hill that lots of people seem to like to visit.

Great outdoors with riverside walks along the banks of the River Thames and the expanse of the great park only minutes away.

Great for kids with Legoland just down the road.

Great for horseracing with two racecourses (Windsor and Ascot) within 5 miles of the town centre.

But above all Windsor is great for shopping and eating with some really excellent places to eat.  In fact we like it so much we decided to create a website to share our Windsor memories and recommendations with the world.

Posted in Writing for the web |

Choosing a Domain Name

Rule 1 – Write it down.

Many years ago we were choosing good names for a new teacher’s newsletter.   We came up with “schools express”, everyone liked it and I went and bought the domain name without writing it down on a bit of paper first.

Big mistake! www.schoolsexpress.co.uk  could as easily be interpreted as ‘school sex press’ which is not a good domain name if you are trying to create a grown up, sensible brand.

Domain names are your website’s first contact with the customer, so keeping them short, on-topic and memorable are the three graces of domain name choice.

Of course it is never easy to find a domain that fills all three criterea so order the three according to what you percieve as important to your firm and go from there.

Brand Names or Generic Domains?

If you own ‘widgets.com’ and you sell widgets, then you are pretty much set for success. Many startups try to get these ‘generic’ domains as lots of people simply type a keyword folloed by dot com into the browser’s url bar when they want something in a hurry.

However, if you then want to expand into other products you will find a missmatch between your brand and offer, which is a big marketing error.

If you already have a strong brand you really should get the domain that matches it as closely as possible. Nike for example, own Nike.com and would not settle for www.nike-trainers.com (although I suspect the own that too!).

Then of course, it is a fair bet that some other genius has got there first and already registered your chosen name. Hyphenated versions are sometimes a good alternative, but other times you might consider contacting the owner and making an offer on the domain name you want. Be prepared to spend a good stretch of time looking for the right domain. However, this is time well spent because the rewards of a good domain name will be worth it in the end. Your customers will find you with ease and they will return more frequently (because your site name will spring to mind readily).

The form below will check availability of domain names. It is service provided by 1and1.co.uk and should help you find the right one.

Check availability now

 

 

Posted in Web design and development |

B2B versus B2C Marketing

The web is a powerful tool for direct marketing, but it isn’t a magic wand. The web generally makes things quicker and easier, but not necessarily better. An badly written marketing email will fail regardless of how easy it is to create and how cheap it is to send out By contrast, intelligent use of data reaps huge reward for the smart business.

So, fundamentally the web changes nothing. We still have to plan our marketing messages carefully, tailoring them depending on whether we are talking to the general public (“Business to Consumer” or “B2C”) or businesses people (“Business to Business” or “B2B”).

Within those two groups we need to subdivide if we are to be effective. This is what we call  market segmentation. The methods of segmentation are different for B2B as opposed to B2C and that is what this article is about. By understanding the segmentation approaches which are appropriate to the markets we can create better performing marketing campaigns.

Some forms of segmentation are equally applicable to both B2B and B2C. Recency/frequency/value of previous sales is the obvious way of splitting an in-house mailing list, regardless of wether that list is business or consumer focused.

B2C marketers have many other ways to divide up their lists. This is because research tells us that similar people do similar things. So, if we know that certain people buy our products we would do well to find similar people and offer our products to them too.

Since people who live close to each other often lead similar lifestyles, we can segment a cold list by postcode. The ACORN classification system has been used by marketers to segment by postcode for decades.  A real life example of this would be where a travel marketer who does well in St. Albans  might choose to extend a campaign to include the town of Richmond upon Thames.  Although not geographically close, both towns are in ACORN group 19 and therefore the people often behave in similar manners. Naturally this data changes over time so it is important to get up to date Acorn records when conducting a campaign.

Gender, age and  number of children are pretty obvious segmentation vectors, but religious beliefs,  political preferences and where people go on holiday are also powerful vectors. Obviously in a B2B setting, the holiday choice of a buyer is unlikely to be a relevant vector in the purchase decisions of a large business.

Slicing a market according to when people buy is also a good strategy. In B2B this can be particularly effective. Many compaies have their own accounting year and funds are more likely to be available at certain periods than at others. Knowing  when these periods are for each potential customer can be the difference between success and failure. Sadly knowing the financial cycles of  consumers as opposed to businesses is pretty much beyond most marketers, although seasonality in general should of course be factored in to marketing planning.

Posted in Web marketing |

Building a calculator

I have enjoyed building a “solar panel calculator” this week. The client wanted a tool that allows visitors to their website to enter their postcode, be presented with a map of their house, click the four corners of the roof and be given back an estimate of how much money they could make from solar panels.

Phew, quite a challenge, but by breaking it up into steps I have now got the prototype working well. Now just need to make it look pretty before handing it over to the client.

Do you need a tool for your website or a smartphone app?  Why not challenge me to make something cool for you.

Posted in Web design and development |

Testing a theory

One of the many ways that Google et al define the quality of a page is by looking at how long people spend visiting that page. Crudely, a  longer visit indicates that the information the visitor wants has been found.

This is nothing new, but what is new is that the relative importance of  ‘time on page’ has been boosted during the 2011 algorithm changes.

Therefore, site additions that encourage longer viewing times are likely to benefit the site much more than they used to.

To put this theory to the test, last week we found a page on one of our own sites with consistent heavy traffic and added an appropriate video to it. Today I can reveal that the analytics are in and the page has performed amazingly.

Time on page has jumped 85%  from 46 seconds to 1 minute and 25 seconds.

In addition the bounce rate fell by 29.6% which was pleasing.

Now this was hardly a conclusive double blind study, but the early indications are that this is a technique that will benefit most sites.

The issue of finding or creating an ‘appropriate’ video are of course not being addressed here, but with modern mobile phones offering quality video as standard, it shouldn’t present any technical difficulties.

Posted in SEO |

Still suffering from being Panda slapped?

For those still suffering the after effects of being Panda slapped, here are some more useful tips from the guys at Wordtracker on getting your site back up to where it belongs.

It certainly seems that though Google has issued site quality guidelines there’s more to it than first meets the eye.

Panda was an update of Google’s algorithm which hit websites in April.  It was aimed at identifying low-quality pages but there was an awful lot of  ‘collateral damage’ with many perfectly good sites being dropped in the process. Read the ‘useful tips’ report to see some ideas about how to fix things for yourself, or call us here at Brown Bear Media and let us help you get your Google positions back.

Posted in SEO | Tagged , , |

Understanding Adwords Quality Score

When advertising online with Google’s Adwords system you will want to find ways to lower the amount you have to pay to get your advert seen. A key factor in this is the ‘Quality Score’.

The Quality Score is assigned to each keyword within an ad group.  According to Google themselves, “a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click.”

So how do you get high quality scores for your keywords?

Well, the Quality Score is calculated by looking at a number of factors, most important of these being the click through rate (CTR)

As soon as an ad starts displaying on the Google domain (they ignore the content network) Google records the CTR for each associated keyword. As the ctr goes up or down, so does the Quality Score.

Therefore, to save money it is good to remove low CTR keywords.  If that keyword is needed, then it needs a new ad of its own which more closely matches it and thereby generates a better CTR.

Negative keywords are an important part of the Quality Score mix too.

Suppose you only sell Green Widgets, but Blue Widgets are incredibly popular at the moment.

If you have an ad for Green Widgets and one of your keywords is ‘widgets’ then everyone who searches for ‘Blue Widgets’ will see your ad, but won’t click. As a result your CTR and your Quality Score will go down and your cost per click will rise. This is not good.

However, if you add the keyword ‘Blue Widgets’ to your negative keywords list, your ad will be hidden from those blue widget fans and as a result your Quality Score will rise and your cost per click will fall. Hooray!

Finding the right negative keywords is not too difficult to do. Just go to a search engine, type in ‘widgets’ or any generic phrase you have concerns about and see what comes up. If you find pages that are not relevant look for the phrases that you and they have that are mutually exclusive and add these to your negative keywords list.

That process can take a bit of time and effort so consider asking an SEO company (hello!) to do it for you. It isn’t a particularly expensive task and can lead to big improvements in the profitability of your adwords campaigns.

Posted in Web marketing |

How does renaming a website affect visitor numbers

We have recently had direct experience of this when we were asked to rename a client’s website domain name at the end of June 2011.

As expected, for the first few weeks, the total volume of visits dropped through the floor, but as we took all the usual steps to ensure as many in links as possible were renamed, the sitemaps were correct and  the domain forwarding codes were working correctly, we saw a steady rise in traffic levels, getting very close to what they were before the change after 8 weeks.

Most important of all was ensuring that the deep links resolved properly to their new equivalents. If necessary you may need to hand code every single link, but hopefully this can be automated with just one line of code on an htaccess file.

Today (almost exactly two months on) the Google Page rank of the new site’s homepage  jumped back up to the same as it was on the old site. Page rank is a good general indicator that things are going OK, so this was immensely gratifying.

So, the answer to the question “how does renaming a website affect visitor numbers?” is that if you do everything you are supposed to do as part of a renaming exercise, the drop in traffic should be nothing more than a temporary blip lasting approximately 8-12 weeks.  Our advice is to have a strategy in place to deal with technical and SEO issues prior to the change in order to ensure your new domain name recovers position as quickly as possible.

Posted in Web design and development |

Simple things

Relatively simple jobs can sometimes be quite satisfying.  Freesource, renewable energy experts, wanted to create a simple web page for their new Welsh office. The design needed to be the same as the main site, the web copy unique and the form needed to redirect elsewhere.

To satisfy this brief we created http://www.freesourcecymru.co.uk.

Simple, clear and above all cost effective.

Posted in Web design and development |
Delicious Digg Facebook Google Buzz LinkedIn reddit StumbleUpon Twitter Email Print Friendly