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Have you ever felt that your business is not growing as fast as it should be? I know I have, but there are only so many early mornings and late nights the body can take before you burn out and become less productive. Science proves that more sleep is the ultimate boost for personal productivity. Finding automated solutions to everyday tasks is one trick I use to gain more time and become a more productive creator. However, if you don't have the type of occupation where you sit at the PC for long spells, then calling in some assistance and hiring a website design agency may be the best idea you've ever had. A great website design agency will create an online presence for your company and help generate traffic to grow your revenues. But it's not just about the page visible on the screen. Increasing conversions, tracking leads, and running paid advertising campaigns are all specialised subjects in themselves that make up the digital marketing landscape. If you've been thinking of upping your digital marketing game, here are six good reasons for getting a website design agency to do the heavy lifting. 1. Hiring a website design agency will allow you to focus on your business, not the technical aspects of having an online presence A website is the face of your business, and it can make or break you. It's essential to hire a reputable agency that will work with you every step of the way, one that understands what works best for your company and knows how to produce results within your budget. 2. A web design agency can help you create an effective plan for digital marketing and social media campaigns Digital marketing is an ever-changing world, which can be challenging to navigate. What are the best practices? How do you know if your strategy is working? It's hard to tell unless you can produce valuable reports that verify the work carried out. An excellent digital agency will work with you every step of the way to make sure that your digital marketing efforts are practical and get results. 3. Having a professional-looking website is essential in today's competitive marketplace Almost everyone has an online presence these days, either through a Facebook page or a website, to promote their business. If you are looking for ways to increase your visibility and show off your professional side, then having a professional-looking website is essential in today's competitive market. 4. Your website should be mobile-friendly so that it looks good on all devices Did you know that more than half of the people who use the internet do so from a mobile device? Optimising your website for all devices is essential good practice, and you could be missing out on many potential customers. 5. Create a high performing site with easy navigation, which will lead to higher conversion rates Websites are no longer just a way to deliver content to customers. With the rise of social media sites and search engines, your website is now more critical than ever to be user-friendly. If you want more visitors to your site, you need to make sure they can easily navigate through it. Good navigation leads to higher conversions which will help improve sales and revenue in the long run. Focusing on enhancing website navigation is one of the critical factors to increase leads or sales. 6. Web designers can provide search engine optimisation services which means more visibility for your company online There are many ways in which you can optimise your digital marketing and make it more effective and search engine optimisation is one of those. Hiring a full-service digital agency will lighten your workload, enabling you to focus your effort on customer service or another vital business area. Best of all, if you choose We Build Stores, then you can choose a pay monthly website plan and get a crackerjack website design agency working for you. Contact us with your project or idea.

If you often wonder whether it's worth investing your hard-earned cash in hiring a professional website designer or digital marketing agency, let me help you come down off the fence and give you some excellent reasons for doing so. It's not just about the website design, you know. A great web designer will make all the difference to your bottom line. "Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing". Oscar Wilde A good freelance web designer is worth their weight in CPC, CPA, CPM, CTA, PPC, KPI and all the rest of the other internet marketing acronyms you can throw at them. If you can't get past the cost per click or acquisition, this is a clear sign you need to hire some web design services. I'm not making up jargon to try and show you how inferior you are. I'm more into grinding the competition into the dust, and you need the web design knowledge to do that. You might consider servicing your car yourself, but the cost of the tools required to do the job properly will often be more than paying an expert web designer to do the job for you. Have you seen how much a SEMrush subscription is these days? An experienced web designer understands the overall objective. While they may not have all the technical skills needed to complete your web design project on their own, working as part of a team has many benefits. That's why a digital marketing agency is so valuable. You will save time and money in the long run. Just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should. I can take my wedding photographs or service my car by watching a video. But is that the best use of my time? Is building a website the best use of yours? What starts as a great money-saving idea often dissolves into a gloop that you sorely wish you hadn't started. Do you have all the right website design tools to use? Do you even know what the right tools are? Many times in the past, I've taken on website development jobs that I subsequently wish I'd passed up on because they took a lot longer than I anticipated. These days if I have a javascript problem, I give it to a javascript expert. If I have a CSS problem, I might take a quick look but getting involved is a colossal waste of my time. It's better to give it to a CSS expert or web designer who knows what they are doing from the outset. Use your time to focus on what you are good at rather than something that seems like a good idea at the time. Today's technology environment is constantly changing; new devices, technologies and trends emerge, which means your site needs constant attention from a web designer if you want to keep it relevant (and retain visitors). If you were doing this yourself, it would be like keeping up with the latest developments in graphic design, mobile technology, and website development while running your own business. Hardly surprising then that most web designers work on an ongoing retainer basis to ensure there's no downtime or loss of sales due to a poorly performing site. And, of course, website designers have access to the latest website design trends and techniques so you can be sure your site is up-to-date. By working with a website designer on an ongoing basis, you'll get a well-designed website and future-proofed against any changes in technology. Why Is Responsive Website Design So Important? Responsive website design builds websites that automatically adapt to the device's screen size display, so a website design viewed on a phone, tablet, or desktop computer will always look its best. Responsive web design has become more critical than ever before. With the proliferation of mobile devices, it's now possible for people to access the internet from just about anywhere. Responsive website design ensures that no matter where someone is accessing your site from, they'll always have a positive experience. Several key components go into Responsive web design: -Fluid grids: A fluid grid is a layout that uses percentage-based widths instead of fixed-width units, meaning that the site will always resize itself to fit whatever screen it's being viewed on, whether a desktop computer or a mobile phone. Flexible images: In responsive website design, you resize images using percentage-based widths, ensuring that the visual elements always stay in proportion to the rest of the site, no matter how large or small the screen is. Media queries: Media queries are a way of targeting different stylesheet rules to other devices meaning that you can have separate stylesheets for computers, tablets, and phones, and each one will only be loaded when needed. Responsive website design is a must-have for any site that wants to provide a good experience for all users, no matter what device they're using and this is why it's important to hire an experienced freelance web designer. The Cost Of Getting It Wrong It is much harder to fix broken code or rewrite someone else's bungled copy than getting a professional web designer to do it right the first time. Plastic surgeons who ruin the job, builders that don't secure ceilings before putting the lintel in, amateur website designers that resize 2MB files and don't know their .jpg from their .png abound. Crimes committed in website design are primarily frequent because they are well hidden and only come to light when testing tools measure performance. You have instant access to the latest online marketing tools. Today, the internet utilises many new and innovative advertising methods such as ebooks, email newsletters, and social media - not to mention all the different varieties of 'pay-per-click' advertising. It can be pretty confusing trying to work out which types of marketing strategies will help you achieve your aims and how to go about implementing them. It makes sense to invest in a website designer who knows the latest tools and techniques and can advise you on which ones to use - and when! They will also make sure that your site is fully optimised for search engines, so customers find you more readily (saves money on other forms of promotion). It ensures that your site makes the right impression from the outset. The average visitor spends less than ten seconds looking at each web page they visit; if the visitor doesn't like what they see, it's unlikely they will stay. This is why it's so important to invest your time and money in a site that reflects the quality of your business, is visually appealing and makes an immediate impact on potential new customers. Don't forget that even websites with the most polished content will look unprofessional if you don't optimise the web design for readability - which can be disastrous if you're selling products or services that require detailed explanation! A professional website designer will ensure this by using clear, simple language and colour schemes with appropriate fonts, images and graphics. So now that I've laid the groundwork and softened you up to hiring a web designer, here are six awesome things your web developer can do for you. Develop A Coherent Online Strategy Competing on price is no way to run an online business. Your profits will dwindle into the ether sphere, and copying everyone else in your market segment will lead to expensive advertising rates. You need to be different to succeed. Building a website is just the start of an extended marketing journey that can take you down unexplored paths and well off the beaten track. The best freelance web designers will build you a great website and show you how to optimise your landing pages for conversions, and find the best search engine marketing channels to suit your business goals. A great web designer will save you time and money in the long run by helping you avoid the many common website design mistakes that businesses make. A website designer will help you develop a coherent online strategy. You wouldn’t open a brick and mortar store without first working out your business goals, understanding your target market and devising a marketing plan. The same goes for your website. A website designer will take the time to understand your business goals and devise a website strategy that will help you achieve them by designing a bespoke website, developing an eCommerce platform or building a membership area. Project management I've written an extensive eCommerce project management guide, so if you want to know what's involved in the web design process and how to launch your website, that would be well worth your time reading. Many things need to come together to get a website project ready for its launch date, especially when working to tight deadlines. Tracking every item to completion is what a great project manager does. You don't want to launch your website and then find that basic user testing or responsive design was not considered. A contact form that does not work correctly when your website goes live is not a good look. Make sure your web design is thoroughly user-tested. Once everything is in place, you can start working on your marketing strategy, including SEO, social media, and email marketing. You'll need to generate traffic to your website to start making sales. The eCommerce project management guide will help you plan and track every aspect of your website launch, from start to finish. It's an essential read for anyone planning to launch an online store and gives you a complete web development roadmap. Knowledge Transfer There are many benefits of working from home, and as I've done it for fifteen years or more, I'm qualified to comment. You can not beat getting individuals to work together in the same space for improving their skills. Sometimes you can enhance even the most straightforward tasks with a bit of knowledge transfer. People who work together in a digital agency on different projects can bounce ideas off each other and improve their skillset far more quickly than working solo from home. Several days a week of office work is so important, not just for a web designer. As a client, you can put all this combined knowledge to work and make a big difference to the result. You can get some great insights from a website designer that you may not have considered before and they are more likely to be up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies. Perhaps one of many underrated features of hiring a web designer is that they are likely to have a network of other people they can call on for advice or assistance if needed, which could save you a lot of time and money in the long run. Hiring a website designer is an investment in your business that will pay off many times over. High-quality productions Exciting imagery quickly captures your readers' attention and inspires them. The overuse of stock images is the biggest failure in amateur website design, and you know when you see stock images because you've seen them a hundred times before. Filling the page with appropriate images and text is one half of the design equation, and the other half is knowing how and when to use white space to make it presentable. Wait! What! You hadn't considered how you use white space in the design? Maybe that's an indication that you shouldn't be doing this job. Stale, overused royalty-free images are prevalent on blogs, and you can always spot them because web designers often overuse them. Getting custom graphics designed by a professional graphic designer for your landing pages makes them look good and gives you a launchpad for some branding initiatives. If you use stock images, be prepared to find a competitor doing the same thing. The best web designers all have access to pay for image libraries. Statistical Analysis Being able to interpret the mass of data generated by Google Analytics and other statistical software can be a full-time job. For those websites with significant traffic, even minor micro-adjustments can have a big impact on the bottom line. If you haven't even installed the tracking code on your website, what chance do you have of competing? Responsive Website Design How Hard Can It Be? Doing it yourself always seems a good idea until it doesn't. The technical bar of web design is continually rising, and staying on top of the latest trends is what the best web designers do. You can't hope to run a small business and drive its marketing yourself without sacrificing so much time that the company dies anyway. Have I convinced you? If you've read to the end, this might be the perfect time to hire a web designer and contact us.

In this guide, I'm going to give you all the information you need to start building an eCommerce website from scratch, with no advanced knowledge required. It will probably help if you don't know anything at all because once you start learning and assimilating information from many different sources, it is easy to become confused and drown in an ocean of conflicting advice. This guide will act as a roadmap for building your very first website. The main thing to understand is that it is more important to get started and make mistakes along the way than to not start at all. Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die as they say in the Marines. Everyone wants to build fantastic money-making websites, but few are prepared to put in the amount of work that will make a dream come true. This guide will help you understand the steps you need to take to build your website and eliminate costly mistakes that put so many people off. Never compare your starting point with someone else's middle. It's good to look at other sites and get inspiration for what you would like your website to become, but it's not good to compare where you are now at the beginning of the journey with someone else who has been trading for several years or more. Have patience and be consistent over the long term to succeed at this. It is much better to work an hour a day over a long period than to burn out after a month. Begin With The Basics Don't spend copious amounts of time viewing website builder comparison charts and comparing features before thinking about what type of business you are going to build. Feature comparison is good, but it will only take you so far. At some point, you have to dip your toe in the water, take the temperature and plunge in! The first item you are going to need is a domain name: 1. Register A Domain Name A domain name is the starting point for everything else you do online. It is the digital address that people will use to visit your website, and it can also serve as your email address. Owning a domain name gives your business a professional gloss rather than using email addresses from familiar broadband providers. Many of the best domain names are unavailable but as domain names are rented and not purchased outright many names find their way back into circulation after the original owner failed to renew it for whatever reason. Finding That Elusive "Perfect Domain Name." So you've spent an eternity planning your eCommerce website project. Everything is falling into place, except for that one all-important item: your domain name. That damn "whois" search box always comes back with the same reply: "registered". Isn't that so frustrating! How are you going to find anything useful that will give your project status and connect with your customers? As your desperation increases, you try more combinations of hyphens or different domain name extensions. Still, even if they are available, they just don't seem right, and you end up going back to the drawing board. Here is my guide to finding brilliant domain names. When you finish this article, you will be able to find great domain names ln minutes, not hours. Dealing With Social Media Name Squatters Before I show you how to use advanced searching techniques, I should make you aware that even if you manage to find a great name that you are happy with, the chances are that all of its social media handles have already been taken. To discover an unregistered nugget sitting there and then purchasing it only to find out that you have to make up completely different names on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter can make you want to poke yourself in the eye hard with your index finger. The first step then is to use a website like namechk.com, which will check the availability of usernames across all of the top social media sites. Social media handle availability is crucial if you are planning on using social media to promote your site, and you can use this in tandem with your domain searching efforts. The awkward combination of trying to find a good domain name and its social media counterparts is why the first method I recommend you investigate is to make up a name. If you make something up, then you are almost guaranteed to get all the names you want. 1. Making Up A Domain Name There are several ways of inventing a name. Xerox, Yahoo and Zoopla are names that you might immediately associate with the industry that they serve, but when they started, the names were meaningless. Making up a name like this means you will dominate the search engine results for that identity, but as a strategy for gaining search engine traffic, it's not a good one. If no one knows your company exists then its company name is not going to be searched for in a search engine. Only when a tremendous amount of work has been done building the companies products and promoting them does this type of name begin to work for itself. It's the best way to get a memorable name for yourself but also the hardest to achieve. Choose an infrequent consonant like X to follow with a vowel-like O, consonant, vowel, consonant, and you'll get a name in no time at all. That's how Kodak was invented. Dropping vowels has also become a popular method. Flickr and Tumblr are two that spring to mind. I don't recommend this method; if it's difficult to explain to someone over the phone, then it's probably a bad name. My preferred way is to combine words. You stand a chance of gaining some valuable search engine traffic, and there are plenty of .com names still available if you are prepared to spend a bit of time and be creative. Namestation.com is one of the best resources for generating new domain name ideas using this method. You'll find something very quickly here. Also try nameboy.com, panabee.com, bustaname.com, and domainnamesoup.com 2. Purchasing A Domain Name Buying a domain name is a frequently overlooked method, but if you can find the contact details for the domain you want that isn't being used, you may be able to get a reasonable price for it. There are between 90k and 100k new domain name registrations every single day, and roughly the same amount get deleted from the registry. People may buy domain names with the best of intentions to get down and do some serious work, but for one reason or another, it never happens. There are over fifty times more people with domain names for sale than there are people who put them to use. Hunting Down The Unloved Domain Name If the domain name you want is registered but leads to a blank "page not found" server error, then the domain has not been set up on the server. Find the owner contact details from the whois information and shoot them an email asking if it is for sale. Domain owners who are serious about making a profit on their domain name investment will either set up a page displaying the price and contact details or have the domain listed for auction, so if the domain does not resolve anywhere, it could just be that the owner lost interest after buying it. Sending an email will cost you nothing. If you don't get a reply from the owner, try asking the hosting company for a contact email. The ownership information for a domain is freely available unless the person who registered it requested ownership privacy, in which case they are unlikely to sell anyway. As a last resort try typing their domain ownership details into Google to see if they own any other active domains. Try Domain Name Auction Sites Trawl through the many domain name auction sites to see if you can find something that relates to your business at a reasonable price. Sedo is the biggest auction site, but there is no time limit on many sales, so many great names sit there attracting offers without being sold. Also try namejet.com, namecheap.com, domainlore.co.uk Another way of finding a valuable domain name that is underpriced is to buy the entire website on flippa.com. It may seem strange, but sometimes a domain name can be sold for more money without anything built on it because people focus on the value of the name itself. A complete website that includes the domain name can be sold for less than just the value of the name. Try posting your requirements on one of the domain name forums with the market you want to serve and your budget. Try Acorn domains for UK domains or Domain name forum for other main .tld's. Also, try namepros.com "Domainers" on these boards are very knowledgeable about the subject and have a good sense of what a domain name is worth. You may also come across names that people have stockpiled and just want to get rid of it. 3. Backordering A Domain Name Sometimes you will type a domain name into whois and find that while it is still registered the domain status is "expired". When a domain is expired, this means that the domain has passed the date by which it should be renewed and has entered a "grace" period by the end of which the domain name will "drop" and become available once more. Grabbing Soon To Expire Domain Names Different domain registrars have differing policies on their grace periods, and you can never be sure of the exact day that a domain will drop. Besides which there is a considerable domain aftermarket that exists to "catch" domain names as they are made available. Snapnames, Pool and Dropcatcher are dedicated domain catching services but many standard registrars like Godaddy.com now also provide back-ordering services so if you are dead set on a name and are prepared to wait it out you could try back-ordering a domain name that you think will not renew. You might also like to set a monitor on a name by using a service like domain tools which will alert you via email when there is a status change to the domain you want to be watched. In the UK the .co.uk extension is managed by Nominet, and anyone who has a Nominet Tag is allowed to interrogate the database of expiring names to find out what has recently dropped. It may be surprising to learn that many valuable domain names expire on a regular basis either through the owner passing away; a company ceased trading or just an administrative oversight. This domain aftermarket is fiercely competitive as you can imagine and sophisticated software solutions have been developed to catch domains within milliseconds of them expiring from the registry. If you think domain catching would be an excellent business for you, then try Hubbard Media who can offer you a complete domain catching solution. 4. Lists Of Expired Domain Names With close to 100,000 domain names expiring every day you would think that there is bound to be some low lying fruit just waiting to be snapped up, but anything that terminates and is not retained by the registrar, back-ordered, or caught by a specialist is generally not worth the registration fee in the first place. There are exceptions though, and the value of a name is only seen by someone searching for it (The beauty lies with the beholder), so expired lists are worth a glance over. The forum owner at Acorn domains often posts up long lists of UK expired domains as they are released from the Nominet registry, and it's worth registering on the site just to get access to those lists. Also try registercompass.org, expireddomains.io Take a bit of time to research the background of any potential expired domain because continuous Google updates (Penguin, Panda, etc.wayback) may have rendered it useless. Many webmasters penalised in this way have merely ditched their old domain name and started up again with a new one. If you purchase one by accident to build your new project on you are in for a world of pain. Aggressive link building techniques and directory spamming were all too familiar before Google began its crackdown and although you can use the disavow tool in Webmaster tools why not just start from scratch with a blank canvas and avoid any subsequent heartache? Buying a domain that is listed in Dmoz is no guarantee that the site will remain there by the way. Dmoz editors are actively looking for sites in their directory that no longer serve the purpose that they were initially entered into the list for. (Update: Dmoz now ceases to exist, so that's another shortcut that has turned into the long way around!) You can examine the history of a domain name by using Wayback machine at archive.org. My advice is to avoid buying anything that has been used before because discovering that you are labouring against an algorithm that doesn't favour you will only occur after you have put in all the hard work. 5. Take Your Time Choose Wisely Grasshopper. Once you start gaining links, guest posting and building your website presence, it's not possible to move without starting over again. Yes, you can use redirects to direct newly purchased domains to your primary offering, but you can't go the other way around. Not without losing all the goodwill you built up or doing a ton of work redirecting everything using your .htaccess file. If you are serious about building your business online, you'll start with a blank canvas. Lastly, here are some useful resources and further reading: Smashing Magazine has an excellent article on linguistics and what the difference is between a "discoverable" domain name and a "brandable" one. Here's a timeless classic from Seth Godin on choosing your business name. Lemon pie – the easy way to learn Scuba. Happy Domain Hunting! 2. Setup Your Business Email Address Once you've purchased your domain name, you can put it to work by setting up your email address. Most domain name registrars allow you to set up an email address from within their control panel. I like to redirect all of my incoming emails to my Google mail account so that it captures all the email from all sources. That way if you don't want to let go of your current email address you don't have to. 3. Choose Your Website Building Software For new websites that don't plan on using eCommerce functionality, there are three choices: A. WordPress WordPress is the hardest to set up for beginners although many hosting plans have "one-click installers" to make the job of installation a breeze. WordPress is the most flexible option, but it is also the hardest to learn. You would use WordPress for a blog with many pages or perhaps a corporate website. For people with limited technology skills, I would recommend that you avoid WordPress, to begin with, and try Wix first. Wix has a 24/7 support team, and if you use WordPress, you are left to your own devices. B. Wix Wix is easily the best website builder choice for beginners. Wix has the most straightforward interface with which to work and build your site as well as an excellent state of the art website template chooser. Everything is done via a simple drag and drop editor, and if you want to add simple eCommerce at a later date, you can do this too. Read My In-Depth Wix Review C. Weebly Weebly follows hot on the heels of Wix being a slightly cheaper website builder option but with loads of features available to expand your website. From a user interface point of view, Weebly is excellent as it doesn't come with so many confusing options in its default state, although you can add more features from the App library as you grow more confident. Alternatively, for those of you that are going to be building an eCommerce website, there are two clear favourites for UK users: A. Shopify Shopify is the best choice for those who want to get started with the minimum of fuss however on top of the $29 monthly fee you will also need to pay around $180 for an advanced theme and Apps in the marketplace that you bolt on can add up to a sizeable ongoing monthly payment. Shopify supports the most channels and is a perfect choice if you are thinking of selling on Amazon and eBay as well as your website because there is plenty of third party software that supports Multi-channel selling. It all comes at an extra cost though so watch those mounting expenses! Read My Shopify Review B. EKM EKM is my choice for UK users who want to build an eCommerce store and get handheld assistance if you require it via the dedicated account manager feature. There are no hidden extra costs to running a store, and all the latest responsive templates are free of charge. There are plenty of additional features available via the App store, and you can take your time activating them at your leisure. For example, the abandoned cart saver routine which I covered recently is a great revenue saver and a feature for which many other eCommerce solutions will charge extra. Read My EKM Review Choose A Website Template And Logo All of the website builders that I've included in the list above have a great selection of "ready to go" website templates that mean you click once and install. In the beginning, it is best not to spend too much time trying to customise your design because you might quickly decide that you like the look of another template and you might want to change your look. Install Google Analytics Being able to track your daily visitors and how they interact with your website is an essential part of the marketing mix. You need to know if you are connecting with your customers and how they are interacting with your website. Read my quick setup guide for Google analytics You'll find the code to install Google analytics in your Google account, but many of the software packages I've mentioned above merely require you to enter the ID of the site you want to track. Common Design Mistakes Business Owners Make So you think you can do better than the professionals? Here are some of the most common design mistakes small business owners make and some tips for rectifying them. 1. You are not creating a customer profile. Whilst this is not an obvious design mistake, you can't design your marketing campaign properly if you fail to identify your customer correctly. It's much better to have a small, tightly focused website built around your subject matter rather than a sprawling mess that tries to cover every angle. Picture your ideal customer in your mind; perhaps it's someone you know, then proceed to build everything around that customer profile. If you don't identify and create a customer profile, you can't make a brand identity. 2. Not Leaving Enough White Space On The Page It's tempting to try and cram all your information into the space available, but this produces a messy, incoherent page that bombards the senses with too much information in one hit. Great design works by making the white space break up information into chunks that are easily absorbed. Using white space in this way is an art and not easy for the layman. Less is more. 3. Poor Font Choices Trying to be different by using an obscure font is a classic design faux pas. Leave the fancy font usage to the experts. If your web page looks messy and unreadable, then changing the font to sans serif will instantly transform it. Make the font-size 12px for body text and the headings 18px or 20px. Use dark black for the font colour as the idea is to make the text easy to read. 4. Unclear Or Missing Calls To Action (CTA) You've got the website and the traffic, but something is missing, and you are not getting the sales. Omitting a call to action (or having too many) is one of the amateur's most common design mistakes. Designing a clear "Buy Now" or "Learn More" button for navigation is one of the essential website design features. If you build it, they will come, " is the old saying, but they will leave if you don't show them where to go. Design your buttons and navigation to make your offer clear, and don't put several offers on one page unless they are related. 5. Copywriting and Grammatical Errors Spelling mistakes are unforgivable as many tools are available to help you write correctly and eliminate bad grammar from your website copy. You may not be the next Hemingway, but using a tool like Grammarly will elevate your writing to a higher plane. 6. Poor Graphic Design Poorly designed visuals are something you can't quickly fix without recourse to a graphic designer. Stock photos can go some way to stave off that next yawn but be careful you aren't using stale or run-of-the-mill imagery. A subscription to a service like Shutterstock will give you access to pay for images that haven't been copied a million times over for a small monthly fee. 7. Not Designing For Mobile Devices Have you checked that your website displays correctly on a mobile device? Many business owners don't realise that a website can appear differently depending on its rendered device. If you use Wix to build your website, for example, there is a separate editor for the mobile version of the website, and most WordPress themes have a mobile version. Spend time with a tablet and mobile phone to see what your website looks like when displayed on these devices. Summary Going through the above list will get you up and running in no time at all, and you should be able to get a website or an eCommerce store up and running in a day using this guide. Some website builders may take a bit longer to "resolve" your newly purchased domain name, but at the maximum, you should be fully working in two days. Have you got questions? Use the comments below, and as always, you are welcome to contact me if you need any assistance.

In this guide, I am going to run you through the pros and cons of the best eCommerce website builders for building an online store and give you an overview of the capabilities of each eCommerce website builder platform. However, before I do that, let's bring the Noobs up to speed by explaining the differences between open-source software and cloud-based website builder software. Open Source vs Cloud-Based Website Builder Software Magento, Oscommerce, Zencart, OpenCart and other similar eCommerce platforms are all open source products freely available to use, as in "free to distribute" and publicly accessible. The source files for each product are made widely available, usually but not always, under the GNU General Public License terms. Open source projects, products, or initiatives embrace and celebrate principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development. https://opensource.com Open-source software makes source code available to those who wish to view that code and modify or alter it for their purposes. Its polar opposite is "proprietary software", which is only legally accessible by the author or creator. Microsoft products are prominent proprietary software examples, as are all the cloud-based website builder software I cover in this guide. GIMP is an excellent open-source replacement for Adobe Photoshop for basic photo editing. Open Office or LibreOffice are direct open-source replacements for Microsoft Office. Many other brilliant programs like Shotcut Video Editor, VLC Media Player, Filezilla FTP, and Livezilla Live Chat are made freely available under the GNU GPL license. Open Source eCommerce Platforms Prestashop: Over 250,000 eCommerce stores use PrestaShop for online shops, and it is one of the easier to use open source projects. It is straightforward to install. It also offers a hosted version so that you don't have to get involved with installation routines and server configuration. Perhaps the biggest drawback is the lack of front-end customisation which means purchasing a third party template to get your site the way you want it. Opencart: Another simple eCommerce online store builder solution, but this one has more going for plugins, add-ons and community support. Opencart is a good choice for someone working on a tight budget, but once you need to start adding more functionality, you rely on the third-party plugin market. They have an excellent showcase of developed sites. Zencart: Extensive product management tools and excellent control over inventory, but you'll struggle to make this look nice without a lot of developer help. Zencart Showcase Spree Commerce: If I were a CEO with a deadline to meet and a small but workable budget, then Spree would be my choice in this category. With the help of a couple of developers, you'll be able to build something with a "Wow" factor in short order. The problem with many open source eCommerce platforms is that they run on dated code. Spree is based on Ruby on Rails, so you use the latest technology for your online store. Spree Showcase X Cart: Has been in development since 2001 and has over 38,000 stores worldwide. The entry-level software is free for newcomers, but there is a $ 495-lifetime license fee if you want to have a theme to go with it. All of the advanced features to sell online are on the paid-for plan. X Cart Showcase Cubecart: Completely free and fully featured, this would be my choice in this category if I was going to make a new online store by myself without any help. Advanced Open Source eCommerce Because of its flexibility, Magento is the frontrunner in open source design and is the tool of choice for most higher-end website design agencies. Magento makes beautiful websites but expect to pay £5k - £10k in development costs. osCommerce: Has been around since time began. It is arguably a better choice for someone with coding skills over Magento because it is a more manageable system for one person. However it is clunky, bloated and difficult to configure with endless options. You could spend a year getting this online store to work correctly. Platform Specific Open Source eCommerce Software Woocommerce for WordPress: If you've built a great blog and want to add some eCommerce functionality, Woocommerce is an excellent choice for your WordPress installation. VirtueMart for Joomla - Free open source eCommerce solution for Joomla. RokQuickcart for Joomla - Simple and easy to set up eCommerce for Joomla Drupal Commerce for Drupal Ubercart for Drupal A Note About Joomla, WordPress or Drupal eCommerce Integration Adding third-party online store solutions to an open-source CMS (content management system) like Joomla or WordPress requires significant work to integrate the plug-in or add-on seamlessly with the original template. The result will be many hours making everything look uniform. Partnering Joomla with Virtuemart or WordPress with Woocommerce will require extensive CSS surgery. Using a CMS as your eCommerce platform is the last resort because you are getting the worst of all worlds - plug-ins that are not as good as dedicated eCommerce software and lack themes or design. There is also the possibility of poor coding introducing security issues to your website. Cloud-based website builder alternatives are far superior in every way. If you have a lot of time invested in your content, it will not be practical to move everything into a cloud-based eCommerce website builder. You will spend most of the following year fixing all those 301 redirects for search engines! An alternative to using a third-party plug-in is to host your online store on a subdomain like shop.webuildstores.co.uk. It is not the perfect solution, but it is perhaps, the most pragmatic. Should You Choose Open Source Or A Cloud-Based eCommerce Solution? The reason to choose open-source software over cloud-based website builder software is flexibility and more customisation options. The reason to choose a cloud-based website builder is the low setup cost and ease of use. But Tony, You Said Open-Source Software Was Free? Open-source software is free, as in free to distribute. However, server configuration, system setup, maintenance and development costs for open-source software must be paid for unless you can do it yourself. Magento, for example, has a vast array of configuration options. With its resource-intensive server usage, Magento is more suited to large-scale deployment managed by several skilled Magento developers rather than individuals building their first website. Digital agencies typically handle Magento installations because of their complex nature and the need for both server and programming expertise. Also, open-source software is at the risk of being compromised if you do not keep abreast of updates and patching protocols which add to the overall maintenance cost. Independently hosted software platforms also have security problems, but part of your monthly subscription fee includes updates and cloud-based solutions like Shopify monitor the hosting ecosystem around the clock to watch for security breaches. Many people who had built Magento or other open-source eCommerce stores in the days before cloud-based shopping carts became mainstream and user-friendly can find that the software they are using is outdated. If that is you, consider using a tool like cart2cart to migrate your online store to one of the more advanced cloud-based eCommerce website builders. You will save a fortune in hosting and maintenance costs. Open-Source v Cloud-Based Website Builder Summary If you need many methods for displaying products and services in an online store, complex shipping rules, multi-language, multi-currency, an almost never-ending list of extensions and plug-ins and complete control over your design, then open-source eCommerce software would be your choice. There is no doubt that Magento eCommerce online stores look better in the main than their cloud-based counterparts (in my opinion). Still, the considerable capital investment can make it a prohibitive option for small stores. With minimal upfront costs and a low ongoing monthly hosting and support fee, cloud-based eCommerce is the way forward for anyone who wants to build a small to a medium-sized eCommerce store. Even those with loftier ambitions can be supported by "enterprise plans" that offer advanced features such as "Shopify Plus". Unless you have sophisticated design requirements, most eCommerce websites can be built quickly from the software in the list below. The Best UK eCommerce Website Builders Now that I've explained the use of different software platforms, here are the best UK eCommerce website builders, in my opinion, that you can use to get your new business up and running quickly. Each website builder has strengths and weaknesses depending on the type of website you want to build so this isn't a strict numerical order list. 1. EKM Best Website Builder For UK Customer Support The EKM eCommerce platform is a shining example of British eCommerce done right, including a robust payment system, excellent customer service, and a great website interface for potential customers. Providing a dedicated account manager is a game-changer for EKM. ​ It's not just the beefed-up customer support that is so impressive either. The new range of responsive templates are awe-inspiring and will get you off to a flying start. The new Evolution mode will make site improvement suggestions for you, and there is also an EKM test store function to play about with new ideas in a sandbox without affecting the live site if you so wish. If your goal is to get your online store up and running quickly with the minimum of fuss and without developer help or support, then the EKM platform does the job admirably. There are enough customisation options available to help you make something that looks great and stands out from the crowd. And you can do it without developer knowledge, as long as you can use a Word Processor and have basic computer skills you can build a thriving online business using this product. EKM Have Unrivalled Customer Support ​When you are setting up an online business for the first time, then it doesn't matter what eCommerce platform you use as long as it works and when it doesn't you get support when you need it. ​ And it's this last point that has convinced me to recommend the EKM store above all other options for UK users who want to start a new eCommerce business. The decision to assign a dedicated account manager to each new account means that you will always have support for your site from someone who knows and understands what you are trying to achieve. ​ There are over 80 eCommerce specialists on the EKM team supporting a user base of some 80,000+ businesses since they started in 2002. ​ As well as UK telephone and email support, you'll also gain access to a community forum where you'll be able to ask questions and chew the fat with other users, which can be an invaluable source of information ​ This level of support is something you won't find anywhere else at this price point. Read My Full In-Depth EKM Review 2. Wix Best Website Builder For Specialist eCommerce Stores Wix.com is a cloud-based online website builder that lets you create beautiful, professional and functional websites without knowing a line of code. ​ The companies growth has been remarkable. From its small beginnings in 2006, Wix passed 1 million users in 2009, passed 50 million users in 2014 and 190 million in 2019. As of September 2021, they have 210 million registered users, with 4.5 million fully paid-up subscribers. The Wix website platform uses a drag and drop interface, so you don't need to know any code at all, and you can make relatively complex designs – background videos and different background sections are just the tip of the iceberg of what you can create with Wix. ​ If you want to get creative and delve into the code, you can. Velo is to Wix as Liquid is to Shopify, so if creating custom events or applications is within your remit, you do have access to programming code in Wix. How Easy Is Wix To Use? ​ The Wix editor uses a browser-based drag and drop interface, so there is no software to install. ​ You add new pages, folders and sub-pages to your website within the Wix editor. ​ Click on the element you want to change – text, images, videos etc. – and drag it to where you want it to be on the page. ​ If you're going to add an effect or alter the properties of the element you've chosen, then a panel will open up on the right-hand side of the screen with all the relevant settings. ​ Wix is incredibly easy to use, and if you are familiar with any standard software interface, you'll quickly get to grips with the Wix editor. Read My Full In-Depth WIX Review 3. Shopify Best Website Builder For Many Products (SKU's) Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, offering a suite of eCommerce services for small to medium-sized businesses, although larger corporations can also easily run their operations on the Shopify Plus platform. Shopify merchants can sell online using the web, mobile, social media, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-up shops. Shopify also allows businesses to manage their inventory, finances, customers, shipping, and analytics all from one platform. One of the main reasons people love Shopify is that it is so user-friendly. Even if you have no prior experience with website building or eCommerce, you will be able to create a beautiful shop on Shopify. The platform is highly intuitive and easy to navigate. Shopify is a popular choice for businesses selling products through brick-and-mortar locations and online, as it provides a seamless way to manage inventory and customers in one place. ​You can also add Point Of Sale (POS) terminals to aid with your stock control. ​ Additionally, many entrepreneurs who are just starting choose Shopify because it offers a low barrier to entry and has scalable plans so that you can easily upgrade as your business grows. ​ Although Shopify uses its own "Liquid" programming language, it's not too dissimilar to HTML and CSS, so if you're familiar with coding, you can easily change your shop's design and functionality. Liquid is a template language created by Shopify and written in Ruby Rails and is used in all Shopify themes. ​ Shopify is a good choice for businesses of all sizes and industries who want an easy-to-use platform with plenty of features and integrations.​ Read My Full In-Depth Shopify Review 4. BigCommerce Best Website Builder For Large Online Stores Dozens of companies in the Fortune 500 and Internet Retailer 1000 use BigCommerce to power their sites so you can rest assured that it scales up and you won't outgrow it. Some of the store designs look fantastic as well so you know you are going to be able to design something that looks superb. There is a Theme store and an App store with hundreds of useful add-ons, and so if the functionality isn't quite what you wanted out of the box, there is probably an add-on that will provide it. BigCommerce has a support team that is available 24/7 via email, live-chat and telephone (UK 0808-189-1224 ) useful if you are building a store for the first time and trying to hold down a day-job at the same time. There is a community forum available so you can chat to fellow BigCommerce users and also a “BigCommerce University” which walks you through the basics of setting up a website and adding products all the way through to launching your store. Very useful if you are just starting out. Both Shopify and BigCommerce do a magnificent job of providing the information you need to get selling as fast as possible and help develop your store. BigCommerce is a good choice for someone who wants to build an eCommerce website. Plenty of help and advice is on hand in the form of tutorials, and the BigCommerce University is a useful resource. The App store makes finding and developing useful add-ons a breeze, and there is a vast array of bolt-ons available to help you make the customer satisfaction journey a positive one. Some of the developed stores in the showcase look stunning, and it's clear that you can produce an eCommerce website using this platform that can compete with anything else that you might like to compare it with. 24/7 Technical support and having all of the hosting worries taken out of your hands are big positives and mean you'll get started selling far quicker than someone who chooses a custom shopping solution. Choosing The Best eCommerce Website Builder For You The balancing act for an eCommerce website builder is to combine ease of use with many features. The more features you add to your eCommerce store, the harder it is to maintain, which is why many of the best solutions offer a range of plugins from which you can choose rather than building them in as standard and utterly confusing you. Designing a website builder software interface that is easy to use and intuitive takes much research and requires extensive user feedback. Many eCommerce website builders claim to be "the best solution", but there is no best solution, just as there is no best car. A Ferrari would be great to commute to work in, but for taking the family on an extended camping holiday, it would sadly come up short. The fun factor would disappear when you try to get your tent in the boot. You could always buy a trailer for your Ferrari, although I do not think I have ever seen one with a tow bar! The first item on your "to-do" list for your online business should be to write a website project management document. If that sounds daunting, then let me assure you it is not. One page will suffice, with a list of all the high-level features you expect the software to be able to handle. Always go for a more straightforward solution and start making money rather than start to build something overly complicated that turns into a costly time and money pit. Proving that the idea will work first before investing thousands of pounds in website design and SEO tools is what a cloud-based website builder is good at doing. The new REST API features that Shopify and BigCommerce are developing mean that website building and integration with third-party tools are becoming more accessible than ever. Alliances with other Saas platforms like Kashflow mean that you get "best of breed" solutions every time and not an underwritten, lightweight afterthought. Saas (Software as a service) solutions can take advantage of the latest hosting technology without worrying about backup solutions and bandwidth. By distributing the data load across multiple CDNs (content delivery networks), you get blazingly fast speed for your website. Choosing something that looks like a good fit only to find out a year later that your company evolved into something completely different (a common occurrence) is not the problem you think it might be. Cart2cart will painlessly import and export your data from one eCommerce solution to another. Please leave comments below and share the article if you found it useful.

A Guide To Provisional Website Building Costs Before you start commissioning a new website design you want to know how much it is going to cost, but before I give you the in-depth answer let me ask you a different rhetorical question – how much is a new car? Your answer is going to be “well it depends". I haven't given you enough information with which to work. You need to know if the car is going to carry a single occupant or an entire family with a boot full of luggage. If the latter then you'd probably point me in the direction of an estate car. But Which Estate Car? Petrol or diesel? Automatic or manual? With a tow bar fitted or without? The Level Of Website Specification Determines The Price. Better built websites carry a premium over their lesser rivals. Do you need a premium business website build or will a less expensive workhorse do the job? Different website builder platforms exist to tackle different end uses. Choosing the right website builder platform is a matter of budget and practicality. Website Cost Project Scope To begin with, you need to ascertain the extent of your business website design project. What are the deliverables, and when are they expected to be completed? When is the supposed "go live" date? If digital agencies or web designers are busy with other clients, then they may not be able to meet your deadlines or expectations, and this can reflect on the total cost. Producing a website project scope document will give your web designers a fighting chance of creating something that closely resembles your requirements. But you can't build a website project scope if you don't know the right questions to ask. Finding a digital marketing partner that can make those briefs come vibrantly to life impacts your project and the website cost significantly. It's essential that you both work in close collaboration with your web design team to achieve the best result. Project Justification At it's simplest, a project scope could be merely a list of pages that an author needs producing. For example; Home Services FAQ Contact About This simple list can then be expanded into greater depth depending on how many pages need components (forms, XML feeds) placing on them. Requirements Gathering For new business website builds, requirements gathering is not an essential part of the site scope because you are not developing or integrating with existing site architecture. Even so, it's a useful exercise. For those builds where a new website is replacing an old one requirements gathering is an essential part of the site scope. Are we replacing existing forms and if so, how is data being collected and where will it be routed? Are there any XML feeds that need to be integrated? Is there a mobile site that needs designing or are we using the global responsive design? Are image repositories being utilised? Where are the existing image source files or originals? Do existing images need resizing, cropping and scaling? Services Provision Building a website involves the integration of many different technologies. Website creation is made a lot easier with website builder cloud-based solutions that provide everything in a ready-made format, but you'll still need to decide: Who is going to write the content and maintain it? Where are graphic design and images/photography being supplied from Who is going to provide ongoing support? Who will provide website promotion and SEO services? Once you have determined the high-level requirements, your simple "one-pager" site scope document can be used to drive forward the entire website development project. Alternatively, for larger projects, you can begin to delve into more detail and flesh it out with more information. The more detailed and lengthy a website project scope document becomes the harder it is to make changes when alternative solutions are found, so it's best not to be too rigid in your requirements and err on the side of brevity. Technology advancements are rapid, and you should be open to incorporating them into your design. Working with a digital agency or web designer is a two-way street, and a website project scope document is to help you both understand what the overall goals of the project are and what the website development costs are likely to be. Once a website project scope has been drawn up, then it's time to start looking at the website builder solutions that might provide the answer. How Much Does A Basic Website Cost? First of all, let's break down the typical costs involved with all website builders. Then we can choose the features we want and add them to our website builder design platform. This way, we can provide actual costs across the board. Everyone has their idea of what is a "reasonable cost" so let me give you my thoughts on the subject before giving you the actual figures. Most of the time, what you are going to pay for a website is going to be determined by your budget. If you don't have one, you should have. The figures I'm giving below are what I think is a reasonable price to pay for the service based on the level of a website that you are trying to produce. In general, you get what you pay for, and a custom logo design that may go through many revisions and be supplied with original .psd files (Photoshop native) will cost around £249. High-end agencies can charge £1,000 or more for a logo, but those costs are associated with high-end websites. You can make a logo yourself using an online logo creation tool, but the results will likely be underwhelming. That's me being polite. The same goes for website development costs. Any reasonable freelance developer should be charging between £25 and £35 per hour for their work. Many agency fees go as high as £60 per hour. Don't be fooled into paying unskilled workers £10 per hour because it will inevitably take them five hours to do the same work. Skilled web designers and developers in CSS and Javascript should be charging around £35 per hour. That's how much it costs. Finding unskilled workers prepared to do the job for less money is a false economy as they will bill you for more hours. A developer that can make a CSS change in a few seconds to correct a glaring error or make massive improvements to the look and feel of a website is worth far more than one that takes hours to do the same job. If you want the job done to specification and on time, pay the going rate. So let's get to the costs: Logo creation £249 Don't forget to ask for the .psd files as well as the finished .jpg for your finished logo design so that you can provide them to external agencies who might need them for stationery or other advertising purposes. Graphic design services (making custom graphics and artwork) £250 Most of the time a logo is the only artwork you'll need, but I've included this for sundries like banner creation. Professional photography services £25 per image It is getting easier to build a website every day, and with the advent of new dropshipping suppliers like Oberlo, the competition is becoming fiercer. The only way to stand out from the crowd is to have eye-popping graphics. Paying a professional photographer to shoot your products is a sound investment. Stock images: (25 images) £300 I've known companies spend £500 on one stock image without batting an eyelid if it is the right picture. Using paid for stock images will save you hours of hunting around the free libraries for suitable photos to use, but they come at a cost. Copywriting: £50 per page Some people find writing for the web incredibly tricky, and their text becomes stilted and corporate. Write as if the person you were speaking to is sitting directly in front of you. That way you'll come across naturally. Alternatively, pay someone to do the job for you. Copy and pasting from existing catalogues or brochures does not work well. SEO Services: £2,500 Any website promotion services should be provided with their scope document because SEO is so closely related to site architecture. £250 doesn't even scratch the surface, and a reasonable ballpark figure for search engine optimisation services would be around £2,500 per annum. Check out my 90 day SEO plan to get started. Website Maintenance Costs: £1,200+ per annum Website maintenance costs include website hosting, domain name registration, and website design and development. These website maintenance services are ongoing costs to ensure that the company website is updated with the latest security patches and features. Additionally, website maintenance can help optimise website performance using tools like Google analytics and reduce downtime. Website maintenance costs vary wildly depending on the type of website architecture used as a software platform. For example, Magento developers can charge anything between £60 - £100 per hour whilst WordPress developers typically charge £20 - £25 per hour. Building A Weebly Or Wix Website Using drag and drop website builders are the most cost-effective way of building a small five to ten-page website that won't need a lot of ongoing maintenance. For a small business website, you should use the premium version to remove the adverts that will otherwise be displayed. Wix website builder is straightforward to use drag and drop website builder which can put together beautiful looking sites very quickly and has a vast array of templates from which to choose. Read my Wix review if you are considering this option. But just because you CAN build it yourself does not mean that you SHOULD. You'll probably create a disaster. Much better to pay an experienced Weebly or Wix website designer to develop your site for you. If your time is precious, then this is the obvious way forward. Weebly is better suited for those who want close control over CSS and layout, while Wix is more suited for those that want better looks out of the box and are happy to go with an existing template. For those of you that are interested, Wix uses large portions of WordPress code to power its websites. An excellent Weebly or Wix designer should charge you around £500 to produce a beautiful looking site. You'll need to pay the monthly hosting plan fee separately. Building A Website In WordPress Creating a ten-page website in WordPress website builder gives you the future flexibility to add many more pages and is the standard way to go. A website developer can modify an existing template for you and WordPress has a vast array of useful plugins to automate many tedious processes like on-page SEO. WordPress is a popular website builder choice because it is cheap to set up and easy to use, building your website in WordPress is an excellent choice for small businesses who want a professional-looking website on a budget. Here are the main reasons you would choose WordPress to build your new small business website: Low cost - WordPress is free to download and use. You will only need to pay for hosting and a domain name. Easy to use - WordPress is one of the most uncomplicated website builders to use. Even if you have no prior experience, you can easily create a professional-looking website. Flexible - WordPress is very flexible and can be used for a wide range of websites. You can easily add new features and functionality with plugins. Good support - WordPress has a large community of users who can offer support and advice. A WordPress small business website typically costs £1,000 to develop, including the cost of a domain name, web hosting, and any plugins or themes you might need. Building An eCommerce Website It makes no sense whatsoever for someone wanting to create a mainstream eCommerce website to choose anything other than Shopify or EKM for UK users. Both solutions rely heavily on templating systems to do most of the heavy lifting and thus tremendously reduce the development cost. They are a far more preferable choice than using a content management system to build an online store. Front-end development costs are likely to be around £2,000 - £3,000 to begin with, and an online store with many products is probably closer to £5,000 and upwards. This production cost is a fraction of what you would spend on an open-source solution like Magento. The beauty of using a cloud-based website builders like EKM is that if required, you can do some of the more straightforward setups yourself and save some of the development costs. Creating your website using a digital agency, you'll be looking at around £10k all in with proper SEO plan maintenance fees and don't forget the £79 monthly web hosting charge. That's the ballpark guide. Questions? Let me know in the comments!

The more people involved in eCommerce project management, the harder it is to get the project across the line on deadline day. Once multiple stakeholders and their egos' are involved, expert project management strategy becomes essential. (Stakeholders vary from those with a senior management interest in adding to the bottom line or data entry clerks in human resources with interest in how job application forms will display on their section of the website) Everyone wants their say and managing expectations is a critical part of the process. Whether building an eCommerce website in the hope of generating a second income, replacing your full-time income or managing the website design for a global entity, following an exact process will reap huge benefits in time and money savings. Here's my guide to getting your eCommerce website project built right the first time, big or small. 1. Assign a Technical Project Manager And Set Goals The Technical Project Manager (TPM) is the person that provides the conduit through which all communication flows, providing the connection between website development staff, clients, digital design firms, graphic design agencies and anyone else involved in eCommerce project management. The TPM organises and coordinates all project meetings, familiarisation, scheduling, and project planning. In small projects, the TPM can be the design lead or even the business owner themselves. In larger projects, TPM's with diplomacy and sound technical knowledge are valued highly for their ability to cut to the chase and curtail the excessive email chatter that typically accompanies projects with many vested interests. 2. Risk Assessment And Evaluation What are the goals of the new website design? Why do you want to do this? What are the current conversion metrics? Any new implementation must not make these worse. Building a new eCommerce website using a cloud-based website builder like Shopify or EKM poses little risk. The primary considerations to take into account are the amount of time the website development process will consume and allocating resources for the workflow process. Building a new eCommerce website using open source tools carries more risk because there is more development work to be done. Magento is especially resourcing intensive and requires more working hours to develop. Typical digital agency rates for Magento are £50 per hour. Professionally built and maintained Magento websites have the Wow factor, and they look great. Replacing an existing website with a new one carries a higher level of risk. The amount of work involved in migrating data, configuring redirects and moving everything into a new CMS (content management system) can be considerable depending on the size of the website. Consider whether you have the expertise and resources to maintain the complete website and drive it forward. Involve stakeholders and ask what new technology or approaches they would like to try. Risk evaluation will determine what is feasible or a step too far. Design your project management strategy in phases and small sprints to add more functionality in later stages. 3. Budget Analysis Expect to pay £2k - £3k for a well designed Shopify, EKM or Shopwired eCommerce website. Maintenance costs are your monthly subscription. Magento or other comparable open-source solutions typically cost in the £5k to £10k region at the low end with hosting and maintenance costs at £2k+ per year at the low end. Hybris, SAP, IBM and Hewlett Packard solutions begin at £50k+ Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) projects can quickly run into millions of pounds. If you have to ask the price you can't afford it. AEM lead developers typically charge £500 per day and are thin on the ground. SEO, Social media marketing and other promotions need a £10k+ per annum budget. Results from companies that advertise top rankings for £100 per month are poor value for money. Decide On An eCommerce Platform: 4. Competition Analysis List all the websites you like in your niche and those you don't like. What are the good points of those you do like? Who are your competitors? Competitor research and uncovering their use of technology is an essential part of the process. As well as discovering the eCommerce platform they use (Wappalyser) you also need to analyse where they get their backlinks from (SEMRush) how they manage their PPC campaigns (SpyFu) and any other business intelligence. Requirements Gathering Business Requirements How do the pricing rules work? B2B (Business to Business) accounts have many different requirements than standard B2C (Business to Consumer) retail accounts. If flexibility in pricing is a significant consideration, you should be looking at Magento, Lemonstand or Zoey where you can fully customise this aspect of your business. Zoey has well-developed processes for handling B2B sales. How do the shipping rules work? Some products may have country exclusions or special requirements such as palletisation or shipping via freight .How does the order fulfilment workflow account for your business practices, for example dropshipping? What are the legal requirements of doing business in your jurisdiction? Functional Requirements Base functional requirements on the user of the service. Some examples are: Product reviews increase conversion rates and highlight product strengths. Who will moderate user reviews and will anonymous reviews be accepted? Product tours (photos/videos/etc.) increase user engagement and differentiate your products from the competition. Shipping calculators set expectations and decrease cart abandonment. Drop-shipped products increase the variety of products. Implement saved shopping carts or printable quotes, because shoppers often require a manager’s permission or purchase order before checkout. How will the account creation routine function? Stakeholder Management & Staff Training There are two ways of approaching stakeholder management. The first is to include the minimum amount of stakeholders possible to avoid creating excessive workflows. Unfortunately, this can lead to significant disaffection with some stakeholder groups but ensures the project runs on time with the minimum of distraction. The second is to include as many stakeholder groups as possible and seek opinions from all. The policy of multiple collaboration adds to the project overhead but appeases stakeholders, and is the preferable route. Identify relevant contacts within each stakeholder group and gather requirements. The objective is to get a picture from every angle of the business. Surveys, workshops, meetings and external agencies are often utilised to collect the ‘bigger’ picture across the company. Discover what forms, feeds and database integrations are required. Prioritising the requirements can be a challenging exercise when dealing with many senior stakeholders. Assign timeframes and create a roadmap to execute the requirements. Ascertain staff training requirements (Content editing, writing blogs, order processing, SEO & PR) Assign documentation detailing. Project Management Tools & Milestone Dates Project Management Software For smaller projects, you could use Trello as your roadmap. I use it to manage content planning for multiple projects here at We Build Stores. Larger projects commonly use the Jira project management system to organise development work. Projects will have a client Jira login providing complete access to sprint boards, tickets, comments, attachments, and view of code commits - used for task-level scoping and planning. The TPM can manage the Jira board Individual case tickets outline user stories, followed by all tasks at a granular level that will accomplish that user story. Tickets move from the backlog into two-week development sprints. This planning is done daily by the Technical Project Manager and reviewed on at least a weekly basis with clients. Expect change during development and utilise the Agile project management approach The weekly discussion with the client concerns the time/budget available and ascertains which features are the highest priority. Ticket “types” identify new feature requests, bugs, and general tasks and have a four-step workflow for all tickets — Open, In Progress, Ready to QA, Resolved. The Agile project management approach minimises risk, as there is never a time when website developers do not have a clear direction, and they can never be more than five days into project development of one feature before it is reviewed or goes through a round of QA with the client and project team. Milestone Dates For The Project Plan Agree on a Content Delivery Date Agree on a Site Architecture Freeze Date Agree on a Site Functionality Freeze Date Agree on a Design Freeze date Agree on a Launch Date & Domain Transfers Design & Development Website Design How many design mockups will the client expect to review? 2-3 is usually sufficient. Examine competitor websites for themes that look good. eCommerce website builders make it easy to choose a theme which can be modified. Use the existing logo or design a new one? If existing what formats are available? Establish a colour theme. Establish the design elements: Buttons/calls to action (square or rounded edges, gradients, etc.) Establish borders/headers and padding/margins. Less padding and smaller margins provide tighter content. Padding and margins create white space. Images: Discuss a content to image ratio. Image aspect ratio (A proper aspect ratio is 1:1 for product images). Organising photoshoots. Managing photos in a database. Which payment gateways are available? Organise SSL Certificates if using a self-hosted solution. Produce a Site Plan (example attached) Content Migration One often-overlooked task when replacing an old site with a new is content migration: The migration process can be quick and painless if the new and old sites have structurally similar databases or there isn’t too much content. For sites with a significant amount of material that needs to fit in more complex layouts, migration can take more time than the actual build. It’s always ideal to start with a spreadsheet of all pages you plan to migrate with separate columns for links (old & new), status (open, in progress, done) and notes highlighting, for example, if the page needs copy-editing or rewriting entirely. Shared Google Spreadsheets are useful for creating the master list of content and tracking what pages to migrate, their migration status (To Do, In Progress, Done), and notes. Use cart2cart to move from one eCommerce platform to another or automate data emigration Content Writing And Style Guides Ensure you produce guidelines for content creation. For example embedded link content, anchor text rules and how to structure headings and subheadings. Determine the type of “case” you want to use for headings — for example All Caps, Title case etc. Do specific departments have a different style from the “house” style? Ensure you annotate CSS documents. User Testing An often overlooked part of building a new website is usability testing. Forms can often be challenging to fill in or allow for the entry of erroneous characters. User test forms to spot flaws and remedy them. User testing is particularly useful for eCommerce websites where cart abandonment is a concern. Eliminate any doubt by having your website extensively user-tested. SEO & Other Set up redirects from old pages to new. Configure your robots.txt so that private parts of your site don't appear in search results. Create And Submit A Sitemap Implement Google Analytics Set up an SEO project manager admin or webmaster@youremail address for all enquiries Run a survey. Often you can fix problems by making your website visible internally before it goes live. Launch Write a “lessons learned” document Backup all your data and store it securely Create a disaster recovery plan Create a page with all your passwords, FTP access etc Have A Party! Would You Like Some Help With Your Next eCommerce Project? Enquire Today!

Many excellent tutorials show you how to use Google analytics, none less than the Google Academy itself. So, rather than rehash the existing material and bore you to death in the process, in this Google analytics introduction, I'm going to give you a brief overview of what it is, how it works and why you should be using it. What Is Digital Analytics? Digital analytics uses tracking software to analyse how users interact with your site. For example, you can measure how long they spend browsing your website (session time), how many visits they make (sessions), where they come from (acquisition), what browser and device they use, what country they are from and much more besides. You can use this data to increase your sales and make your marketing more efficient by: Discovering the most profitable pages of your site Analysing where users come from Dissecting individual campaign information such as pay per click (PPC) Optimising shopping cart abandonment rates Connect Google Analytics with your Google Webmaster Console, and Adwords account for optimum results. Monitoring the traffic from different platforms like PPC, social media, and organic search makes it easy to compare them against each other and figure out what provides the best conversion rates. Using analytics software is like plugging a data analyser into a motor vehicle to see the faults and how to make it run more smoothly. What Is Website Tracking And Analysis? Have you ever had the feeling that you are being followed? Have you noticed that every time you visit another website, the adverts are targetting you specifically with offers for purchases you've recently made or items that you have been diligently researching? Of course, it's not by chance. Every website you visit uses "cookies", and you are continually being asked if it is OK to accept them. A cookie is a small text file dropped into your browser cache which might contain any or all of the following: The amount of time you spend on a website The links you click while using the website The options, preferences or settings you choose Accounts you log into Recording which pages you've visited in the past Items in a shopping basket An eCommerce website uses cookies to remember the items you're storing in a virtual basket before checkout, and this is how they remember who you are and what you were shopping for when you return, even if you don't have an account. A social network uses cookies to track the links and then uses that information to show you more relevant or entertaining content and, of course, sponsored adverts in the future. Cookies are a powerful data collection tool for internet marketers. Under May 2018 EU law, companies need your explicit consent to collect and store your information which is why everyone these days asks you for "cookie consent". Incidentally, you can simulate a cookie free browser session by starting an incognito or private browser session. This is useful for logging into multiple emails or social media accounts simultaneously or browsing websites without alerting family members to that surprise holiday you have been planning. Analytics Software Works By Using Cookies Website tracking and analytics software use cookies to identify users on a website uniquely. The cookie that gets created usually lasts for up to two years of inactivity, so every time a user visits your site the expiration date gets adjusted accordingly. From a data collection perspective, there are drawbacks to the use of cookies to analyse user data, for example: Cookies are browser-specific, which means that Internet Explorer can not read Google chromes cookies and vice versa. So if a user elects to use two different browsers, you won't be able to reconcile them as the same user in analytics. Cookies are not shared across devices, and they are not passed between logged in and synchronised browsing sessions, which leaves a big data hole. For example, someone could browse your website in their lunch break at work and when they make the purchase on their tablet at home in the evening, and you wouldn't know it was the same user. It is possible for the user to clear their cookie browser cache and destroy all cookies manually! Any subsequent cookie creation will give the user a new client ID. However, the amount of information you can gain by using website analytics far outweighs the above, so how do you collect the data and put it to use? Website Analytics Software Whenever a discussion about website analytics comes up, it's most likely to revolve around Google analytics because it is free, easy to implement, simple to use and hence the most well known. There are alternatives, but you would need a specific reason to use them first, and you can only establish that by doing some analysis. So Google Analytics is the place to start. Google Analytics works by inserting a small piece of code that runs one every page of your site. In Wordpress or Joomla, for example, you put the code in the footer or use an analytics plugin. In Wix or Weebly, you have a custom code option, and all eCommerce software has a setting for you to place your Google analytics account number found in your admin dashboard. Why You Should Use Google Analytics 1. It is a free enterprise-class analytics software. Google can see your data if you are wondering what they get out of it. 2. All data is collected automatically. You don't need to do anything once it is set up and as soon as data starts to be collected it can be reported on, even if you don't plan to do any analysis yourself. 3. It integrates with Google Adwords so you can analyse and perfect your paid-for campaigns. 4. Quickly see which pages have a high bounce rate. "Bounce" is the metric used for visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page or less. if you can fix the reason people find your page(s) unappealing you can reduce bounce rate. 5. See which locations your visitors are coming from, what language they use, and what devices are most prevalent. 6. Find the top-performing pages on your website so that you can write more useful content for your readers. 7. Set different goals to be achieved and monitor them. For example, you might like to know how many people fill in a subscribe to a newsletter or lead generation form. When building your website or ready to go "live" on your domain name, don't procrastinate and put off installing Google analytics. The first reason is that delaying the setup means that any data capture is deferred. You can't go back and capture data that you haven't been tracking. The second reason is that it is so simple to install that it would be criminal. Collecting complete and accurate statistical data is at the heart of any winning marketing campaign. In this post, I will show you how to accurately set up your Google Analytics configuration at the Account, Property and View levels. Organise Accounts, Properties And Views You will probably only have one or two website accounts to set up in Google Analytics in your lifetime. But it is helpful to understand how the hierarchical setup works to know the design interface. I've marked each identifier with a red underline in the image below. You may have more than one Google account, or you may be managing an account for someone else. These accounts show up in the left column. Each property (website) then has a unique identifier (UA-3071727-30), for example, and the view column shows which reports are available for that property. In this way, understand that a single Google user can have multiple Google Analytics accounts, and each account can contain up to fifty properties. Each property can then support a maximum of twenty-five "views" or reports. Views are where you create your reports. Within each report View, you have varied options to set rules that affect how the data is displayed. Each report can have settings for eCommerce data collection, Site Search, Goals, Filters, Segments, Annotations, Channel Groupings, Custom Reports, Content Grouping, and User access. Creating several Views rather than using the single default View gives you a greater insight through different Goals, Filters, and settings on each View. Still, in the beginning, it is sufficient to set up the default View and begin collecting data. Each report or View collects data from the account creation day, so if you make your Google Analytics account on the 1st of January but don't create any Views, you won't see any data until you do. The minimum requirement is to make your Google Analytics account, add your website property, and create a view to collect data. Integrating With Other Google Products There are three other significant google products that you need to connect your Google Analytics account to: 1. Google Search Console monitors your organic search engine performance on Google. Go to your Google Analytics account. Go to Acquisition (left sidebar) > Search Console. Click the Set up Search Console data sharing button. Choose your Search Console account. 2. Google Adsense for monitoring your performance on the paid-for Ad network. Sign in to your Google Analytics account. Click the Admin tab at the top of the page. In the "Account" column, select the Analytics account that contains the property you want to link with your AdSense account. In the "Property" column, select the Analytics property you want to link and click AdSense Linking. 3. Google Adwords for monitoring performance on the pay per click network. Open Google Analytics. Click Admin and choose which account and property you'd like to manage. Under property, click AdWords linking. Click + New Link Group. Select the accounts you want to link. Enter your Link Group Title. Switch on all sites where you wish AdWords data. Click link accounts. Pro Tip! Do not, under any circumstances, allow your website designer or SEO professional to create a Google Analytics account on your behalf. If you do, because you are too lazy to develop it yourself under your own Google account, then when you part ways with them, they will take your analytics data along with them because it belongs to their Google account and not yours. You'll have to start again. It may sound silly, but this also goes for domain names, any software you purchase and hosting space. Make sure it is all purchased and registered in your company name, or you might lose it all. View Your Google Analytics Data After a week or so of collecting data, you will be able to view a report and begin to understand how to analyse your data. Using the date dropdown in the top right, you can select the date range to report on and compare date ranges (for example, this month to last month) to view your data. Default View Reports Audience reports give you information on your visitors, where they came from, what language they speak, and how often they visit your website. Acquisition Reports will give you a detailed breakdown of what channels and sources your website traffic came from. Behaviour Reports will tell you the most visited pages on your site, how long people spend on those pages and the top exit pages. You can also learn how fast your website loads and specific suggestions from Google on how to make your website faster. Google Analytics Summary Analytics is a crucial part of building your online business, and without it, you are working in the dark. The critical step is to get your analytics ID installed on your website as soon as possible because data can be analysed retrospectively. Using analytics, you can identify the source of your website traffic and compare them to discover the best performing channels. Use analytics in conjunction with a paid Adwords campaign to provide conversion tracking analysis. All We Build Stores pay monthly websites come with your Google analytics code pre-installed but if you need help with any aspect, please contact us.

If you had already begun to suspect that the worlds best blogger, well, many people say so, had a weakness for the HBO TV series "Mad Men" then you'd be absolutely right. I watched it the first time around in a haze of bringing up five kids, but since they have subsequently fled the nest, it's the perfect time for a Netflix re-run. But before I get to the point of today's blog post, let me share with you something I have discovered from not watching television. Yes, that's right, for the past six months or so I've been TV averse. Why I Stopped Watching Television It all started when I began to get an uneasy feeling of detachment whenever I turned on the TV. I noticed I had begun to record lots of programmes on SKY that I never watched, and when browsing, I could never find anything that would entertain me. I'd start watching a film, and then, after ten minutes I'd be looking at the IMDB app for ratings, actors and other background information rather than concentrating on viewing the film. It got worse. Soon I started using social media at the same time the football was on to see if other fans opinions aligned with mine. It became more entertaining to read tweets disparaging the appearance of a contestant on "University Challenge" than it was to see Paxman's gurning face whenever a "starter for ten" was wildly off the mark. It all comes down to the memes, you know. Then I realised people around me were doing the same thing. Suddenly "Super Sunday" wasn't so super when the boys came around to watch the football, and they were more interested in their betting apps and smartphones than watching the football game itself. Something didn't feel right at all.Riveting your reader to their leather recliner and capturing their full attention for the duration of your new blog is a finely balanced high wire act. So I went cold turkey on the TV, cancelled my SKY subscription, and in its place, I stepped up my meditation and mindfulness programmes. I began Yoga and took extended dog walks instead of lying horizontally on the couch most evenings. I've done a 14-day water fast before now and stopped drinking alcohol for twelve months in the past, so this was just a natural extension of my well-being program right? Not quite. I ended up feeling like forced junkie detective Popeye Doyle in one of my favourite films "The French Connection ll" in no time at all. "Give me the fix" my brain shouted, unable to concentrate on anything for more than thirty seconds at all. However, I stuck it out, and within a few days my concentration improved and I was able to focus better. The uneasy feeling went away. After a few months, my mental state was a lot more positive. After six months, I can quite happily entertain myself for a whole evening with meditation, silence, solitude and a real book. My son calls around the house every weekday morning on his way to work. He laughs at me and calls me weird for sitting in a quiet front room with the TV off, drinking my Dolce Gusto and writing my journal. My wife thinks I'm "odd"for not watching TV, and I know other family members snigger when they talk about me and my weird habits. But you see, this is my Zig to your Zag. As a society, our predilection with screens and technology is brainwashing us and dumbing us down. It may seem a strange thing to say for someone who is an advocate for technological advance, but computers are supposed to be harnessed to do the work for you, not to do your thinking for you. And a side benefit of not watching screens is that people stop shoving their smartphones in your face with their grotesque "you gotta see this" antics once they realise you are off the meds. Anyway, now that I'm a recovered TV addict, Netflix seems like a great way of returning to watch premium drama occasionally and what could be a better start than "Mad Men" and oh, the sweet irony of watching it sans adverts. In the series one finale, the Kodak guys turn up for a presentation by Don Draper, and he gives them a gut punch in the feels. The “wheel” was a new product that Kodak invented to display photos quickly and easily using 35mm slides via a projector screen and in this scene, Don turns the ordinary sounding "wheel" into the time machine that became known as the Kodak Carousel. My father used to have a Kodak carousel, and I remember him spending the evenings numbering and re-ordering the slides. There were spectacular shots of him sitting on top of huge mountains in the snow with his army buddies and putting up tents and heating up thin soup on a tiny stove. Let Your Readers Feel The Emotion Take a leaf out of Don’s book and describe your product in vivid detail. Sell the aroma, not the flowers. Engage your reader with real-life stories of why you love the product so much, why you get out of bed in the morning to go to work and why you put so much effort into spreading the news. In your quest for more business, your blog is your most valuable sales tool available, and it works for you over and over again. While you sleep, while you eat dinner, or are in meetings preparing for that new product launch. A blog works for you consistently, unlike Don, who like all creative geniuses was an extraordinarily erratic and sometimes tragic figure. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes in the gutter, we loved and hated him for the flawed emotional character he was. Too many smart words bewilder and befuddle while keeping it too simple runs the risk of falling from the high wire into the bulging net where all the other dunce blogging failures have piled up. The middle road is filled with acts that walked the tightrope but never quite captivated or engaged their audience. They just went through the motions in the expectancy that it was enough, never looking like they may fall to an untimely death at any moment. In addition to a dull, lifeless blog, copying your product descriptions from other websites may seem like the quickest way to make your site live, but with no zing to the bling or pizzaz for the topaz, your flat and monotone style is a guaranteed conversion killer. You don't have to become the next Hemingway or Asimov to produce compelling sales copy or an entertaining blog, follow these simple rules to become Don Draper's next capable assistant: 1. Tell A Real Life Story Telling your story is a method of copywriting that doesn't base itself on how good or bad you are at joining words together. It's all about your experience and how you involve the reader in the emotion of the subject. "There is nothing to writing – all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." Writer Ernest Hemingway A real-life story about how you struggled to hold down two jobs, got made redundant and sold your house to start your business is guaranteed to be a compelling read. It doesn't matter what business you are in, emotional connection is the difference between apathy and affection. 2. Inject Your Own Personality Just because everyone else writes their blog as though they had a frontal lobotomy and the opinion of a politician doesn't mean you have to produce bland, middle of the road averageness to fit in. If you have an opinion, then voice it because that will elevate you to the top echelon of blogging superheroes overnight. Blogs devoid of original thought, using text that is copied, thieved and barely rewritten to disguise itself from the plagiarism police is so common that anything with a dash of personality and brio stands out like a paupers lunch at the regal banquet. 3. Be An Imperious Authoritarian, Not A Weak Submissive Write like you mean it and display your sound subject knowledge so that readers understand you to be the expert you say you are. Writing like a whimpering, simpering guttersnipe should be left to those who do it best using words like "maybe", "perhaps", "could be" and "might". The use of these suppliant words indicates that you might have left your spine in the wardrobe when you got dressed this morning. Rid your text of this insipid banality and instead use "certainly", "definitely" and "never" to state your greatness. Become an avaricious researcher and back up your words with key facts and figures so that no one can be left in any doubt who wears the trousers around here. 4. Space Out Your Sentences No reader likes to be confronted with a solid wall of text that looks like a page from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot". Space out your sentences so that they can easily be scanned for the good bits and a quick understanding of the context of your post. Use plenty of subheadings to make the text easier to grasp. 5. Use Images To Support Your Text Part of being a good blog writer is finding appropriate supporting imagery, and this can take a lot longer than you might think if you haven't done it before. Adding images to your copy brightens up the page and presents an opportunity for the reader to pause and consider the meaning. Stay away from cliched images like people shaking hands or working on laptops because it looks like you couldn't be bothered to put any real thought into it, which happens to be true. 6. Turn Appliances Off And Become A Monk For A Few Hours Take writing seriously and turn off your phone, your music and anything that might go "ping" in the middle of a sentence. You can't write anything worthwhile with headphones on, or if you are attempting to reply to emails at the same time. Human multitasking is a fallacy and a trap that you shouldn't fall into. Computers multi-task by dividing their processing power between operations. The more concurrent operations, the slower everything runs because processing power is not infinite. By contrast, humans are unable to focus on more than one thing at a time. Continually switching your attention between multiple tasks destroys your concentration and ensures each task will take longer to complete. It's much better to write for an hour or two in one session and then repeat to a conclusion to maintain a high level of productivity. 7. Read, Re-Read, Read, Publish, Re-Read A big problem of being a self-published author is that you have no copy editor to read your work and ruthlessly edit it. There are several steps you can take to mitigate against the disaster of publishing error-ridden copy. The first is to use Grammarly, which will remove all the obvious punctuation errors and help you to eliminate writing in the past tense, which is a common beginner's error. The second is to read and re-read your work several times even after it is published. After a year or two of writing, it can be astonishing to read your older copy and notice how much you have improved as a writer. This is an excellent reason to get in the habit of updating your older posts. So, to summarise, If you have designs to become the next Don Draper try telling a real life story that has some personality woven into it. Make it clear that you are a master of your craft and space out your sentences to make the text easy to read. Add some images to spice up the piece and concentrate fully on the writing task at hand. Be your own harshest critic and copy edit fiercely. Would You Like Some Help With Blogging Or Copywriting? Contact Us!

So many social media platforms to choose from and such limited resources, what's a small business owner to do? Getting out the machine gun and scattering bullets everywhere is a waste of your essential finite resource - cash! If you want to snipe and take accurate shots, then you'll have to limit your targets. The puzzle is knowing which social media audience to choose from the outset before you leap off the high board and plunge headfirst into the chaos. In this article, I'm going to give you a quick Twitter marketing masterclass so that you can make an informed decision and decide whether or not Twitter should be part of your overall social media marketing (SMM) plan. First up you need to know what the differences are between the most popular social media channels and what they are used for: Instagram is primarily a visual experience and is ideal for showing off your products. If you have excellent photography skills, know your way around an image editing program like Photoshop or can use the filters built into your smartphone camera to good effect then Instagram would be the right choice of a social media platform for you. Because the browsing experience for Instagram is so visual, the text is really an afterthought and trying to convert browsers to buyers is a lot more difficult on Instagram than other social media channels, particularly given the restriction on where outbound links can be placed. As a brand building exercise, Instagram is a great business tool but only if you use captivating, original images and swerve the bland memes and other uninspiring stock photography. Check out the Instagram basics for beginners or advanced tips for Instagram. Facebook is the all-rounder of social media interaction. You can create a page for your business and add text and images much the same as a web page all within the Facebook ecosystem. Because people are signed into the platform, it is easy for them to like and share the content they come across. Facebook has also added many tools to assist with converting traffic; Facebook pages, instant messaging, page insights and advert creation tools to name a few. You can also run and manage Instagram advert campaigns from your Facebook dashboard. Twitter is primarily a textual experience with the ability to add images or videos to support your narrative. The primary reason to use Twitter is because of the massive volume of users (330 million in the first quarter of 2019) and the main reason not to use it is because of the lack of filtering and tools to help you narrow down the demographic. What's the point of broadcasting into a volume of noise so high that you'll never be noticed? Twitter interactions are "real time" which mean that it is a brilliant platform for customer support, but only if you are prepared to staff it adequately and act on the feedback gained. Slow responses to social media, in general, are poorly received. Should You use Twitter For Social Media Marketing? First of all, you might like to decide whether or not SMM, in general, should be part of your overall marketing effort. Here is a post I made earlier for a quick overview of social media marketing. Not everyone needs to use SMM, and in some cases, it can be wasted effort even to try. For most small businesses and solopreneurs, investing the saved time in improved website content or optimising an existing email campaign would give a much better return on investment than starting a new SMM campaign. Heresy! I hear you cry. And well you might. But making your pockets lighter so you can run ever more furiously on the SMM hamster wheel is poor man's entertainment for the cultivated and enlightened web developer. Being On Twitter Is Different To Marketing On Twitter Correctly Being on the radio is no good if no one tunes in to your show just as displaying your beer commercial in the TV advert break for "biggest loser" is not going to gain you any new customers. Yes, you spent the money on advertising, but if people are not receptive to your message, then you may as well not do it in the first place. How many times have you been sweet-talked into placing an advert in the local rag at huge cost only for it to draw an expensive blank? Better not to do it in the first place. And this is where people fail with Twitter, just because it is "free" to do does not make it inexpensive and doing it wrong can also have a negative impact. The number of people losing their jobs or embarrassing themselves irredeemably through drunk tweeting like this NASA intern is steadily on the rise. Research Your Competitors If you want to know if you can be successful on Twitter take a look at your competitors and see how they are faring. Seeing successful competitors is the litmus test for deciding if you should make the investment or not. As an example, it's insightful that very few website design companies use Twitter and of those that do, driving user engagement is proven to be a difficult job. It's a good sign that I would be better off focusing my efforts elsewhere rather than trying to build a Twitter following for We Build Stores @storebuilderuk On the other hand, book authors and media people who understand the medium do exceptionally well on Twitter and can gain a massive following by doing it right. For example @therickwilson When you are doing your research, as well as noticing how many tweets and followers a Twitter account has, look at the user engagement on their posts and see what kind of questions and answers are posted. This will give you a feel for the type of Twitter account you need to run. Just because someone posts a lot does not mean they are actually engaging with their audience. It's an astonishing fact that over 6,000 tweets per second are sent into the ethersphere. With that kind of competition for eyeballs, it is no stretch of the imagination to see why the majority of Twitter social media accounts are bereft of any interaction. Getting Twitter marketing "right" is no mean feat. Whichever social media platform you choose, there is an optimum method of distributing your content and the following tips will help you to present Your Twitter feed in the best light possible and give you the best shot at building a following. Quick Win Number One - Create A Great Twitter Profile Keep your Twitter user handle as short as possible so that people can easily remember you and keep it the same across all of your social media profiles. You can use Namechk to see what is available before committing to a user name only to find out that it is not available on other channels. Invest in some great graphics for your Twitter user profile. Once created, the header graphic can be reused on Facebook or Linkedin if you are planning to use those social media platforms as well, and it will keep everything uniform. In a sense, your Twitter profile is like a business card, and you have limited space to make a first impression. Succinctly say why you are awesome and why people should follow you and include the link to your website. Quick Win Number Two - Be Authentic In my introduction to Twitter marketing, I encourage you to go and find similar companies to yours and identify how well their Twitter marketing is working for them. Once you've established that there is a precedent for wading far out into the murky waters of SMM, then you can use the same techniques to build your own following. But that doesn't mean you should copy them word for word. A crucial part of being successful is being authentic, and authenticity by definition cannot be copied. I copy and steal ideas all the time. You may be horrified to hear me say that, but it's been going on ever since the concept of "business" was created. Companies continually copy or ape products as soon as the patent runs out, and they can legally enter the market, improving the product or service and reducing the cost. However, copying things word for word is not only going to get you into trouble with the plagiarism police, but it's also a futile exercise. If you have no chutzpah to add to the conversation, no original thoughts or ideas, then how can you expect to generate an ardent following? Bring original ideas to the party and improve on those that already exist. Without authenticity, you'll never rise above the insane noise levels on Twitter. Quick Win Number Three - Customer Service When things go wrong, or a product or service doesn't come up to scratch, then people often take to Twitter to vent their frustration. You can use this to your advantage by monitoring for mentions of your brand name and replying with an offer to help in a timely fashion. I like to use mention.com, but a quick Google search will give you plenty of options for monitoring social media. If a Tweet isn't going to solve your customers' problem, then include a link to a help page or document or ask the customer to email you for more assistance. In addition to offering customer support directly, you can also proactively help with customer problems that may be related to your product or service. Also, once you start monitoring for mentions of your brand name, hopefully, you'll get to retweet all the beautiful things people say about you. They do say nice things, right? Quick Win Number Four - Use Twitter Advanced Search Twitter is a melting pot of words with millions of users and trillions of tweets. Trying to make sense of subjects and do research is not Twitter's strong point. But hidden away amongst Twitter's feature set is an advanced search tool that makes research a more viable proposition. To access the advanced search tool, enter your search term into the Twitter search bar as you normally would. Once you press return, you'll see a "search filters" box appear in the top left of your Twitter page. From here, you can access the advanced search Twitter tool. The advanced search fields enable you to explore Twitter's outer reaches: "all of these words" will help ensure you're narrowing in on a specific query "any of these words" will broaden your research scope "none of these words" to exclude irrelevant search information "these hashtags" will find favourite topics. "from account" and "to account" to see interactions between specific people "mentioning these accounts" to see who's talking about you Quick Win Number Five - Tweet Your Quora Answers If you haven't used the question and answer website "Quora" yet, then you may want to take another look. The latest financing round values the platform at a staggering $2 billion. Quora offers all the information that you want to know but didn't know there was an answer for. By answering questions and then tweeting out your answer, you can establish yourself as an expert in your chosen field very quickly. Quick Win Number Six - Pinned Tweets Pinning a tweet means that it appears at the top of the page in your Twitter profile. You can change the pinned tweet as many times as you like, and it will stay at the top of the page no matter how old it is. Pinning tweets is an excellent strategy for highlighting a promotion your company is running or an event you are hosting or even sending traffic to a landing page. Get creative with your pinned tweets and highlight your best work. There you have it, six fantastic tips to get your Twitter marketing campaign out of the starting gate and into the race. Did you like this article? Perhaps you might consider having your social media campaigns run professionally by the experts? Contact us for more details. To summarise, you can quickly decide whether or not to use Twitter for SMM by looking at your competitors and examining their follower counts and amount of engagement they generate with their posts. Remember that follower count alone is no guarantee of success because followers can easily be purchased or grown through "follow me back" strategies. Even though Twitter is free to use, the cost of creating a campaign and investing your time can be considerable so choose wisely. Did you like this article? Perhaps you might consider having running your social media campaigns professionally by experts? Contact us for more details.

Successful social media marketing is an incredibly tricky magic act to pull off. Unless you have a unique product that everybody is clamouring for or celebrity status that makes for automatic growth, gaining social media followers takes a lot of persistence and hard work. Do it right, and you'll be rewarded with a loyal following that you can reach out to whenever you want to get the word out quickly. Make a hash of it, and you'll be looking for a way to pull a rabbit from a hat. How does Instagram fit into the social media network tapestry? Twitter is the home of acerbic quick wit or pithy one-liners and laconic put-downs, it is the wild west of social networks. Facebook enables you to set up a company page and encourage likes and customer interaction and is a much more civilised place to do business. Facebook is the Rome of social media although getting thrown to the lions is a regular occurrence for those caught up in business malpractice. And Instagram? Instagram is the London of social networks, fresh, sophisticated, cosmopolitan and rewarding dashing flair and panache. Created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in October 2010 and purchased by Facebook in 2012, Instagram enables people to capture and instantly share their photos and videos. It has quickly gained more than 1 billion users making it one of the most powerful social networks. With its continuous innovation and development of new features, staying on top of the latest emerging trends requires constant attention. To begin with, visit "play store" (for Android users - Samsung, Sony, Huawei etc.) or "App Store" for Apple users and download the Instagram App. Step 1: Create Your Instagram Profile To register for an Instagram account, open the app, tap Sign Up, and sign in with your Facebook account or provide an email address and password. I recommend you sign in with your Facebook account so that your accounts are linked. Step 2: Add A Profile Picture Add a profile photo to the Instagram app by tapping on your profile picture in the lower right, tapping the white circle by your name and taking a new picture or importing an image from your phone. Use "edit profile" to change your name and how it is displayed and add some information about yourself. You can also add a link here to your website. Step 3: Find People To Follow If you are a Facebook regular, then you'll be offered a suggestion list of people to follow who also use the Instagram network. Think of some celebrities you like or subjects you are interested in and start following people to see what kind of images they post. Step 4: Post Your First Photo Or Video To post a photo or video, tap on the camera icon in the middle of the bottom menu of the app. You can then take a picture, record a video, or choose an image from your phone gallery. Once you have selected a photo tap "next" and here you'll be offered an overwhelming amount of choices to edit your image either through filters, changing exposure, boosting saturation and much more. My advice to begin with is to ignore all these filters and concentrate on how the process of adding images works. You can always delete images and repost them at a later date if you want to change something. Next, you’ll be prompted to add a caption, add any other Instagram user tags that you would like to include and add a description of your image. Beginners Hints And Tips: Image Sizes In the beginning stick to square images. For the We Build Stores Instagram feed we use 750x750px as the standard size image, and we find this works best with display across all social media networks. You can use the built-in crop image tool to make your picture a square. Use Your Best Photos It's a common misconception among social media users that more is better and burying your audience under an avalanche of images is the way to more recognition and followers. While you want to keep up a regular posting schedule (about twice a day is considered optimum) you also need to strike a balance between posting just because you can and posting because you have beautiful images to share. You want people to be "wowed" by your Instagram feed and not left feeling underwhelmed with a succession of second rate imagery. The average social media user is firehosed with a torrent of pointless data so making a great first impression is imperative. Tagging Other Instagram Users Underneath the "caption" field you'll find the option to "tag" other Instagram users and let them know that you've posted a new picture. Instagram Mentions To mention someone in your caption, type @ in front of their username and they will then receive a notification in their activity feed. You can choose to get a notification every time a specific user posts a new photo by turning on notifications for each user individually. Visit the user's profile, click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner of the post, and choose "Turn on Post Notifications". That way you'll never miss a post, and by following a few successful accounts, you'll get some great Instagram marketing ideas. Likes And Comments To like a photo or video on Instagram tap the “heart” icon. If you like a post by accident, you can tap the icon again to unlike it. Use the bubble icon to send comments and keep them brief. Instagram is a visual experience, and no one wants to write a "War and Peace" reply on their smartphone. Use Hashtags Intelligently Using hashtags on Instagram is the primary way to reach a wider audience. Instagram limits the number of hashtags you can use in each post to 30. Avoid hashtags like #dailypost or #instagood. In much the same way that targetting search engine keywords that are too broad is not good SEO practice, you need to niche down your hashtags so that they focus on a tight nit theme. Choosing broad themes will result in your images being lost in the cacophony that is social media. Here is a great hashtag generator. If you use short captions, then your hashtags are going to display at the top of your post and look messy. There are several methods of moving hashtags down the page either through the use of special characters or hidden line breaks. If you are struggling to make line breaks work, then that is because Instagram is no respecter of formatting. Here's a great video explaining how to work around it. Hide Old Posts from Your Feed Without Deleting Them Once you've been posting for a few months, you'll start to get a feel for what type of content resonates with your audience by the number of likes and comments. Rather than deleting old posts to spruce up a tired aesthetic, you can archive them instead to be restored at any time in the future. Tap the three dots at the top of the post you want to remove from your feed Select "Archive", and it will be hidden from your feed. Add Unique Fonts And Characters To Your Bio. Instagram has emojis built into its interface, but you can also copy and paste special characters and fonts using a fancy text generator site like Lingojam That's the basics covered so open yourself an Instagram account and get posting!

In this guide, I will show you what it takes to rank your pay monthly website and where your hard-earned money gets spent. Every website is different. Some are big, some are small, there are those in between, and those websites all began at varying times. The small business SEO strategy required for a small microsite founded in 2018 differs from the requirements of an extensive eCommerce website design that started three or four years ago. Hence, SEO is ART (in the artistic sense) because merely applying science in a formulaic fashion is a waste of resources and budget. The website development work already done dictates which jobs get promoted to the top of the to-do list, No two websites are the same, and the approach is always different depending on the SEO work already carried out, which dictates the jobs that get promoted to the top of the to-do list. To begin with, insist on an SEO report of work done and do not accept glib generalisations. Every decent SEO exponent worth their SEMrush subscription knows how to produce a site report for search engine optimisation. Small business owners need to know where their money is being spent! Working Within Your SEO Budget Your budget is a significant factor because you can create unlimited content with an unlimited budget. With unlimited cash, you can generate endless clicks. With infinite links, you can have unlimited website traffic. You can become One with Google. We all have budgets to work with, some bigger, some smaller and all of us have deadlines by which we expect a return on our investment. With pay per click marketing, you can easily measure the return on investment through conversion tracking, but this isn't the case with search engine optimization (sic) and organic search results. Seeing the benefits of small business SEO work can take several months to take effect. The good news is that robust SEO work lasts for years and doesn't disappear overnight, unlike your PPC campaign budget which has to be continually refreshed. What Is Search Engine Optimisation? Your SEO strategy is a core part of your online marketing effort. The goal is to increase visibility in organic (as opposed to paid for) search results resulting in more traffic from a user search. Search engine optimization (sic) encompasses the way your site is structured (technical SEO), on-page elements (page titles and descriptions, alt tags and content) and off-page elements (link building). You should also consider the overall usability of your site as part of the SEO process because an easy to use website retains visitors, reduces bounce rate and increases session time. All of which may contribute to your search results today but definitely will in the future. Identifying the correct keywords for your site and identifying the pages that will serve those keyword searches also comes under the SEO umbrella. Yep, there's a lot to learn for small business owners, and in this guide, I will concentrate on "on page" elements with a follow up to cover "off-page" shortly. White Hat v Black Hat SEO At this point, it would be a good time to talk about those infamous shortcuts and how easy it is to rank by cheating the Google algorithm. Otherwise known as Blackhat SEO. I started working on the internet in 2000. So I have seen a lot come and go. When I made my first website, all you had to do was keyword stuff the page title and description, and you were good to go. However, then Alta Vista became a victim of Google, and in turn, it was harder to fool Google. Stuffing your pages full of keywords became a guaranteed SEO technique to ensure plummeting search engine rankings. In c2009, I joined a link network where everyone pooled their links with other network members' websites. It was known as link-vault, and the more pages you had, the more virtual voltage you had to spend. Everything was working great until Google devalued sitewide footer links, and the system was suddenly put on life support, eventually dying a desperate death. In the early days, I did my share of silly things, and the reality is that trying to clean up a messy backlink profile is very difficult once it has gotten out of hand. If you try to gain an advantage by targeting a search engine's blind spot, you are setting yourself up to fail. Once you start getting search engine traffic and begin building a business by it, you will be devastated when it all falls apart. Of course, there are many more examples of people trying to gain a quick advantage. Some are crude, like keyword stuffing or generating hundreds of pages for similar search terms (gateway pages). Some are complex, like setting up many blogs on many different servers to create a link network. What is inevitable, though, is that eventually, they will all fail or become too time-consuming to manage. Google improves its search results algorithm daily, and significant updates are becoming less frequent in favour of logical evolution. As Blackhat sites tumble down the search engine rankings, the Whitehat sites inevitably rise to take their place. There is no future in gaming the search engine. Experts Who Claim To Know The Search Engine Algorithm Moreover, for those that claim to know the secret to the Google Algorithm or how it works – how could they? We know many things about how Google displays search results, and we can determine pretty much what works and what to avoid, but understand how the algorithm works? Has anyone successfully made anything that remotely tastes like Coca-Cola? Does Bing give as good a return for a search query as Google? If anyone wanted to know the secret sauce recipe, it would be Microsoft? Why work on something for hundreds or even thousands of hours only to jeopardise it by trying to take shortcuts? Being the recipient of a site exclusion message in Google webmaster tools sends a shiver down the spine. Getting a penalised site reincluded is a fraught process. Don't let that be you. The way forward is to be entirely Whitehat. Completely spotless, unspoiled by anything possibly interpreted as spammy. Stay away from paid links, particularly in the early days when you have not yet established a natural link profile. Those links will stick out like Eskimos on the beach at Blackpool until you have enough genuine cover to make them hard to find. Let me be clear that I do not condone the practice of buying links. Of course, many websites do it, and that's how they maintain high search engine rankings across the board, but it's flirting with disaster, and you want to sleep easy at night, don't you? Doing The Search Engine Optimisation Basics Right The goal of small business SEO is to help people who are looking for your product or service find you. That is it; that is small business SEO in a nutshell. Your job as a website owner is to optimise your website pages and the website to be spidered easily by a search engine. Once the search engine has all websites in its database, it ranks them according to its algorithm to determine the placement of each site in the search results and the easy way to see this is in Google search console. In this way, each search engine can have the same amount of websites in its database, but the output of each varies because they all have different algorithms with which to benchmark the results. Different algorithms used by various search engines are why your site ranks in different positions depending on the search engine. Your job is to tell the search engines precisely about each page on your website. More importantly, you have to match your pages to the search subject. Keyword Research: Finding The Right Keywords Keyword research is a cornerstone part of small business SEO. If you get this bit wrong, then everything else you does becomes a struggle. You have to know which keywords have a high search volume and which keywords are trigger keywords. Trigger keywords are those that carry purchaser intent. For example, searching for "which UK eCommerce platform is the best" indicates that the person searching is early in the research process. Someone searching for "EKM v Shopwired" is a lot further down the research path, and the last search ", EKM Review" is loaded with purchase intent. Think about how you do the research for your purchases and how you refine your keywords. The aim of keyword research for an entirely new website is to find keywords with a high monthly search volume and trigger keywords. It is fruitless to rank for high volume keywords that don't carry purchaser intent. It does not end there, though. You also need to find keywords that don't have a high amount of competition to improve your chances of being visible on the front page. A good starting point for keyword research is Google's Keyword Planner and Google search console. Discovering Long Tail Keywords Finding high volume, low competition keywords that also convert into paying customers is the objective of keyword research, but that can be a challenging prospect, especially in saturated markets. High competition is why targeting low volume, high trigger keywords can be more profitable, but it takes more work to unearth them. Long-tail keywords are those that people take the time and trouble to type in because they know what they are looking for. “UK eCommerce website builder that supports eBay and Facebook.” “UK website builder for multi-channel selling.” A good keyword strategy is a mix of both higher volume and long-tail keywords. Attracting long-tail keyword traffic is also a by-product of great content marketing. Creating Content And Optimising Your Pages Once you have chosen your keywords, it is time to begin writing and weave them into your content. By incorporating keywords from your research into your professional blog content, you begin to tell a story to the search engine, but watch out! You are not writing for the search engine; you are writing for real people. You can always tell when content has been written purely for search engines because it is stilted and devoid of emotion. Write with your reader in mind and try to answer the questions they might have for you. Your content will flow naturally, and you don't have to manufacture sentences to cram in your keywords. I like to write to picture a particular customer of mine and compose the article as if I was informing them of the subject, talking one to one. Don't think about writing for a broad audience; focus on the one person you have in your mind's eye, and your words will flow smoothly. When considering pages as a whole, keep in mind that search engines can only understand written text. Video, flash and audio files cannot be "read" by search engines. The inability of search engines to spider this content is why it is a good idea to offer full transcripts and the video itself on the page. On-Page Search Optimisation You need to pay attention to five different areas of each page and "optimise." There is an explanation for each element, and then I will give you an example at the end to show you how they all come together as a whole. Page Title Tags Your page title is a significant indicator to a search engine of your page content. Be creative when writing page titles and strive to pique the reader's interest. The most compelling titles and descriptions gain the most click-throughs when faced with a wall of text from which to select in the search results. Page Headings Always include a heading on your page, and this heading should duplicate or reflect your browser page title so that you are consistent in informing the search engine what your page is all about. Then you should use headings to break up your page, introduce white space, and make your text quickly scanned. This Is Heading One This Is Heading Two This Is Heading Three This Is Heading Four Meta Tags Meta tags used to be the place for you to stuff all your keywords, but now they are used much more subtly to improve CTR (click-through rate). Pay particular attention to the meta descriptions, as most search engines use this text to display under your page title. Image Alt Tags Often overlooked, ALT tags are there to describe an image. If that seems counter-intuitive, then bear in mind that many people used to browse the web with photos turned off to save on bandwidth costs. ALT Tags would help those people understand the page. Filling in all your ALT Tags is the best search engine optimization practice, so don't overlook them. Internal Links To make it easier for people to access your content, you should link to critical pages on your site where it is relevant. Don't overdo it, though, because too many links can make a page unreadable. It is good practice to link to your essential internal pages where applicable and make them as accessible as possible. Internal links also tell search engines what pages on your site are all about, so don't miss out on the opportunity to link to your key pages. Let's Simplify The Nine Basic Website Marketing Strategy Elements: 1. Keyword research means discovering how competitive keywords are to rank in the search engines; this is the foundation on which you build your business. 2. Website design and build means navigation structure and making sure pages are easy to find. 3. On-page search engine optimisation is a "do once" necessity. You need the right mix of keywords in your content. The correct page titles maximise your traffic. Paying an expert to do it optimally is a worthwhile investment. 4. Off-page optimisation means sourcing excellent links. It is an ongoing monthly process. It covers link building methods like guest posting, online press releases and building relationships with other website owners in your niche to solicit links. If you are paying a search engine optimisation company a monthly retainer, this is generally the bulk of the work they should be billing you for. 5. Pay per click marketing is a method of paying for advertising on search engines or other sites. Can you write headlines that attract clicks? Make landing pages that convert? Doing it better than anyone else is the key to making it work. 6. Content marketing means adding insightful blog writing and meaningful pieces that add to the value of the overall conversation. 7. Social media marketing means engaging in the ongoing conversation using your choice of media channel. 8. Email marketing means building a subscriber list. 9. Conversion rate optimisation means integrating all the above into a well-oiled marketing machine that attaches value to an action. (Lead, sale, subscriber). Everything else is fluff. Smoke and mirrors. Now Let's Build Your Digital Marketing Bonfire: Doing keyword research will create a match. The better your match, the more chance you have of lighting a fire. Your product is the kindling with which you get your bonfire started. A better product means the bonfire will catch and burn more quickly. Building a beautiful website design will create a bonfire skeleton. The bigger, the better. Adding excellent core content means the bonfire will burn more brightly for longer. On-page, SEO will ensure the bonfire has plenty of oxygen and will breathe life into it. Off-page SEO will bring constant and steady wind to your bonfire. Pay per click will add more logs to your bonfire. Content marketing will throw giant trees on your bonfire. Email marketing will bring rapid bursts of accelerated growth to your bonfire. Social media marketing will pour gasoline on your bonfire and make it dance ecstatically. Conversion rate optimisation will make sure your bonfire is always manageable. Why Doesn't My Website Rank In Organic Search? You've spent a lot of money on your new website design and added excellent blog content; however, the red needle stubbornly refuses to move to the right. You will wonder why there is no juice to seduce or ignition for your mission. Let me give you some tough love, honey. Top search engine rankings come from hard work and copious amounts of virtual heavy lifting. Those links won't refer themselves, don't you know? The barometer by which you should measure your search engine ranking is an answer to this simple question – where do you think your site deserves to rank on its own merits? When you take away your blinkered prejudice and properly examine what makes a top search engine listing, you'll see that merely existing is not enough. Milk in the tea will always be mixed, but cream in the coffee rises to the top. Here are answers to many of the most common questions as to why your website does not currently rank highly in search engines: 1. Your Site Is New A site that is three months old or less hasn't had enough time to breathe. The analogy with fine wines is great because websites age gracefully with consistent application of effort. A vital element of all successful sites is that the owner had patience and persistence in the early days of a website's life when zero traffic meant it was easier to give up. The lower reaches of search engine listings are littered with the indifference of the impatient business owner. 2. You've Missed The Small Business SEO Basics Giving every page a unique title and adding a page description is the minimum effort required. Create a spreadsheet listing all your site pages and add all the page titles, article titles and page descriptions. You will have a record of your site architecture to hand off to an SEO expert if required, but you'll also have created your guide to internal linking, one of the most influential and underused SEO strategies. 3. Substandard Content Is Letting The Team Down I referred to your site as having "excellent" blog content in the opening paragraph, but that's not nearly enough. You need creative copywriting and striking imagery if you plan to ascend to the throne of the content king. Do not substitute quantity for quality. Writing ten 500 word articles is counterfeit to crafting the precise and surgical authoritative ten thousand word guide that provides cornerstone blog content for your blog. Resist the temptation to skip the research and cite sources. 4. Your Site Is Not Mobile Responsive The standard content management systems (CMS) and cloud-based website building software have mobile responsiveness built-in or templates that support it. If you use a software platform that doesn't support mobile devices, you'll be behind the eight ball. Google is rapidly switching to "mobile-first" indexing, which means that if your website doesn't display correctly on mobile, you are likely to suffer the ignominy of anonymity. 5. You Don't Have Enough Inbound Links Each link you gain from another website acts as an indicator of value to a search engine. The more links you have pointing to your site, the more the perceived value and the higher you will rank. One great link from an authoritative website is worth many average links. Do not be seduced into thinking that the volume of links will create your shooting star. In many cases, a handful of decent links are good enough to make your site appear among those of your peers. The top spots are reserved for those that gain the juiciest, most luscious and precious links. Around forty-five per cent of search engine traffic goes to the top three Google positions. 6. You Need To Give Precedence To Long Tail Keywords Ranking for short tail (one or two keywords) high volume terms is an obvious but flawed search engine strategy. Firstly there is just too much competition, and secondly, those high volume keywords are not the ones your website will convert into paying customers. Long-tail keywords (four or more) confirm searcher intent and are much more likely to bring potential buyers burdened with the weight of credit card and e-wallet moolah from which you must relieve them. 7. Your Competition Is Outworking You If this is the case, then I suggest you avail yourself of a copy of Grant Cardone's 10x Small Business SEO Strategy Summary Small business SEO is straightforward; you do your keyword research using a keyword planner to identify those keyword phrases that you can realistically hope to rank for when you first launch your website. After that, make each page of your site reflect a keyword term for which you want to appear in the search engine results. You would pay an SEO expert to do this job for you because they are experienced in digital marketing and finding the low hanging fruit - those keywords that will convert into paying customers but don't have excessive competition. Of course, this is becoming harder every day, with more people building sites than ever before continually raising the bar but with consistent effort those high spots are acheivable.