If you are taking money on line, or via a handheld credit card machine, it’s always galling to have to pay your payment provider a reasonable percentage of your revenue (e.g. PayPal up to 3.9%) – we wouldn’t mind so much if they did something decent for their money – but from a developer perspective PayPal’s system is difficult to use, badly supported and way out of date. Apparently they don’t seem to care about their customers, which is probably because of the lack of competition. Google waded into the market (as it does with all markets, it’s like some kind of child fueled by cola and crisps that can’t keep itself to itself) some time ago with Google Checkout, but they seem to have done the minimum possible just to match PayPal and have gone pretty quiet of late.

But finally somebody seems to have identified the opportunity in the payments market to offer a decent service at a fair price. Payment Sense is their name, and you can check them out here: www.paymentsense.co.uk. Think of them acting a bit like Tesco Mobile – they use the same robust infrastructure as everybody else, but take a smaller margin, passing the saving on to you. Give Gemma at PaymentSense a call on 0800 0443552 for a chat if you like, mention our name and you get a preferential rate. Blimey, a name and a phone number, in the UK… you won’t get that out of PayPal or Google Checkout for a start!

Put the PaymentSense system together with a WordPress website with a WooCommerce eCommerce system and you’ve got a recession friendly priced introduction to selling online – contact us to find out more.

Help and advice on SEO in Cambridge, Huntingdon or Peterborough from WebSanity Internet Marketing.

See: https://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2511914

This is a vital tool for the research  behind search engine optimisation. Google tell us to produce good content then they won’t tell us how.

In future you will need an AdWords account to access this information. So the slow slide of Google into ‘evil’ (their moto is ‘do no evil’) continues. They take the search information we give them, which they sell to advertisers and slowly they give us back less and less…

I recommend you research your keywords whilst this information is still freely available. Other systems exist for keyword research, but I’ve always found the quality of their data to be dubious.

An Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

Overview

How often do you check to see which page your website features on when you search for your products or services via the major search engines? Are you happy with where you appear or do you want to improve it? Statistics show that most people, who search online, only click through to the websites that appear on the first page of the search engine results. If your website isn’t appearing on this page then it’s very likely you are losing out on potential business opportunities. Our workshop will demonstrate how search engines work and how to you can improve your online visibility by creating search results that will attract more customers.

What you will learn:  

• An introduction on how search engines work
• The three pillars of search engine optimisation (seo)
• How to conduct keyword research
• How to build content and use keywords within your website to improve your search engine rankings
• Why competitor research is important to improve your online performance
• How social media can help with your SEO rankings
• How to monitor the results of your efforts using Google Analytics

Who is this workshop for?

Anyone who owns or who is responsible for a website and would like to learn more about improving their online visibility via the search engines.

Help and advice on SEO in Cambridge, Huntingdon or Peterborough from WebSanity Internet Marketing.

Just out of interest, if you ever wondered about Google’s very interestingly, but seemingly complicated, form of auction used to bid and charge for Google AdWords, it is a form of ‘Vickrey auction’. That’s where you bid one amount but end up paying an amount based on the bid below yours’ value. In Google’s case they use a quality score so the higher the Click Through Rates for your ads, the higher you rank and the less you pay – so it is well worth putting effort in to optimise your Google AdWords keywords and ads.

Help and advice on SEO in Cambridge, Huntingdon or Peterborough from WebSanity Internet Marketing.

For example, you might ask to advertise for ‘video production’ and the idea is that Google will also show your ad when people search for ‘video creation’ as well.

This is a lazy approach and spreads your ads wide, but at a high risk of being shown inappropriately, causing your click through rate to drop, your quality score to drop and therefore your position to drop and your cost to increase. Not good then!

In reality broad match can be useful with several word phrases to catch some broad traffic. However one recent case we came across highlights the dangers of using it:

Whilst giving some SEO advice to a company I reviewed their AdWords setup. It was a usual first stab at AdWords with just one group containing a bunch of broad matched words, including the above term ‘video production’. Whilst showing how this was a bad thing to do we looked at the search terms this had triggered for – a facility offered by AdWords. I couldn’t believe my eyes to see that google had shown their ads when somebody typed is simply ‘youtube’. WHAT?! So Google had seen us advertising for ‘video production’ and shown our ad when somebody just typed in ‘youtube’ (and every spelling variation you could imagine). That is utter madness and an indication that 1. Broad matching is evil, and 2. Get professional help before spending money on Google AdWords.

The real tragedy is that the majority of their spend budget was consumed by people clicking on these ads and not on ‘video production’ – over £300 burnt on nothing in just a couple of months.

Please please please don’t throw money away like this – seek professional advice before dipping into Google AdWords, it will save you money!

It might not seem the most important feature in the system, clearly not to Google, but receiving  a monthly set of stats is sometimes just the trigger you need to do something more to improve your SEO!

I’d highly recommend you go into your Google analytics account today and set up a monthly summary report to be emailed to you.

Google sees the rate at which people click on each entry in its search results, so if people tend to not to click on your website then Google will move you down the rankings. That means: have clear and highly focused title tags on all your pages, and have snappy, catchy description tags for each page. Google doesn’t read them but if you have missing or duplicate tags then people will skip you and Google will indirectly mark you down.

Dwell time is the time that somebody spends on your site before coming back to Google. If you have poor content, or content not focused enough, or too little content, then people won’t spend long on the site, Google will spot that and therefore reduce your authority. That means: review your content, make sure there is sufficient on the page, and make sure it is interesting and engaging.

Remember that Google has access to all sorts of information about your site: it gains a huge insight from users of it’s Chrome browser. So, if you want your site to be an authority in a given area and rank highly as a result, make sure it IS an authority!

We got some reasonable viewing numbers (Facebook advertising is a lot about brand awareness) and a small, but what we’d expect, number of click throughs. Cost per click was circa 30p.

But, remember to use your friend Google Analytics to check what people are telling you about visits – use it as an arbiter, it gets a true and fair idea of the number of real human visitors to your site. In this case we say a third that number of visitors from Facebook, making each visit cost 90p. Hmmm, suddenly that wasn’t so attractive for us. Then check to see how serious these people were by looking at average time on site for them – 18 seconds compared to 2 minutes odd for organic traffic. Hmmm, these people are not engaging with the site at all! Estimated cost per real engaged visitor £9. Wow – that’s way too high: time to pull the plug on Facebook advertising.

Lessons for people to take away:

• Always check reported numbers from anybody in Google Analytics
• Don’t just check numbers of visitors, but also their level of engagement
• Facebook appears to be scamming its advertisers – charging for over 3 times the number of real visitors (I have a hunch it isn’t filtering out automated spam bots crawling it’s pages effectively and you get charged for each of their visits – checkout the internet and you will see that this seems to be a common problem)
• Facebook visitors are such low quality you need to approach with caution and monitor numbers, measure results to check if it really works for you

Help and advice on SEO in Cambridge, Huntingdon or Peterborough from WebSanity Internet Marketing.

Advantages:
- It will be possible to secure domain names for longer.
- It will be possible to get discounts by buying longer renewal periods.
- It will be possible to show to Google that you’re in it for the long run by buying 10 year renewals. This only affects new domains – probably.

Remember, you will be able to renew in advance even if your domain is not due for renewal now.

From an SEO point of view we’d recommend you renew for as long as possible… just don’t forget to renew in 10 years time!

A trend you will see from a lot of larger companies is to say ‘like us on Facebook’ to get a discount code, free guide or enter a competition. This is a clear distortion of the social sector and a good reason why google should be taking social indicators with a big pinch of salt – they are easy to distort by some.

As a small business how can you join this party? Well, if you have produced link bait content that has real value then why not try www.paywithatweet.com to ask people to add to your social indicators before allowing them access.

We’d advise a balanced approach of free content with very clear social bookmarking icons, and more in depth content that you require people to ‘pay for socially’.

If you feel uncomfortable doing this then remember that the big guys are all blatantly doing it, and that it’s only fair to ask for something in return for giving away content that has real value.