Web Wise Business – websites scotland (and beyond)
website development and websites Scotland from web wise businessPay Per Click Marketing – Landing Pages
When creating you Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing campaign it is worth putting some careful thought into which pages you want the adverts to send traffic to, what those pages will look like and what you want the visitors to do once they are there. As these pages will have a large impact on the conversion rate of your traffic with regards to the desired action you want them to take, it is important to make sure that the page makes the right first impression by looking good. It is also important to ensure that the page provides the visitor with roughly what they were expecting. There is no point targeting the term “florist” with your PPC only to try and sell recruitment services!
Finally, make sure that it is as simple as possible for the visitor to achieve your desired action, whether that is buy your products or provide you with contact details.
Pay Per Click Marketing – Brand Name Targeting
An important tip to remember when it comes to Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing is to determine what you gain by targeting your own brand name. If you already hold the first spot in the natural search rankings for your brand name, then spending money on PPC for the term is a wasted effort. Since visitors are already searching for you (they’ve entered your brand name), you will simply end up paying money to get people onto your website that were going to visit it anyway.
Targeting your own brand name should only be done when you do not hold the number one spot in the natural search results for the term, or if your brand name is a commonly used term or name, such as Web Design Scotland.
Pay Per Click Marketing – Keyword Targeting
When setting up your Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign, it is important to do some thinking and research on keyword terms you wish to target. The best place to start is by taking a look at the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to get an idea for which terms are well searched for already and how competitive they are in terms of people already targeting those terms.
Website Marketing – community
Establishing a community on your website can be a great way to encourage visitors and develop visitor and user brand loyalty. If, for example, you sell cars on your website, then it stands to reason that the people who might buy cars from this website probably also like to talk about them too. Providing a space for these users to do so and regularly encouraging and steering discussion can not only be a good way to foster an active community under your own brand, it can also allow you to further promote your products and influence potential buyers.
However, establishing a strong community is not something that can be done easily, it requires a lot of time, effort and hard work to create a site with which users will want to interact with. If you think it is worth doing and could work for you, make sure you have something slick that meets visitors expectations when they arrive. If it doesn’t, they are potentially lost forever.
If you’d like to discuss developing a community website, as web designers Scotland, we would be happy to help.
Website Marketing – exclusivity
Another method of attracting visitors to your website is to offer something exclusive to your online customers, or those who use your website to contact you or perform a desired action, that wouldn’t otherwise be available to them. Letting potential customers know they could be getting a better deal by buying from you online will not only encourage visitors, but it can also reduce your overheads too as you could save on costs for offline, such as store fronts, displays, flyering etc.
As web designers, we regularly discuss with our clients how they could offer exclusivity to visitors and reduce their business costs by effectively utilising their website.
Website Marketing Scotland – competitions
Once you have your website looking and working how you want it to, the next step is to get visitors to the website. While not an easy task, there are a number of techniques you can use to encourage traffic to your website, one of these is running a competition.
Competitions incentivise people to perform a specific action from simply visiting your website, to completing a survey, providing you with contact information, or playing a game to name but a few. Competitions are a good way to create a buzz about your website and also to generate links to your site from various forums and social media websites. Why not speak with your web designer about running a competition on your website.
Web development in Scotland – flash
Flash can produce some great looking sites but it can be expensive to put together and it is not very SEO friendly at the moment. By all means use flash but use in sparingly and don’t blow the budget. As web developers we can come up with decent features without resorting to flash.
Web development in Scotland – fashion
One of the things we notice in web development world is fashion. Images can look dated fast, styles of presentation can look old within months and glitzy animation can suddenly look old hat. We’d recommend holding back on too many expensive whiz bang things and encourage good solid functionality.
Web development in Scotland – shopping carts
A reliable shopping cart is pretty important if you are adding ecommerce. They come in a variety of formats – some free and some expensive. As web developers we build our own – sometime based on others base implementations. We do that so we can stay in control.
