Benefits of Working with a Translation Agency – free Language Training!

I really enjoy working at Digital Trading – the days are so varied because we work with so many different clients.  In the last few days I have worked with a high tech cable manufacturer, a ball bearing company, a lingerie company, a wine importer, an interior design company and an archaeology business.
One SEO client I am working with now is a translation agency and language training company.  For me, someone who is very interested in words and the use of English Language, working with language training specialists has been a great experience and I have learned a lot. If you want to know the sort of thing I have been learning go here language training blog

When should you use Pay Per Click Advertising or SEO.  Is it a straight shoot out? Can there only be one winner for your business?When a client comes to us asking for a new website design one of the first things we always ask them is “how are you going to promote your website?”
We know we can build a magnificent website with all the latest features and functionality but if the right audience does not visit that website – and take the right actions while they are there – then that website will ultimately be judged a failure. Clearly we don’t want that scenario. Hence the question “how are you planning to market your website?”

How will your target audience find your site? And crucially how will you make sure they ‘convert’ while on your site. By this I mean convert to become customers, subscribers, prospects or contributors. In short,a convert will have ‘done the thing that you wanted them to do’ while on the website.

So – let’s look at the key question of how to drive traffic to your website. You have a number of options or strategies that you can use here. These would include; offline marketing, online (or Internet) marketing and Social Media marketing. For this article I have separated Social Media out from Internet Marketing though you could easily argue it comes under that banner.
If we look at the two main options available under Internet Marketing we have Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Paid Search Marketing a.k.a. Pay Per Click (PPC).
For the uninitiated here it’s time for a couple of definitions;
SEO is all about getting your website on to the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPS) ‘organically’. Work is done to ensure that when someone uses a search engine to search for a product or service that you offer, it is your website (or web page to be more accurate) that appears on the first page of search results.  Studies show that in truth, being on page one of Google is not enough, you really need to be in the top 4 or 5 places to take full advantage of the traffic that will then flow to your website.
PPC is to do with the sponsored searches that appear alongside the organic search results. The sponsored searches, or Ads, may be displayed in a shaded area above the organic search results (no more than 3 and not always displayed) or listed down the right hand side of the results pages. You will set up a campaign based on a selected number of keywords or phrases – when someone searches via a search engine and uses one of the phrases in your campaign then your “Advert” will be displayed. If the searcher then clicks on your advert  they will be taken to your website – in fact to a specific page in your website – and you will be charged for that click – hence the term Pay Per Click.

Many people seem to believe that they need to make a choice between using an SEO strategy or a PPC strategy.  This is not the case and we certainly don’t hold this view. In our experience there is much to be gained by developing an Internet marketing strategy that utilises both PPC and SEO.

If we were working with you to put an Internet marketing strategy together we would be looking to take the best from PPC and SEO. So what are the pros and cons of PPC and SEO?

PPC – key benefits;
• Hit the market quickly. The main benefit with PPC is the fact that you can be on page one of Google (or other search engines) within a few hours of your campaign going live. This could prove tremendously powerful if you are trying to hit the market very quickly. With SEO it could take months before you get near page one.
• Highly manageable. PPC is highly manageable and controllable. You will decide how much you want to spend on PPC and the campaign can be designed around that monthly budget. Once your budget limit is reached your adverts simply stop displaying until your budget is replenished.
You can also set the amount that you are prepared to pay for each click. The average ‘click costs’ will vary depending on how competitive that phrase is. Click cost will range from a few pence to a few pounds. If you need to pause or stop the campaign for any reason this can be done instantly.
• Precise Audience Targeting. Because you choose the keywords or phrases that will trigger your advert to be displayed when someone enters those search terms into a search engine, this means that you can tightly define the type of audience that will see your advert.
You can also target the geographical areas that you want to cover. For example if your target audience is all within 30 miles of your business you can set your PPC campaign to only display your ads to people within that geographical area. Therefore your advert – if written correctly - will be appealing directly to your target audience at exactly the moment when they have chosen to look for the products or services that you offer. Compare this to traditional broadcast advertising which is fundamentally a mass appeal to everyone, in the hope that a few of those will be in a research or buying ‘mode’.
• Detailed Reporting. The systems which control the PPC programmes also provide comprehensive reporting information. You will be able to track such things as number of times your advert has been displayed (impressions) the number of times your avert was clicked and the Click Through Rate (CTR) the amount you pay per click and the average click cost. This is just some of the campaign management information that is available to you to help you refine and manage your campaigns.

SEO – Key benefits;
• Cost effective marketing. £ for £ you will be hard pushed to find a more effective marketing strategy than SEO. Apart perhaps from a properly managed Social Media campaign, SEO will put your website in front of real people who are actively searching for the products or services that you are offering. The huge increase in online search volumes – away from the traditional use of Yellow Pages or local directories – means that a well-managed SEO programme is the best way to put your business in front of your target audience exactly when they are prepared to receive your message.
• People trust organic searches more than PPC Adverts. The statistics show that searchers trust organic search returns more than they do the paid adverts and so are more likely to click on an organic search result than a sponsored link. I believe that this is especially true when the searcher is looking for information rather than a product. Personally if I was looking online for a specific product and price was my main motivation, then I would not care if I clicked a sponsored link (paid advert) or an organic search result. When I am searching for information however I always prefer the organic results to the paid search results. I feel they have more credibility.
• SEO is less expensive than PPC long term. If you are looking to develop a long term (over 6 months) strategy for marketing your business online then SEO will be the winner over PPC. This is because once the hard work has been done and you have achieved a page one position on Google via SEO, then the cost of maintaining that position should reduce significantly and at that point you start to enjoy “free” traffic.  Contrast this to a PPC campaign where you will always be paying for every click or visit to your site regardless of the outcome.
• A Search Engine Optimised website is a better website. To get a website SEO’d requires a lot of attention to be paid to the sites content (among many other factors). Sites that are in a professional SEO programme should provide a better site visitor experience. Their content should be well structured and presented, pages should load quickly, all links should be working, content will be regularly refreshed etc. In short the site will be properly set up and well managed and maintained which will make it more appealing to the visitor.

If your business needs to be found online then the good news is that you have a choice over how you achieve that result. The main thing is to have a clear view of what you are trying to achieve and then to apply the best strategy to achieve it. Depending on your objectives you can use PPC or SEO but be aware that a combination of both could be the best way to deliver you the ideal results you are looking for.
For more information on this subject, or to arrange for a free no obligation consultation with one of our Swindon based Internet marketing specialists, please contact Steve@digitaltradingcreative.co.uk or call 01793 680866. We would be delighted to talk to you.

If your Website contains spelling mistakes then it could be costing your business thousands of pounds in lost opportunities.

The BBC recently picked up on the comments of an e-commerce website owner who claimed that his online revenue doubled after he fixed some spelling errors on his website tightsplease.co.uk. These figures were extrapolated and the assumption was made that poor spelling on websites is costing UK businesses millions of pounds in lost revenue.
Just to set this in context, figures from the Office for National Statistics published just last month show that £527m per week is being spent online in the UK alone.

How tolerant are you of bad English on websites? It’s an important question. In a very non-scientific poll conducted in our office (8 people) I discovered a fairly wide spread of tolerance ranging from “two or three errors on a page and I’d leave the site” to “I don’t care as long as the information was what I wanted”.
However it was interesting to learn that the type of website was a factor here. People were inclined to be much less tolerant if they were looking for a company that was going to represent them or their business in some way. One example given was estate agents, “I would not want to put my house on the market with an estate agent whose site had spelling or grammatical errors.”

Tolerance was also lower on e-commerce sites but for a different reason. With the estate agent the concern was that that agency would not do the best job in representing the house seller, partly because a buyer may be put off by the website and not see the property but also because the lack of attention to detail might be a reflection on how the whole business works. The fundamental issues here therefore were related to professionalism and credibility. Translate that sentiment to someone tasked with finding a service provider for a company, e.g. a marketing or a PR company, or a legal practice or, heaven forbid, a printing company. That spelling error could cost the company dearly.
With e-commerce sites the concern was more to do with trust. A site that has spelling errors would raise concerns that maybe this website is not a UK based site. With the ever present danger of credit card fraud and identity theft the feeling was that spelling errors and bad grammar would raise a warning flag.
This “trust” concern is echoed by the director of the Oxford Institute at Oxford University. William Dutton says that “in these instances when a consumer might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a misspelt word could be a killer issue”.

So – how error free is your website?
Below are some basic tips to help you to avoid spelling and grammatical errors appearing on your website;
1) Once you have written your content get someone else to read it. Often our brain knows what we wanted to say and compensates if we haven’t quite written it correctly. Another person reading your content will not have the same “blind spot” as you.
2) If you have no one else to review the content for you then you should get out more! Seriously though - take a break and come back to review it again later and as you are on your own read it out loud. It does help!
3) If I have written a chunk of text directly into one of my websites, I will copy that text and run it through a spell checker – often this shows up a couple of errors simply because my typing ability is not brilliant.
4) But be aware - definitely do not rely solely on your spell checker to pick up all errors. They can’t take the context into account so they won’t know for example if you should have used “there” instead of “their” or in this example, a complementary bottle of wine versus a complimentary bottle of wine. Get that one wrong and you could be handing out free wine all day!
5) Check carefully for the common grammatical errors – especially the dreaded apostrophe!

Alternatively if you want to offload the responsibility for ensuring your business has an error free website you can always ask us to check it for you. Helen, our in-house usability specialist will review your site page by page and report back on any spelling or grammatical errors that might exist.
Then you can rest easy secure in the knowledge that visitors to your website will not be put off when using your site.

How do you select the best website design company for your Business?

Here are 5 top tips to help you to do just that.

Choosing the best website designer or web design company to design and build your new website is an important decision that really requires careful consideration.  If not, you could end up making a poor investment that damages your business and costs you a lot of time money and energy to put right.

Quite often we are contacted by new clients who need us to develop a new website for them as their existing website is not working for them. Often these websites have been poorly built leaving the client very dissatisfied with the look or functionality of the website, or the web designer has lost interest and disappeared half way through the project, or is holding the client to ransom asking for more money before releasing the website.

In many cases there has been a complete breakdown in relations between the client and the website designer. Often, when we investigate further we find that the problems are money related where the web designer has under quoted for the project and then starts looking at how to get out of the deal or lever more cash out of the client.

So how do you avoid these issues and end up with exactly the website your business needs and an investment that really works for your company? Here are some tips to help you achieve this.

1) Make sure you have a clear idea about what you want your website to achieve?
Ask yourself some fundamental questions such as;

• What do you want a website for?
• How does a website fit into your marketing plan?
• Who is your target audience which the website will address?
• What key messages do you want the website to convey?
• What outcomes do you expect from the website – what functionality will the website need?

You need to ask these questions of your business because you will need to brief the web design company that you ultimately employ. If you don’t know these answers then your web designer will not have a completely clear brief and this is where expectations of what you wanted to get from the website designer and the website you actually end up with can start to diverge.
In my view this is the first real test of your prospective web design company or web designer. If they do not spend a significant amount of time seeking to understand your business and how it works and the objectives and goals you are trying to achieve then you should be concerned, because if they don’t have a full understanding of your business and your objectives then it’s likely that you will not get a website that really works effectively for your business.

When we work with prospective new clients we spend our first meeting running though a detailed questionnaire which pulls out a huge amount of information about the clients business and their objectives. We can then use this valuable information to design exactly the right solution for them and their business. We can also make suggestions and raise questions that they may not even have thought of. Often people are unaware of just how much a website can do for their business and this in-depth questioning and discussion helps both us and the client to arrive a t the best web design solutions.

2) Investigate the Web design company
If you have a web design company in mind that you think you’d like to employ make sure that you check them out. Ask to look at their design portfolio. They should be only too happy to show you. Look at the designs to see if they are all similar or if there is real creativity in their website designs.  You should see a wide variation in the design styles which should reflect the web designers ability to be creative within the brief given by the clients.

There is one key thing to remember here though and I always have to remind our prospective clients of this fact, the designs we produce at Digital Trading Creative are exactly what our clients wanted, so if you don’t particularly like the designs we show you, that won’t mean that we can’t design the perfect website for you.

3) Can the web designer you are considering cope with the assignment?
When you look at the quality of the web designers work also check out their ability to produce the sort of website that you are looking for. If the portfolio they show you is limited to brochure style sites (with little functionality built in) but you want an e-commerce site then make sure they show you examples of e-commerce sites. There is a massive difference between creating a great looking brochure style website and a properly designed e-commerce site and many web designers will not have the experience to deliver these types of websites.

4) Take up references. You want a long term relationship with your web design company.
Make sure that you do follow up on references. It is important that the website design company that you choose to work with is one that is going to be interested in a long term business relationship. At Digital Trading Creative this is one of the key things that we always work hard to achieve. We are not interested in delivering a website and then leaving the client to it, while we move onto the next project. We want to develop a long term and mutually beneficial relationship with our clients. Your website will be an on-going and continually developing project – if it is designed and managed correctly. Therefore you should be in regular contact with your web designer to make sure that the site is working effectively and delivers a payback on your investment.

5) Can your web designer deliver other services.
Once you have your website it is extremely important that it performs effectively and delivers a return on your investment. Ideally your web design company should have discussed with you at length how you are going to market your business through the site. Please do not expect that just because you have a great website people will automatically come to it. You will have to invest time and money into pulling visitors to your site. 

With Internet marketing in mind it would be a bonus if your chosen website development company also provide internet marketing services such as Search Engine Optimisation and Pay per Click advertising. In addition do not forget the most important element in all of this which is ‘conversion’.

Conversion is the where your return on investment occurs. You might have a beautiful looking fully functional website with thousands of visitors coming to it but if they don’t do what you want them to do when they get there then your website is failing your business. So definitely ask your website design company how they will help you to achieve conversions. If they can’t give you credible answers it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t deal with them but it does mean that you will have to find another company that can help you to get the conversions you need, and splitting that work between two companies is not always the most effective solution.

The point here is really that if you can find a web design company that can also handle your Internet marketing and Conversion requirements you are much more likely to get the results that your business expects.

Finally there is one important message that you have to take on board when deciding on which web designer you are going to choose. There really is no getting away from this and that is in the world of web design you truly do “get what you pay for”.

The web design business is a very competitive sector. That is good news for you. There are many companies for you to choose from and there will always appear to be hundreds of web design companies offering very low prices for web design projects.  This is why you need to be very clear about what you want to achieve and why you need to consider carefully the 5 points above. By all means you need to try and get the best deal that you can get from whichever web design company you go with. But remember that the best deal for you and your business is not necessarily the one with cheapest price.

The best deal will be the one that delivers you a website that truly works for your business – a more expensive investment that gives you an on-going return, is far better than a low cost investment that fails to deliver. If you are really serious about your business make sure you are serious about selecting the right web designer for your company.

What is Google’s +1  and what are the implications?

At the end of last month (June) Google launched its +1 feature into the UK and a couple of other European countries as well as Japan.

This feature is al in the experimental stage but it’s likely to become a permanent fixture and the thinking is that +1 will form a part of Google’s long awaited wider social networking platform.

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Are your Digital Assets Optimised? (Do you even know what they are!?)
If being found online is your goal then you need to know.

No doubt, because people like me (Website and Internet Marketers) keep telling you, there is not much point having a website if it is not capable of being found by your target audience.To get your website found effectively you need to be appearing at the top of the search engines page returns (SERPs) and to help achieve that you need to make sure your website is fully search engine optimised at all times.

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Mobile Friendly Websites. You need one - especially if you are a locally focussed business.
The proof is out there!

As anyone involved in web design and digital marketing should be telling you, mobile is a very hot topic right now and it’s going to get a lot hotter as the use of smart phones grows dramatically. (By half way through 2010, 12.8 million smartphones were in use in the UK this represented more than 25% of all mobile phones.)

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