The Credit Crunch is clearly creating hard times and changing behaviours. Although online trading growth has been stronger in recent years than non web retailing (see section (2), it is clearly hard going in most sectors currently.
So in our first item we give some ideas, based on practical experience of our own, and our clients, which might help manage the effects of the downturn - I hope you find something useful there, and can keep your own business moving forward despite the pressures of the recession.
1.The Credit Crunch - how online trading can keep your business growing
The shift to online trading is continuing, and should help website owners during the Credit Crunch, but the question is how? So here are some thoughts from our team and our clients which we hope will help.
a) Turn a niche market into a scale opportunity - products where the market in their immediate locality is too small to generate worthwhile income. However, the web helped turn this local niche into a scale market as buyers around the UK and internationally began to search out their sites.
This has worked for site owners selling high value camera accessories, personal fashion items, and electronics maintenance.
Even old, declining, physical markets can be become profitable as the wider selling reach of the web brings potential clients from the surrounding areas eg many repair services used to be in every High Street for many products. Now, to find these, people will scour the web to find the service you want – we have clients for whom this has worked well.
b) Try newer areas – for quite a while, the web was used most strongly for travel, books, music and electronics. Increasingly now, other physical product sales are growing strongly, eg food and clothing have become high growth areas, so why not check out any ideas you might have - we can help you estimate the possible demand for these before you incur significant spend.
c) Improve your price proposition – Aldi supermarkets have achieved a 64% increase in site visits, and 34% of web users are now interested in using shopping comparison sites (nma.co.uk). Moreover, 22% are increasing their use of value supermarkets and auction sites.
So make sure you have pricing or a specific price offer, which addresses the new cost emphasis in shopping.
d) Diversify – it is sound business advice to “stick to your knitting”, and “maintain focus on core activities” and we don’t challenge this. However, the web does let you research and test a new business idea more quickly and at lower cost than previous, physical models.
So, if you have built an understanding of how the web works, with one business or product, why not check out the idea you have been carrying round. Firstly though, use some careful keyword research to check out the size and nature of the market – if required we can always assist with this.
e) Maintain your presence – web marketing costs are low, compared to physical domain marketing. So don’t let your ranking slip. Use the full range of promotion tools to win links, and build your web presence using Article marketing, Press Releases, a
programme of site changes, and directory and non-directory links to help win a higher position.
Please contact us if you would like proposals to increase your visibility.
f) Try a facelift – can you improve the visual impact of your site? Try some new graphics, some video material? When did you last change the colours or text on the site?
And how about some fresh content too - remember that Google prefers those sites which do change or renew their content to those with static content.
We have extensive experience of content and design options to achieve this - just contact us if you wish to pursue it further.
2. NET HAPPENINGS
News, themes and trends from the Internet – home and abroad
Text messaging - in 2008, volumes grew by 38% on previous year, ie some 216m text messages were sent each month in the UK, equating to 1213 text message per person in 2008!! (mda.org)
Mobile web use – the number of users accessing the web via their phones grew by 100% during 2008. (Comscore.com); some 7.3m people in UK access the web in this way.(Neilsen Mobile)
Social Networking – Facebook had 23m unique UK visitors in February, a 75% increase on February 2008.(comscore.com) It now outscores the combined figure for Bebo and MySpace.
e-Retailing spending - grew by 9% month on month in March 2009 (imrg.org), achieving annual growth to date of 19% - this growth figure of course far surpasses the physical retail spend pattern.
Continued shift to internet promotion - around 70% of European advertisers plan to increase their online ad spend during 2009. Traditional media, especially TV and Newspapers, are seeing spend move away as budgets are shifted to online media. (nma.co.uk)
In 2008 online ad spend overtook newspaper and magazine advertising. (nma.co.uk)
3. NET TIPS
Some hints you could consider
Add a News Page – it doesn’t have to be ambitious. A few lines on changes you have made, or on what you are offering - now or in the future, will give you the core of the material needed. With an efficient Content Management System, and a simple page
structure, making the changes can be straightforward.
Enhance your content – add a new section either giving information related to the products you offer, or a “how to” section, eg how to use the products you offer on the site.
Perhaps give advice; eg if you sell fashion products, you probably have good fashion awareness; why not offer suggestions and ideas on the site?
4. NCS FOCUS
News and services from NCS that might help
NCS Free Directory Submission Service – high quality free directories are a valid source of inbound links, but finding them has become increasingly difficult. Many appear free and emerge as paid only at the final stage when a fee is sought.
Over the past few months we have reviewed over 2000 such directories and developed from these a database of fully free, high quality directories. It includes UK and International Directories, and Commercial and Shopping Directories.
The database will be maintained, and allows us to offer this service speedily and cost- effectively. Contact us if this looks relevant for your business.
NCS Web Advertising Service – in addition to maintaining Pay Per Click programmes for our clients, NCS now undertakes keyword research, optimisation and banner services for any business wishing to advertise its services more widely on the web.
Just contact us if you would like our support to help increase your web advertising.
Developments in web marketing, site design, and web services
Social Networking and Mobile web use remain the two liveliest
issues in Web marketing currently - good use of both is a platform for getting better value from your site. In the next issue, we give an action check list on Social Networking, so this month we lead on Mobile web use – I hope the article and the rest of the content help you win more users for your site.
1 NET ISSUES
Significant issues that could impact on your website approach
Using Mobile access to bring more visitors to your site
Use this approach to increase your site traffic through Mobile web access:
a) Scale of web usage - using mobiles to access the web has stepped up sharply over the past year - according to Scoot UK, web traffic from mobile devices increased by over 4000% in the last 18 months. Apple hold by far the greatest share of this - their devices now handle more than 70% of mobile traffic on the web.
Even a year ago nearly 70% of i–phone users visited web sites via their phone on a daily basis.
b) Most popular uses - the most popular use of mobiles on the web is for email (59% of users); news headlines (46%) and social networking (41%)
c) Web brands – the most popular web brands were Google (55%); Facebook (42%); BBCNews (40%); E-bay (30%) and YouTube (77%)
d) Trends - Gartner reported in May that, worldwide, smart-phone sales increased by 85% year-on-year, so web usage trend seems likely to continue growing.
Clearly website owners should consider carefully the extent of the need to tailor their sites to suit mobile phone visitors, and how best to do this.
e) Our Approach - NCS assesses the degree of mobile relevance for all sites we develop, especially potentially high usage sites, e.g. information only sites, forums, social networking, sites addressing young user market.
Lower priority sites e.g. within certain industrial/commercial sectors will be identified also with, typically, a different technical solution being offered. Optimal domain usage, i.e. whether .mobi is best option, or whether non mobile domains will be adequate, are considered also.
f) Technical solutions - the optimal technical solution will be considered, e.g. for simple sites– the existing web site will often suffice for majority of mobile phones, with minimal content change needed, and .mobi use not needed.
For complex sites, e.g. for mobile-relevant sites with high content levels, (e.g. offering a wide range of products) a .mobi domain may be appropriate; the text content may need simplification; use of the flash/javascript content of existing site may need removing and image formats may need changing.
We will consider with clients the optimal level of search spend, once the site is up, to achieve the necessary level of visibility for the site.
g) Cost - the cost of specifying and developing fully mobile-friendly sites depends on the profile of individual sites. In some instances an effective solution can be delivered for minimal additional cost, as all requirements can be incorporated within the basic site specification.
In other cases it may be necessary to radically tailor the site content for mobile visitors - effectively a separate, mobile - orientated site is needed, although it can detect the mobile device and serve up a different set of pages suitable to them.
Under all options we closely tailor the price to reflect the work needed, with maximum re-use of existing content.
2. NET HAPPENINGS
News, themes and trends from the Internet – home and abroad
Mobile web usage - UK web traffic from mobile devices has increased by over 4000% in the last 18 months. Apple hold by far the greatest share of this - their devices now handling more than 70% of all mobile traffic (scoot.co.uk).
Social Networking - Facebook remains dominant – in the US 50% of the population is now on Facebook (Dreamgrow.com) – followed by YouTube and Twitter.
Online Shopping Update - UK online shopping is growing at 18% pa – the UK is Europe’s leading e-retail economy, with online sales likely to reach c£75bn in 2011 (imrg.org). By contrast, overall retail sales have actually shown falls in recent months.
Internet Promotion – double digit growth in online advertising spend is expected in 2011 – being driven by higher social media use, video, and display advertising. Paid search and mobile show strong growth also (nma.co.uk).
3. NET TIPS
Some hints you could consider
Use correct anchor text - when you put links to pages on your site, use terms for the clickable link which are the terms people will use when searching in a Search Engine for that activity. e.g. if you are a golf equipment e-tailer, and want to link to your new products page, don’t use “our new products” for the link, but describe the page more specifically, for example, “latest golf hybrids and drivers” – Search Engines attach far greater weight to specific terms like these.
Having said this, it is also important to vary the anchor text in your links – so don’t put the same text in all your links.
Get a long tail – long tail keywords are those which have several words, not a single word as the search term. Recent research (axandra.com) has highlighted that long tail keywords are much more likely to result in a sale than more general ones and often have less competition from other sites.
Thus, you will get both better conversion rates and more visitors if you focus on long tail keywords, rather than a single word, for your keyword.
Get on top - research (optify.net/axandra.com) has confirmed that if you get to the top positions on page 1 of Google, you not only get more clicks (the top 3 get 60% of the clicks), but you get a higher click through rate. Optify conclude that if you you double your site promotion spend to get to from 2nd position to 1st, you might triple your visits for that keyword.
NCS has 10 years experience in Search Engine marketing, so please contact us if you need help with this.
Think Firefox – the lastest Statcounter browsers statistics show that by May, Firefox held a share of 42% of browser usage - Internet Explorer was below 25% with Google Chrome increasing to nearly 26%. Clearly, Web owners need to check that their sites operate effectively with each of these browsers.
4. NCS FOCUS
News and services from NCS that might help
New Sites – we have launched a number of sites since the last newsletter – just visit our News Release page for a sample or click on our Portfolio page to see a much wider selection of our work.
Content Development - Google are reducing the rankings of shallow content sites, ie sites with minimal content. So be wary of relying on a minimal, passive, brochure site, to gain the search engine ranking you need. We have massive experience developing content for sites across a wide range of sectors – just approach us if you think your content needs enhancing.
