There are some fundamental rules when it comes to the design. Your site should:

1.  Capture your visitors’ attention. Visitors form an impression of your site within 2 seconds of hitting the home page, so you really have no room for error. If they don’t like what they see, they will head straight back to Google and on to your competitor’s site.

2.  Make the right impression, immediately. Your site needs to accurately reflect your business in a design and language that your customers and prospects will relate to. In order to achieve this, you need to ensure you understand your market and what your customers look for. If you’re not sure, some market research would be a good idea. Reproduction of printed promotional material such as company brochures is not the answer and should be avoided. Have a look at your competitors’ sites and consider their strengths and weaknesses, then use this to hone your own website’s design and content. Your prospects will be undertaking the same analysis.

3.  Be easy to navigate. The layout of the site and the content within it should be clearly visible from the home page. We have all heard the ‘one click’ rule. Visitors should be able to find and access what they are looking for with one click of the mouse. Search engines love this too.

4.  Focus on the strengths of your business. Whilst reproducing printed brochures is not recommended, you should remember that your website is your strongest promotional tool and should therefore paint your business or your offering in the most attractive light possible. Relish the opportunity to shout about what makes you unique, why you are the organisation to work with, the benefits you bring, what others are saying about you. Use the skills of an experienced designer to help graphically represent your strengths in order to ensure you are appealing to both the visual and auditory attentions of your visitors.

5.  Encourage your visitors to return. A visual impactful site that is easy to navigate and provides useful information will encourage your visitors to return, telling others along the way.

6.  Engage with your visitors. Organisations use many techniques to engage with their customers, including blog campaigns, newsletters, promotions and social media. All have excellent value in their own right, although depending on the nature of your business, some will be more suitable than others. It is important to ensure your site invites participation and interaction wherever possible.

7.  Be updated regularly. A static site will soon be ignored, not only by your customers and prospects, but by the search engines. You should ensure sufficient time is programmed in to your schedule to give your website the focus it needs to grow and blossom. In return, it will work hard for you, generating new business opportunities.

If you would like to discuss how Hot Waffle can help your business achieve new business opportunities through website enhancement and optimisation, give us a call for a free, no obligation chat.

We all run lives that are busier and fuller than ever, often leaving important things to the last minute and relying on our adrenalin reserves to see us through. Despite appreciating the importance of good content, it is easy to fall into the ‘something is better than nothing’ trap, particularly when deadlines are looming or in-trays are over-flowing. Whilst it is true that some content is better than none, we would urge you to concentrate on what is being said, thinking about things from a reader’s perspective as well as the search engines. Here are some quick tips to help you achieve powerful content, whilst continuing to manage your day-to-day demands:

• It’s a Sales Pitch!

Whether you are a sales person or not, you need to ensure what you are saying in your content positions you well and sets you apart from your competitors. Concentrate on your differentiators (your unique selling points) and make sure these stand out within the body of the text.

Furthermore, make sure you are selling the benefits of your products or services rather than the features. People will base any buying decision on the solutions your offering provides them, how it will make their life easier/better/wealthier/happier/less-frantic, so you need to be concentrating on ‘what’s in it for them’ rather than the product or service itself.

• Make it Punchy!

Research shows that when using the web, people make split-second decisions and will spend little time on each page. It is therefore vital that your content is ‘sticky’, afterall, you’ve worked hard at enticing your reader to visit your page, you don’t want them to lose interest and disappear. Ensure your content is to-the-point, engaging, helpful and informative. Don’t be verbose. Use sub-headings and bullet points to help people to skim-read information and find what is interesting to them.

• Focus on Keywords.

Your content should focus on the keywords that your customers and prospects would use to search for your products and/or services.  The keywords should form the basis of your content and all material should be developed around them. If the keywords you use are not those your customers use, your content won’t be found by them, so it is important to spend time thinking about the appropriate keywords to target.

• Keep it Original

Whilst tempting to replicate sales material found in printed brochures, content for websites needs to be created with the online reader in mind. We highlighted above how readers on the web will skim-read, so their attention needs to be grasped at the earliest point, with enough to keep them interested to encourage them to delve further, exploring all the pages within your site.

Equally important is to use your own words – do not ‘borrow’ other content as this will be very poorly received by Google and other search engines, who will not treat your site as authoritative and will rank you poorly.

•  Keep it Simple.

Don’t use jargon or terminology that won’t be universally recognised and understood. Furthermore, keep it in mind that all sorts of people use the internet, so keeping your content simple will ensure you do not confuse or alienate any of your visitors.

If you would like to discuss your Content Writing needs please get in touch info@hotwaffleseo.co.uk

So why are some companies more successful than others on the Internet? The answer is that they are implementing a Search Engine Optimisation Plan. SEO is now a requirement for any size business and the only difference between large and small organisations will be the budget and personnel involved in promoting the prominence of the company’s website. I have worked with large and small organisations alike and have seen plenty of ways in which the David takes on Goliath in ways that have not been available through traditional advertising and marketing tools. The Internet is now a shopping and reference tool for everything, the telephone book and catalogue. How can you have to rank better than your competitors? You’re among 2 billion other sites so can you stand above all others in your industry?

“My website is the dogs proverbials when it comes to design, isn’t that enough?” Well actually no its not, the design of your site is very important when it comes to converting visitors to your website but they have to visit in the first place. Imagine the most beautiful shop front anyone has ever seen with bounties never seen before on the planet to tempt the shopper but the store is on the third rock South side of the Assynt Peninsula & nobody can see it. Placing a website on the internet is akin to designing a business card, taking a boat across the Atlantic Ocean and dumping them overboard box by box hoping that they will be found by the right person. Yes design is important but without an SEO plan to complement the hard work your visitor rates will be low and conversions however impressive will only be operating on a small scale. When it comes to website promotion and marketing what goes on behind the look of your site is actually more important than the visual aspects or fancy flash technology. Getting ranked for the things that you want people to find you for has become a science but also a science in perpetual motion with changes in method on an ongoing basis. Good Seo involves constant fine tuning and walking the sometimes fine line between successful website promotion & spamming which can have disastrous results. Knowledge is the key and knowing how to use the results of your analysis will allow you to unlock the potential of your web site. Flexibility, patience, stamina, a systematical approach and creativity all combine as qualities for good SEO.