 There we go. Hi everyone, my name's Andy Wilkinson, as they said. And we deal specifically with websites, but when I first started to create websites, it soon became very apparent to me that there's no point having a website unless someone can see it. So very soon started to focus on online visibility and the different ways that you can promote yourself online. Ac yw'r cyfnod yma yw'r cyfnod yn gweithio? Rydyn ni'n gweithio felly mae'r cyfnod yma. Rydyn ni'n gweithio. Mae'r cyfnod hwn yma yn y cyfnod yma i開始, mae'r cyrwfio'i enghreif yn y gweithio. Ac mae'n gweithio'n ddif yn fath o'r cyfnod a gwneud gyda'r gael cyfnod yma, ymgyrchu'r cyfnod, ymgyrchu'r cyfnod, ac rwy'n gweithio'r cyflogau. God knows why. So, is your website a form of advertising a good question really? My clicker's not working, yes it is. So, I put this picture up really because obviously this is a row of terrorist houses and I want you to kind of imagine that all of a sudden everyone in this house, each of these houses has just opened a business. Yeah, now what? Nobody knows from looking at these houses you would not know what they do, how to find them. For me that's kind of similar with what a lot of people do when they start to put websites online. They'll approach an agency or they'll approach someone who knows how to make websites and they'll launch the website. I've even had clients, I mean some of you probably be familiar with this where you'd be about to deploy a website and your client will say like, no don't put it online yet because I'm not sure about the wording and you're like, nobody's going to see it, you know. It's news, especially if it's a brand new domain but there is still that kind of TV comedy where you're going to put it online and everyone's going to start hitting it all of a sudden. So for me, this is what it's like when you launch a website. And there still seems to be this discrepancy with people between the fact that it's real people at the other end that are using these websites. You're not just communicating with robots, you're communicating with real users at the other end. If you go to the high street, this is what we say. So basically, you know that all these are shops, you know what they're selling. They've got shop fronts, they've got branding, they've got the products in the windows, you know what they're about. Now for me, when we talk to clients, it's kind of clear that you've got to be able to translate the physical space into the virtual space. And the answer to that is advertising. It's online advertising and I think I wanted to speak about it because especially amongst my fellow web designers and developers, those who don't deal with digital marketing, it's quite common for them to demonise it or say it's a big con or no I don't do that, it's just a Google want all your money kind of thing. And I just wanted to talk about that a little bit. So I love this quote, one of my favourite quotes. Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark, you know what you're doing but nobody else does. So you've got this website, you're not advertising it. You've set up this brilliant new business, you sell this great product and you've launched your website online but nobody else knows about it because you've not done anything to advertise it. I was speaking to a friend last night in the pub when I got here and she said to me, businesses didn't think anything a few years ago of paying £1,500 a year to advertising the yellow pages. It didn't flinch at it but people and clients quite commonly now would just go out of the mines if you even quote them that for a website especially like a new or micro business. They're like, why should it cost me that much? It's nuts to me because it's like you will pay your rent, you may not even have people who come to your physical space and you will pay rent for it but you don't think if you're doing your entire business online or people plan to do their entire businesses online just don't put this thought into what it takes to get seen online and for me what I try and explain is that the difference between traditional as we call it versus digital advertising isn't that different you're still reaching a person at the end it's just where are those people now those people used to look in the yellow pages now those people look at the phones or their iPads so if we can get our clients to understand that there's no difference between digital advertising and placing an ad in the yellow pages then that's part of the journey I keep pointing this this way but I need to be pointing it over there so another point is again many people don't think twice about traditional marketing and promotion so the yellow pages for me is similar to search advertising so when you type something in online you search for it you see your adverts right at the top of the page that is similar but then you have another form of advertising online it's popular on Facebook, Google, Twitter and it's display advertising and that is exactly the same as say a billboard or a promotional product or a print product and yeah most of us don't think twice about traditional marketing, promotion we've got business cards you know these long yards advertising all these promotional products print products and yet paid digital for me every day I still hear it demonised in the world of small business like oh I tried that I spent £100 and I got nothing for it it's a big con I've literally never had anyone say that about a batch of leaflets which may have cost more and had no response whatsoever so it's all about for me a lot of clients would expect to spend say £500 on digital advertising and they would come to me and say I need to see at least £2000 back from that I will literally always say right off the back that's great but don't you think that if I could just do that I'd be in the Bahamas and not sat here like servicing you but it's true wouldn't it be great to just say I'll put £10 into digital advertising and then I'll make £20 back immediately and yet that seems to still be the expectations of paid advertising and yet nobody would have that expectation of this kind of thing it's just like it's promotional it's promotional so because of that I find that a lot of our small clients just don't want to advertise another thing is they may have tried it they may have seen that all encompassing Google voucher where you get £75 whoops tried it sorry about this and you're completely burned through that £75 because they followed the Wizard of Online setup and then they just don't trust advertising again see I don't think that companies like Google and Facebook do themselves any favours but I imagine they must absolutely make a fortune from doing that and that's probably why why they don't really do much about it so just these are my tips there's so much to cover and I just want to say I've got half an hour here to talk and I couldn't possibly talk about SEO, AdWords and all paid advertising and even scrape the surface of it in that time but just a few tips for good online visibility and whoops so before you start most people have already got the domain but I don't know if you can see this but I typed in some of the to look for some of the worst domain names and these are actually real domains that they can all be read differently literally all of them I like Power Genitalia best that's just one of my favourites what's that all about so that illustrates my point really nicely think about your domain get it right before you put it online in all seriousness most of us who are web developers know this, your domain is many things it's your email address so if you email someone from one of those domains what are they going to think? auction shit dog it's key words people find you with so that could be quite worrying an indication of what and where you are IP anywhere and most of all it is part of your brand I'm glad you found those funny because I thought they were hilarious IP anywhere part of your brand's personality so that's the first thing really look at that domain I'm not going to ramble on too much about hosting and it is probably obvious to a lot of people and there's a lot of advice in here but a lot of clients often want to go for the cheapest possible hosting you will offer, as web designers often offer them a really good and robust solution and they'll come back and say but I can get it for £2 here so you know things we always say is well traffic, how many visitors you allowed how much storage you're going to need I think our largest website is less than a gig and even that I think is large because when I learnt to build websites long time ago our aim in uni was to get them less than a meg so can you imagine backups daily backups in case of a disaster do you get email boxes with this domain we always recommend a proper mail solution anyway just find a good hosting provider and really drill down with our clients as to why do you need a website everyone needs a website but it comes back to this remembering that you're dealing with actual people at the end you know do you need a website or is it just that you want to engage with people it's generally that you want people to read your articles buy something fill in a form you know you don't need a website you need customers so yeah drill down the why the web presence is a means to an end what is the end how do you want to get there some of the things we do to help our clients discover the goals is we've started doing something recently called impact mapping you may or may not have heard of it but you can check it out impactmapping.org and it helps clients get the content drill down by putting the goal right at the beginning there so we want to achieve this revenue at the end of the year this is course trying to sell courses so who would the people be that that would affect it might be put my teeth in I can't say it prospective students existing students, teachers or internal teams and what action would they need to take so all the different actions they might want to buy a course they might want to sign up for a repeat course recommend to their friends in structures might want to create more courses and then from there you can quickly start to get a series of real micro goals there and these actually turn into the structure of a website quite nicely so it might be a campaign an email campaign a landing page so it's a whole concept and you can check it out there impactmapping.org so I didn't want to spend too much going over all that because most of us here are know how to get a website online but I did think it was worth mentioning so the first thing is is SEO and the most obvious SEO tips for a website is title tags and meta so make sure that the title and description is what search engines normally display there are plugins out there if you're using WordPress for all your major content management systems and we all know the main ones there's a lot of people here today with different plugins for that if you use a link service or product in your blog post make sure that you link things internally within your site when it comes to external link there's a little bit of controversy on this now on bat linking but what we always say is if it's a quality bat link then it's worth it so go for quality schools governments, newspapers PR agencies are a good place to start if you can afford to use one and then again influencers and bloggers and with all web content the content is really important make sure it's regular make sure it's well worded worded for a human there's nothing worse than reading a page that's been optimised for SEO in an old hat way and it just doesn't read properly to a human I think we've all come across pages like that and keep it up to date because your up to date content is always ammunition for splintering onto lots of other networks yeah, so just a little bit about search engine and I just I'm staying in Finsbury Park and I just did a quick google search for breakfast in Finsbury Park and the first thing we've got now is the local listings now what's what's really interesting is as search engines have evolved organic content is being pushed further and further down the page especially if you're on a mobile and as you know most of us are now accessing the web on a mobile especially if we're making a search like this now I I did this search today on my desktop for the purpose of the slide but if I was searching normally that would be a mobile search for me so you've got the local listings these people have been astute enough to use google my business so one of the first things we always say to anyone who puts a website online is you need to hook it up with google my business it can make such a massive difference to your online visibility it can make that difference to your online visibility if I don't think I saw any of these on page one anywhere in an organic listing but they're there because they're on the map I had a client who has a company and I'm sure she won't mind me saying she's a clinical psychologist and her company was called Time or is called Time Psychology and when we launched that site she complained for a while after that she couldn't be found and we were saying you've got such a name where you're competing with Time magazine Psychology Department and you've got people looking for part time psychology positions and she was in control of her google page I think at the time or another agency and after having looked into it she had her old domain linking to the name of her company and as soon as we switched it out like the next day you typed her in as a company because that's what she couldn't find herself on and a few of her search terms she was right there then on page one so it's so important to get yourself on the map for visibility it can be one of those things that just makes so much difference further down, top organic result as often is, TripAdvisor and you have your title here and underneath we've got the URL and the meta description now this one hasn't been optimised it's just picked up what TripAdvisor's content content of the pages so you're getting a review there luckily it's a good review it is hooked into reviews but it's not really giving you much information so I mean personally I would see that and I would just carry on looking for something after after those results came this so there's a cafe called the front room was that there, yes it was so the front room cafe now you can see their meta descriptions have been thought about and put in properly so many people not saying anyone in this room but so many people and especially when they're adding pages to their own website or adding their own blog content don't think to make sure that these are filled in and that they actually say what's on the page and you know because it says breakfast in Finsbury Park then we've got those results right there I didn't go for breakfast there by the way it might be really good so but then beyond this what started to come up now is as I said before about mobile and mobile content and the more that happens and the smarter that search and more sophisticated that search engines have become position one you know is position one even enough now so I did another search just a really relevant one how do I install WordPress I do know how to do that by the way but yes so the first thing I see there is Google AdWords so obviously bidding on their own brand which is good practice really well put together ad using all the ad extensions that are possible all those extra things encourage users to click right on through although that's not really telling you how to install a WordPress website so you see that there obviously WordPress's own adwords team are bidding on their search terms so they're always appearing at the top of the search engine and that's probably not that costly to do and it usually isn't to bid on your own brand but then the top organic search is the codex is right down there I mean depending what you're looking at it's just way below the fold so let's put this into another business and think about your average user and their attention span which I think is around three seconds now online you know you've done all this work to get to position one and we've got this, we've got position zero um so that's what it's referred to position zero and if if you don't know about position zero and you haven't heard of that as a thing just google how to get position zero results there's a good article on moz.com that goes through that and explains a lot of the things that you can do and we see it a lot with movie times so if you start googling movie times or you look up an actor most of you will have noticed that you start getting these results that are not websites but they're actually part of google or they could have been pulled from a website but they're presented in a different way so this one the top one is called a featured snippet if you code the content of your website in such a way it can be picked up as a featured snippet so you can see that hostgator have got right there, right above so I mean this is really good because this will get a very high click through rate and this is going to get hostgator an awful lot of traffic probably way more than the codex so by putting a bit of helpful content in your website you can actually get this coveted position zero if you tweak it right and again related questions here so these will pertain to other people's websites that have this kind of featured snippet on them and there are a lot more than these but like I say you can get quite a bit of info about that on moz.com and it's really really interesting and yeah right down there we've got the organic result so just a few tips for rising up the search engine rankings and again it is about high quality text and it's about the text on your pages being relevant to the content of your website to how it's indexed again reaching out to influential people can help you an offering to write posts on other sites that's not as easy to do I don't find we've worked with companies who've then gone to other companies for SEO and they've done outreach and they've written articles wow have I been talking for that long yeah so be authentic and measure right I had a lot more to say but I'm just going to cover this then basically so this is the battle that we hear all the time for me so we do both PPC we do pay per click more than SEO to be fair and it seems to be a fight literally when I googled SEO and PPC I get these like fist fight pictures coming up and it's just like well you know why why does it have to be a fight to me both things are very important to a website's visibility and you get this you know SEO is slow it's free it's durable it's not free but if you do it yourself you either need to pay an expert who certainly isn't free you know and if you're doing it yourself it's taking a hell of a lot of time that's time that you might be better doing what you're really good at it isn't necessarily slow with latest updates of search engines changes in content can almost update on the fly it is durable you know and it is earned but for pay per click advertising they've said that it's expensive versus free it's not necessarily expensive and it can be a lot cheaper than say printed material because it's measurable because you can choose who sees it and because you only pay when somebody chooses to visit your website and you can also decide how much you want to spend every day and once for it being temporary this is another thing we hear well it's all we're paying but as soon as we switch it off we've lost everything we work with a client who does children's jelly snacks and he was quite a new brand they're called Naturelli and he didn't have barely any organic search at all and we ran some digital campaigns on his brand name with display advertising and this was one family launching a product within three months I think their organic search had grown by 400% and that it doesn't matter whether you switch the ads off or not people then know about this product that they didn't know about before they may have used it and then they're going to start searching so sometimes he runs ads sometimes he doesn't but that organic grows temporary advertising your brand even if you stop people still going to know about it it's best to keep going if you can but don't just assume that if you stop that everyone will forget about you so just to add to that Zmot is something that's known as the zero moment of truth and it's that point in time again just look that up somewhere you suddenly become aware of something that you weren't aware of before so yeah a good well rounded digital campaign it can permanently improve your search engine rankings it's so SEO, PPC do both everybody wins so few tips we've paid start small, watch it grow it's not scary if you knew it's great for building an audience and brand awareness work out spend based on how much you make per conversion try different platforms Facebook, Twitter, Google the good thing is you can be laser focused with your targeting you can target by postcode by keyword by demographic there's so many ways you can target and you can have very little wastage again re-targeting imagine showing your ads to people who've already visited your site and you know that they've got a level of interest imagine if every leaflet you gave out was to someone who might actually be ready to buy and then finally just seek advice, watch out for sharks I can have you at the top of Google in 10 minutes but is anybody going to be looking for the keyword that I've got you up there for so that is really relevant to ask I'm going to finish there because I have got a few more slides but they're all kind of social media and I've run out of time so thanks for listening I really appreciate it and if anyone's got any questions I'll try my best to answer them Any questions? Great talk and I just wanted to say that absolutely everything that you said resonated with my own experience over the last 13 years of setting up on my own and running an agency You mentioned the importance of the local listings Google Maps became Google Places Google Business became Google My Business now I'll put it this way You take on a client and then what do you say to the angry roofer who's phoning you up saying I used to appear on one of those three coveted slots and now I've gone and it must be something you've done I'll say a lot more than that but I'll just leave you to answer that Yeah there is that and you know to be honest that has not happened to me so I've not really thought to say anything about that but thanks for the warning So what do you feel how does Google decide who to put there if there's hundreds of competing businesses in a locality from everything I know it will be to do with the quality of the landing pages themselves I'm going to go out there and say there's so much to cover it I don't know everything about Google My Business but what I do know is if you put any other kind of ad out there or Google listing that the algorithm runs on the keyword match to the keywords on your website things like things like the site content you're putting me on the spot now because there's quite a few there's quite a few things that make up like ad quality that makes your pair higher and it's not and I know these listings are free so I oh my god typical Yeah I'm actually not sure I'm actually not sure what would make someone disappear off a map and it's not happened to me but we've not really tend to dealt with individual tradesmen so that's something I'll actually look into but yeah I don't know to be honest but great question sorry yeah I mean which kind of all plugs into like how much content and work is kind of done on that listing isn't it yeah go on right oh so I wasn't entirely wrong there yeah I've never I've never worked with like several of the same kind of business in the same kind of area so it has in all the years I've done it it's literally I've never been asked that question to be honest yeah and yet places like yell literally only pay Google to get higher up the search engine and you know they take a huge cut they are a premier Google partner which is a it's always a cause for annoyance amongst my other Google partner colleagues but yeah what's your question when you're talking to clients and they ask you what sort of budget or you're speaking to someone who's completely unrealistic about the fact that Google isn't free what sort of budgets do you work with realistically to give them a return on their investment so budget wise I we will work with right across the range my biggest spend is around has been around £1500 a day but I know there are much bigger spends than that and our smallest spends have been around £300 a month what we try and do with clients is sometimes I will straight out tell them it's not worth spending money until you've done this to your website or you know we've had we had someone ring us and say we want to be the biggest human resource number one go to site for this and we came back with a proposal I'm really lucky that one of my business partners joined me from Google and I've just gone like that with a lot of the Google stuff to him because he's worked there for years and he just knows inside out how it works so he came up with a okay you need a monthly spend of at least £7-8000 and they were like oh we've got one and he's like okay well you need to realign your goals then there's a lot of agencies out there that will just say they'll promise you the earth for your money but they're going to have a really high turnover you know some keywords and some industries you need to spend a lot things like the keyword mortgage can be up to £70 a click you know from looking from doing research that the average of what keyword could cost but then you can also choose how much you plan to spend on that keyword you can also do a lot with paid advertising where you are very specific that people have to type in an exact combination or certain words before the ad will appear so for example if someone was looking for office space you could negative out the word post so if someone typed post office your ad would not show for that and there's no it's not immediate you've got to optimise over several months before you can start seeing results and this is what we say it's the you know this is why we try and say to clients you've got to view it the same way that you would view putting an ad in a magazine or send it out a leaflet campaign you cannot just switch it on and expect it sometimes it works I think that's a really good point because most clients seem to be quite unrealistic about their expectations in terms of how quickly the actual campaign will begin to give them a return oh but you know we had a client approach us and say I just about spend £25,000 on a TV campaign but I want to go digital and we put this proposal together that managed that spend over a six month period and gave him all the what he could expect to see in terms of traffic who would see it and we sat down with him and he said well I've only got £1000 and so we're like ok well you know that's a lot different than what you said he just wanted to dip his toe in and I think the campaign had been running 2-3 weeks he'd spent about £500-600 we were getting a lot of click throughs to his site a brand new product in the UK like not many people had heard of it he was a children's mouldable clay and he rang me up quite angrily saying I was going to spend £25,000 on TV I'm not making any sales and I'm like did you spend £300 on Google and £300 on Facebook like what are you expecting and you do have this level of just complete anger directed at you that you've not suddenly pressed a button and made someone rich and managing expectations it's like any other form of advertising it's not a magic button last question just a small one I just wanted to know if you could put the slides online somewhere cos they were really interesting yeah absolutely I'll come and speak to me in a minute I'll email them to you anyone undernet is my you can tweet me I guess that's hang on so it's undernet or it's Andy with an eye at me by factory.com if you want to email me I'll happily send you slides is that the LinkedIn yeah I suppose so I've not done that before but yeah by all means cool that was a really good finish thank you oh thank you very much