 Hi everyone, welcome to Recover and Rise, our third session today. My name is Cheryl Tipton, I'm your host for this series of webinars. Susan, if you could just turn your camera off for a moment, if you don't mind. That would be lovely. Thank you very much. So Recover and Rise brought to you from West Sussex County Council and their partners. And today we're going to be talking about improving our websites with a brilliant presentation from Mike Humphrey. Before we start on that, I just want to talk to you quickly about Remo and the platform that we're on, which is a really brilliant networking platform. Just a couple of housekeeping points so everybody's aware. Once the presentations start, as you'll see, I'm sure you can probably see the same as me, everybody's little icons at the bottom of the screen. You can't actually move around whilst the presentations in action. But when we go to our networking session at one o'clock, you will be able to move around tables by simply double clicking on your table that you want to go on to. You'll also see that there's a help desk. So if you do get stuck, pop over to the help desk and one of us will be able to help you. There's a one-to-one area as well and there's a quiet area. It's a really fantastic platform. Once Mike starts speaking, there'll also be an opportunity to pop questions in the Q&A. If you could use the Q&A rather than the chat function, that would be great. And then I can try and feed Mike all the questions. On Tuesday, we had absolutely loads of questions, which would be brilliant. And anything he can't get time to answer today, he has promised me that he'll answer by email. So please do keep flooding those questions in. I've got a couple of slides to share with you very quickly, just about the series and what we're up to. So if you can, everybody can see, if you can see my slap, yep, lovely. So Recover and Rise, obviously, we're all about activating online and getting everybody online and to make the most of their business online. We've got four series in this program. The first one, obviously getting online. Then we go into customers and marketing, systems and productivity and growth and expansion. So if you want to, you can actually book onto everything, which is absolutely brilliant. And if you do enjoy the webinars and you do think it's really good, if you could tell your contacts and get everybody to join in, that would be even better. It's a completely free program. So you also benefit from support from our digital champions who I'm going to introduce to you later on. And there's lots of also grant funding that we can signpost you to. So there's lots of free support and lots of really good stuff. So we're here today improving your website. And we're going to hear from Mike Humphrey about just really how to improve your website. How to top tips really to make things work better, how to analyze. And Mike's got a case study also where they got involved to help somebody improve their website. Mike is hanging around, so he's going to be here for our networking session as well. Let me pop those away. And without further ado, Mike, would you like to come up onto the screen and start your presentation for us? You just need to pop your camera and your mic on Mike. Aha! You can see your presentation across to you. There you are brilliant. So Mike has been working in the digital space for over 20 years and helping all sorts of companies online. Before forming DigiBubble, Mike worked for all sorts of organizations, AOL, Financial Times, OpenX and Microsoft. So over to you, Mike. Thank you. Thank you, Cheryl. And good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for your time. So yeah, as Cheryl's alluded to, we're going to be having a quick walk-through how to improve your website. The fundamental here is that we've come at this from more of a strategic level. So just giving you some thought processes and some preparation exercises before you start entering into actually the execution of your plans. And I know that there's a number of seminars within the series that are going to be covering things like e-commerce, security, marketing. So yeah, without further ado, we go into it. So we have a quick look here at what's coming up. So we'll do a quick introduction into me and my business just to validate why I'm sitting in front of you today. And then we'll have a look at the most important element for me when considering success online is how you plan for that success. So looking at your preparation, where you look at your measurements, what your key performance indicators are and how you understand where your return on investment is coming from. Then we'll have a look at the core fundamentals. So these are areas that you can do very quickly and easily with yourself or alongside your developers or your marketing teams to improve the bare bones, the fundamentals of your website. So around media, photos, videos, content, some SEO thoughts. And then some of the most important is call to actions. We've also got some tools for you. So we're having a look at what we've got as an ROI calculator to calculate your ROI. I recently launched a health checker tool that we've got on our website. And also we share in a keyword research tool so you can really start to understand what's happening and why. And then we've got a quick case study to go through of where we've applied some of these thought processes to a client's business locally. So quickly looking at us, we are DigiBubble. We are a full surface digital agency. We're based just inside or just outside Manor Royal on the Beehive Ring Road. We fundamentally started in 2006. So Keith, who's on the call, is a technical lead. My background is digital advertising and marketing. And between the two of us, we both had a broad range of skills that we found are in demand and increasingly so with the current climate. We both had experience in project managing large digital projects. And what we identified is that there is a consistent issues between the requirements of the business and what their service provider actually gave them. So from that, we got some real good ground early 2015. And by the end of 2015, we'd both quit full-time employment and DigiBubble was formed. Fundamentally, what we offer is a central controlling hub for your digital touch point. So your website is functional, it's secure, it's well maintained and technical, so you know that you've got a peace of mind that it's well looked after by a professional grade equipment. We then work to evolve and understand what the client needs and evolve how they present themselves online. And we do that through various digital advertising approaches, some enhanced functionality and tools like e-commerce systems, payment gateways, booking, lead generation. Key for us is analytics and reporting. So we put Google Analytics in or advanced analytics tools in that allows us to really reinforce where we're seeing success, track that return on investment and make adjustments to the overarching strategy for you to ensure you see that success online. We also offer content management. So writing that content, providing blogs, news, thought leadership and media. And we also police and maintain third party management. So how you work with MailChimp, how you work with the link partnerships for your SEO, Google My Business, these sort of platforms. So that's us with DigiBubble. Our hookline is that we are your formula for digital success. And part of that is what we're about to talk about here. So the first stage of improving your website is planning. So in the previous series, we had looked at the fundamentals of how we build and technically manage a website and what you need to consider and what your options are in terms of how your website is built. So if you do need some information, if you didn't see that presentation, let anyone in the team know here and we can get that to you. I'm happy to have a chat through those elements. So now we're taking the level that we've assumed you've got a good website that you're relatively happy with. You're looking to improve it and how we go around that. So the first sign of preparation and planning is that your improvement should be calculated and researched. If you are going into your website and making adjustments on the fly without any real insight or justification, so you haven't looked at analytics, you haven't looked at market trends for the season, these sporadic adjustments are really going to limit your success and you'll never really be able to signpost exactly what the winning point was because you never really understood when and why you made the changes. So identify your website goals, identify your audience and really put a pin in what makes you unique. So there needs to be something that separates you from the competition and that allows you to broadcast that. So measuring digital marketing is key. So if you hear what we're having a look at is a quick look at how it was. So 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago, the markets really evolved in the last five years in particular. So your return on investment primarily in the past was based on revenue and an increase in sales. If I ran an ad online, did it make more money? That was the black and white. There really wasn't appropriate analysis. There was a bit of analytics. There wasn't the heat mapping available. There wasn't tools like Search Console within Google available that allows you to really break down what is going on, how people get to your website and what they do. A lot of marketing tools assumed success. Well, we ran a campaign on the 3rd of March and we saw a sale on the 4th. So it's got to be that campaign we run. It's an assumption. So now tools are allowing you to actually pinpoint that to the minute where that came from. So based off of the historic elements of digital marketing, it was difficult to track success. And from that, it was difficult to really shape a strategy moving forward or a plan of attack for how you evolve. How it is now is that we've got huge range of analytics tools that are available for you. And we can break down your positions in Google Organic Search. We can see what percentage of top page of Google the amount of times you've appeared on Google as a percentage in position one. Websites now aren't where they can be. Just a standalone static source of information. But now they're a central hub. They control multiple digital touch points, email marketing, SEO, pay-per-click. All of these buzzwords and terms are all coming through. So now to win online, you need to have real good control of that central centralized hub and make sure that it's communicating with your digital touch points efficiently and the tools that you're using are appropriate. The systems and these digital hubs are allowing real time tracking so we can see minute by minute what the immediate uptake of a social media campaign might be and how quickly that drops off. So you're allowed to influence your advertising regularity. You're able to split test and align your reports and your insights into what worked and what didn't work and align two ideas within the business and then come to a conclusion at the end. And we're also able to look back historically. We're able to really see, right, OK, this is what went on in this time last year for Christmas. We know that fidget spinners were the trend this last year this time is going to be those little pop things. We can start seeing what season do these trends come in and how well do these trends react through Christmas or Easter or these areas. So we're really able to get some good level insight into how the history of your industry works online. So in terms of understanding your objectives and looking at key performance indicators, it's key that you identify what is success, what does success looks like. So fundamentally, a lot of the times this comes down to revenue. So if we run in an e-commerce shop or anything that's like a lead generation, how many times the phone rings, you need to think about is revenue your main success driver? Not everything is tied to that. What we might be looking at is share a voice actually has the number of branded search, the amount of people searching for my company online gone up. With the right tools and the right controlling hub, we're able to really give some insights into whether that's right or not. And if you do focus on that revenue when you're looking at your key performance indicators, what you could be doing isn't really impacting on the true effectiveness of your marketing. If you haven't planned and you haven't looked at what the length of your lead time looks like, so it takes six months for a client to come in, but you're only focusing on the immediate revenue within two or three months of running a campaign, then you're going to be attributing failure to something that we don't really know whether it's one or not. So really have a look and think about what are my key performance indicators, these KPIs, and am I able to attribute a revenue value to that? And if I can, that starts to build the foundations for how we start to improve and involve your presence online. So some digital key performance indicators, just a few examples here. So you can have a look at unique monthly visitors, how many people have clicked through your website over a set period of time. We can look at a cost per lead. So how much does it cost for you to get the phone to ring or for somebody to pick up to complete an inquiry form and you have that received in your inbox? Your cost per acquisition. So how much does it cost you to acquire a new customer? If you're in the e-commerce world, looking at your average order value can be quite key. So we know that we've got 10 customers and they spend an average of 30 pounds. And we know roughly speaking, we've got 300 pounds to play with to try and get 10 people through the door. Lifetime value is key. So if you have returning customers that come back again and again and again, you've got that real good sticky business or customer commitment, then look at that lifetime value because then you can be looking at spending more to on board because you know that two or three years down the line, that's going to easily make up for the initial outlay. And then lead to close ratio is very much an internal process, but there's elements we can do to improve the quality of the leads that are coming through to your business. So how many leads do we need to send you for you to close a new client? If that's one in 10, that's relatively low. But if we increase the quality and get that to one in three, then we've made a real big step forward in terms of the success you'll see from your marketing without necessarily having to spend more on doing it. We just, you're able to target more efficiently and really work with your audience more to increase the quality of your leads. So one more of these is that these, the key performance case, these are particularly around brand. So if you don't have an immediate purchase that could be made or a contact form or a contact point, what we can have a look at is your branded search lift. So like I said previously, how many people are searching for your business online? And then from that, what happens? Do they come on the site and disappear? Do they look at a competitor? We can find that information out. We can have a look at your average position. If within organic in particular, are you position one against your branded term? And if you're not, we can start looking at a performance indicator within your marketing to get you to that top position. And then also look at non-branded click-through rates. Really separate out your branded search and your non-branded search. So if you're an optician, so we look at all the opticians as a keyword, the branded search lift can be easily measured and influenced because that's your branded term. But glasses online is going to be a very different kettle of fish. So you really need to have a look at the percentage of interest you have in your keywords, your organic listings around non-brand related search terms and the respective click-through rate. So moving on to this, we just have a quick look at ROI. There is another seminar happening within the series. There's looking at ROI in some great depth. But fundamentally, your return on investment is monitoring the profit generated from marketing and weighing that up against what it costs for you to create and deploy that marketing campaign. And there's a little formula that works to give you there that gives you just a rough percentage about what your return on investment. We generally see ROI comfortably for something like e-commerce. We'd expect to see a 10 times return on what our client is seeing from the advertising they're putting into the system. And I'll go into that in a bit more detail in the case study because we've got a case study for an e-commerce client that will be joining us. So just a quick look at what you can anticipate in terms of conversion rate and that return on investments for some of the main advertising mediums out there. So Google AdWords is a market leader and is well established. The conversion rate as an average across Google is around 2.4%. If you have 100 clicks, you'd expect to see two, maybe three clients come in through those 100 clicks. The top 25% of advertisers, so the people that are positioned highly, a bit more aggressively, are a little bit more switched on to how their approach to digital are seeing almost double, a little bit more than double the conversion rate. The top 10 are seeing double of that again. So the more you spend, if you spend it intelligently, you can have a real big impact on your bottom line in terms of the incremental increase of the interest you see in your business. Bing is a very different creature. So while Google controls about 80% of the search market, Bing is a very different audience. We tend to see that it's an older market. They're less technically engaged. So fundamentally Bing within the industry is looked at the users that didn't know how to change their default search engine. But that is reflected in how they behave online. And you see that within the top 10% of the advertisers there, there's a really big increase in the amount. So if you get into Bing and you're in the top 10% position on Bing, you're going to start seeing results that far outweigh Google. What you need to balance is the fact that Google's got a lot more volume. So these are the two areas. It's a quality and a quantity argument between Bing and Google. But split test, work at them, there's two independent audience buckets and change your wording, change your messaging accordingly. For email marketing with the birth of GDPR, the quality of the data that's sitting behind a business's email marketing list has increased. And from that, there's been a noticeable increase in the open rate from emails. So around 42% of a quality data list from direct customers would be opened. And we see around an 8.3% click-through rate from content within the emails into the respective destination pages. So that's a quick run-through of just how you plan and there's some of the key areas you need to consider. So now what we look at is how we improve your website and what the fundamental, we've got three key areas that we'll be looking at here. The first is your photos and your videos and the media that you choose to use on your website. We covered this a little bit in the last one, but to go through it again is vital. Having your photographs be authentic and genuine. So Shutterstock and Pixabay, these sort of areas of stock images are really suitable for a business. They're a great tool. But if you're really trying to send over the message that you're genuine, you're trying to get that audience buy into your business, you're trying to trigger those emotional values within your audience, then you need to be genuine, you need to be trustworthy and you need to be authentic and that can be reflected in your media. So the photos you use, if you've got team photos, get into the office, take photos of your team. If you've got a product range, take a picture of them in situ, on the shelves in your shop with customers next to them being interested. Avoid the stock images. When you control your media and your photos, work with some branding elements of a consistent color overlay, a consistent filter, some element that allows you to be consistent with your style and branding across your digital touch points. So both the website, email marketing, any display advertising that you run, having that brand consistency gives the consumer the peace of mind that they're sitting within the same sphere, they're always working with the same business, it's not a different department, it's not outsourced to a third party ghostwriting, lead gen system, it's consistent and that really does make a lot of difference when you're trying to improve your website. Quality is key. So if you are taking your own photos, let's not just do it through an iPhone or anything like that, get your good camera out and if you don't have the tools or the confidence to be able to do it yourself, then commit to a videographer, a creative team or a photographer to provide that content for you. Make sure it's relevant. So you signpost people around your website and then the media reflects the point of the pages or the media that they're absorbing, make sure that that content's relevant and always consider that file size and the type of media that you're using. If you build content onto your website, photographs is a good example, videos is another good example and adjust the large raw files that you've just plugged in from your SD card and dragged them straight onto your website. There are going to be enormous files for your website to manage and you'll have to increase the load speed of that website and it's going to start to negatively impact the user experience on your website. So really consider that file size, compress the images and resize the images so that they're appropriately sized but also the file size is quite small. So keep that under a few megabytes at least. So content in SEO. So SEO is really key. So where you've got paid advertising on a search engine takes the predominant place. The rest of that page is ranked according to a number of variants that the search engines have put into place. So SEO is fundamentally the practice of getting targeted traffic to your website from those organic listings. Generally speaking, organic listings see a higher conversion rate. They see higher customer engagement. They see a higher click-through rate and SEO is very good for establishing trust. So if you do it right, the audience knows that you've been put there because you've met a number of predetermined parameters from the search engines. You haven't just paid the highest number to get to the top of that page. You've committed to good content. You've committed to researching keywords that are applicable and you've also communicated a marketing message intelligently and that really does make a big difference to the traffic delivery onto your website. So we're firm believers that your content strategy and your SEO should work in tandem. You need to have a look at what keywords are working and are most popular at that time of year or work a few months ahead of yourself. So now we've got an eye on Christmas. So what's the keywords that people are going to be looking for at Christmas this year? And then what you start doing is building content around that to make sure that you make reference to these focus keywords that you really want to drive traffic through. And at the end of this presentation, I've got a few links for some tools that will give you this insight. Research extensively. So don't be afraid to sit there and scroll through other people's insights. You know, two, three years ago, what were the trends? What did people search? Look on the Google AdWords, the keyword planner and really understand what impact seasonality you have. So we want to make sure that we, if we're going to go into the efforts of writing and committing to content, we want to know that this has got a purpose and we know that we've got an end goal. There is a KPI there that we're trying to achieve. Again, authenticity turns up. So make it original because if you start getting flagged against plagiarism, if you start getting flagged against duplicate content from platforms like LinkedIn or something like that, you'll get penalized. So make your content purposeful, but also make sure you load your content onto your website first. Don't load it into LinkedIn and Facebook and then do your website because the time stamps will attribute Facebook to all of your hard work. So your website is the central hub and then what we do is we use your website to communicate what you want to Facebook, not vice versa. So manage your brand and non-brand strategies separately. So we mentioned in a previous slide, it's key to make sure that you've got a strategy for getting yourself and your own company name at the top of organic search. What we then do is once you're there, let's look at the main keywords that we want to target ourselves, these non-branded keywords that are a little more generic and competitive, but they're the ones that we really want to start benchmarking the benchmarking success against and build your content, build your SEO into the very fabric of your content strategy. This should be something where you can build out a list of 100 keywords you're going to be targeting over the next year and start thinking about the titles of the blog posts you're going to write or the descriptions of the products you're going to be putting into the website and the lead up to Christmas because we know that this group of keywords is very popular. Really give the terms and the keywords in particular a real good thought about what people are going to be searching for, why and when. Moving on there into calls to actions is surprisingly common that we have clients come to us that will never ask their customers to do anything online. Customers land on a website and actually don't know what they're doing or why. If you don't have an online shop and you're not telling me to call you, I'm a little bit lost as an end user to think about what I'm going to do. So get those call to actions and then don't be afraid to signpost customers into exactly what they're there for. Shop now, have a discount code. Call us for a free order into your brand strategy and we have it with our health checker is a really good opening conversation part so we encourage people to complete these questionnaires and engage with the business. So make sure your audience knows why they're on your website and align that call to action to a KPI. So we know that somebody completing a lead inquiry on your form has got a value because we know 10 of those are going to turn into one piece of new business with a lifetime value of 3,000 pounds. We're starting to get an idea of how we're asking customers online to work with us and what the value of those positive actions are. So a few tips for your call to actions is be clear. Everybody wants to just be direct. Tell them why you're there high. Click here to buy now. Click here for a free consultation. Use contrasting colours. Really make that call to action stand out. Don't be afraid to have it flash at them and tell them that this is what we want you to do. You know, thank them be polite but you can still ask them quite nicely what you want them to do. Understand the value of that action and the value of those APIs and broadcast the process. So if it is okay, click here for a quote. When they do click there, communicate to them what's going to go on. Thank you for completing this form now. One of our team will be back to you within 24 hours with a full breakdown of how we can help. Track and monitor that success and put conversion tracking on thank you pages. So we're able to then say, okay, somebody searched online for website quotes. They've been updated on our website. They've gone into this particular page has got a call to action for a website health checker. They've completed the inquiry and then our pixels fired. So we're able to see the complete journey and then we're able to start eliminating areas that we think we're losing interest or we're losing traffic and start to increase the lead quality that's coming through to your business. So always test it. Always analyse it and always evolve it. It's very rare that as marketers they're nailed on the head first time. It's a process of learning and we do that alongside you and your business goals and what your perceived success is. So that's cool to action. So what I'm going to have a look at here is we've got a customer that we recently took on. So we've been working with them for about six months now. So it's a customer called Flux Farms. Some of you may know them. They're the manufacturers called Flux Linseed Oil which for me was an unknown area. An enormous business with huge vats and a warehouse just south of Horsham. Well established business. Claire the business owner has always driven the business through her passion, through her experience, through events that she goes to picking up the phone and talking to people. So it's been very much focused on her expertise and her picking up the phone and pulling into place orders. Only 20% of sales came from her online platform. She built the website herself with a few helps over the years. So when we got into it, it was a bit clunky. It was a bit all over the place. She had very limited tools and she had very limited understanding of how to really make those tools work for her business. Our recommendation was that she really needed to go at a website and do a full go over it. It had been years in the making and it had been tested and just googled and learned. So it's a bit of a mess and it still is today. But she was hesitant to evolve into a new full spec online product until she'd seen that online and started making some headway to justify the costs of evolving that digital platform. And for us that's fine. We come in from a marketing perspective. It's not all about just building the website from the get go. We can work with the tools you've got and with the right tracking and analytics we can really start to build insight and forecast what success looks like in the future. So our recommendations of the bat is that we need to start looking at SEO and we need to look at content. She had a tremendous amount of knowledge that you could only ever get from her farmers market or if you found. So what we thought is well that's build this into content that you can share online and position yourself as a thought leader within the world of cold pressed linseed oils and the health benefits that that has over time. Highlight the products alongside that so we know that linseed is a good source of omega-3. We know that it's good for gluting in tolerant if they've got porridges and these sort of things that they do for plant-based diets, vegan diets, people on especially high protein diets but vegetarian and start using your content and your SEO as an education piece to actually inform people before they get to the phone call, before they get to Claire give them that base level of information and no stage had Claire really given any thought to what success looks like online looking at what the markup within her product was, what percentage of a profit she wanted to spend on marketing. She was just like I'll just have the sales as long as they come I'm happy and she looked just at the bottom line yet business is still good we'll carry on so we really took some time to start benchmarking what success looks like and what is the percentage of a profit that goes into marketing what do her margins look like after we keep the lights on and all the staff paid so we built out these success measures and then we started strategizing about how we can utilize paid advertising with Google and Bing and we also started to introduce affiliates because she's got a lot of passionate people around her introducing people but with no real benefit for them so an affiliate scheme for her and her network of people really started allowing us to use this as a marketing tool and email email your current customers thank them for your customer business email them if they've not shot with you let them know that Christmas is coming let them know we've got back to basics back to school lunchbox bars lunchbox bars that are really healthy so what we did is we onboarded direct affiliates we are able to calculate that we need to pay them 3% of a basket value for their affiliates 3% of whatever they introduce since May we've introduced 23 affiliates to the business and now over the last 4 months we've been generating around 1,800 pounds of revenue for that business that was previously never accounted was never part of anything pay-per-click advertising she's got a modest budget of 800 pounds a month that she's spending but we're now seeing a 10 times return on that so her Google in particular will generate between 8 and 10,000 pounds of sales on the website which sounds good but for us that's about the bare bones of where that should be if we factor in that she's really only looking at 30% of that is profit and then she's got to take in 20% of that is going to actually be marketing budget we're about on the nose for what that is looking like as a decent consistent return the key one there now is that there's been a consistent formula that we've been holding firm for a few months so now next time we have a conversation about how we increase customers we know that we could double the input of advertising spend on Google and know that that's going to still give us that 10x return back anything else we evolve out of pay-per-click we use as a separate budget and we don't disturb this fundamental foundation of the website we've also seen 300% increase in organic sales so where she's been sharing these thought leader pieces where she's been educating people that linseed oil is a really good source for omega-3 there's also a number of diets and specialist diets there's something called the budwig diet very niche but incredibly popular now that she's getting ranked against these specialized areas and her products are able to fill the gap in the market for flower supplements or oats people that don't want oats would rather go with linseed porridges or something like that these guys are coming to and finding organically because they're there doing their homework to find out what's the best product for them so the future is what we're looking at now so again another couple of months we're going to be looking at modernizing and expanding her digital presence so she is agreed that now is the time and the efforts we've made to improve what we've currently got it's justified us modernizing and expanding her website in particular looking at specialist areas like pets it's really good apparently linseed oil if you've got a horse it's good to put on the hay it does something with horses but we didn't really want to present that on the website because I don't want to feel like I'm buying horse food it was the area so now we're starting to build out the linseed pet store we're starting to look at budwig diets and specialist diets and personal health connections with personal trainers and plant-based bodybuilders these specialist diets are really gaining ground and she's planning on building a vertical for each one of these each with a separate online shop selling the same products but built on a different skin we're extending the advertising partners so we know now that where we've worked with affiliates directly and we've got 20 or so direct affiliates that are working with us now there's networks that can open that up to partners that we would never be able to reach into the past real scale on affiliate networks working with large scale publishers online working with partners within the advertising space to bring and present the creatives to a much broader market based on a commission on KPI there is a CPA cost per acquisition that cost is 3% of basket value what we're doing is expanding upon that consistent performance so we know that next month that budget is being doubled and we also know that there is focus on new campaigns where we're starting to look at trade partners and wholesale where we're starting to work these into having larger bulk buy opportunities so she can start working to having these inside retail establishments so that's our case study so the last part of the site I just wanted to leave this next slide up here for for anybody to take note I'm going to be circulating this around the group but the website health checker is a tool that we've recently developed and it just gives you scores about what your website is how well it's performing so against all performance things like speed whether or not you've got page load times whether you've got the right sort of navigation on the site we also do look at SEO elements so you being ranked and found properly by websites is your security in line is key and we also look at your mobile responsiveness so these four areas come to give you a set percentage so you'll see a percentage score a grade score that we give you and there's a inquiry form there that if you send that through to us one of our team will get on the phone and talk you through where you can make improvements and if or why we can we can support you and we've also got an ROI calculator so this is a automated calculator that will if you input the amount of users you've got on your website and the number of inquiries your websites currently generating the percentage of profit that of your of your overall sales that goes to to marketing answer a few questions and what this gives you is a rough plan of what you could afford to be spending per click to get people onto your website so what does what is the cost of one visitor on your website for you to to see a consistent success according to the parameters within there the keyword research tool that is a Google tool so you may need to open an account if you don't have an account with Google you might need one but that keyword planner will give you all of the forecast in and all of the keyword recommendations not only against your website but also what the competitors are doing and it also breaks down what keywords online are generating the most interest and the most competitive they're the tools that we've got available for you and I'm happy to jump on a call and talk you through any of these and just explain it in a little bit more detail and fundamentally that is us that is the end of my presentation and thank you everybody for your your time and your ears. Thanks Mike that was actually brilliant again thank you and second time this week Mike joined us so thank you ever so much for your time and again I've got a few questions for you if you don't mind starting off with a question about SEO actually one of our guests is updating their SEO monthly that's taking about two months to land on to Google he's asking how often should he be updating his SEO keywords? I'd say the SEO keywords go with new content is the key like you say if you're running content monthly that's more than enough it does depend on the industry if you're a news outlet or you're a large publisher providing a lot of articles then more often but for the most part updating your website monthly with fresh content around keywords that are appropriate for that time of year is more than okay we generally go through a bit of an audit on our clients SEO at least every three months just to make sure that the keywords that we had put in there a few months ago are they getting ground are they sticking are they still appropriate can we remove that keyword from the piece of content and put it into something new and sort of change the direction of that piece a little so yeah I'd say new content at least once a month if not more if you can but then a good review and a good dig into it every three to six months okay thank you and Mike you just mentioned that you do have some review tools on your website that we can signpost to another question I actually just asked that they've heard about companies that do reviews of websites for free what do you think of them are they helpful or are they a bit of a con well I say they're only a bit of a con if you're giving me money really so if it's free advice go and get it and just use it to inform your decision so we do a health check there's lots of health checks we do use it as a lead gentle but what it allows us to do is have a central point of conversation if we know that you're looking you're concentrating on your performance or your SEO or your mobile responsiveness and it allows us to focus on what areas that we feel they'd need to evolve into in the future so it's actually really good tool to give yourself and equip yourself with I'm coming to you Mike and I want to build my website but I'm really I really want to focus on my paid speed and my mobile responsiveness because that's where I'm struggling at the moment if you go in equipped then you're going to it's just going to come off better all round really so yeah sure okay and there's quite a few tools out there aren't there that people can access for free themselves like Google Analytics and so on and so forth so that would be a really good starting point wouldn't it before you go perhaps to a professional or as you say you could hop onto somebody who's offering support and advice and take that information for yourself yeah and you could and there's enough developers out there like we're always happy to sit there and sit on a phone with anyone and go through it because fundamentally if we give our client even our prospects just a bit more insight and a bit more information and give them the confidence that actually this guy isn't just out here trying to make a quick bug he's actually looking long term so we look at our clients what do you want this to look like in a year the web build element of it is fundamentally the easy part really if you've got all your content in line you know what you want to do you employ us we've got Keith my business partner can knock out anything you want online that can be quite quick and quite painless then what happens is you start thinking well now I've got that I've committed my spend but actually making that work that's where the real journey is that's where the really enjoyable part of the process is is evolving that product so if you've got a feeling that your web designer hasn't got the marketing support to make your digital project fly then you've probably got someone there that I'd say go and find someone that's got a blend of the skills that you need that would be the key one for me yeah brilliant two more questions if I may because I know we're running short of time but Jackie's asked you mentioned an industry open rate on emails 42% I think she missed that you mentioned it earlier in your presentation and she's asking is that B2B is it B2C is it on sales emails, newsletters, single-blast announcements what sort of where are you getting that sort of open rate from I think that I think it's quite high open rate isn't it yeah that is a high that is that's from MailChimp from a stat that I found at the back end of last week and they've seen that there's been a huge uptake some MailChimp are really flying through lockdown and I think what people have started to really consider is there is the engagement of your existing audience that everybody generally bangs the new business drum right let's go get new audience new people where's our next customer coming from they're probably sitting in your computer somewhere already they've got return customers and you can real add value to those so what MailChimp's been saying is that that's what's been getting the the traction online so processes like GDPR and people being really conscious about data privacy online means that your email quality is increased especially from MailChimp they really they rule privacy with privacy with an iron glove you really can't get past it so these people are bought into your business they've opted in the appropriate means you're familiar with your customers you're offering discounts you've got varying ways of engaging with them online so that's seeing a consistent increase of the open rate of emails and seeing as high as 42% primarily from what we were seeing that came from a consumer element and it was around e-commerce but we see similar we see similar systems to that doing just as well things like sending blue and all this sort of stuff and just on Vicki's point there I've seen we do like MailChimp we think MailChimp is a market leader but other email providers are available really so it's down to think about the tools what are you trying to do and match that to the tool that you need to work with yeah absolutely and generate some loyalty from your current customers and Lisa asks if you have a member section on your website with a login does SEO exclude this content as it's not available to everyone it does because it's hidden away from search and if you've got a member's area you don't want Google sign posting to that member's area because it will bypass all your logins so if you're doing exclusive content for members only and someone searches it and it comes up on a page it sort of eliminates the point of members only so you can within most websites you're able to tell the search engine don't index this page so within your members area you say right don't index these members only area and Google will leave it alone hmm that's interesting actually it's very interesting two more before we let you go how important is it to have a blog I think we talked about this on Tuesday actually yeah a blog is a really good way of controlling the content that you're the quick content that you're putting on this these article pieces news pieces insights thought leadership whatever happens to be rather than going in and playing around with the real guts of your website like the foundations of it page layouts and all of this and making pages upon pages upon pages to share this content run it as a blog and then have automatic sections within your page that references that blog so you put a category in call it headlines I don't know what the term would be and we know that that goes across there's four stories across the top of your homepage so then you guys sort of as the end users of your website the owner think right all I've got to do is go in write a blog I can still do all of my SEO scores it still builds a page but it's set within a fixed template and then we can populate the bulk of the website with that content additionally rather than getting in and thinking we're going to mess around with the whole function of the website for a news article so for us blogs are key if you're going to be regularly sharing news insights thoughts and case studies testimonials then yet get a blog system going thank you last but not least cost this is a difficult question to answer I know but for a new business with a limited spend what would be a good starting budget for SEO I think you can do a bulk of it yourself and I think you're probably going to be more qualified than me to go in and do the keyword research because you already know the market you're one up so if you then came to me and said I want somebody to manage why SEO write this content we work with a couple of copywriters and it ranges from a hundred pounds for a blog up to five six seven hundred pounds for a blog or into thousands for full grade website writes with all of this in mind so yet focus on what it is you want what is it what is it you're doing it for and do a bit of research with a few free tools there and go into the conversation armed and predetermine your own budget because it's such a wide variety see if you go to okay I want I want you to look after my SEO might but I don't want to spend more than a hundred pounds a month but okay cool we'd work something out with with shape a package around and how to evolve that and work back with you I mean there's just so many SEO tools online as well aren't there mods.com do a beginner's guide to SEO and AHRFs I think is the other one so there's an awful lot that you can do yourself isn't there as well as you know getting support through this program too yeah I'd say get the foundations do the best you can to build your own foundation your own knowledge and just equip yourself and don't worry about jumping into a load of tools whether it's free or not free google keyword planner and that will give you a breakdown of the last 12 months keyword activity around particular keywords and like an ROI calculator so you know roughly speaking what the value you've got for a new visitor landing on your website you've got you've got that map and then they say call around talk to a few people take the hours consultations with companies like ours and go and talk to all of these and you'll soon see whether or not they've got the idea if that synergy if you start feeling that bounce if they're excited about it if they're talking about the evolution you think okay this is something I can commit to the Guinness top will always flow brilliant thank you and thank you for your time Mike so as I say you're happy to stay around aren't you doing networking half hour so if you have any more questions for Mike do please stay on and chat with him at one of our tables for a minute we'll say we'll say bye and cheers thank you cheers Mike thank you so just like to quickly finish up because we'll go into our networking session but I'd just like to quickly just pop my slides up again and share with you the next couple of webinars just so you know what they're all around so if you can see that's Mike's there with me so next oh we've jumped one sorry so Tuesday next week September 21st we've got Chris White coming to talk to us he's a police detective inspector and he's going to talk to us about web security so alongside building your website and thinking about all of the things that go into that he's going to talk about how you can keep your business and your data safe online and hopefully give you some confidence to challenge when something doesn't quite look right it's a massive subject and so Chris is going to come along and talk to us on Tuesday again at midday and then next Thursday we've got Malcolm who's going to pop on and have a chat in a minute talking to us about e-commerce so if you want to sell online what to do where do you start what approaches are good what does e-commerce look like and he's going to give us a brief intro to measuring performance so two really worthwhile webinars again next week and then just very very quickly because I know you're probably all keen to have a shuffle around and have a chat I just want to bring you back to the support that's available I mentioned it earlier in the week we've got free business support from the business hot house and grant funding we've got business grants from low case and we've got knowledge exchanges from RISE so there's lots and lots of grants and funding and support available out there at the moment to help businesses get online and to help really help everybody prosper post-COVID last but not least our digital champions there's seven experts that are involved in this series and every week we're going to meet a few of them they are here to give you specialist support and they are here to give you up to eight hours of free support depending on what subject it might be e-commerce it could be website it could be securities we've talked about it could be strategy it could be planning it could be whatever you want so I'll do a quick intro to them now for you so you know who to talk to but do take this up it's a really good part of this program to get you talking to somebody who can really help you completely free of charge so if I move out of my screen and pop back over here I've got I think four digital champions in the room Susan, Malcolm, Rob and Lisa so let's see if we can bring you all on screen together if you all want to pop your cameras on and your mics on there's Malcolm, there's Susan there's Lisa Brilliant, there should be one more Rob, yay so if in turn let's go with Malcolm first because he's just because he's top of my screen just a quick 30 seconds Malcolm on what you can offer if somebody looks to take business support with you Sure, hi everyone so I'm Malcolm I've spent more than 20 years in digital and mostly e-commerce working agency side supporting about 500 e-commerce businesses through marketing, website development and e-commerce site development five years as head of e-commerce for FMCG and luxury brands dealing with budgets and customer acquisition and marketing and email activity and for the last three years I've worked as a freelance specialist helping direct to consumer product based brands grow their e-commerce revenues and so I've worked with Coaster Capital for about a year now as well providing workshops and help and resource for those types of businesses Brilliant, so you're all about e-commerce so you're the man to come to for e-commerce Excellent, thank you Susan, Susan you're next on my screen I'll just go around my screen Hi, I'm Susan Winchester I've got about 15 years experience working in a business marketing strategy previously worked in the financial services industry and for the Department of International Trade and then more recently as a consultant with Coaster Capital and then on digital transformation projects and organisations I basically focus on looking at the analysing of your micro and macro environments and looking at how to bring those bits together in order for you to grow and developing just online and looking at the whole of your projects or comes together so that's kind of me in a nutshell Brilliant, thank you Susan So you're all about strategy then So it's kind of like analysing and then putting a road back together to look at how you can benefit basically bespoke looking at the opportunities for your business and the industry that you're in Thank you very much It's really nice to just kind of chat a hone in a little bit on what your particular skills are because then we know the audience can kind of know who they want to make those support appointments with Rob, you're next on my little screen going round Hi everyone, so I'm Rob Lawrence, I'm a consultant coach and author and I specialise in e-commerce, marketing and digital transformation I'm a strategy guy really at heart so typically I work with SME leaders to really understand where their organisation is relative to competitors then to identify the opportunities and threats in that market and then help them develop a really good strategy to develop their capabilities looking not just at websites and marketing but also skills and technology and so on A little bit of background 20 years as an e-commerce director before that general manager marketing director I was e-commerce director for 2E Travel leading digital transformation over 100 companies worldwide, most of them in the UK and I also set up and led a digital agency in London and I'm looking forward to working with everybody but if I can't work with you I'll just blatantly show you my book and you can buy that instead Oh we do like a bit of blatant promotion going on here it's not subtle but you know it is a useful book I mean completely unbiased opinion obviously Thank you very much Rob and last but not least Lisa I know you're all about systems and productivity aren't you I am doing my pitch well Cheryl if you can do it for me thank you so Lisa Care I'm a Deloitte trained Chartered Accountant and 20 year career across finance director operating officer type roles in professional services and in industry working with small businesses so I am now a consultant and business coach and I have a framework called Productivity for profitability which looks at perspective, performance people and process to see where you can make the best improvements in terms of this digital adoption series series 3 around systems and productivity is very much my sweet spot so looking at your operational systems and how you can use digital tools to be more efficient Brilliant, absolutely brilliant and we're really lucky to have these professionals with us and be able to access this sort of support it's an absolutely fantastic part of this series so thank you guys if you could just all turn your cameras and your mics off I should wave you all bye bye they're all gone like that okay I'm going to now move us into our network in if you can stay with us to help us one that'd be brilliant we're going back into the remote platform as soon as I turn a little button off so you'll all appear back on the table if you want to have a chat with Mike obviously about website optimisation then please do or any of our digital champions but please stay on with us and just a really big thank you again for coming and I look forward to seeing you next week thanks so much