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The Importance of a Website for Your Business

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In today’s digital era, where everything seems to be moving online, having a physical presence for a business is no longer enough. A business website is no longer a luxury; it’s now a necessity for businesses in nearly all industries. Here at Yopp, being the largest and longest serving pay monthly website company in the UK, we have seen first hand how a website and ongoing marketing is essential to win business and stay ahead of your competitors.

Here’s why a website is essential for your business and how you can take advantage of the benefits.

Accessibility and Credibility

A website provides a 24/7 presence, allowing potential customers to access your products and services at any time of day or night. It’s not just about selling; it’s also about providing value and information. Moreover, having a professional website lends credibility to your business, reassuring potential customers that you are a legitimate and established entity. Also, a well maintained website which is regularly updated is a great way for people to see and find out more about your business before they make a decision as to whether they will use your business. Updating with recent projects, company news, changes in services as well as well-informed blog posts on industry news is paramount in ranking your website high and being found on Google.

Marketing and Reach

Traditional marketing techniques can be expensive and often limited in scope. A well-designed website acts as a central hub for your online marketing efforts, allowing you to reach a broader audience. Whether you’re using SEO, social media, or email marketing, a website helps to link all of these elements together seamlessly. Living in the digital age, over 94% of all business is now searched and Google being by far the largest and best search engine out there, so your website coupled with good SEO & marketing techniques will help you grow or sustain your business.

Customer Engagement and Support

A website allows for interactive engagement with your customers. Features like chat support, contact forms, and feedback sections provide a platform for customers to ask questions, express concerns, or provide valuable insights into their needs and preferences. This constant interaction helps in understanding your audience and in serving them better. Also, a well informed website with lots of FAQ’s and blogs providing information regarding your services will help customers make informed decisions and help you win more business.

Data and Analytics

Your website can provide invaluable insights into customer behaviour and preferences. Tools like Google Analytics allow you to track the user journey, understand where your traffic is coming from, and find out what content is resonating with your audience. This data is vital for making informed business decisions and tailoring your services or products accordingly.

Competitive Advantage

If your competitors have an online presence and you don’t, you’re at a significant disadvantage. A website allows you to compete on a level playing field, showcasing your unique selling points and helping you stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Cost-Effective

Compared to traditional brick-and-mortar operations, maintaining a website is generally more cost-effective. It can reduce costs related to rent, utilities, and staff. Moreover, with e-commerce capabilities, a website can act as a complete sales channel, reducing the need for physical storefronts.

Scalability and Growth

A website offers unlimited potential for scalability. As your business grows, your website can grow with it. Whether you want to expand your product line or enter new markets, a website provides the flexibility to scale your business operations as per your ambitions.

In this age of digital transformation, having a website for your business is not just beneficial; it’s vital. From enhancing credibility and reach to offering insights and flexibility, the benefits are multifold.

If you’re a business owner still on the fence about developing a website, now is the time to take the leap. Collaborate with professionals or use user-friendly website builders to create a site that resonates with your brand and connects you with your audience. In the modern business landscape, a website is not merely a tool; it’s the heart of your online identity, and investing in it could be the key to unlocking significant growth and success.

Yopp websites are the UK’s leading pay monthly website company with over 12 years of working with small to medium businesses in the UK in all sectors. Speak to us today if you are thinking of growing your business and how pay monthly could be the right option for you.

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How To Get Your Small Business Found On Google

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In today’s digital age, having a website for your small business is no longer optional. With more and more consumers turning to the internet to find products and services, having a website that is easily discoverable on search engines like Google can make all the difference when it comes to growing your customer base. In this article, we will discuss how small businesses in the UK can rank their website on Google using various tools and techniques.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the process of optimising your website to improve its visibility and ranking on search engines like Google. While SEO can be a complex process, there are a few basic steps you can take to improve your website’s ranking:

Keyword research

Identify the keywords that your target audience is searching for on Google. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find popular keywords in your industry. There are many other plugins available too such as Neil Patel, H-Supertools, Moz and AHREFS that can all help you to define the best and most accurate keywords and phrases to use before you begin your optimisation.

On-page optimisation

Make sure your website’s pages are optimised with the keywords you have identified. This includes optimising your page titles, meta descriptions, and content. You will also need to ensure that your content is not stuffed with keywords because that looks pretty rubbish to read and don’t want your website to look spammy and then get penalised by Google, keep your keyword density to around 5%

Content creation

Create high-quality, engaging content that is optimised with your target keywords. Regularly adding fresh, relevant content to your website can help improve your ranking. Google loves well written and easy to read content that is concise and to the point, but mainly it needs to be relevant to your service or offering.

Website structure

Make sure your website is easy to navigate and has a clear hierarchy. Use internal linking to help search engines crawl your website and understand its structure. Also, if you are creating a WordPress website, you’ll want to download a plugin like Yoast or All In One SEO and generate the sitemap link. You’ll then need to head over to Google Console, create an account, submit your website via domain or a HTML tag and then add the sitemap there so Google can index your website.

Google My Business

Google My Business is a free tool that allows small businesses to manage their online presence on Google, including their search results and Google Maps listings. Having a verified Google My Business listing can help improve your website’s visibility on Google and attract more local customers through the maps and without a Google Business account you are making life hard for yourself.

To set up a Google My Business listing, head over to Google Business and add your business information, including your address, phone number, and website. Once your listing is verified, you can update your business information, respond to customer reviews, and add photos to your listing. It’s a great tool for growing your business locally so make sure to keep it updates with recent work, offers, services and new products and keep those reviews coming in too. Once you rank high in the maps locally you’ll be getting traffic to your website too which is a real brucey bonus.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. Having high-quality backlinks can help improve your website’s authority and ranking on search engines like Google. Here are a few ways to build backlinks for your small business website:

Guest posting

Reach out to other websites in your industry and offer to write a guest post for their website. In exchange for your content, you can include a link back to your website. You will need to ensure that the website you are linking from is in your sector and is relevant to your industry, it’s no good writing an article about kitchens from barber website. You’ll need to ensure the content is relevant and well written as mentioned above.

Broken link building

Find broken links on other websites and offer to replace the broken link with a link to your website. Also ensure that you are link building too, getting links from local directories like Yell, Thomson Local and also local business directories and websites close to your town is a big plus.

Infographics

Create high-quality infographics related to your industry and share them on social media and other websites. Infographics are highly shareable and can attract backlinks to your website.

Social Media

Social media can be a powerful tool for improving your website’s visibility and attracting more customers. Social media is free, but it takes time but if done right you can really market yourself well on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok as well as Twitter.

Here are a few tips for using social media to improve your website’s ranking:

Share your content

Share your website’s content on social media to attract more visitors and improve your website’s engagement metrics. Google loves quality social signals, so ensure to add links to your website too to get those clicks coming in.

Engage with your audience

Use social media to engage with your audience and build relationships with potential customers. Respond to comments and messages in a timely manner to build trust and credibility.

Use hashtags

Use relevant hashtags on social media to help your content reach a wider audience. For example, if you are a kitchen company looking to showcase your products make sure you check out the trending hashtags for kitchens. A good tool for this is Tag Finder, simply put in your keyword and it will generate the best hashtags and most used for visibility in your country or area.

Other Tools

In addition to the tools and techniques mentioned above, there are a few other tools that can help small businesses improve their website’s ranking on Google:

  1. Google Search Console: Google Search Console is a free tool that provides valuable insights into your website’s performance on Google. It can help you identify technical issues, monitor your website’s traffic, and improve your website’s ranking.
  2. Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a free tool that provides detailed insights into your website’s traffic and user behaviour. It can help you understand which pages are performing well, where your traffic is coming from, and how users are interacting with your website.
  1. Local business directories: Register your business on local business directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Bing Places. This can help improve your website’s visibility in local search results.
  2. Online reviews: Encourage your customers to leave online reviews on Google, Yelp, and other review sites. Positive reviews can help improve your website’s reputation and ranking on search engines.
  3. Mobile optimisation: With more and more people using their mobile devices to access the internet, it’s important to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile. This can help improve your website’s ranking on Google and provide a better user experience for your visitors.

Ranking your website on Google can be a daunting task, especially for small businesses with limited resources. This is why it’s good to work with a quality company that specialises in digital marketing and web design to take the headache away from you.

However, by following the tips and techniques outlined in this article, you can improve your website’s visibility and attract more customers to your business. Whether you’re focusing on SEO, Google My Business, backlinks, social media, or other tools, it’s important to take a holistic approach and consistently monitor your website’s performance. With patience and persistence, you can achieve a high ranking on Google and grow your small business.

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ORGANIC SEO TIPS FOR 2020

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New Year, new Google algorithm – if that’s not a slogan yet it soon should be. 

Google has numerous plans in store for the new year, as it continues its mission to deliver the best organic search results to users. As ever that means staying ahead with the latest search trends.

Optimise your mobile SEOIt?s generally acknowledged Google always rates good mobile performance in its rankings but now it?s even more important than ever, as Google moves towards ?mobile-first rankings and considers the mobile view of your website as a priority. In short this means mobile-friendly sites will flourish whereas websites that fail to demonstrate good mobile performance may find themselves shunted down the list.

So when designing your website content has a powerful mobile-first perspective. It?s always easier to expand well-designed mobile pages to desktop than the other way around. 

For good advice on the way forward see :- Learn about organic SEO

Get your technical SEO in orderSEO is all about the correct setting up of a website just as much as it is about great content and usability, so always make sure your website is optimised for both Google and the end user.
In particular, Google has suggested it may penalise slow-loading websites far more in 2020 – so that means : reducing large images, tackling problematic server response times and optimising your CSS, to name just a few critical items.

Google Chrome may even display a ?slow loading? icon on some websites which will surely tarnish your reputation in the eyes of potential customers.

Optimise for BERT algorithmIn a nutshell, the latest BERT algorithm is designed to identify the end user’s intent. This means if you?re producing content that is relevant to the search term, but not highlighting the reasons behind the search your rating could fall behind.

In short, those website owners who research a users? journey through their site, noting the access points and top tasks and optimise their content accordingly will have a clear advantage.

Use structured data to help Google understandStructured data supplies additional context that Google isn’t quite intelligent enough to figure out for itself (yet). It gives Google a better idea of basic page structure, what each element is supposed to do and how each page fits into the wider site structure.

Google Search Console is a useful tool for solving issues with structured data, but it’s a complicated topic to master so it?s always advisable to consult an expert if you don?t have the in-house knowledge needed.


Show Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (EAT)The EAT concept is bigger than just SEO but by applying a strong business strategy aligned to these goals will go a long way towards improving your site’s search performance, particularly as Google has confirmed they will support these principles in 2020.
Practically this means running activity that improves your company?s reputation, demonstrates market-leading knowledge and delivers with clear authority. Conversely organisations who struggle with these goals may find themselves falling behind.

SEO guidance for 2020 is readily available at Manchester UX agency as we have years of experience helping people with their rankings. 

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5 Simple Digital Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

We all want our marketing to work for our business, but digital marketing can be a minefield for any small to medium business owner in the UK. You are probably amazing at your trade, be that plumbing, landscaping, building, finance or whatever sector you are in. So the last thing you want is then try to become the best digital marketer because you’re probably going to be taking on too much no matter how good you think are, it’s always best to stick what to what you do best and leave digital marketing and web design to the experts.

We thought we would write a quick blog update on what you can do with minimal effort and fuss to help your business break through the noise of competition and make your business stand out from the rest, engage with your audience and ultimately get your customers picking up the phone.

Here are our top 5 simple digital marketing tips to help you win online:

1 – Reviews – Reviews – Reviews

Google loves reviews and uses them in its ranking algorithms, in fact Google uses their own review system to help bring your website up online for locational SEO terms so its always good to get great reviews from happy customers. However, Google also brings in reviews from other areas such as Facebook, Trustpilot, Yell, Rated People, Trustatrader and other verified citation websites, so just go for the Google reviews, spread them around and you will find that when you start to search your business, Google will also index and bring up your reviews.

2 – Be Sociable

It’s hard to rank a website in Google, theres a lot you need to learn and do to achieve this and the likelihood is that you are not going to learn SEO fast, so being sociable is the best to harness the power of social media to display your work, company news, recent projects to people across the social spectrum. We have clients that make thousands just across Instagram after building a following and using good sales techniques to break through like endorsing celebrities, local groups and getting your friends to share your work to their friends and so on. The best social media sites for business we still find are Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram and Twitter, Google Plus is taking a bit of time, but I would create a Google Plus account anyway as that will link to your website and help rank on Google.

Google loves a sociable business that is transparent so keep being social and Google will index your website and also bring your social profiles in for keywords relevant to your business.

3 – Blogs Baby!

Blogs are a fantastic way of updating your website and keeping you relevant, we add blogs to all our websites as standard as we know you need to keep your website updated constantly. Google uses the power of blogging too to determine your rankings and a good blog with relevant information (like this blog) is providing your audience with knowledge. You can talk about the latest kitchen appliances, plumbing accessories, travel, fashion, anything – no matter what your market or business, a blog is a must.

4 – Youtube & Video Marketing

Oh my word – videos! Today its easy to create videos and post them on to Youtube. Google owns Youtube and understands the power of video marketing. People don’t want to be reading long boring articles, they either want straight to the point information or they want a video explainer video, makes life much easier and Google knows this.

So, if you have video walk arounds or recent projects, news and updates to your business, get them down on a video, upload to Youtube and post socially and embed to your website to drive engagement.

5 – …and finally – Relevance

This might come as a shock or we might be teaching you to suck eggs, but staying relevant is so important to Google and your audience. Google is effectively a very high end directory website, so when users add a query, they want the results to be relevant to their query. This can only be done by ensuring that your content and website imagery and optimisation is relevant to the work you do. If over time your business changes, your website needs to change to adapt to it, this is keeping relevant which is good for SEO and digital marketing.

If you follow these 5 tips, you won’t go far wrong in your digital marketing success, if you have the right web design company supporting your business for the tech side of coding and high end SEO, you will benefit yourself a lot if you are managing your own digital marketing too. After all, its a competitive marketing out there online and with 92% of new business being searched, you need to stand out from the rest.

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3 Core Principles To Optimise A Website

When it comes to ranking a website on Google, we get asked time and time again how to do it and what’s involved. There are many factors that will help you move your website up the rankings and it involves hard work and making sure your brand or services speaks loudly and more to the point relevant to your target audience and location. In regards to our customers who are generally small to medium businesses on our pay monthly plans, these are the general rules you want to follow and we hope this makes more sense in how we want to partner with our clients going forward.

1 – Building your digital weight

This is what we call it, but we know that the more relevant information there is out there about your business (notice we said relevance – this is the buzz word here), the more hits your website will get and with it being relevant your CTR (click through rate) will be much higher. So, we need you to have social media platforms in place for your business – Facebook page, Twitter, Linkedin, Google Plus and any other more local platforms that suit your business needs such as Houzz, Checkatrade, Rated People (for trade markets). Once we have the social media all setup, we then need to blog about your business, when blogging about your business, you want to show people before and afters, new products, company news, new services, new staff – anything that promotes your business and again – keeps your website relevant. Adding news to your blog enables marketers like us to write out relevant content about your services and locations meaning more chance of keyword variations being seen.

2 – Backlinks

Google’s algorithm relies on links coming back from high pr websites to your website. So, how Google ranks the site is by getting relevant backlinks from websites Google already trusts that link back to your site thus showing Google you must have good services or news to convey. The best way to do this is to reach out to companies you may have worked with that rank well and ask them to write about an experience they had working with your company. This will provide a good relevant backlink which will help your site rank for the keywords you are pushing. Also, UK Directory sites and local sites provide the fundamental foundations of any link campaign and can be keyword focused.

3 – Onsite Optimisation

Making your site title, page title (meta titles) page descriptions (meta descriptions) around your keywords are a must. Also, making good use of keyword density in your copy such as making sure the keyword is in the first paragraph and closing paragraph and used throughout the copy (be careful to not overuse as this is classed as keyword stuffing). Where you can, it is always good to use header hierarchy such as H1 for the title then H2,H3,H4 and so on. This enables Google to read the content better and organise.

Make sure you optimise your images with alt text and make sure they image size is not causing the page to run slowly. Use videos where you can especially if embedded from Youtube as Google owns Youtube and knows video marketing is more effective than reading articles – we are in the video marketing age.

Creating a clear and concise sitemap is essential for Google to crawl the pages on your site and putting this in to a clear and easy to follow sitemap will help with the ranking process. Also, make sure robots.txt is set to allow for all pages you want to index and then go ahead and submit your website sitemap to Google Console. Google Console is a great tool for monitoring your website’s health and to see how Google is crawling your website.

There is a 4th golden rule in making sure you have a mobile optimised website, but we have covered this another article.

So, following these 3 basic core rules will be the foundations of creating a website that will, over time rank well and keep you high in the search results but also keep your business relevant. Remember the 3 core value to ranking a site:

  • 1 – Keep your site relevant to your business
  • 2 – Backlinks from higher PR websites
  • 3 – Keep your page load quick
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