Design on the mind

What better way to illustrate to you what we can do for your business than to show you a case study of an ecommerce website that we designed and built for a client recently:

The Client

Chew Valley Trees are a long established nursery who specialise in hardy, native and ornamental trees, shrubs, hedging and fruit trees. They are situated at the bottom of the Mendip hills and their 18 acre nursery continues to grow both in size and product range. Their plants have featured at major national venues such as the Chelsea Flower Show, Hampton Court Palace and Westonbirt International Festival of Gardens. Professional and amateur gardeners alike have benefited from their helpful service and knowledgeable advice.

The Challenge

Chew Valley trees needed to reach a wider UK audience in order to expand their selling power. Their existing website was only a single page that wasn’t able to give any idea of the range and variety of plants and trees that they sell. It was also not optimised for the search engines and therefore not being found by a wide enough audience.

The solution

Deckchair quickly produced some initial designs for a full ecommerce website and after discussions with the Chew Valley team, started to build the website. The overall design and layout is appealing to the market sector with plenty of pictures, descriptions and tips. The navigation is intuitive and allows the customer to browse the product categories to easily find what they need, before proceeding to a secure payment system to buy the products.

The Chew Valley team has the ability to update the products, pictures and descriptions easily through a simple admin system. This enables them to add new products themselves and keep the website fresh and up to date. A news section allows them to add interesting and topical information making the website a valuable resource in the gardening and landscaping sector. It encourages their customers to return to the website on a regular basis.

Of course the website was built from the ground up to be search engine friendly and is optimized for niche key phrases such as:
Ornamental trees
Native tree shop
Trees online

They are averaging 150 hits a day and 78% of those are coming through google. The conversion rates from these visitors are very good and improving month on month.

The Result

As a direct result of their new website and it’s search engine positions, Chew Valley Trees is now a flourishing online business and their sales figures have soared. Not only are they reaching a UK wide audience through the website but the company profile has been raised and has increased the number of people visiting the nursery too.

Testimonial

“We could not have been happier with the level of service received. The genuinely friendly approach and sympathetic understanding of what we were trying to achieve were professionally translated into a website that we are delighted with. Nothing was too much trouble.”
Julia Scarth, Owner, Chew Valley Trees.

Are you a business owner who wants to take your business online with an ecommerce website? Give us a call we are happy to talk to you about your options and we can give our expert impartial advice on the best strategy for your company

Toni

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Top SEO tip No.5 – Google Analytics

Once you have designed and optimised your website, you need to check your stats regularly to see how well it is working for you. You can then make educated adjustments to your web design or page content.

Sign up to Google Analytics (It’s free) and you will be able to track visitors in intricate detail from where they enter the site to where they are exiting, which pages they are viewing, how long they are on the website. Also, where your traffic is coming from ie referred websites or search engines.

You can set up ‘goals’ on your website so that you can track conversions. For example if you want to know how many visitors make it to a certain page but drop out before they actually buy the product, this is very easy to do. All this and much more, so give it a try!

That’s all the tips for this week folks, have a good weekend!

Toni

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Top SEO Tip No.4 – Directories

Submitting your website to certain online directories will bring not only extra traffic but good inbound links to your website as well. So, good for your SEO and your business will be found more easily on the seach engines.

I would highly recommend FreeIndex, as their name suggests it is FREE! There are many other useful features on this website; you can add images, testimonials and get your clients to leave reviews on your company profile. Very easy to do

If you write a blog or have a blog based website I would recommend going to Technorati to claim your blog!

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip

Toni

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Top SEO tip No.3 – Title tags

Once you have written the relevant content for your website (See yesterday’s blog), it is now very important that your Title tags are written correctly and you are making the best use of them.

Your title tag is the heading of each web page that appears at the top of your screen. It is very important that you optimise these by describing the key phrase for that page as well as including your company name. For example a web page describing pink bananas sold by Bananarma Ltd in Bristol should read:

Pink Bananas Bristol – Bananarma Ltd – bespoke bananas Bristol

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip

Toni

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Top SEO tip No.2 - Content and Key phrases

I’m sure no one will disagree with me that Content is still King in Search Engine Optimisation terms. When writing the content or copy for your website you need to keep the focus on your target audience. What are the phrases that your potential customers are using in the search engines?

Spend a little time using a tool like wordtraker and you will see not only what key phrases people are using but also how many other websites are competing for them. (It even has a free trial to get you started!). When you have found your niche key phrases, take the time to write a separate piece of copy that focuses on each one and turn them into separate pages of content for your website.

This is the best way to build up good, relevant content for your website that focuses on what your target market is searching for.

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip!

Toni

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Over the space of this week I will post a series of blogs containing some top SEO tips that I hope will be of some use to you, particularly if you are just starting out. So here goes with the first one:

Top SEO tip No. 1 – Domain Name

If you are about to choose the domain name for your business website, then bear in mind that Google will favour a keyword rich domain name. What I mean by this is;
 If your company sells green widgets in Bristol, you will be better off choosing the domain name www.greenwidgetsinbristol.com as opposed to your company name.

This of course is only one factor in your overall SEO strategy and this one aspect alone will not give your website first page Google listings for those keywords. It can, however give you an advantage over your competitors who have a less descriptive domain name.

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip!

Toni

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Thought I would do a short post on this subject as it is still a topic for debate and a little confusing (possibly only for me).

What is Google PageRank? PageRank is a numerical scoring system that gives a unique ranking to every page on the internet. The ranking number is based on the number and quality of inbound links pointing at the page (according to Google).

Check your pageRank here with this SEO tool

So, is PageRank important for rankings?

Well, from what I can understand it certainly seems to be less important than it used to be. Nearly everything I have read seems to suggest that it has become more of a way to check the popularity of a page than to regulate its positioning on the results pages.

The Deckchair website homepage used to have a PR5 which would be considered OK, certainly not terrible. About 8 months ago our PageRank dropped to PR4 and this was after having done a lot of work on our linking strategy and content. Despite this drop we are doing better than ever in the SERPs (Search Engine results pages).

For example if you do a Google search for “web design Bristol” you will see that we are No. 3 on the first page (chuffed with that).  Many of the websites that appear lower than the Deckchair site for that search term have higher PRs of 6 and 7. So it would seem that content and other non-PR factors are more important for a website’s rankings.

Some say that the PR is only a measure of the ‘quantity’ of inbound links.  So websites that have concentrated on buying as many links as possible regardless of how relevant they are will find that they don’t do as well despite having a very high PR.
The flip side to this thinking is that PageRank drives Google’s monthly crawl, meaning that sites with a higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper than sites with low PageRank. So, for a large site with an average-to-low PageRank, this will present a problem; if your pages don’t get crawled, they won’t get indexed and people won’t be able to find them. Is this still the case?

SEOBook author Aaron Wall says; “Instead of chasing PageRank I like to find the low PageRank sites that rank well in the search results. What links do they have? Why are they ranking so well? If you get the types of links that those sites have and if you have a compelling website that other sites actually want to link to, the PageRank will naturally fall into place without you developing a wonky link profile trying to artificially boost your PageRank.”

Any thoughts anyone?

Toni

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During the process of designing a website I find that very often the job of writing the copy for the site is completely underestimated. I suppose to the client the look and functionality of the website are foremost in their minds. Of course these are vitally important, but getting the copy right is also important and should not be overlooked.

When you actually sit down to write about your own company or services you will probably find that it is quite hard. It is not uncommon for people to struggle with it and then have to extend the deadline of their website or seek professional copywriting services at the last minute.

The main thing to remember is; keep reminding yourself of who you are writing for. Firstly you are writing for your web visitors (or human audience) who you will hopefully convert into customers. Secondly you are writing for the search engines to ensure good positions in the listings.

For your human visitors the main things to bear in mind are:

• Focus on the benefit to the reader – Be sure to tailor the copy to the reader’s interests or the benefits to their business. How can your product or service make a difference to them? Nobody wants to read endless drivel about when your company was founded, what you eat for breakfast etc etc.

• Keep the first paragraph of any body of text simple and to the point – readers can get the information that they want quickly and then make the choice to read on for more detailed information if they want to.

• Don’t confuse your objective with long words or over wordy sentences.

• Check your spelling and grammar – Not very professional to have misspelled words all over the place.

For the Search Engines, bear these points in mind:

• Keep each body of text focused on a researched key phrase – The search engine crawlers scan the text and analyze it to find out what the page is about. It is important that you thoroughly research the key phrases that your visitors use, so that your page will be listed high on the search engine results pages for that term.

• Keyword Density – Getting the balance right is important. You need to make sure that the relevant key words/phrases appear in the copy but you don’t want to over do it either. Google in particular can spot a piece of copy that is overloaded with a key phrase a mile away and you might be penalized for keyword stuffing. (Your human readers won’t like it either).

So, whatever your product or service, be sure to keep both audiences happy when writing the copy for your website. Any other top tips out there?

Toni

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Supposing you were to employ the services of an experienced web design company whose SEO consultancy services were second to none. Once on board, your entire online marketing strategy was overhauled. From relevant content, linking strategies and web traffic analysis the job was done.

Within a short space of time you are climbing to the first page of the SERPs and you have quality traffic driven to your site. You are absolutely thrilled….But can you handle it? The phone is ringing off the hook; your email inbox is full of enquiries and requests for quotes. Your dippy receptionist is finding it hard to cope and your head of sales has gone off sick.

OK I may have exaggerated the situation slightly. But you need to be aware that if you make drastic changes to your online (or offline) marketing strategies you need to be prepared internally for the increased business. Can you cope with the calls? Do you have enough stock? Do you have enough staff?

Are you based in Bristol? Does your company need a new web marketing strategy? Search engine optimization? Pay per click campaign management? Web traffic analysis?
Give us a call at Deckchair 0117 9299150

Toni

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