During the Christmas break, I’ve been helping out Ivory Promise Brides in Bolton with their small business SEO strategy. Like a lot of small companies Ivory Promise have a WordPress website. They are selling designer wedding dresses from the likes of Pnina Tornai, Eve of Milady, Naama & Anat, Blue by Enzoani, Mon Cheri and Charlotte Balbier. 

I hadn’t heard of these designers before – but they are really impressive and there’s clearly a market here for affordable luxury. The shop are also offering competitive prices and exclusivity to the UK or Europe, so there is a clear value proposition. They have even had enquiries from Dubai where people will fly across the world to their shop in Bolton to see their exclusive dresses.

The first thing I did was try to define who the buyer persona is and then think about the appropriate channels, content and data in order to inform the digital marketing and SEO strategy. This is of course from our very own #Passion4Digital Buyer Persona Spring (shown below) from our book Digital and Social Media Marketing: A Results-Driven Approach. It’s ideal for Small business SEO strategy or indeed for larger companies!

I logged in to their WordPress dashboard and then looked at the data they have from their social media channels, Google Analytics and Google Search Console to start snooping around for data and insights.

What I found was that the site was driving a pretty reasonable amount of traffic, but not really generating many enquiries or conversions. The majority of users are female between the ages of 25-54 and generally from the UK. They were browsing the site usually on mobile (60%).

Analytics shows that the buyer persona is female, age 25-54 and usually on a mobile from the UK

I’ve also recently been reading the excellent book E-Commerce Website Optimization: Why 95% of Your Website Visitors Don’t Buy, and What You Can Do About it. Ivory Promise isn’t an ecommerce site in that, it doesn’t sell through the website, so the goal is to generate interest and enquiries. That said, there are a lot of useful insights in the book around user experience, copy optimisation and testing. Basically, the book advocates testing and subtle changes, which can make a big difference.

I formulated a list of things for improvement such as:

• Install the Yoast plugin for SEO and use to optimise pages
• Do some keyword research using Keyword Planner and Search Console
• Split the product pages up so that each could be SEO optimised
• Create unique titles and meta descriptions based on keyword research
• Create and encourage more external links including from social media, suppliers and others
• Make sure the pages are mobile friendly, no errors and explore AMP (accelerated mobile pages) through an AMP plugin
• Add a contact form and make the contact page clearer and linked from key pages and AMP
• Take into account the buyer persona in terms of use and behaviour
• Added a goal in Analytics for the contact page and derived keywords used, demographics, traffic etc.
• Various other tweaks, copy changes and others
• Sat down with the client and talked them through the changes and what needs doing on an ongoing basis

Pleased to say, soon after the changes were made, page views have doubled and the shop had a record day for enquiries through the website. Still much work to do – but I think this goes to show that some small changes can make a big difference. It is still a work in progress of course, but shows that you don’t need to spend a fortune, sometimes some small tweaks and attention can make a difference. Have you got any similar experiences or thoughts about small business SEO? We also run short face to face or distance courses in Search and Social Media Marketing. Please Drop me a line on any of this, I’d love to hear from you!

I wanted to start by covering 2 of the most common questions searched online according to results on www.answerthepublic.com: What is SEO? What is a great SEO strategy for my business? and relate them to the experiences I’ve had with a friend and colleague who runs her own online business.

Please let me know in the comments below if you find this helpful or like and share the post with your social media.  This blog follows my completion of the Search and Social Media Marketing course at The University of Salford.

What is SEO?

First of all, SEO means Search Engine Optimisation and describes how we take your business and increase your rankings on a search engine such as Google or Bing.  The aim is to bring the listing for your website or physical store to the top of the search results and ultimately increase your business revenue.

There are many different search engines worldwide, I have listed the top 2 in the western world; however, the same strategy can be used no matter which engine or device is used to find you.

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Technologies such as Google’s search engine and the other search engines out there have made our life easier. We now live in an age where people rely on search engines for answers to their problems. Online business now rely on  search engine and good user experience help to improve their product and services which leads to the topic of how you can use user experience for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). I work for a company called HX Training and this post outlines my experience trying to optimise our web pages for things like our Legionella Awareness training and learning more about search and social media marketing.

The speed at which search engines give answers to queries also makes it so reliable that some people trust search engine results more than what a fellow human says. Have you ever been in a gathering of friends who are trying to remember or establish a fact which leads to an argument and someone says let’s “Google it” which almost seems so obvious? While a search engine provides immediate access to information, sometimes we still tend to get personal answers from official and reliable resources, or a friend.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – the process of making your digital profiles visible on search engines for a range of relevant search queries – has changed drastically over the last few years. Google is the market leader in the UK and has reshaped the SEO landscape. Google is one of the top leading search engines in the world, believe it or not. Where Google goes others follow. Read more…..

What is SEO?

What is SEO? That is a great question, and one that will be explained in detail throughout this blog post. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has vastly become an essential part of any digital marketing strategy, due to its proven effectiveness and wealth of benefits (don’t worry I will explain in detail later).

Search engine optimisation is a marketing technique where you aim to grow your visibility organically in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages). SEO is done to improve rankings, increase the awareness of your product or service and drive traffic to your website. However, an important tip to take away is that with SEO, you shouldn’t just create a search engine optimised page, you should make the page user friendly, relevant to your audience’s needs and easy for search engine robots to understand.

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5 Key Points of Progression

In both 2014 and in 2016, members of the team at Wildings Solicitors have joined The University of Salford in MediaCityUK for the SSMM course. For Solicitor Director, Kid Harwood, who attended SSMM in 2014, the course reaffirmed just how much of a pivotal role legal marketing would play in the development of the legal sector.

Getting involved with the communities in which we work is extremely important to us at Wildings. Seeing The University of Salford offering real value to businesses in the North West is something we found extremely heartening and is one of the reasons we were keen for our staff to rejoin in 2016.

Away from the SSMM course, Wildings have been involved with some great events at The University of Salford. KickFactor, launched at Creative Entrepreneur, was a Wildings Solicitors sponsored competition that took place in Media City in April 2016. The event saw young entrepreneurs from the business school competing for a one thousand pound investment in their business ventures.

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IVA Advice and IVA Debt Advice SEO

Company introduction

X-debt is a debt company dealing mainly IVAs (Individual Voluntary Arrangements) a form of debt management and IVA debt advice . The company relies on introducers of new business which can be expensive. The aim of this SEO work is to try increase the amount of business through the company website www.x-debt.co.uk and improving the google rankings will help with this.

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In the legal sector, reputation means everything. Word of mouth recommendations have secured client instructions at law firms for decades. Provide a quality service and you will be rewarded by having previous clients point their friends, family and colleagues in your direction should they ever require a solicitor.

Word of mouth recommendations will undoubtedly continue to play a prominent role in the decision making process of those looking for a solicitor. However, as the business landscape evolves and clients demand different experiences, failing to keep up with the curve could prove costly. Getting the fundamentals of digital marketing for law firms correct is something firms of all size should be investing in.

In this blog post we will discuss the basics of digital marketing for law firms, highlight some useful tools and prove why investing your time (and maybe money) into digital is absolutely key.

The three key areas we will cover are:

• SEO
• Social Media
• PPC

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As a recruiter I have gone through a journey. Gone are the days where I could solely rely on newspapers and company websites to find and attract talent. Although these methods are still used, with the growth of the Internet and social media combined with a competitive market, I recognise that social media recruitment is an essential tool to finding top talent. Not only do I recognise this, I am excited by this!

How do we know this?

A global social recruiting survey completed by LinkedIn found that more than 50% of jobseekers now use social media to assist them in their job searches. With this in mind, it is important to understand and develop a social media recruitment strategy. Not only is social media an important recruitment tool to attract and source top quality candidates, it’s also an exciting opportunity to create and develop your digital presence.

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Do you own a small business and struggle with your digital marketing?

I can sympathise, empathise and advise. Help is available for most small businesses.

Me, Hannah and my husband Jonathan

Our small business RepairsByPost has gone from a traditional bricks and mortar business to an online business within the last year. It was the scariest thing we have ever done. ‘Our’ is myself and by husband, and that alone has its own tribulations. (You can read more on my blog post about working with my husband).

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CC by hin255 from freedigitalphotos.net

The Search and Social Media Marketing course at Salford University has some brilliant SEO and digital marketing tips . Small businesses like mine need to be able to market themselves online. We all know we have to be at the top of the rankings to get noticed. Here are the ten most important lessons we’ve learned so far:

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