Tracked business growth through proven online marketing techniques.
AUDITS | PPC | SEO | CONTENT | LINKS | UX | CRO
What are you aiming to achieve?
WHERE NEXT?
You’ve built something amazing. Can I help you to reach the next step?
Building a business is always tough going. Standing out can be hard, and you might have been working for countless hours to pop your head above your competitors’. I’ve been there too.
You have so much more left to do to achieve your vision, but something is niggling away in the back of your mind … how to grow your customers?
I’ve tried all of the online business growth techniques. Here’s what works.
As a 20 year online business owner who’s generated over 14 million conversions through my brand, my successful formula for maximising customers is a specific blend of:
Auditing + PPC + SEO + Links + Content + UX + CRO
I’d love to use this formula to help your business achieve your vision.
MEASURED SUCCESS
ROI can’t be calculated without knowing “Return”.
Calculating the value delivered by marketing has never been more achievable.
Using software, we can track the volume and conversion rate of your existing online marketing strategy and find the changes which will impact your business.
Using the diagram below, you can see the huge opportunity; a lack of optimisation at each level of the funnel can turn 1,000 searches for “London lawyers” into only 5 sales.
THE FULL FUNNEL: FROM SEO, TO YOUR SITE, AND TO YOUR SALES TEAM
THE FULL FUNNEL
SEO, Links, Content, UX & CR-what?!?
If you’re fairly new to online marketing, these tools might be totally alien to you. Here’s a brief description of them, along with how taking advantage of them can benefit your business.
What is it?
Search Engine Optimisation is making changes to a website in order to make it as attractive as possible to Google.
What does it involve?
Typically it will involve changes to individual pages, links to other pages on your site (internal links), production of superb content and earning links from other sites to yours (link building).
There are many more technical aspects which should be considered too, but they are the basics.
What’s the business benefit?
Google will send more relevant traffic to your site, creating more opportunities for increased sales.
What is it?
Pay Per Click marketing is paying Google or Facebook to receive traffic to your website, in order to generate customers.
What does it involve?
A campaign is set up on Facebook and/or Google to deliver specific types of traffic to your business.
A highly effective PPC campaign will involve an element of trial and error in the early days to see what converts for you, and ongoing changes to keep up to date with the platform (Google or Facebook)
What’s the business benefit?
There is no more immediate way to create traffic than PPC. You can start today and be receiving traffic tomorrow.
What is it?
One of the key factors for ranking more highly in Google is the amount, strength, relevance and quality of links point into your site. Link building is the act of increasing the amount of these.
What does it involve?
I prefer the term “link earning” to “link building” since it more closely matches my approach. Google can take a very dim view of certain “link building” tactics.
Link earning online usually means you’ve created a fantastic piece of content which another site deems useful for their audience, and therefore links to.
What’s the business benefit?
With higher rankings in Google for the terms you’d like to rank for, there will be more sales for your business.
What is it?
Content is production of copy, photography, images, videos, quotes, infographics and web-apps (mini applications that run on a page).
Content marketing is using these assets to build your business.
What does it involve?
To produce content starts with a topic – what subject we do want to produce content on? Content should always solve a problem.
From there .. we get creative and do enough research to ensure ours is the best content on the subject, most fully meeting the users needs.
What’s the business benefit?
Quality content allows you to bring in new users, plus build a brand and a following. The right content also attracts links in the safest manner.
What is it?
User Experience is a sister subject to CRO.
It’s ensuring there is a simple and easy journey through your website for users to gain access to what they need from your business.
What does it involve?
The most important word in User Experience is “User” and, when assessing a website, there are a number of options starting from simple polls all the way up to eye tracking.
At the point we have ideas of where users are struggling, there will be website changes to improve the experience.
What’s the benefit?
A poor UX experience will typically confuse and frustrate users which reduces the amount who stay on your site to make any kind of purchase.
What is it?
Conversion Rate Optimisation is a sister subject of UX.
It is the act of driving people to generate more purchases or leads on your website.
What does it involve?
CRO uses an analysis of user behaviours to generate hypotheses which can be turned into tests.
The tests can be executed using a “split test” on your website, where two versions of a page are displayed to the user and the difference in conversion measured.
What’s the business benefit?
If you have 100 people a day come to your website who generate 8 leads, you have an 8% conversion rate. If you could improve the conversion rate to 10%, you have a 25% increase in turnover.
What is it?
Auditing is the correct beginning of every online marketing campaign: what isn’t right and how can we fix it?
What does it involve?
Your site is checked against dozens of key criteria to determine if they receive a pass or fail for each element. Where they don’t, a plan is put in place to fix the element.
Audits can be primarily SEO (including links and content) and/or UX (including CRO)
What’s the business benefit?
In order to know what to fix, we need to know what’s wrong, so auditing is a cost minimisation exercise. Typically, all sites will have a number of areas where they could improve.
What is it?
Search Engine Optimisation is making changes to a website in order to make it as attractive as possible to Google.
What does it involve?
Typically it will involve changes to individual pages, links to other pages on your site (internal links), production of superb content and earning links from other sites to yours (link building).
There are many more technical aspects which should be considered too, but they are the basics.
What's the business benefit?
Google will send more relevant traffic to your site, creating more opportunities for increased sales.
What is it?
Pay Per Click marketing is paying Google or Facebook to receive traffic to your website, in order to generate customers.
What does it involve?
A campaign is set up on Facebook and/or Google to deliver specific types of traffic to your business.
A highly effective PPC campaign will involve an element of trial and error in the early days to see what converts for you, and ongoing changes to keep up to date with the platform (Google or Facebook)
What's the business benefit?
There is no more immediate way to create traffic than PPC. You can start today and be receiving traffic tomorrow.
What is it?
One of the key factors for ranking more highly in Google is the amount, strength, relevance and quality of links point into your site. Link building is the act of increasing the amount of these.
What does it involve?
I prefer the term "link earning" to "link building" since it more closely matches my approach. Google can take a very dim view of certain "link building" tactics.
Link earning online usually means you've created a fantastic piece of content which another site deems useful for their audience, and therefore links to.
What's the business benefit?
With higher rankings in Google for the terms you'd like to rank for, there will be more sales for your business.
What is it?
Content is production of copy, photography, images, videos, quotes, infographics and web-apps (mini applications that run on a page).
Content marketing is using these assets to build your business.
What does it involve?
To produce content starts with a topic - what subject we do want to produce content on? Content should always solve a problem.
From there .. we get creative and do enough research to ensure ours is the best content on the subject, most fully meeting the users needs.
What's the business benefit?
Quality content allows you to bring in new users, plus build a brand and a following. The right content also attracts links in the safest manner.
What is it?
User Experience is a sister subject to CRO.
It's ensuring there is a simple and easy journey through your website for users to gain access to what they need from your business.
What does it involve?
The most important word in User Experience is "User" and, when assessing a website, there are a number of options starting from simple polls all the way up to eye tracking.
At the point we have ideas of where users are struggling, there will be website changes to improve the experience.
What's the benefit?
A poor UX experience will typically confuse and frustrate users which reduces the amount who stay on your site to make any kind of purchase.
What is it?
Conversion Rate Optimisation is a sister subject of UX.
It is the act of driving people to generate more purchases or leads on your website.
What does it involve?
CRO uses an analysis of user behaviours to generate hypotheses which can be turned into tests.
The tests can be executed using a "split test" on your website, where two versions of a page are displayed to the user and the difference in conversion measured.
What's the business benefit?
If you have 100 people a day come to your website who generate 8 leads, you have an 8% conversion rate. If you could improve the conversion rate to 10%, you have a 25% increase in turnover.
What is it?
Auditing is the correct beginning of every online marketing campaign: what isn't right and how can we fix it?
What does it involve?
Your site is checked against dozens of key criteria to determine if they receive a pass or fail for each element. Where they don't, a plan is put in place to fix the element.
Audits can be primarily SEO (including links and content) and/or UX (including CRO)
What's the business benefit?
In order to know what to fix, we need to know what's wrong, so auditing is a cost minimisation exercise. Typically, all sites will have a number of areas where they could improve.
CONTINUAL EXCELLENCE
Your reputation & brand are built through continuous high quality improvements.
Producing one amazing page can generate hundreds of inbound links and social shares, but ten mediocre posts – costing the same to produce – will typically generate no business benefit.
Companies which chose long term consistent excellence are more successful in the long term compared with low-quality rush marketing.
How I achieve marketing results
The tools are less important than the strategy, but choosing the right ones can still mean the difference between success and failure.
Here’s a little more detail about them.
AUDITING
- Business needs analysis & KPIs
- Cost minimalisation mindset
- Production of an easy to follow plan
SEO
- On page assessment & optimisation
- Technical SEO analysis
- Google penalty recovery
LINKS
- Link analysis
- Content based approach
- Outreach services
CONTENT
- Content and keyword gap analysis
- Niche & industry specific experts
- Copywriting, infographics & images
UX
- UX "best practice" analysis
- Personas and user journeys
- Visitor recording
CRO
- User research
- Hypotheses & test generation
- Split testing
I started programming at 7, and later gained a computer science degree, plus the project prize. I programmed computer games for some years, before moving into project management.
With this new dotcom boom, though, I started a business in online recruitment, building the early website, and the Search Engine Optimisation. That was the beginning of a 20 year fascination with online marketing.
The site now has thousands of pages, generates a millions visits a year from Google and has created nearly 14 million conversions since we started. We’ve achieved our core vision.
Outside of work, I’m a very keen traveler since it broadens your horizons and teaches you about life from other perspectices. I’m also a strong advocate of overall health and wellness.
How can I help with your marketing?
I’m not sure yet. Maybe I won’t be able to? Maybe it’s already incredibly well optimised? I won’t know until I take a look through, so let’s chat about your business.
Common questions
This unfortunately is a "how long is a piece of string" question.
If you have a new site - or a site with few links - and you want to rank for something very competitive, it might take months to years.
If you're a well established site with some positive SEO factors already, and you want to rank for a fairly standard article title, it might take as little as a month.
Nothing ever takes just a few weeks though and you should be prepared for that.
This will probably depend on whether you have much in the way of traffic coming into your site already and how saturated you are around the terms which you'd like to rank for.
If you have significant amounts of traffic and are a mature site, I would probably recommend looking at Conversion Rate Optimisation first, but an audit will tell me more.
Sometimes traffic can dive and recover within a matter of weeks or months after a Google update, and you should be aware of this, although I accept it can be incredibly scary!
However, if it's been longer than this, you might have some more significant problems. If you've not made many changes to your site recently, it may be that you've been caught in a Google algorithm update.
A basic audit will give me some idea of what's going on and I can advise you further.
Don't panic! This is surprisingly common.
Typically, when businesses want a new website, they go to a web designer. The web designer is often a graphic designer and he designs you something which looks amazing, but where no thought has been put into conversion rate.
We'll need to look at exactly what has happened to determine the cause.
I'm a big fan of pleasing users.
If your competitors are already ranking for the phrases that you would like to rank for, producing content which is better than theirs is probably a good starting point.
I also think the time of just 500 word blogs on "5 top tips for xyz" has passed and content has to be more engaging, with exceptional interest value. This will include words, but can also include images, graphics, video, photography and infographics.
OK! I can handle that challenge.
When I was working through a vast amount of lead generation statistics, I hit the Google limit of 1/2 million cells in a spreadsheet. I wonder how many other people have done that!
Not really...
I do some design as examples as part of UX and CRO projects, and I also do wireframing, but I'm not a website designer.
However, I might be able to make changes directly to your site if you would like me to, presuming there is a content management system which I can access.
These days I do a bit of Python programming in order to do some data crunching, but if you're looking for a programmer, I can't help I'm afraid.
