June 17, 2009
Website Strategy
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Travelling today we saw a website url on a van that made us double-take (and laugh).
The van was fairly ordinary except for the url printed on it of www.barrycursonsplumbingandheating.co.uk. We’ve seen some pretty long urls in our time but that one has to be up for a top ten award!
But it made us take note of it just to investigate further.
Looking at that website we found content that, although it could be a lot stronger, was adequate for a local company and there’s been an attempt made to get natural search engine positioning. The purpose of this piece though isn’t to go into the problems with how that SEO has been done, or how the website could be strengthened, but to focus on the url itself …
At a total of 40 characters, that url is far too long for the average person to accurately remember. We got it wrong on the first attempt to type it in by missing the s on ‘cursons’. So we dug into the shorter url of www.barrycursons.co.uk and found that it’s owned by the same person and, at a much snappier 22 characters, would have:
a. been more much memorable on the van
b. saved in costs of printing on the van (currently the van almost needs an extension to fit it in)
It made us wonder how many people would have seen that van but they wouldn’t have investigated further because the url was too lengthy, or tried to and failed. We don’t know the full story behind why such a long url was chosen as the ‘out and about’ visibility of the business but we do know that it probably leads to lost business.
Some would say that ’size matters’. That’s true in some circumstances but when it comes to urls, we’re happy with our small 17 characters www.custwin.co.uk url.
June 8, 2009
Google Adwords, Website Strategy
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Winning business from a company website is usually achieved through both of the following together:
- A website that’s strong enough to encourage visitors to make contact/buy after visiting it.
- A website that’s well promoted both online and offline.
For 99.9% of companies that’s the situation. If a website isn’t strong enough then there’s little point in actively sending traffic to that website and because most companies are in competition with others, it becomes a constant battle to not only raise the visibility of products/services but to ensure that people buy when they visit the website.
So it’s quite unusual to see a situation that isn’t ‘the norm’ but that’s what we’ve had for some time with a client.
We started working with this client some time ago and our brief was originally to send PPC traffic to the website, which we did. Client feedback has always been that good levels of enquiries/business are gained and so in theory, everyone should be happy. But not us …
Our focus with clients is to ensure that the maximum possible benefit is gained from PPC traffic to the website and if we identify weaknesses within a client website then we will highlight them as opportunitities for improvement. This is what happened with this particular client because we could see numerous options to expand the PPC campaign but didn’t feel confident that the website was strong enough to convert that extra online visibility into enquiries/business. After a period of time we had a meeting with the client to discuss further and discovered something very unusual …
This particular client sells a product that is fairly niche but has quite a high potential customer base. In short, those people looking for the product (or phrases related to the product) are already in a position where they have little choice but to buy the product and so, regardless of the strength of the website, they end up buying anyway. In normal circumstances, people would land on a website, not like something about it, and would go to the next website in the Google results and so on until a company fully impresses them enough to buy/make contact. In this situation, what I refer to as the 0.1%, the lack of strength in the website doesn’t have a massively detrimental effect on the amount of business gained because the potential clients have no choice but to buy.
Of course, it’s true that if this client wanted to gain even more from the traffic to their website then through website redevelopment work, that could certainly be achieved. But for now, being in the very small minority of companies that has no competition for their products, they enjoy that position of being what’s probably 0.1% of all company websites that don’t have to be strong in order for PPC to succeed.
Back in the real world, for the other 99.9% it’s as ever important to ensure that the company website is incredibly strong before spending too much money on advertising such as PPC.
