Website categories and prices

Website Development, Website Strategy No Comments

Going back several years we used to write blogs focusing on just one or two aspects of a website that would benefit from being improved.  They were never intended to be a complete “pull it apart and put it back together again” but instead just a few pointers.

We’ve not done that for a long time and so we’ve revisited the concept, focusing on the website http://www.boothpix.co.uk/.

I happen to know that the website is in the process of being changed but these couple of points may not have been considered.  The two subjects I’ve chosen to look at are:

  • Categories
  • Prices

To start off on a big positive, I’d never heard of photo booth hire before I went to this website and thought “what a fantastic idea!”.   That was closely followed by two thoughts of:

“That’s probably ideal for all sorts of event types.”

“How much does it cost?”

Let’s start with the most important one first …


Price

We live in tough times.  Less money floating around means that people are more cautious about what they spend it on.  Even those who don’t have as much money don’t want to appear as if they can’t afford things.  So let’s step into someone’s shoes, having been to this website, loving the concept, but first of all thinking “don’t waste time digging deep just yet because if the price isn’t right then there’s no point considering it further”.

Many marketers would say that you don’t have to put prices on websites.  If website visitors are the right type of people, who can afford it, then they will make contact.  If website visitors don’t see a price, and still make contact, but can’t really afford it, they may still be possible to convert into business.

I understand that viewpoint but will always fall on the side of the fence that says “at least give people an idea of how much something costs”.

If that website owner isn’t spending money on advertising and all the traffic costs nothing or little then having no prices doesn’t actually lose them money from their advertising budget.  However, when there are costs involved to get people to a website and those same website visitors have an expectation of seeing an idea of pricing, many of those people will leave the website, which means wasted advertising budget.

Noting the nature of photo booth hire, the website says that each event is unique and therefore it’s not possible to provide a set price.  That’s fair enough … but doesn’t go far enough.

Each type of event could easily be categorised and rough pricing provided.  For example, a booth may be required for a 21st birthday party and the expected number of photos to be taken could be 100, or 150, or more.   Such information could be easily provided within the website.   The business owner is not tied to those rough prices and an exact quote would still need to be provided, but the potential customer is far more likely to get in contact if they have a rough idea of pricing related to their event type and numbers of photos/people (plus other parameters that may be relevant).

Of course, there will be people who visit the website, see the costs, and then leave.  That will always happen.  However, what probably currently happens is that many people leave the website because they have no idea of pricing at all.  By putting pricing indications in this website it will gain higher levels of enquiries.

However, it needs to be a bit cleverer than that.  Which leads onto …


Categories

The website has a section focusing on Packages (http://www.boothpix.co.uk/index.php/hire-options/) but the concept of packages is perhaps too far down the buying path.   My suggestion would be for the website to focus more on the concept of ‘Event Types’.  For example:

  • Weddings
  • 18th & 21st Birthdays
  • Teenager Birthdays
  • Company Parties
  • School Proms

Within each event type there would be a range of photos to browse through, covering previous events.  For example, all the previous ‘Weddings’ sessions would be within the Weddings section.  This is something commonly done within photographers websites.

By grouping types of events together, potential buyers get a good feel for:

  1. How similar groups of people used the booths
  2. Numbers of people who have used the company before (for the event type)

Within such an ‘Event Type’ sub-page there is the opportunity to include indications of pricing specifically related to the event type.   The prices may well be similar to other event types (for example, a wedding with 100 photos may cost the same as a 21st party with 100 photos) but the point is to give people the information they’re interested in, all within one part of the website.

Over time, by adding more and more events into the relevant Event Types sections, the website gets stronger and stronger.   And by putting those event types in pretty graphical boxes on the home page, as routes straight down to those types of events, the website owner is going to get much better clicks into the sub-pages from the home page.

Conclusion

The danger with trying to cover just a couple of opportunities within websites is that other things jump out at the same time and these are supposed to be blogs, not full website strategies.  But for BoothPix, those two pointers are enough to be focusing on for now and will make a substantial difference to the success of the website if implemented.  And for any website owner the two questions that may be worth asking yourself are:

  1. Are there elements of my website that should be categorised better in some way?
  2. Do I need to be clearer about pricing of my products or services?

Case studies on websites

Website Development, Website Strategy No Comments

This week has witnessed a tale of three companies, each of which had a differing attitude towards case studies on websites.

Tale 1

The first is a client company who, through being busy, didn’t get round to creating case studies to go on their website.  However, we eventually got their commitment to create case studies related to a particular service they offered.

The difference was highly noticeable.  From a service page without case studies to a service page with 3 case studies and a link to more, the change was a significant increase in enquiries gained about that particular service.  The exact words of the client were: “we can see now that you were right and we’re now going to dedicate more time to creating case studies for our other services”.

Result: a client that will see business continue to grow, through showing potential customers not just what they can do, but what they have done for other customers.  Who cares whether a company ‘can’ make widgets?   What people care about are the widgets that have been made for people and how great those widgets were.


Tale 2

The second example is a relatively new client, a company that is well established and is always busy, but has an eye to the future (and so wants to develop the website further).  For over 2 months now I’ve been trying to get case studies from the client but them being busy has stopped that from happening.  There is no doubt that within no time of them having such case studies live on the website, that website visitors will be enquiring at a higher rate.

But time is the enemy and because only they know their subject well enough, it’s hard to get anyone else to create the case studies.

So I’m going to see them next week, having got commitment to a couple of hours within which we will do nothing but create case studies.  Them talking about the jobs done, and me creating the case studies.  Painful?  Yes.  Necessary? Yes.


Tale 3

The final example is a conversation with a previous client from years ago.  They now want to move their website forwards and before ‘signing up’ want an idea of what Custwin would be doing and what would be expected of them.  It’s very clear that they need a raft of case studies related to the products they’re selling BUT they have yet to be convinced that it’s worthwhile them investing time in it.  I’ve said that I’d be willing to sit with them and create case studies but even before that being accepted, they still need to be convinced case studies are needed (even though to me it’s blatantly obvious).

This is where website statistics come into play because there’s simple maths that can be applied:

  1. Take the number of website visitors in the month.
  2. Subtract those website visitors that don’t appear to be ‘useful’.
  3. Compare that number to the number of enquiries gained in the month.

All the time that the enquiries to ‘useful visitors’ ratio is too low then it shouts out that the website needs to be strengthened (in this case, starting with case studies).

We’ll see where that goes but I’m hoping that the previous trust built up with the client company will result in a dedication to at least measure what’s currently being achieved from the website, before then pushing forwards through the creation of case studies.

Not convinced yet that you need lots of case studies on your website?

So, one week and three different viewpoints on whether case studies are important within websites.   If you don’t have any, or much, in the way of case studies on your website then the recommendation is to take some time out and create just a handful that can then be made live on your website.   Then track the people who look at those case studies and see how much of a difference it makes to enquiry levels.  Once convinced that case studies on websites are important then build them up higher and higher.

There’s always a website worse than yours

Google Adwords, Website Development, Website Strategy No Comments

Sometimes it may feel that you have the worst website in your industry.   Day to day the visitor enquiries are non-existent or very low, and you think things are bad with your website.

We’ve reviewed and helped literally thousands of websites in our time and although there’s little excuse for having an underperforming website, it can sometimes be comforting that there are people out there with a worse website and focus than yours.

This one will appeal particularly to people in the holidays industry.  There are some brilliant websites in the holidays industry, particularly the niche holiday websites.  Then there are those in the middle ground.  And sometimes you find something that is spectacularly off target.

We had an enquiry come in recently and it said:

“i run a travel agency ..i do advertising on google. i want to buy 50 to 100 keywords for a year and i want them to be on top..can you please tell me how much it will cost me for a year?”

Apart from it being one of those ‘how long is a ball of string?’ questions (and actually impossible to answer even if knowing what keyword phrases were wanted), the focus was very much on advertising.

A bit of dialogue later and it turned out that the person wanted to be visible under various ‘holidays’ type phrases.  So I looked at their main navigation bar as there was nothing else jumping out from their website saying ‘holidays’.  I won’t name the company because that would embarrass them (no, they’ve not become a client – they ran very fast when they were told how much work they’d need to do in order to justify using Google Adwords).  That navigation bar displays as:

Nothing about holidays in there.

Eventually I worked out that if you click on ‘Flights’ it takes you to what is their holidays page and you can see a sample below …

Putting aside me wondering whether ‘Adeliade’ is anywhere near ‘Adelaide’ (I have a degree in being pedantic about website errors), I thought “hmmm, Adelaide for £811 – let’s look at that” and I clicked on the box.

Well, I tried to click on it.  But it doesn’t go any deeper.

On discussing that with the website owner they were surprised that anyone might actually want to look at details of the holidays on offer and “surely they’d see the price and ring up to find out more?”

So, we’re at the point where this company wants to spend money on sending Google Adwords clicks to a website that is woefully inadequate.  In fact, it makes even mediocre holiday websites look good.   At that point I (nicely) said that I wouldn’t be prepared to set up such an Adwords campaign and that they’d be advised to run a mile from anyone who would be prepared to (before the website is strengthened).

I suspect that they’ll do exactly that. God forbid, they’ll go directly to Google who will quite happily help them set up an Adwords campaign that links through to a rubbish website (they have a department dedicated to doing just that).   It was very clear from the conversation that they had an Adwords tunnel vision and nothing mattered more than sending traffic to the website.  Unfortunately, this is a common disease that can lead to financial death.

Maybe it’s time that we had some sort of central system where business owners can submit their website details and ask for people to grade it on various factors (design, content, depth, etc.).  Just a quick 2 minute appraisal ticking boxes and maybe adding in a few comments.  Everyday people could respond, as could website professionals.  The intention wouldn’t be to sales-pitch services on offer but to give just a small bit of time to website owners that need a collective view (rather than one opinion) of where their website needs to be stronger.

With such a rating system in place, people like me would be less likely to get enquiries about Adwords from people who are clearly not yet ready to line the pockets of Google.

11 for 11-11-11

Website Development, Website Strategy No Comments

Any excuse to come up with some website success tips, in recognition of today being the 11th of the 11th 2011, here are 11 tips that will help you gain more business from your website if you spend just a bit of time on one or more of them …

  1. Increase your blogging frequency

    Blogs that are useful to people help to keep you in their minds for when they may need your products/services, or may be able to recommend you onto others.  If you don’t blog, then create just one a month.  If you do blog, then increase the frequency.   If you’re completely stuck on how to get started then take a look at http://jododdssocialmedia.com/op/business-blogging-2/business-bloggers-manual/ – a real bargain.

  2. Follow up with 11 website visitors who didn’t make contact

    If people from companies visit your website but don’t make contact then it makes sense to see if you can salvage something (by making contact with them).  If you don’t have the ability to identify companies that have visited your website then take a look at http://www.a1webstats.com/what-is-a1webstats/a1webstats-features/companies-visited/ and take advantage of the free trial.

    And if you’re asking yourself the question “how do I know which person within the visiting company came to my website?”, the answer is “you don’t”.  However, using systems like LinkedIn and your existing contacts, you may find a route into that company.  If nothing else, a cold call to that company, trying to get through to someone who may have been interested in your products/services, has got to be worth a try.   Following the ‘11’ theme, if you contacted 11 companies who you know visited your website, and only 1 of them came to anything, you’ve still won more than you would have done by not doing anything.

  3. Boost your testimonials

    How many testimonials do you have on your website?  Do you have testimonials related to specific products or services that you provide?  Do you think that potential customers could be more likely to make contact with you, having visited your website, if you have more testimonials from happy customers?

    Boosting the number of testimonials on your website by even just one is a step in the right direction.

  4. Analyse the competition

    Select a phrase that you want to be/are visible under within Google.  Type it in and spend a bit of time looking through the websites of competitors.  What are they doing on their websites that make you think “that’s a nice touch”?    Replicate it and then beat it in some way.

  5. Make a small website change

    If you know how many enquiries your website typically generates as a percentage of website visitors, then you’ll probably like to increase that.   By making just one small website change you can improve the website visitor experience.  For example, you could put in some fresh graphics, add in a video, offer something for free, or change the font to be nicer.   If you’ve followed tip 4 above you’ll probably have plenty of ideas for making changes.   Then sit back and see how that has an impact on visitors vs enquiries.  If it’s successful then make another small change.

  6. Analyse your biggest landing page

    Apart from your home page, see which page of your website has most people landing on it (e.g. from search engines).   Analyse how each of those visitors then navigates through your website.  What did they type (e.g. into Google) to find that biggest landing page?   How many of them moved beyond that landing page?  Do you think their visits were a success for you?

    Don’t know how to dig deep into people who land on certain website pages?  Take a look at http://www.a1webstats.com/what-is-a1webstats/a1webstats-features/entry-exit-pages/ and feel free to sign up for the free trial.

  7. Write something fantastic

    What could you write, as an article/blog within your website, that you think is the best article on that particular subject?   If you invested the time to create such an article and then made it visible online (e.g. get involved in online discussions about the subject and refer people back to your article), then surely that would bring traffic and interest back to your website?

    Everyone has at least one world-beating article inside them – it’s just a case of putting fingers to keyboard and start typing.   Create the article, promote it online, and then monitor it (see tip 6) to see when people click through to that page of your website.

  8. Highlight your contact details

    People are short of time.   When they look through your website they may get to a certain page that interests them the most.   If your contact details (phone number and email are sufficient) are highly visible on every page of your website then it makes it easy for people to make contact with you (instead of having to go to a contact details page, where they won’t be able to still see the page that was of most interest to them).

  9. Offer a guarantee

    What can you offer as a guarantee related to one or more of  your services or products?   If you had a big bold ‘Guarantee’ type graphic that links through to a page that explains the guarantee, could that give people more reason to buy from you/make contact?   Be big and bold and show people that you’re good enough to offer a 100% no quibble guarantee.  You will notice your enquiries to visitors ratio increase as a result.

  10. Pick a poor performer

    Identify a page of your website that doesn’t get much traffic (see http://www.a1webstats.com/what-is-a1webstats/a1webstats-features/visited-pages/ for how to do this) and ask yourself whether it matters that the page doesn’t get much attention. If you think it’s a valuable page within your website then consider how you could adapt other parts of your website so that they point to that page in a better way.

  11. Set a figure-based goal

    Just because of the blog subject, pick a number as the figure to base a goal on. For example, if you have 50 people who contact you via your website, over a 3 month period, set a target of an 11% increase over the following 3 months, and do whatever you need to in order for that to happen. Or, if your website traffic needs to be higher, set a percentage (11%?!) increase that you want to achieve within a certain timescale.

    Whatever the goal it needs to be related to you gaining more business from your website and it needs to be written down and measured at milestones along the way.

Keep watching for a similar blog on 12/12/12.

100 days left to make 100% improvement

Website Development, Website Strategy No Comments

Today marks there being 100 days left of 2011 and it’s probably a good time to reflect on what we’ve all achieved in 2011 to date.

We all start the New Year full of goals and things to achieve but life being what it is, many goals (both business and personal) don’t work out quite the way we wanted them to.

So today, I’m calling for a 100% improvement in 100 days.  But 100% of what?

Being in the web industry, the answer is: elements of website strength.

No, not necessarily gaining a 100% boost in website traffic (although that could easily be done in 100 days), but one or more things that you can increase by 100%, that are easy to do, and will help.  For example …

How many testimonials do you have on your website related to specific products or services you provide?   2, 3, 4, more?  Whatever the number is, how easy would it be to boost that number by 100% within the remaining 100 days of 2011?  And how much more impressed would people be to see more testimonials on display?

Maybe you gain a certain number of enquiries via your website each month … what could you tweak to raise that number by 100%?

Or perhaps you do the occasional blog, maybe 2 a month.  Would a 100% boost to 4 a  month be potentially good for your online recognition?

Or maybe you tweet something really useful only a couple of times a week.  Boost that by 100% to 4 times a week and recognition will rise.

You may have created a couple of videos for your website and so could double up on those.  Or you may have no video at all and so a 100% improvement would be the creation of just one!

Of course, please feel free to have a bigger goal such as increasing your website enquiries/sales by 100% in the remaining 100 days of 2011.   It’s certainly possible with the right knowledge and mindset (and perhaps a bit of outside help).  However, if you’ve found the first 265 days of the year have left you with many goals not achieved then perhaps it’s best to focus on just a few smaller ones that will improve your website and when you see the results from that, maybe inspire you to do more of the same as routine, rather than working within a targeted number of days.

The link between exam results and websites

Website Development, Website Strategy No Comments

Today was the day of reckoning for many as school exam results put smiles or tears on the faces of thousands of teens.  I was there at the school with my daughter, seeing how her efforts at school translated into results.

It made me think about the parallels between exam results and company websites.

In the case of my daughter, she needed to get certain results to guarantee a few things:

  1. Getting into 6th form.
  2. Being able to do I.T. in 6th form (if you do I.T. then you get to go on a trip to New York – yes, I know, not really the right reasons!).
  3. Get a juicy £150 bonus for passing her Maths (which had been a problem subject).
  4. Getting her 16th birthday present of a flashy camera (needed to do photography if getting into 6th form).

Unfortunately, the Maths grade was poor, which had the following negative knock-on effects:

  1. Poor Maths grades = loss of £150.
  2. Poor Maths grades = no option to do I.T. as a subject, which means no New York trip.

She’s highly likely to still get into 6th form, because other results helped her and, let’s be honest, the education system is so dumbed down that it’s extremely hard to totally fail nowadays.

Back to how this relates to websites …..

  • If more effort is put into school studies then better results will be gained.
  • If more effort is put into website strength then better results will be gained.
  • If school results are impressive then there are benefits (taking a subject that facilitates a trip to New York; getting a financial bonus of £150).
  • If websites are impressive then there are benefits (more enquiries and sales).
  • When you leave 6th form, if you’ve taken your own education and, more importantly, attitude, to a much stronger place then you will have a chance of gaining work in the big wide world.
  • When you’ve continued to build on your website strength, never accepting that it’s finished, then you will gain ever more business.

How many people in business are the equivalent of those who didn’t put in enough effort to get the better grades at school?   They are the ones that have websites that don’t get great results because they don’t put the effort in.  Some of them have websites that generate nothing at all – the equivalent of the dreaded ‘U’ grade in exams.

My message to those coming through the education system is this:

Although (in my view) attitude and ability to impress people are far more important than exam grades, the ‘system’ expects you to have put sufficient effort in to get the grades you need to impress those who could be in a position to pay you money.  If other people have more to impress people with, then they will do better than you.

In parallel, my message to those with websites that don’t gain enough business is:

The effort you’ve put into your website may be eclipsed by the effort that your competitors have put into theirs.  People have a choice of who to buy from and if your website is the equivalent of lower level exam grades (in the eyes of the viewer) then you will not get what you want in business and life.

The longest url ever

SEO, Website Development No Comments

As part of SEO it’s useful to get the url of your website pages right.  It’s only one aspect but it can help.  Most people nowadays understand that it’s crazy to have a url that’s not plain English (for example www.example.com/CatProd?Prod_id=123345 instead of something like www.example.com/pink-ballet-shoes.html).

Some people understand that you should have plain English urls but still don’t quite get there.  For example, the page http://www.thedancelocker.com/bloch-m-1.html is all about a particular brand of dancing shoes so it would be better off as being http://www.thedancelocker.com/bloch-shoes.html or ending /bloch-dance-shoes.html instead of that bloch-m-1.html.

And then there are those who understand that you need plain English in the urls but somewhere along the way get carried away with the keyboard …

http://www.ipapurchasing.co.uk/ipa-purchasing-consultants-and-catering-procurement-specialists-offer-discount-supplies-and-catering-discounts.html

Wow!  That makes for a long url.

Why would you do such a thing?   And more than that, repeat it throughout that website.

The golden rules with naming pages within urls are:

  1. Use hyphenated words (e.g. pink-ballet-shoes instead of pinkballetshoes).
  2. Use only a maximum of 3 words.

For further reading on url structure, a useful guide can be seen at http://www.bml-creative.co.uk/2010/10/url-structure-for-seo-success/.

Internet years more than dog years?

Website Development, Website Strategy No Comments

They say that there are 7 dog years in a human year.  Similar could be said about Internet years because the technology/ways of using it moves so fast.

What I mean by this is that websites age very fast.  Taking just one human year, there could be two identical companies where one has:

  • Created a Twitter presence and is actively using it.
  • Put video of their products on their site.

… but the other company hasn’t done anything new except perhaps update their news page every now and then.

Another year passes and the first company adds in more features to their website and their competitor creaks into action by putting just one video on their site.

Another year later …. you get the picture.

It’s not purely related to the websites themselves either, because one company could be very active on blogs, Twitter etc., building up a presence for themselves, whereas the other company keeps plodding along.

There must be comments in company boardrooms up and down the country along the lines of:

“Sales are lower than even last year.  The marketing people don’t seem to be doing their job – we gave them budget to add a video onto the website this time last year and yet the sales haven’t increased”.

But in the boardrooms of companies that have realised the Internet moves fast and they have to move with it, the comments would be more like:

“Sales are up again, helped by the Twitter strategy, plus the blogging and videos.  It’s also been really useful to now be tracking the companies who are visiting our website so that we can then make contact with them if they didn’t make contact at the time.   For the coming few months we’re putting more budget into email marketing, having now proven that it works very well for us”.

Unfortunately, there’s still a well-entrenched view that the ‘Internet’ (including the company website) is a separate activity that has to be thrown a few pennies from time to time.  There’s little realisation that a human year equals many Internet years and in order to move forwards there has to be investment to ‘catch up’, followed by an ongoing programme to stay equal to, or ahead of the online presence of competitors.

A simple test for any company is as follows:

  1. Type a phrase that you’d like to be visible under in Google.
  2. Look at the websites of competitors that appear under that phrase.
  3. Note down aspects of their websites that are different/more modern than what’s on your website.
  4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 for as many phrases as you like.
  5. Ask around people to get their feelings on how useful those ‘extras’ are.
  6. If the answer comes back that your website/online strategy is Internet years behind your competitors then make the wise decision of investing everything necessary in positive change.

Old websites = lost business

Website Development, Website Strategy No Comments

What does an old website say about a business?  It could say any of the following:

  1. We’re so busy and successful that we don’t need to focus much attention on our website.
  2. We don’t innovate much.
  3. We don’t keep an awareness of what our competitors are doing online.
  4. We generally don’t have much attention to detail.

If you go to the website http://www.wintwire.co.uk/intro.html it immediately jumps out as being ‘old website’.   The copyright at the bottom of each page of the site shows as being 1999.   Wow, this website is practically an antique!

I went to the ‘Meet the team’ page (http://www.wintwire.co.uk/team.html) and I wondered whether any of those people are still with the company (or alive) and how interesting it would be to compare their photo now to how it was then.

Could it be that the company really hasn’t updated the website since 1999 as the copyright indicates?

There are many ways to find out how old website pages actually are.  One is using a bit of javascript in individual pages.   So I went to the intro page and removed the url, replacing it with:

javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

… and hit the enter key.  That displayed to me as:

Which means that the page was last modified on 15th February 2002.  Wow – by the time the 2012 Olympics are here that page will be 10 years since being updated – it should have a birthday cake!

So there’s a double problem here: not only does the page display as a date of 1999 but the last update of 2002 is still over 9 years in the past.

What does all this tell me about that company?  For a start it tells me that it’s pointless looking at the website content because it’s so far out of date that they probably don’t even make some of the products now.  Secondly, it tells me that they’re not interested in capturing my attention because otherwise they would have updated their website more recently (at least to have come into the current decade).  Thirdly, it could imply to me that they have poor attention to detail overall and even though they could be brilliant at what they produce, my initial impression is going to stop me making contact with them.

But they’re not alone because in my experience the majority of ‘manufacturing company’ type websites are woefully behind the times in so many ways.  Which is a shame when it doesn’t cost a fortune to get websites sorted out and the return on investment could be relatively quick.

Time travelling back to the Verona opera

Google Adwords, Website Development No Comments

As part of client work we keep an eye on adverts that appear in the Google Ads and, nearly 4 months through 2011 we saw the following advert appear when we did a search on Verona Opera holidays:

Checking the calendar to make sure that it was in fact 2011 and we hadn’t travelled back in time, two thoughts sprung to mind:

  1. The advertiser has outsourced their Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and the (lack of) service provider hasn’t updated the advert to 2011 from 2010.
  2. The advertiser runs their own PPC campaign and doesn’t have their eye on the ball.

If it was the former then the advertiser would have good reason to shoot their service provider because not only will an out-of-date PPC advert significantly reduce the ability to gain clicks, the click-through-rate (CTR) will decrease, which will cost the advertiser more if they want to then get a decent position (as Google will penalise if the CTR is too low).

If it was the latter (advertiser running the PPC campaign themselves) then it would imply that their attention to detail was poor.  Would YOU book a holiday with a company that didn’t pay attention to detail?   You think you’re going to Verona and end up in Bognor.

There are more signs of a poor awareness of what’s needed to win online, when you go to the landing page itself

  • Poorly scanned image of seating, not even translated.
  • Page meta title crammed with all sorts of keyword phrases in a scatter gun approach that will fail spectacularly.
  • Poor meta description showing no awareness of how it should be used.
  • 2006 copyright in the footer.
  • Focus on ABTA as a supposed sign of credibility (when people are becoming increasingly aware that ABTA gives them little protection).

Will that website owner be sitting there, wondering why they’re not getting many bookings?   Possibly.

Will they finally work out that their PPC advert is letting them down?  Possibly.

Will they maybe then go on to realise that their website landing page and organic SEO is poor?  Possibly.

‘Possibly’ is the common word here.   All sorts of companies may ‘possibly’ work out that certain things are wrong with their websites and online promotion.  But they lose a lot of time and potential business while in the meantime, their competitors just snap up the opportunities through a stronger online focus.

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