Some things to consider when defining your target market are:

• What is your target area? Are you targeting local, regional, countrywide or global?
• Are you targeting businesses or consumers? If targeting businesses are they small, medium or large? If targeting consumers is it important to target families, couples or even the single market?
• Are you targeting the budget or premium market? Are you looking to sell lots of lower priced items or a few higher priced items?
• Who is most likely to purchase your products or services? Are they gender specific, for certain age groups or are they targeted to a certain activity, lifestyle or hobby?

Identifying your ecommerce stores target market at an early stage means that you can attract the right customers and not waste resources by targeting the wrong people. Targeting the right market allows you to achieve a higher return on investment.

Understanding your target market allows you to find the best and most relevant keywords for your website from the very beginning and gives you the perfect opportunity to ensure your website content is rich in these keywords. Knowing your market means you can search by location, price and specific interests and find the keywords that are most likely to drive traffic to your website.

Customers with a set budget may include words such as ‘cheap’ in their search terms, whereas people searching for more expensive products may include words like ‘luxury’ or ‘designer’. Using the correct keywords is important for successful conversion rates as targeting the wrong keywords is unlikely to attract suitable customers.

Knowing your target market is not just important when choosing keywords for search engine promotion but also when considering the design, layout and functionality of your website.

If your target is a younger market, you may want your website to be more eye catching with more activities and things to do. If you are targeting an older market, something cleaner and easy to navigate may be preferred. If your target is businesses then a professional look and feel are best.

From a technical point of view, this also allows you to decide the types of functionality you want to include. Websites targeting businesses may want to include features like having to register for an account to view prices or even special loyalty based prices for certain customers.

Consumer focused ecommerce websites may want to include features like ‘send to a friend’ so that visitors can share product recommendations and increase traffic through word of mouth; or shareable wish lists that allow visitors to save items for future reference or share on occasions like birthdays or Christmas.

Knowing your target market is important to the creation of your ecommerce website, but this is also the perfect time to identify your competitors and check out their online store to get a feel for how they target the market. I’m not suggesting you copy their website by any means, but knowing your competitors and understanding how they work will allow you to identify things that could work for you as well as things you wouldn’t want to include.

Having a list of websites you like (whether relevant to your target market or not) along with information about your target market gives your developer a better understanding of what you want to achieve with your website and allows them to suggest options to enhance your online store further.

Read Part 1 of the discussion at Ecommerce & SEO: The important part you play.

Please feel free to contact us with your comments via Twitter @impactwebsolns or ‘Like’ us on Facebook.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions Ltd
Search Engine Optimisation & Ecommerce Web Design Midlands

This week I will be discussing ‘You’ and the important part you play in the creation of your ecommerce website and it’s promotion. Over the coming weeks I will be covering ‘Your Market’, ‘Your People’, ‘Technical Requirements and Scalability’ and ‘Your Marketing’.

So let’s begin with….

You

Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer developed a hypothesis called ‘Implementation Intention’ which is the idea of planning goals in advance; adding as much detail as possible (how, when and where as well as solutions to any problems you may encounter) for greater success. Implementation Intention is something that very much applies to the creation of an online store.

Making the decision to create an ecommerce website is not something you should just pass over to your website designer, after all – no one knows your business as well as you, so you are perfectly placed to add input into how your store should function.

Before contacting an ecommerce specialist, spend some time putting together a list of things you want your website to do and include.

Things you may want to consider:

• How do you want the online shop to look and feel? E.g. clean and minimal or vibrant and young.
• What do you want your customers to be able to do on your website? E.g. Add items to wishlists, recommend products to a friend, leave client reviews for purchases.
• What do you want the website to do for you? E.g. Is your main focus to increase your turnover or are you looking for a better way of processing your orders and handling administration?
• How do you want your ecommerce website to interact with existing websites? E.g. Link from an information or sister website to the online store, link to an information site.
• How important is it for you to be able to update the website yourself? Is the system easy to use and will you receive training on how to update your website or would you prefer to pay the designer to complete updates for you?
• Do you have product information and images available to provide to your web designer to speed up the product import process?
• When do you expect your ecommerce store to launch? What are your timeframes for individual sections of the website to be completed i.e. designs, products added to the website, testing.
• What will your role be in the creation of your online store? How much time will you need to invest in getting the site up and running?
• Will your website be built in an SEO friendly way? Is this included in the build costs or are there additional costs? How does this work link to a full search engine optimisation campaign once the website has launched?
• Where do you want your web designer to be based? Local companies will be more accessible.

Once you have decided what you want for your online store, your developer will be able to work with you and advise you of the best ways to not only achieve the things you have requested but recommend other options to enhance your store and achieve your overall goals.

By highlighting any problems you are looking to solve at this early stage, you can work with your ecommerce specialist to find the best possible solution. From experience, you are the best person to say how your business works and what you want your website to do; your ecommerce specialist is the best person to tell you how this can be achieved from a technical point of view (if you aren’t technical ask them to explain in a jargon free way!).

Please feel free to contact us with your comments via Twitter @impactwebsolns or ‘Like’ us on Facebook.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Ecommerce Web Design Midlands

In fact, 81% of all Internet users enter a website via a search engine. Search engines follow any link they can find and add lots of pages from the same website to the search results, making the chances of landing on the homepage just as likely as landing on any other page on the website!

So think of your online store as a bricks and mortar store. You want as many people as possible to enter your shop, so you open every single entrance – doors, windows and since it’s Christmas even the chimney! Now think about which departments in the shop these entrances are closest too and make a sign for each one e.g. ‘Enter here for Search Engine Optimisation‘, ‘Ecommerce web design this way!’.
Obviously you don’t want these signs to be massive, so little and often is the key. Make sure the signs are relevant, I don’t want to enter through the entrance marked ‘Search Engine Optimisation Midlands’ to find ‘Ecommerce Midlands’, that means I need to go searching for the right entrance and that will mean I’m unhappy by the time I get there!

This is exactly how your search engine optimisation should be, a handful of content relevant keywords per page giving you greater product placement in a wider range of search engine results, and a better chance of being found for all of your products.

As long as the keywords are relevant to your products and services it should be easy to add them into the content of the website. Product descriptions are a must in an ecommerce store as the customers are unable to physically touch and see the products, so base their decisions purely on the information provided, and a high quality of data also increases conversion rates. For a successful online store, products don’t always have to be the cheapest but they should be the best value! Even if your competitors are selling the exact same product you should still convince them that yours is the best! One important way to convey better value is with a professional looking website.

Websites that have been created in free site builders or created in WYSIWYG editors such as Frontpage often find it hard to compete with websites that have been custom built by a professional web designer – remember ‘Beauty is in the eye of the mouseholder’ and the visual aspect of a store is a must for most serious shoppers who want to deal with a professional organisation rather than someone who is going to take their money and ‘do a runner’.

Another way of conveying your market value is with good search engine rankings for the products and services you offer. 36% of online shoppers associate search engine placement with company prominence, something that you would expect from a reliable company, providing great value and service!

Intelligent keywords are crucial for attracting customers to your online store, which is why we get to know your business before we provide suggestions for the keywords that would be of most benefit to you. If you would like to discuss how a search engine promotion campaign could help to increase sales for your ecommerce website, call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Studio 2 Online
Ecommerce & Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

The text in the blue bar is the title of that specific webpage, and is the first impression a search engine will get of that page. Although the title is often ignored by users, it is important to not forget to optimise it for the search engines. When creating your titles for your pages, remember the following points:

• The title should contain the theme of the webpage
• It is normally the text that is displayed on the search engine result page
• It should be 80-90 characters long
• A title should be unique for each webpage
• The placement of words is important, with your keywords located at the front
• The title should be an informative summary of the page content

If you are looking for a search engine optimisation agency that can help with all aspects of improving your site for search engine optimisation, then give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

So as a leading web design agency, Leicester we are well aware of the importance of having your website listed highly in the Google rankings.

Achieving a listing on the first page of Google can be a challenge, especially for competitive keywords. Getting to the top involves important decisions at the initial website design stages, as well as a well planned search engine optimisation strategy.

The benefits of ranking well in Google are:

• Google controls a large percentage of the search engine market
• Google will send more traffic to your site than the other search engines, which means more customers and therefore more profit.
• A site performing well on Google will also generally do well on the other search engines.

Studio 2 Online offer both web design and search engine solutions for our clients. This may seem an obvious thing to say, but we get a lot of enquiries from people about optimising their website, where it’s obvious that the previous designer had little or no understanding of how to build a website that’s search engine friendly and ready for a SEO campaign.

So why not ‘kill two birds with one stone’ and let us design and build your website to a high search engine friendly specification and then run a successful SEO campaign for you? That way you can have the first page of Google as a goal right from the start.

Oh, and don’t forget the value of Google Adwords as a complimentary search engine marketing tool to boost your enquiries and sales even further. Needless to say, we can help you out with this as well!

To help your website on its way to the first page of Google, or to discuss any of the web design and search engine optimisation (SEO) services we offer, contact the Studio 2 Online team. Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Web design Midlands

If so then that website was lacking a very important aspect of good web design – a site map.

A site map is as useful to a website user as a road map is to a driver, and here are 5 useful tips:

• Your site map should include a link to every page within your website; from the homepage, to your contact details, to your deepest subpages.
• A link to your site map should be included on every page of your website. This means that every page within your site is only ever two clicks away, which is not only good web design, but also useful for getting your pages indexed by the search engines.
• Keep your site map under 100 links, and if more are needed then split into multiple site maps.
• An XML site map is important for search engine optimisation as it allows search engine crawlers easy access to index every page within your site.
• It’s important to understand the difference between a HTML sitemap and a XML sitemap. A HTML sitemap is useful to the visitors to your site, while a XML sitemap is designed to give information about your site directly to search engines.

If you’re lost and in need of some direction with anything to do with your website, or if you are after a brand new site, as a leading web design agency, Leicester we can provide excellent web designs and search engine friendly services to promote your business and increase your enquiries and sales.

Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting. If you need a map to find us, then there is one on the website…we wouldn’t want you getting lost after all!

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Web design Midlands

• Don’t change URLs: indexed URLs are precious!! Don’t change them!! Search engines crawl a website and index pages on your website that they then return for relevant search terms. It is alright to change heading, images and other content on the webpage but avoid changing indexed URLs.
• Optimise Website: Apply search engine optimisation to the website before it is launched, not after it’s live and up and running on the internet. Basic SEO techniques can be applied to a website during the build. This also helps to strengthen the information architecture of the website so a user can be led through the website as you planned it. For example, a user may enter a product page and actually be guided through to the information on the product and ultimately the ‘buy now’ webpage, hence changing a visitor into a customer.
• Website Content: for the above to be possible it is important that your website copywriter understands your business and its target audience completely. A good copywriter will write copy for the target audience, speaking their language. Good web copy will also help lead the user to the right web page once a visitor has entered the website.

To find out more of such useful tips contact our web design midlands agency based in Leicester to have an informal chat and see how we can help redesign your website and promote it in Google and other key search engines through SEO.

Mariam Shariff

Studio 2 Online – Web designers Midlands, Leicester

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Some points to consider:

• Choose:

1. A professional Website Design Company who will spend time understanding your needs – very important!
2. A good copywriter who can appreciate your company ethos and your target audience to turn your website visitors into customers
3. A visually powerful website design that reflects your business
4. A website structure that is easy to navigate for a site visitor as well as a search engine robot, especially if you’re selling products/services online.
5. A website navigation system that is simple and easyto use, with information or products no more than three mouse clicks away. A copywriter specialising in websites will be able to help you with this.

• Make your website accessible in accordance to the W3C Standards
• Allow external links to open in a new tab or window, but avoid too many or it just becomes distracting
• Include a good user sitemap that is easy to navigate

Things to avoid:

• A website that is not accessible to everyone, including those with visual impairments. Indeed if a website is not accessible to everyone this could lead to legal action
• A completely Flash based website – it may look good, but it’s likely to take ages to load so people will lose interest before they even enter the site, and search engines don’t like Flash
• Too many back grounds – less is more when it comes to website design
• Too many external links – you want people to stay on your website, not wander off elsewhere!

For more advice on choosing the right web design for your business contact our Midlands based web design agency on 0116 275 8456 to have an informal discussion on our web design and other web services.

Mariam Shariff

Studio 2 Online – Web design Leicester, Midlands

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During the web design process of a new website or ecommerce website, one important design element to decide on is whether or not to use frames.

Using frames is displaying two or more HTML pages within a single browser window at one time.

If you are new to web design, you may think that there is no problem in doing this, but it can cause problems for both the visitors to your website, as well as search engine crawlers.

If the page is split into frames, this will cause web design issues that will affect your visitors who are using a browser that doesn’t support frames, and can also cause navigational problems. Also, search engine crawlers cannot index framed sites easily, so your search engine optimisation will suffer.

As a leading web design agency in the Midlands, we can help you acquire a fantastic website that will provide excellent web design standards as well as being search engine friendly to promote your business and increase your enquiries and sales. Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Web design Midlands

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Remember that most people use the web to look for information before they make a purchase, and this is true whether they end up buying online or on the High Street. So a website is the best way of sharing information with potential customers about your products or services.

The key is to keep the website content customer focussed i.e. what does your target audience want.  By doing this you are marketing your product or service in the most cost effective and optimum way possible.

Remember the Internet is a world where perception is reality. It’s not the size of your business that matters online. Instead, to be successful the way you present your business online must be stronger than your competition.

That’s why you need to use a good, professional web design agency to create your website. A good web designer will be able to identify crucial aspects of your business and translate this into a web design that draws attention to the benefits, or USPs of your products or services, and also gives you a real return on your investment in terms of increased enquiries and sales.

Have a brochure website if you want to promote your business or an e commerce website if you want to sell online. Using a good e commerce system will really help make your website search engine friendly. With your website ranking well on search engines the potential for your market becomes as big as you want it to be.

As a leading web design agency in Leicester providing web services to  businesses across the Midlands we can help you acquire a fantastic website that will promote your business and increase your  enquiries and sales. Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting.

Mariam Shariff

SEO Engineer – Studio 2 Online
Web designers Leicestershire

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