The reality is, whilst you and the people in your business may be very nice people, nobody is bothered. What they are interested in is what you can do for them.

The content of your website needs to focus primarily on meeting the needs and solving the problems of your visitors. So if you would like to transform the profitability of your site review your content from this angle.

Your website needs to be about your target visitors and their needs and desires. You should also give them plenty of information, so that they can see how what you are offering will be of value to them.

If you would like help in producing compelling marketing copy for your website, please give us a call now on 0800 082 7010 or email info@philyarrow.co.uk. Not only do we provide a web copywriting service, but we can optimise content for Google and the other search engines.

We are going camping in Europe soon and needed some equipment, so we visited a local shop and they were very helpful. They let us examine products and even inflated a sleeping mat for us to try for comfort. With that sort of service normally I would not quibble about paying the odd pound or two more. However, we knew from the company’s website that their prices were not the cheapest and decided to search Google to see what savings could be made.

Well, we bought what we needed online from two companies and saved no less than £40 on purchases totalling about £160. The sites are Outdooraction and Campervan Accessories and both offered a seamless e-commerce experience that made buying from them very straightforward. Taken together with the significant savings, it is no surprise that competitive businesses like these, who skilfully use Internet marketing and particularly SEO to ensure they feature high in the organic search results, are doing well in the current climate.

What about your business? Let us boost your sales and profitability and help you to get the best from Internet marketing. Please call us now on 0800 082 7010 or email info@philyarrow.co.uk to find out more.

One of the boats at the Festival was the Pride of Bristol and Hayes Parsons Ltd, a well known local insurance broker who specialise in marine insurance, entertained clients aboard. The company has been around since 1964. With extensive experience in commercial insurance, they provide impartial advice, a full claims service and keep fully up to date with market developments. Hayes Parsons Ltd are making use of Internet marketing and you can check out their website at www.hayesparsons.co.uk

The Pride of Bristol is an ex-Royal Naval Auxiliary Service vessel that is now owned by the Pride of Bristol Trust. Free educational trips are offered to underprivileged or special needs groups. Subsidised youth trips are also available and groups from such organisations as the Prince of Wales Trust, St Johns Cadets and Scouts have spent weekends or weeks learning all of the basic skills of seamanship, coastal pilotage, ship handling, helmsmanship and safety at sea, plus the more important skills of cooperation with others and pride in personal achievement.

The Pride of Bristol also have a web presence and you can find out more about how fundraising trips from Bristol Docks are organised to support their youth work by visiting www.prideofbristoltrust.co.uk

Remember if you are a local company or organisation with a website and you would like to drive more visitors to your site, we can help. Ring us on 0800 082 7010 or send us an email at info@philyarrow.co.uk

Investment in digital media channels like search engine marketing, online advertising and affiliate marketing averaged nearly one quarter (23%) of the total marketing communications budget in the companies surveyed.

Early adopters have already optimised their budgets, balancing online and offline channels. For later adopters, their spend could and probably should double over the next three years, particularly with the economic climate encouraging investments into more accountable, direct-response digital media like paid search.

If you have not yet realised the benefits of investing in Internet marketing, particularly search engine marketing and Pay Per Click, please contact us now on 0800 082 7010 or email info@philyarrow.co.uk and let us show you how you can get the most from your budget.

Why is that? Well despite people believing that just because they have created a great website, everyone will flock to it, the reality is somewhat different. Websites are not like shops that experience passing traffic. They are out there in cyberspace, along with millions of other websites.

People don’t visit sites by chance, they need to be driven to them by Internet marketing. The design or content of the site will not determine the numbers of visitors to it.

So, are you using Internet marketing effectively? If not, you will have wasted much time and money in designing a website that nobody can see.

Do you know how to go about marketing your website effectively? Where do you start? What is the most cost effective way for you? How do you gain the edge on your competitors?

Businesses in the current economic climate need to find smart ways to attract customers and having a website that is effectively invisible is not smart. We at Phil Yarrow Consulting know how to get your website visible in Google and the other search engines, so that people looking for what you offer can find you.

Please call us now on 0800 082 7010 or email us at info@philyarrow.co.uk so that we can help you take those first steps in effectively marketing your website.

In recent times I have been applying these skills to web copy writing and I read some excellent advice in a blog from Seth Godin the Permission Marketing guru. He made a great point that thinking about copy gets in the way. “You start writing and then you patch and layer and write and dissemble and defend and write and the next thing you know, you’ve killed it.”

He suggested an interesting approach to try instead:

Imagine you are writing a classified ad. What’s the offer? What do you want me to do? Remember you’re paying by the word!

“Lose weight now. Join our gym.”

Six words. Promise and offer.

From this minimum you can then add flesh to the bones as needed but before adding any words or a sentence ask: Is it better? More effective? Gently and carefully add words until it’s as effective as possible, but as short as possible.

You might want to make your promise more vivid, or more clear. Perhaps you need a testimonial or two to back up your promise. Does your call to action need to be more urgent? You can play with all of that, keeping in mind the original imaginary classified and that you’re still paying by the word (because attention is expensive).

This principle applies to newspaper articles, blogs, how-to books and direct marketing letters. It also applies to the emails you send and website copy. We at Phil Yarrow Consulting are here to help you with your copy writing needs and all aspects of Internet marketing. So call us now on 0800 082 7010 or email us at info@philyarrow.co.uk

By the 10th century Bristol was a flourishing commercial port. Over the following centuries the wool trade developed with Ireland and Bristol merchants soon developed a prosperous cloth trade with much of Europe and the Near East. In the late 15th century the merchants of Bristol began to join together to protect their own interests and their organisation, the Merchant Adventurers was incorporated in 1552.

The city’s cloth trade diminished in the 18th century, but Bristol prospered from the slave trade, the West Indies trade, and newly established industries, primarily the processing of metals. An engineering tradition became established in the 19th Century, spearheaded by the Great Engineer Brunel. The aerospace industry has been based in Bristol since the early 20th Century following the founding of the Bristol Aeroplane Company at Filton. In the mid 1960s Concorde was built and tested at Filton, which is also the home of Rolls Royce. Today, Bristol is a large commercial centre and one of the most popular cities for business relocation.

Much of the local economy is based on engineering, particularly defence, aerospace and electrical. There is little evidence of much Bristol Internet marketing among engineering firms. However, here are three examples of Bristol engineering firms that have their own websites.

• City Engineering (Bristol) Ltd is a long established family run engineering business specialising in quality sheet metal work and fabrication in stainless steel and aluminium as well as mild steel.
• FR Warren are based in Bristol and have over 50 years industry experience as engineering plastic stockists and custom plastic fabricators. They specialise in the needs of industries requiring plastic fabrications, industrial plastics, building plastics, engineering plastics and promotional sign making plastics.
• Steel Monkey Engineering Ltd is a specialist manufacturer of staging & scenery for the film, television, & exhibition industries, creating one off sets for designers & producers of awards shows. Steel Monkey’s workshops in central Bristol are dedicated to metal fabrication, joinery & painting.

A quick overview of the average cost per click from Google Adwords tools for key phrases targeted at Bristol reveals average potential costs per click as follows:

These PPC costs, while not particularly high, are not attractive given that this market has low search volumes and not much keyword competition. This illustrates why keyword research is so important before embarking on a PPC campaign. Bristol engineering firms may find it more profitable to test other online marketing approaches to increase brand awareness, such as SEO or targeted email campaigns.

Phil Yarrow Consulting are Bristol based internet marketing experts and can ensure that your online marketing spend is used effectively and produces the best results. Call us now on 0800 082 7010 or email us at info@philyarrow.co.uk to find out how we can help you.

Internet Marketing is about driving traffic to your website. It doesn’t matter how wonderfully designed your site is, this has nothing to do with how many people will visit it. Is your site all about you and your business? That’s not going to encourage people to stay. Visitors all have needs that they want to satisfy, so they want to know how you are going to do that. They will get bored quickly and leave if you don’t tell them what you can do for them.

If you are getting people to your site, perhaps through a Pay Per Click campaign, but they are leaving without showing any interest, what can you do?

You need to think about what you want people to do. If you have an e-com site you may want to focus on getting them to buy something from you immediately. However, if you are providing a service, it might be better to get your visitors to give you their name and email address (and possibly other contact details). The aim is to begin an ongoing relationship, known as ‘Permission Marketing.’ (See my previous blog). You’re basically getting peoples’ continuing permission to communicate with them.

If you choose to go for the sale when people arrive at your site, you’re going to need some very well-written copy that emphasises the benefits of what you are offering, leads people to action, and if possible guarantees the purchase. Phil Yarrow Consulting offers a web copy writing service, so give us a call on 0800 082 7010 and we can discuss how we can increase your web profits.

If you’re going to use your site to get peoples’ contact details, you need to give them a compelling reason to do so. The best way is to offer something valuable in return. Perhaps a newsletter, or a free report or a free sample of your product, but it needs to have real value. If you follow this up with a good email campaign, you should be able to get a good proportion of those to convert to customers.

Whether you decide to go for quick sales or sign people up depends partly on what you are offering and how you want to conduct your business. The answer is to test both and see which works best for you and your business.

Apparently, shoppers are flocking to the Internet searching for bargains to try and beat the credit crunch.

A recent study has revealed that last year £14.7bn was spent online in the UK – up 35%, or nearly 10 times the rate of growth of the total retail market.

The number of people who bought goods online increased by 24.7% to £22.6m. People are also shopping more regularly on the Internet – an average of 16.9 times last year, up from 14.2 in 2006. Cheaper broadband and wider service availability has been a factor.

With reducing costs to get online and retailers improving their e-commerce websites, the view is that online retailing is well placed to capitalise on falling consumer confidence and lower levels of disposable income.

Online shopping is expected to reach £44.9bn by 2012. One in three music and video purchases is now made via the Internet and this is expected to rise to two-thirds by 2012.

Malcolm Pinkerton of Verdict Research who carried out the study said that “Having an internet presence is now vital and the combination of an in-store and online presence with strong links between the two is essential”.

So in view of these facts, how can businesses gain an edge in this new climate? Here are some suggestions:

• A properly designed and search engine optimised website that effectively markets their product using compelling web copy;
• Ongoing SEO to ensure top placement for selected keywords in the organic search results;
• Targeted PPC campaigns to channel customers to their website;
• Professional PPC management to improve CTR and maximise conversions.

If you implement these, your business has the potential to thrive during a period when many of your competitors are going to seriously struggle.

Phil Yarrow Consulting has over 11 years experience in Internet marketing and a proven track record of success. So now is the time to let us help you to cost-effectively make the most of the rapidly expanding opportunities in Internet marketing. Call us on 0800 082 7010 or email info@philyarrow.co.uk.

Google is always looking for ways of ensuring adverts are highly relevant and now looks closely at the website being advertised, particularly landing pages.

Google defines Quality Score as CTR + Ad text relevance + keyword relevance and landing page relevance. This has caused steep increases in minimum bids for some advertisers because of a poor quality score. These increases seem to be related more to the website and landing pages.

The positive way to view this is to remember that the overall aim is to make user experience better, so Google rewards more relevance.

To achieve a good quality score you need to consider the following:

• Relevance between keywords, ad wording and landing page – the keyword needs to be in the heading and two or three times in the copy. Visitors are more likely to convert;
• Send people to separate landing pages;
• The landing page needs to have useful material that will get people to take action; Information needs to keep them there to avoid bounces. Otherwise Google thinks your landing page is irrelevant. So you need a compelling message to keep them there and to sign up and register to capture contact details;
• A standalone name squeeze page – this gives two options – to sign up for a freebie and register or quit. Limiting choices tends to increase conversions. There have been discussions whether Google likes this approach, but they don’t have anything specific against it. Some advertisers have suffered for name squeeze pages, but there are other factors such as poorly done pages that cause bounces. Sometimes having one or two links makes a difference. Test options and see what happens.
• Sometimes if a standalone page is an entire website, Google gets concerned. It likes larger, more established sites. It is wary of websites with just one or two pages that could border on scams. Google wants to see well established, reputable businesses. So add pages to your website.

Phil Yarrow Consulting can help you improve your Google Quality Score and get you the best results for your PPC campaign. Click here or give us a call NOW on 0800 082 7010.