Fresh, engaging content is vital for your website’s SEO and to keep your customers coming back to your site. It also helps keep your social media channels up to date, linking to your site and sending more customers to your blog pages to find out more. The struggle many companies have, however, is knowing how to blog and what to blog about.

How to blog and what to consider…

Your audience – understand who your audience is. What will they want to hear about from you? What are they interested in? Tell them something they might not know about you or your industry, information they may want to repeat to their friends or colleagues.

Topic – using a content twister can help with this and generate ideas for a whole year without having to think too much about it.

Working title – it is important (as with any webpage) that your blog post title includes the vital keywords that you are hoping to be found for when your audience searches for them. Your working title may change by the time it goes live but it will help keep you focussed on the subject of your blog.

Outline – write a brief outline of what you would like to include in your blog and to keep you on track, for example: What are you going to be talking about in the blog? Why are you telling them this information? How can they use it? Where can they find out more? Do you have any similar blogs that may interest them?

Writing your blog post – use your outline to help you write your blog. Remember to include those important keywords and synonyms. Aim to write at least 200 words, ideally 300.

Links – to other, relevant pages on your site and also any external sites that may be of interest to your audience. These links will all help with your search engine optimisation.

Call to Action – what do you want your readers to do once they have read your blog? Buy a product? Read more blogs? See what services your company offers? Sign up to a mailing list? How will they benefit from one of these?

Optimise your blog – include a meta description (a brief sentence about what the page is about, including your keywords and approximately 160 characters); page title and headers (again including your keywords); alt text on images (including keywords).

Once your blog is live, put a link to it on your social media pages or integrate your pages with your site to ensure your blog posts are automatically added to your social media accounts. Find out more about social media integration.

Now you have an idea about how to blog, look out for our next blog about what to blog about!

Good luck!

Picture this – you have used a big chunk of your marketing budget to improve your website (or give your company a web presence) and to ultimately increase your company’s website conversion rate. It looks fantastic, really enhances your brand’s identity and informs your customers of everything they need to know about who you are and what you do. However, there is a problem…your website is not converting the customers you expected it to and you are concerned that your website is not performing the way you wanted it to. What do you do??

Instead of scratching your heads pondering why your site isn’t converting any customers, take a look below and see how we suggest you improve your website conversion rate:

Create a testimonials page – often overlooked, testimonials are a great way of letting your potential customers know what a fantastic service they would receive from you. It is vital that your page looks believable – use a picture of the writer and/or their company logo if relevant. If it was handwritten, scan it and use it on the page, or print out the email they sent. This makes each testimonial more convincing and is more likely to encourage people to use your company, ultimatley increasing your website conversion rate.

Where should my testimonials page go? Ideally, your testimonials page should be on the top level navigation and just before your CONTACT tab. This makes it easier for visitors to your site to find and shows them that you want to see what other people say about you. You care enough to ask for feedback from your customers – care enough to make sure other people can see what they have to say!

Can I see some examples of ‘good’ testimonial pages? We have helped a number of our customers improve their testimonial pages by either advising them on it or creating and updating them ourselves and they have seen their conversion rates increase since doing them. Take a look at some of these perfect examples and see how you could make your reviews increase your website’s conversion rate:

• Central Housing Group
• Lord Cars
• Hill Upholstery & Design
• Trio Telecom
• Henry Gates Security Services
• Routemaster Hire

The start of July saw Click Return welcome Tahira Anwar join the team as our Digital Marketing Assistant. She joins us from Ginger Juice as part of her development for her Apprenticeship.

Despite only being part of the team for a few weeks, Tahira is already making a name for herself and last week passed her Google Adwords Fundamentals exam with a whopping 90%. Throughout the exam, Tahira had to demonstrate her knowledge of campaign creation, management and optimisation. She is working alongside Artur on our clients’ PPC campaigns and this exam pass shows how much knowledge she already has and which will be consistently applied to the work she completes each day at Click Return.

The course covers the benefits on online advertising and Adwords as well as best practices for managing and optimising Adwords campaigns.

She also passed the Google Search Advertising with a very impressive 96%. Both exam passes mean that Tahira has now officially achieved her Adwords certification – just like her colleagues Brad and Artur. Tahira will need to resit and pass the exams every 12 months to keep her certification.

Tahira was thrilled to pass the exams and is looking forward to using this additional confidence on clients’ ad campaigns. She commented, “I’m so pleased to have passed the exam – having those pieces of paper to confirm you certainly know what you are doing is amazing and really builds your confidence. I can’t wait to learn even more from the team here while I complete my Apprenticeship!”

One are of your website that should not be forgotten is your thank you page. We should never underestimate the power of a simple “thank you” – those two words can give someone a huge impression of you, it’s simply good manners and it is often remembered if it is not said. Whether we are paying for something in a shop, leaving a taxi, have walked through a door held open for us or simply acknowledging a compliment , we automatically want to thank the person and we have had that etiquette drummed into us from a young age.

The same manners should be used when someone has tried to contact you through your website – whether they have filled in an enquiry form or requested a brochure of your products. Not only does a thank you page give you the chance to show your customers that you appreciate the time they have taken to get in touch with you, but it also gives you the opportunity to keep them on your site for longer and possibly sell more to them through links to other page on your site and also including your social media links.

 

 

What should a good thank you page include?
Change the URL – www.test.com/thank-you so your customers know that their query has been received;
“THANK YOU” – ensure your customers can see that you are saying thank you;
Let your customers know when they can expect to hear from you;
Include links to other areas of the site you think they may be interested in;
Make sure they can see your phone number should they need to get in touch another way;
Give them other ways of seeing what you do = social media links;