Author Archives: Dave McEvoy

Why investing in content is worth the hassle

June 27, 2017

I cannot count the number of times I have had to tell a customer that there is no such thing as a silver bullet for getting great results on Google.

It is something that takes continuous time and effort and you have to focus on multiple tactics to have a successful strategy and for what it is worth here are my top 5 mediums for success:

Google Adwords / PPC
Social Media
Email Marketing
Web Auditing
Content Creation

With that being said if you put a gun to my head and forced me to pick one for sustainable success it would have to be content creation.

Creating unique & useful content can be challenging and takes more focus and effort than any other digital marketing activity but of the 5 elements of success content gives you the best long term returns. The other mediums deliver results only as long as you are putting the effort in but content continues to deliver online traction for visitors long after you have written it.

To understand why that is you have to look at how google gathers information & delivers results.

**** Disclaimer! – I am writing this blog for the uninitiated in digital marketing, SEO PPC or any other three letter Acronym associated with our trade. As such the language and themes are intentionally simplified yes I know the details are more complex but I find most business owners need plain English translations for the jargon most Digital Experts spew. This blog is for them not for the Matt Cutts Wannabees ****

The first part of this is the Google Index. This is the vast database of information that Google stores regarding websites on the internet. It is collected by software designed to crawl the internet and record what it finds. This software is collecting and analysing the content of billions of web pages. It is this index that Google uses to rank pages and website in terms of their relevance to a particular search term.

So for example if i enter the phrase great web design company into Google will look at it’s database (index) and use a complex set of rules (algorithm) to decide which entries in it’s index are best suited to me.

Rather than trying to give you migraine by explaining several thousand factors Google reportedly use lets focus on the first part of this equation Google can only return results from sites that it has indexed.

The most basic principal of indexing (not ranking!) is providing Google unique and relevant content on the topics you want to rank for. So if I want Google to index this site well for phrases like web design or digital marketing I should create lots of unique and original content about those things, have a look at our blog and tell me how we are doing 😉

In short the more content you create the more you give Google to work with. The more it has to work with the more likely you are to gain rank. This is the major difference between content creation and other digital marketing tactics. Content goes directly to the index while other efforts are tackling ranking.

For the real anoraks in the audience you should hasten over to this post by Gianluca Fiorelli. He lays it out in fine detail.

Now that you have the inside skivvy how do you make the most of it? When we train our customers on content creation the initial reaction to “write your own content” is anything from blank stares to people running and hiding (this actually happened)

Side note: This reaction is not unusual and that is fantastic news. If all of your competitors are terrified or just to busy to create good content the content you create has more value because there are less creators out there than you think, particularly for the Irish market.

Get over the shock and accept that just like everything else in business doing it well takes time. To help you on your way here are my tips to creating consistently good content.

Depth and sources

A huge number off well informed websites advise that the minimum amount of content Google requires to consider a page as a resource is 300 words. But this is at best an educated guess. Do not be overly concerned about the length of your content. focus instead on the quality of what you write. Make it direct, informative and keep it simple. As for the idea that a quick copy paste from that other site is an easy win please do not bother. Not only will you not gain any traction for it ( Google recognises copied content ) you can actually end up boosting the person you copied.

Content Calendar

A fantastic tool for keeping you on track particularly if you are part of a team. It is a simple excel sheet in most cases that lists a week by week break down of topics to work on and what channels (blog, landing pages, social article) to use. It is amazing how effective a simple sheet is.

What can you write?

When it comes to selecting topics there is not really a good or bad topic as long as it does one of the following; distract, entertain or educate.

This can take the form of product knowledge, an in depth review of a popular offering or better yet a customer case study. Industry Knowledge, an article addresses emerging trends in your industry. Last but not least customer knowledge information on how to solve or overcome common issues for customers (like understanding content writing)

Providing content for your visitors is what the internet was before it became a commercial playground and it is still the backbone of successful websites. Don’t avoid it! get stuck in and 6 months from now you will see the difference.

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Is your website like a grumpy salesperson?

By Dave McEvoy

Jakob Neilsen, Usability, User Experience, User Interface, UX on May 13, 2017 by Dave McEvoy.

How many times have you found yourself getting irritated while trying to
complete a process online? Booking flights, hotels, buying a product? Well if you struggle to complete a task on a website the good news is you are not to blame.

Jakob Nielsen, arguably the first and definitely the leading expert on website
usability has said that a bad website is like a grumpy salesperson. Meaning it actively drives customers away from it by frustrating or irritating them. If a website is difficult to understand or use it is the fault of the designer or company not the user.

We often design websites around our experience or understanding of our products and this is usually bad news for users. The worst sin of all is to assume everyone uses the website the way you do. Remember you are not your customer, they have different experiences, needs and understanding of your services or products. You need to consider your website from their perspective.

When you do that, the all important questions are:

Are all menus consistent throughout the site?
Are the main sections or functions (like product search) obvious?
Are you bombarding them with everything at once, or are you giving them relevant information one piece at a time?
Do you know what your visitors are trying to achieve and why it maters to them?

If we are honest, most of us will not have a definitive answers, it will be more of a gut feeling. So how do you diagnose a bad website? Well it might be common sense but unfortunately it is not that common.

Ask your users!

Conducting a Usability study

This is actually a lot simpler than most people imagine. It consists of gathering a small group of people (normally 5-6) in a room with a range of devices (Smart Phones, Tablets, Laptops) and asking them to carry out specific tasks. While they are carrying out the tasks you observe and record there behavior and reactions. Do not listen to what they say but watch what they do (thanks again to Mr Nielsen for that tip)

An important caveat here is that the users you gather should relate to your ideal customer or user. If you are not sure who that is you should check out our research options here but in short they are the people you expect to use your website to buy from, or learn about you.

The specific tasks you set your users is up to you but you are looking at there behaviour and assessing 5 key aspects:

Learnability:

How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the website?

Efficiency

Once users are familiar with the website, how quickly can they perform tasks?

Memorability

When users return to the website after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?

Errors

How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?

Satisfaction

How pleasant is it to use the website? remember, the more relaxed and comfortable your user, the more likely they are to convert.

Studying the results of your tests through the prism of these pointers will give you a very clear idea of what you need to improve on and what is all ready working well. Once you have made improvements to the way users experience your website the most important thing to do next is…

Ask your users again!

The best way to ensure your results keep getting better is to test, tweak and test again. This should never stop. As the intelligence, technology and attitudes of your users keeps evolving. So should you.

This article is giving you the briefest outline of something called usability which is vital to User interface Design (UI), which in turn is a major aspect of User Experience (UX) I have intentionally left these buzzwords until the end of this article because a lot of you out there have a negative reaction when you hear them.

You assume that it is either too complicated or too costly but as you can see from the simple steps above it is very easy for any business to start listening to how their customers feel about interacting with them.

If you feel like you need a bit more help on this then why not get in touch and we can start a conversation.

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What should I spend on a website?

By Dave McEvoy

Custom Websites, eCommerce Website, New eCommerce Websites on April 24, 2017 by Dave McEvoy.

This is most common question anyone in the web design industry gets asked and if you know web designers you know it is not always a straightforward answer. Compare it to asking a car sales man how much a car costs. It all depends on what you want the car to do. To get an accurate quote on a website you need to give the web designer or company more details.

I am writing this article in the hope that it will give you some insights on how to effectively budget for your website. In the interest of full disclosure, I have a small bias because I work for one of the best website development companies in the known universe! I will try and keep my ego in check and give you information based on my experience in the web design industry over the last 10 years.

To understand website costing you need to look at three questions:

What do websites cost?
What can I afford?
What is my priority?

What do websites cost

If you carry out even the most basic research you will find that website costs vary wildly depending on where you look and it is not always clear what the difference in the result is. To help dispel some of the mist around this you can break it down into four broad categories.

D.I.Y Websites €0 – €500

Platforms like wordpress.com, Weebly & Squarespace offer you the option of do it yourself web design. If you have some technical or design experience it can be a great low cost options. As with all DIY projects the results can look fantastic or frightening depending on the skill set you have. Most of these platforms come with preset themes that may well suit your needs and require little else other than your content.

Assisted D.I.Y. Websites €500 – €1500

For the less brave but still budget sensitive they can engage a professional to set up a WordPress theme and tweak it to suit your requirements. This normally leaves you with a great looking site that you then must populate yourself with your own content. This can be a real winner for small business or start ups as there is minimal outlay and you have an experienced developer on hand. A word of warning though: Your professional works based on billable hours (or should do) so you need to know how much of their time you are getting as some of these projects can creep which can lead to a fractious relationship between you and your developer which is no good for anybody. Always ask what the hourly or day rate is and then cost in terms of time. It is fairer to both of you.

Professional Website €1500 – €3000

This is where a lot of web designers like to work. Still a reasonable cost but more time to do more. Believe it or not web designers like to create beautiful work and if they have the right budget they normally do just that. As with the previous option make sure you know the time rates for your web development company and agree a reasonable timeline at the outset. This price range is perfect for standard business websites or simple ecommerce systems. If you need your site to go a little further or do a little more it is usually possible to evolve or build onto this type of site. If you need it bespoke from the start then you need to look at the next step up.

Bespoke Web Development €3000 + €?????

Ok so this can be real blank-cheque territory so if you are going down this road you should either a) have plenty of experience with websites or b) have someone who does. Most bespoke sites are completely reworked or remodeled within their first year because clients are rarely right about what is important for their customers. Starting small and growing big is a much safer option. However, if you are committed then here are a few things to keep in mind:

Create and sign off on a functional spec. Make sure everything you want the site to do for you and for your visitors is down in black & white.
Create graphics before you start building. You should see and sign off on images of what the key pages of the site will look like before committing to the build. This limits the misinterpretations of developers.
Agree a timetable for every key stage and stick to it.
Agree rates for additional work. It is hard to think of everything and extras normally cost extra so get a clear idea of what the rates day/hourly rates are for work over and above the spec.

What can I afford?

Now that you know the kind of costs that are out there you can start to focus on the real question: What can I afford? To answer this, you need to know a few things:

How long will this website last? Websites generally have a technical shelf life of 3-5 years. If you consider the pace at which the web design industry moves you will realise that nobody can predict where we will be in three years. There is chance that your website will be as good in three years as it is today but it is more likely that something significant will have changed in security standards or user experience. If you are shopping around now you should be looking at your website spend as something that will last for the next 3-5 years (similarities here again to car buying).

How much revenue will it generate? Deciding what to invest in a website should be considered in terms of what the website is going to create. How many new leads or sales or what is the potential revenue you are expecting (top tip: be conservative!) Once you have an estimate on this, your new website development should fall between 5-10% of the gross profit on those sales.

Let’s look at two scenarios:

Website 1 is a business website with no ecommerce engine. It generates 4 leads every week with at least one of those leads converting to a sale every month. If the average value of the sale is €400 and the cost of sales (what you spent on the product) is €110; then your gross profit is €290; 10% of this is €29 so over three years this website will generate an estimated €1044 (€29 x 36 months) This puts you firmly into the assisted DIY bracket.

Website 2 is an ecommerce website generating 25 orders a day. The average order value is €48 with a gross profit of €10; That gives you a gross profit over three years of €273,750; 5% of this total is €13,687 which puts you into the bespoke price range.

The point I am making here is that you should look at your budget as a percentage of your gross profits as this gives you a sense of what a reasonable budget is. This is probably something your accountant has already told you.

What is my priority?

My decisive point for this post is that once you have all the figures, you need to decide what the priority is. You can only spend two things in business and that is time or money. I have found that there is a balance between these when it comes to web design. The more of one you spend the less of the other. You need to decide how important the website is to your business and act accordingly. You may have lots of free time and very little money which means you are going to be a master of DIY or alternatively you might have a budget and no time so the professional is your best route.

Hopefully you have gained some useful insights in pricing your next website revamp but if you are like me and have just skimmed this article let me give you all the above in a neat little cliché:

There are three options for pricing any job:

Fast
Right
Cheap

You only get to choose 2.

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The Trust Stack and what it means for your ecommerce website

By Dave McEvoy

ecommerce, eCommerce Web Design, eCommerce Web Design Ireland on April 19, 2017 by Dave McEvoy.

The Trust Stack is fast becoming a common term for how people are interacting with companies and individuals online. The formal definition, according to Rachel Botsman, is as follows:

A new trust framework is emerging in the collaborative economy, the ‘Trust Stack’. In the first layer of the Trust Stack, people have to trust that a new idea is safe and worth trying. The next layer is trusting the platform, system or company facilitating the exchange. And the third layer is all about trusting the other user.

Trust or faith in ecommerce as a concept has been well established but if you are involved in ecommerce you need to pay attention to that second layer, “Trusting the platform”. When a new customer is contemplating a purchase from your platform they are dealing with uncertainties. Is this the right product? Is that the best price? When will I get it? Along with a host of other concerns that give the average new customer a high level of uncertainty.

A good ecommerce website will do everything it can to lower that uncertainty which in turn builds on the trust the customer has in you and your business. Sounds good right? But how do they do it? Here are some key factors that you should look to address at two key stages of the purchase process, the product details page & the checkout process. These pointers are based on a traditional product based ecommerce process but many of them can be applied to any website.

Its all in the detail

Below is a screenshot from our friends at babyaccessories.ie the page layout is clean and simple but there is a lot of elements here that create trust with visitors.

A large product image lets the customer see exactly what they are getting it also has an image zoom feature (take a look at the live site here) that lets the visitor get up close and personal with the product and judge the quality.
The product title contains the brand name, colour and product type, you would be surprised how often it doesn’t!
The price is the largest piece of text on the screen closely followed by the original RRP which shows the discount.
Beneath the price you have a free delivery statement which offers a visitor free delivery if they spend over a set value.
They are displaying both an availability icon (confirming they actually have it on the shelf) as well as an estimated delivery timetable.
Speaking of delivery, there is also extra delivery and returns information in the tabs beneath the image. Lack of, or unclear delivery and returns information is one of the most common reason for abandoned carts.
Last, but definitely not least, they are displaying the statement “safe and secure shopping” statement along with a recognised online credit car processor. Customers will recognise and respond to processors they have used before.

All of these elements reassure a visitor and make them much more likely to click on the all important “add to cart”. This is a great start but it is only half the battle. Lets move on to the checkout process.

Good Checkouts Increase Sales!

Cart abandonment rate online is somewhere between 60-80%. You can lower your percentage by continuing to build trust and lower your users’ uncertainty. Here are some pointers to consider:

Simple cart summary

When a customer visits the cart you want to make it very simple to start the checkout process. The cart should have only the essential information for a customer to make that decision. Keep your cart simple by making the options for removing or updating quantities of products obvious. Show your delivery options clearly and make sure the customer can see the total cost at this point. In addition, an eye catching checkout button that is visible above and below the cart summary. Do not make your customer look for twice for it.

Stop asking me to join your cult!

The most common first step for a checkout is to ask the user to sign up or log in as a member or checkout as a guest. This is a bad idea. A first time customer does not want to join your club or become a fan. Pushing them at this point can drive them in the wrong direction. It is far better to let them checkout as guest and ask them to join afterwards (preferably with a bonus for doing so) If the customer is already a member they just need a simple log in link.

Choice of payment providers & delivery options

Customers are getting used to having it their way. Providing customers with options for payments (PayPal, Stripe, etc.) gives them control. The same goes for your delivery options. Express delivery, standard 3 day delivery or collect in store? Don’t assume you know what is best for your customer.

If you spend time studying how visitors behave on your website you can find hundreds of ways to lower their uncertainty and increase your revenue. If you would like us to take a look at your platform why not mosey over to our contact page and we can start a conversation.

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Simple Navigation – the key to a happy visitor

By Dave McEvoy

User Interface, Web Design, Web Design Dublin, Web Design Ireland on August 12, 2014 by Dave McEvoy.

A website’s success is not just based on how good it looks or on what it does. These things are definitely important but equally important is website navigation, your visitors’ ability to move around your website and find what they are looking for.

Simple navigation is one of the most important factors for you to consider on your website. Continue reading →

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