Archive for the ‘Online Business Growth’ Category

TOP SEO EXPERT MATT BAILEY RETURNS TO SCOTLAND

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Top global Internet Marketing Expert Matt Bailey one of the top speakers at SES (Search Engine Strategies) conferences at locations around the world returned to Scotland during the 10-15 October 2011 to meet with Scottish website owners from all over Scotland.

Matt, was last in Scotland during February 2011 when he visited Glasgow and from this visit decided he wanted to return and meet with more business owners from different business industries from across all of Scotland who have either a brochure website or ecommerce website and are serious about making money with their website online.
Matt is going to be working more closely with us here at OnlineXcellence and is looking to deliver some Masterclass events during 2012 to those who may seek a career as a website author and being trained by use here at OnlineXcellence.

If you are running a website and you want to be trained to a high standard by Internet Marketing Professionals then look no further than the engaging with the website marketing experts at OnlineXcellence to help you.

If you want to know how to make your website successful and have never attended a Search Engine Strategies conference in locations such as London or New York, you don’t want to miss hearing Matt Bailey speak about Internet Marketing.

Every year in London, New York, Chicago, Amsterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Toronto and San Francisco business owners come to hear from high profile speakers such as Google Evangelist Matt Bailey. So you don’t miss out on what Matt has to say listen watch the presentation he delivered at Google.

Matt’s presentations are in a language that everyone can understand from his conversational, entertaining speaking style and his ability to explain high-level search marketing concepts in a way that even “non-techies” understand. So if you are a Scottish business owner frustrated with your website not making you enough money you want to work with Matt Bailey and the internet marketing and seo experts here at OnlineXcellence then  othen why not consider working with Matt Bailey and the other Internet Marketing  and SEO experts here at OnlineXcellence where you can be guaranteed the knowledge you gain will help you achieve improved sales and profitability from your website.

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Getting British Business Online

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

The headline of this post grabbed our attention too, but it was found tucked away in the Mail On Sunday ‘Enterprise Zone’ edition (28/2/2010) at the foot of the page. OnlineXcellence were curious, would such an initiative bring the level of expectation that is being offered to business owners who are not yet online with a website?.

The people behind OnlineXcellence have been helping businesses launch websites since 1998. Over the years we have seen a number of funded campaigns launched to help the UK business owner be ‘trading online’. The headlines and marketing messages offered by such campaigns were all too familiar, ‘Be Online in 5 days’ or ‘Set up a Website in One Day’. It is known that in the past such schemes have been doomed to failure as successful websites need proper planning if they are to survive.

Get British Business Online was launched in April 2010 to help create an internet presence for 100,000 firms. It is a partnership between the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, BT, the British Library Business and IP centre, Google and a number of support partners UK wide.

The Getting British Business Online initiative will allow firms that sign up to be given a free web site which will be registered in Google’s search engine. And here is the interesting part, a tool to help businesses create a website in 20 minutes.

Can this really be done? Without doubt if you have sufficient web design skills and have an idea about best practice website design you probalby can build a website in this time frame. But, what was important to us was how many novice business owners who never set out to build their own website, could do this task in 20 minutes and months later find out they had built a website that has not really worked for them.

BT offers free telephone support, but admittedly its limited support.

So, this was a reason OnlineXcellence became a support partner in Scotland for businesses who want to begin by having a GBBO website.

Our website training courses hand hold the business owner to achieve having a successful website, whether its a starter website offered via the GBBO scheme, or you want to create a more complex website.

OnlineXcellence training courses provide important advice and guidance through a number of workshops that starts by helping the business owner understand search engine marketing, best practice website design, and the best approach towards website marketing that includes Search Engine Optimisation, so you end up with a successful websites.

It is excellent that Google is involved, because when you build a website and launch it you do need to ensure that Google can start building relationships with your website domain name.

To get your FREE website Google provides a domain name address.

It would still be recommended once your website is built you go to Google and ‘ADD YOUR URL’.

The Getting British Business Online website has an area that provides details on other Google products.

An important product you need to put in place is a Google Account.

Once you have signed up to a Google Account you need to ‘import’ other important Google tools needed to support your website;s marketing strategy.

These tools contribute to ‘search engine optimise’ your website.

How much time do we need to train the people to use these tools effectively?

We have devised 8 training modules to assist businesses in Scotland who have either signed up to a GBBO website or already have another website platform type in place, and need to improve the websites performance.

We cover all sorts of topics in the marketing training courses from Search Engine Optimisation to where to host your website.

You would be amazed the amount of businesses who thought there website was hosted in the UK only to find there website was on a cheap hosting solution in Minnesota or some other off-shore location.

OnlineXcellence has carried out a number of website audits for businesses and we can include this when you attend an OnlineXcellence marketing training course. 

You can learn more about Google tools such as a tool that helps you do ‘Geo Specific Targeting’ with your website. We can teach you how effective this tool is.

In order to deliver our website marketing training courses hailed by business owners as excellent we regular attend the Search Engine Strategies Conferences the next being in London during Feb 21-25 2011, where all the industry thought leaders and real world practitioners in the world of search gather once a year.

Here we meet and exchange information with some of the best online marketing people in the world and bring this valuable marketing tips back to business owners in Scotland via our well attended courses.

Paypal are also participating in this ‘Getting British Business Online’ campaign. This means you can turn the free ’20 minute website’ on offer into an e-commerce website.

Be in no doubt that this ecommerce add-on comes with some limitations. You can learn from attending our workshops what these are and whether adding this ecommerce module will be right for your business.

If you need a  more complex website, we can introduce you to a number of website design companies in Scotland that build successful ecommerce websites

A website project cost can vary from, £2k to £12k to £24k or more.

We can guide you through this price minefield to ensure your budget meets its objective. Why this service is important? Well take a quote that crossed our desk recently indicating it would be around £92k for a website. That included the website platform and all associated marketing for this new website where the company’s brand was not yet known across the UK. Don’t fall into this trap, come and do our training courses.

The government backed GET BRITISH BUSINESS ONLINE initiative will deliver a series of activities run throughout the country by partners such as OnlineXcellence. These events will promote the benefits to business owners why they should have an online presence and why they should go a step further and gain further marketing skills and learn more about making use of Google products.

The presenters are knowledgeable at internet marketing and best practice website design.
At times well known search engine marketing professionals will come to Scotland and give incredible insight into website marketing.
Our workshop presenters have a track record of showing they have helped businesses to be profitable from either having a brochure website or an ecommerce website.

The OnlineXcellence program launched in Scotland helps small businesses be successful online with the aid of a website. The training program will help your business achieve putting place competent staff members to manage your website towards achieving ROI for the business.

Larger websites can take longer to plan, build and launch.

The OnlineXcellence program helps and trains either a new start business or one that is already established, with a website presence that not only provides a fit for purpose website platform being put in place, but more importantly providing the necessary skills to manage the website day in day out. This day to day website managing task is always seriously overlooked, and yet its the most important to both the website owner and the person who is given this very important task to do. That person is who we up skill and then becomes known as the website author or champion.

Having a website is one thing but understanding search marketing and knowing what to do in order for the website to achieve getting visitors and sales, well that is at the heart of having a successful online presence.

‘Getting British Business Online’ , aims to provide positive results and meet with business owners expectations. We hope the scheme is successful and that is why we have become a partner to help deliver  your business expectations.

GBBO is just about 1 year old. If you want to us to review your website, then get in contact with us through this website.

We would also welcome any comments about whether you think the GBBO scheme can or is working with you.

We would particularly like to hear from website owners who are actively in the thick of things trying to keep their website ahead of the competitor curve everyday.

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National Statistics Omnibus Survey’s could be valuable to the small business website owner

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

When it comes to marketing a website you need to decide where your cash rich target market audience is located.

It does not matter whether you have an ecommerce website selling products or a brochure website just promoting services, any website page has the ability to bring revenue into a business.

The information provided by the National Statistics office said in 2009 that 18.3 million households in the UK (70 per cent) had Internet access in that year. This was an increase of 28 per cent since 2006.

What was interesting about the statistics provided was that the region with the highest level of access was London, with 80 per cent, and the region with the lowest access level was Scotland, with 62 per cent.

Now that gets you thinking when considering to launch a website and, especially an ecommerce website. What businesses fail to do is tactical marketing. Where to aim your website pages in order to capture the cash rich and the large audiences that are in buying mode.

With any new website, the first year is tough if you are trying to grow your website organically. We say tough because we are referring to the smaller businesses who have great ambitions and high expectations to do well online. Especially if they are intent on selling products online. But depending on what marketing budget has been laid aside, will depend on how quickly that large footprint across the major search engines will take to develop.

And there are many small businesses out there who are spending very little or in some cases nothing at all on marketing their website and just hoping that traffic will come.

Organic search engine marketing takes time to mature, it could be 9 months or more depending on the marketing activities you apply to ‘fuel inject’ your website.
So flicking the turbo switch that is Pay Per Click advertising might be in your strategy to increase your websites awareness.

But many businesses jump into this with little or no knowledge of say, how Google Adwords actually works. If no training is sought and no PPC professional is hired, it is usually inevitable that the campaigns set up will lose the business owner money and the website not achieving a page conversion to sale or gaining an enquiry.

So, whilst the UK as a whole has seen an increase of 69 per cent since 2006 of households getting internet access, just how much sales would an ecommerce website achieve if only targeting Scotland?

And for those business owners spending less than £10-£20 a day on Pay Per Click Advertising are there any Scottish businesses out there right now who can say hand on heart that they are achieving excellent conversion ratios and high volumes of sales from such a small budget, and just getting there traffic from Scotland?

Or lets open this debate out more and ask of a Scottish business who can boast that for this small daily marketing budget they are achieving global reach into new markets and there PPC Ad landing page is a real revenue generator for their business.

And, one final question to the Scottish Business Community with websites, how many of you feel you are being successful and getting a reasonable slice of the £4billion a month being spent in the UK online?

The OnlineXcellence team would like to hear from you

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OnlineXcellence appears to be on People’s minds

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

As we head towards the most important date on the Scottish calendar Feb 12 2010 where Scotland is honoured to be graced with the presence of the most influential and leading expert in search engine optimisation Rand Fishkin, the OnlineXcellence team came across another great article from our friends over at Wordtracker.

We just love this article from their guest blogger Judith Lewis
Judith will be publicly speaking in London at this years Search Engine Strategies conference from Feb 16 2010. And of course the OnlineXcellence team will be there too.

But more about Judith who is raising the issue about SEO standards, getting accreditation, qualifications and a subject that is really important, and that is the business owner who wants a website, but we all have to manage their expectations.

We once came across a website agency not that long ago that said SEO was dead. But as Judith is trying to say there is SEO and then there is SEO. And this is where we agree, because we put it to the business owner, how do you know you are getting a good SEO Service? How much SEO knowledge could you achieve by yourself?

There are those website designers out there that are going to add in their website build quote to the business owner ‘SEO Services’. And a lot of the time the business owner doesn’t really know what that entails. Maybe the business owner doesn’t want to know, but, would you drive a car not knowing where to put the oil, fuel and water? How far would the car go without such ingredients?

A business owner does want their website to succeed, they have expectations, and usually high ones. There is no point paying good money for this glitzy looking platform if its not going to bring what is important to the business owner seeking online success.

We are of course referring to traffic, visitors, sales, profitability and wealth. A website is only going to achieve those things if the person driving the website everyday is knowledgeable enough to know what gear to put the website pages into.

And therefore OnlineXcellence and Judith Lewis in the opinion of this article are very much on the same frequency because it is true what we both agree on, SEO can make or break a website.

We love the website design community, without them there are no websites to market. But this is an unregulated community. When the OnlineXcellence team engage with a business owner who may already have a website or considering to build one, either way there will be a website company in the project.

As soon as we are hired, the shutters come down at the website agency, because they think we are going to upset their kitchen.

They could not be more wrong. OnlineXcellence is looking for a win win situation. If a website agency would freely admit they might not have all the skills or are willing to work with us so they can deliver on best practice and be even better at what they do, what is going to happen? Of course, more people will want to do business with that website agency.

And if there was some form of regulatory body that could point the business owner towards a best practice agency delivering OnlineXcellence, which is not just a ‘nice website design’ but a website that is bringing the client traffic, sales, profits, wealth and return on investment. Everyone’s a winner.

If your a business in Scotland and cannot make the pilgrimage to the really big Search Marketing shows in London, New York, Chicago and other fine locations around the world, then Friday 12 Feb in Scotland at Central College Glasgow from 0900-1530 come and hear Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org and find out how the OnlineXcellence initiative can help grow your business online.

Register for the event as you cannot afford to miss it.

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