Maintain now or regret later
Why you need a maintenance package for your website At Constructive Marketing we always say “a website is never finished” and a maintenance package goes hand in hand with that statement. We understand that as a business owner, you’re very busy so keeping your website up to date is probably at the bottom of your priority list. The problem is, if your website isn’t maintained it becomes outdated and a target for malware which could be disastrous for your business By having a maintenance package, you’re paying an expert to carry out these updates for you, keeping your website secure and working efficiently. They can also update the content on your website too, making sure that your main digital storefront is kept up to date. Bespoke Maintenance Packages No two websites are ever the same from the design to the plugins and software used to make the website work, as a result a maintenance package should always be able to adapt to the website it is servicing. It’s also worth mentioning that whoever designs and builds your website does not have to maintain it. When looking for website maintenance providers, make sure you check that they have expertise in looking after other websites built using the same type of platform. Also make sure there are no hidden charges. Be clear with your needs so they can price appropriately. The maintenance packages we provide can include software updates, content changes and website security. By having a maintenance package in place it ensures that there is always someone on standby to fix any issues that occur with your site. This includes things that are out of your control, such as server outages and errors. If these are left unattended they can be severely detrimental to a business’ online presence. So having a friendly team at the end of the phone to quickly fix these issues is not only really helpful but could also save you from potentially losing income Disadvantages of not having a Maintenance Package By opting to not have a maintenance package in place, your website is vulnerable to security threats, viruses and even malware. If any of these issues were to occur you would either have to spend your time attempting to resolve the issue or pay a large hourly rate (as an emergency call-out) for someone with experience to fix the problem. The hourly rate in question would most likely be more expensive than paying for a maintenance package in the first place. A maintenance package is essentially a warranty for your website which ensures there is someone to resolve any issues you might have. The requirements for needing a maintenance package always comes down to how much time and expertise you have to update and maintain your website. If, like most people in business, you are time-poor and the answer is very little, then we would recommend that you absolutely put one in place. If you would like to talk to a member of our team about maintenance packages then give us a call on 01903 686858 or email web@constructivemarketing.co.uk
Top 3 Reasons Why You Should Be Using WordPress
The first thing to think about when it comes to creating your new website shouldn’t be what it is going to look like but rather what you are going to use to build it. There are a couple of website builders people tend to gravitate towards when building their first website, those being Wix and Squarespace. While these do offer their own benefits, there are a few reasons why WordPress should be your first choice. Here’s our top 3: 1 – Easy to use and customise These simple website builders offer basic features for people who aren’t experienced in web design to build a website quickly. While these options may seem cheaper and easier at first, where these website builders fail is when it comes to expanding on your website with additional functionality and accessibility options. Something a website should do as your business evolves. This is where WordPress comes in, its ever-expanding library of plugins and themes far surpasses that of any other site building platform out there. How we’ve done this for a client – We built Woodstock Day Nursery a new website in a user-friendly website builder. This means that staff can make changes to the website themselves which is important to them as a busy small business. Once the website was completed, we delivered a training session for the staff to make sure they can use the website builder to make any changes they need to. It’s worth mentioning that 30 minutes of website changes are included in our website maintenance package. So even if you can do most of the changes, anything you can’t do we can do for you as part of the monthly fee for keeping the website secure. 2 – Security When you are building your new website you want to be sure that it is protected against malicious attacks. This is where the multitude of security plugins available on WordPress come into play. One popular example is Wordfence, a plugin which periodically scans your website for issues and security breaches. It can also send you notifications when users log in to your website. This can help you figure out who is accessing your website and when exactly they did it. How we do this for clients – Whenever we have a maintenance agreement with a client we always ensure that we add security plugins to the website. This is to ensure that the site is protected against malicious and harmful attacks. These attacks often include creating a backdoor into your website for unauthorised users to access, defacement of the website and slowing down the load times of the website. While these security plugins aren’t guaranteed to stop everything, they do protect against the vast majority of attacks. 3 – Data Data portability isn’t often something people think about when creating a website but it definitely should be. Being able to export your whole website and move it seamlessly to another location such as a new domain is a massive timesaver, and WordPress makes this very simple. Other website builders such as Wix make this process much more difficult than it needs to be, as they don’t want you to take your website away from their servers. This means that you can’t export your website to another host if you are unhappy with the service they are providing. Flexibility is what WordPress is all about. Being able to design your site how you want, with the ability to move it to a new domain in an instant, all while making sure your site is secure. What more could you ask for! How we do this for clients – We use WordPress for all of the websites we build and this allows us to easily transfer a whole website onto another URL. The huge benefit this has is that the website ‘in progress’ is a live site so it looks exactly how it will look when it’s transferred to the main URL. Rather than having to view the site in an editor which may not be showing you exactly what your site will look like when you hit ‘publish’. Personally, we couldn’t recommend WordPress enough. If you want to find out more about why you should be using WordPress give us a call on 01903 686858 or email our web development team at web@constructivemarketing.co.uk See below for some examples of websites we’ve built for a variety of clients. Clicking on one will take you to the site:
Top 3 Most Common Website Mistakes And How To Fix Them
Websites are essential to the success of a business, whatever the sector. . It’s therefore very important that they are well-designed and contain good quality content to make sure that they serve your customers well. Our many years of designing and building websites for clients in different industries mean that we are often asked to cast our expert eye on other websites to suggest improvements. With our vast experience, we’ve noticed the same mistakes being made and thought it would be helpful to point out our top three and tell you how to fix them. 1. Outdated Images Images are a great way to showcase your work on your website; especially if what you do is visual. They’re also great to break up text and make your website more engaging. Having said that, it’s important to make sure you update them. This applies more to websites that have been live for an extended period of time, as images can become outdated. Showing something fresh that your audience may not have seen before can spring new life into your website, making it feel new while not actually changing the design or layout of the website. Google and other search engines will recognise new images (with ALT text – see below!) as new content to your website and this will help to boost your website’s organic SEO. Ultimately increasing your ranking on Google or other search engines. How to fix outdated images on a website What we recommend is to allocate time every six months to go through the images on your website and change them up. Whether that be simply updating photos of the team, or swapping a stock photo for a different one. 2. Not Including ALT Text Speaking of images, you would be surprised at the amount of websites that upload them without ALT text. Providing ALT text for your images is a necessity when it comes to accessibility. Screen readers can’t detect text that overlaps images, therefore alt text is required so that the image can be described to the user. Adding ALT text can also have a significant organic SEO as, put simply, search engines can’t read pictures – they can only read words. By describing uploaded images with keywords and search terms, search engines will be able to understand them and rank them in relevant search results. How to add ALT text to images Adding ALT text to your website images can be done through the backend of your website. Usually through the media gallery, you’ll find somewhere to write ALT text for each image. If you’re unsure, it’s always best to speak to your web professional, if you don’t have one, we’d be happy to help. 3. Lack of Common Phrases and Keywords When it comes to writing the content for your website you need to make sure that you are including keywords and phrases that your potential customers would use. By using common terms that are related to your business, search engines will be able to rank your website in relevant search results. Increasing your search engine ranking and ensuring that your website is associated with search terms that your audience are using. How to write SEO-friendly content We could write a whole blog post on this! But the main thing is to keep it relevant and always be mindful of what you are writing and who it is for. It’s not going to be beneficial to include phrases that you might search for as a business owner as they could be completely different to the keywords and phrases that your clients search for. So make sure that you know your audience! After all, Google is now ranking websites that are helpful to the target user more highly. You can find out what Google finds unhelpful on websites here We understand that making sure a website works for your business and its target audience can be difficult. If you’re looking for expert help with your website, we would love to help you. Give us a call on 01903 686858 or email us at info@constructivemarketing.co.uk.
The 5 Things Google Finds Unhelpful On Websites
As a result of Google releasing its new algorithm update in August, the types of content that are considered “helpful” have changed. Trying to figure out what content on your website is “unhelpful” can be difficult. Let’s discuss a few things that could be lowering your site’s ranking, and how you can change the content on your website to be on the helpful side of Google’s new algorithm. Duplicate content Displaying the same content across multiple pages on your website is arguably the most unhelpful thing you can do. Not only do users get bored of reading the same information over and over again, but Google will detect duplicate content and rank your site lower as a result. Reading the same information on your website is not helping your website’s users and they will more than likely look for answers elsewhere. This will greatly increase your bounce rate (the number of users quickly clicking off your website) and your average session time will plummet. From these stats, Google will recognise that your website is unhelpful and it will rank your site lower in the search results., Meaning that you will get much less traffic to your website. To avoid a low ranking on Google, you need to make sure that all of the content on your website is different. This isn’t just limited to text, it includes images and videos too. By reducing the amount of duplicate content your website contains, your average ranking on Google will increase. It won’t be an immediate spike in statistics, but over time you will start to see your session time increase and your bounce rate decrease. Here at Seaside Creative, our team of content experts are on hand to make sure that your website is full of original content. Give us a call on 01903 686858 to find out how we can help you. Writing to fit trends Although Google doesn’t recognise all trend-fitting content as unhelpful, it will flag up content that is written to fit a trend just to appeal to the search engine. The way to identify if your content is written in this way is to ask yourself the question, are you writing about this for your existing audience or just because you have seen a lot of other people writing about it? If the answer is that you’ve seen a lot of other people writing about it, Google will likely flag this up and, as a result, rank your website lower. The solution to this problem is to make sure you know your audience, and don’t just follow what everybody else is doing. By understanding your audience, you’ll be to create content that will be helpful to them. Unsatisfying content One indication that might suggest your website could be unhelpful is users feeling the need to find more information. This would commonly be identified by a high bounce rate.‘Unsatisfying content’ is another way of saying ‘unhelpful content’ which is exactly what Google would identify unsatisfying content as. Unsatisfying content forces users to look at another website for the answers that you could easily provide. Writing satisfying, high-quality content would resolve this issue and improve your website’s statistics as your bounce rate would be much lower, improving your overall ranking. Keyword stuffing Keywords themselves aren’t considered unhelpful by Google, however, excessive use of them just to appeal to search engines is. Keyword-stuffed content is usually written poorly, making it unhelpful to the user. As explained in one of our latest blog posts, Google’s main aim with the new update is to ensure all listed websites in the user’s results are helpful. Therefore; websites with keyword-stuffed content are simply not going to rank as highly as websites providing useful, less keyword-stuffed information. Getting rid of keyword-stuffed content on your website can really help Google recognise your website as a helpful one and ultimately make it rank higher in search results. False Information False information will cause Google to flag your website as unhelpful. Misleading the reader into believing something that isn’t true is very unhelpful, not only to the reader as they have to find the correct information from somewhere else but to your website as well. Any website containing false information will automatically rank lower on Google. It could also lead to low review scores for your company on social media. Would you want to be known for providing false information? The best practice to prevent this from happening is to make sure the information you display is factual. Proving this with credible sources (also known as backlinks) will help to show that your information can be trusted and your credibility on the internet will start to improve. At Constructive Marketing we have a team of specialists who can help you get to grips with this new update to the Google algorithm. We can make sure that your website is helpful to Google and make sure that your website stays relevant as this new era of Google rolls out. Give our specialist team a call on 01903 686858 to find out how we can help you with your website.
Understanding Google’s New Algorithm
Google has just finished rolling out its latest major update, which they have helpfully called The Healthy Content update. With this update, Google is attempting to filter content that is published on websites into two categories: content that is made for the users and content that is specifically designed to rank highly on Google. Who/What is Google targeting with this update? Websites with large amounts of content that is deemed unhelpful, or out-dated ‘SEOed’ text written with the intention of ranking highly on search engines seem to be the main target for this algorithm update. Any website with content that is written with the users’ best interest in mind seems to be largely unaffected by this update. This has made it more important than ever to ensure that the content on your website is high quality and helpful to your audience. If you need help with this, get in touch with us. Why has Google changed its algorithm? The ultimate goal of this update is to promote content that is designed to help users above that which Google deems to be less helpful. Google wants well-written and high-quality content to be ranking much higher than it currently is. While content that is specifically written to cater to the old algorithm should now rank below newer high-quality content. This shift in the content hierarchy will allow Google to showcase content that is unique so that users aren’t reading the same information in every article. Ultimately, Google wants to serve its users in the best way possible, showing them the most relevant and useful content. Flipping the current system upside down. What this means for you Following the update, you’ll need to be mindful of what content is going to be affected the most. Although the algorithm is not designed to target a specific niche, Google has stated that certain types of content will be affected more negatively than others. These are: All of these types of content are typically created in a way search engine algorithms like; rather than with the target audience in mind. Rather than being applied in the usual way on a page-by-page basis, this new update will be applied sitewide. This means that Google will assess your site as a whole and determine whether or not your content is written for users or the search engine. If Google decides that your content is split between helpful and unhelpful content, it could flag up your entire website as unhelpful. The amount of unhelpful content that will be allowed on a ‘helpful website’ is still yet to be released by Google. So it’s best practice to keep the amount of unhelpful content on your website very low. Find out what Google classes as unhelpful in our other blog post. How to keep your site ranking highly with the new Google algorithm The first step you can take is to remove any content that is unhelpful. This means removing content that: A top tip from us is to make sure that you don’t repeat the same things across your whole website as this will help lower the chances of your website being flagged up by Google’s new algorithm. It will also help to improve your rankings on Google and who doesn’t want that?If you’re struggling with making sure that your content is helpful and relevant to your audience, get in touch with our team who will be more than happy to create helpful website content for you. Avoid being unhelpful at all costs! Although you may think that Google flagging your website as unhelpful doesn’t matter, getting this label from Google could mean that your site gets a very low ranking. Just to add salt to the wound, it could take months to prove to Google that your site can publish content that is designed to help users. What’s more, if your site is labelled unhelpful, every piece of content that you publish will have to go through a rigorous validation process. Which can take weeks, if not months as it is an automated process. To find out more about the update to the algorithm take a look at Google’s official blog Here at Seaside Creative, we’re content marketing specialists who can write helpful content for your site. Making sure that your site avoids becoming unhelpful, and ultimately, keeping your business visible in Google’s new algorithm. Give our specialist team a call on 01903 686858 to find out how we can help you stay on top of this big change.