Test your businesses website loading speed using Page Insights on Google. If your loading speed needs improving work alongside a quality reputable web design designer. They will be able to help improve your sites speed with some of the below suggestions:

• Enabling compression: Use a programme (Gzip) to compress the size of your CSS, HTML & Javascript files on-site. For images compress the sizes using Photoshop or other design software.
• Reduce page re-directs: Every time a page directs to another page, the wait to find a search and page result increases. Ensure minimal re-directs as these slow down your loading time.
• Leverage browser caching: Browsers store information every time a user visits your website. Set your ‘expires’ header for a year, this reduces the loading speed over time as it loads saved information and doesn’t have to load the entire page.
• Improve server response time: Server response time is affected by the number of traffic your site generates, the amount of information it has to load plus the software and hosting package you use. Ensure the server you use has adequate space, the most up-to date software and deals with issues like slow queries and performance.
• Optimize images: A simple but effective tip for improving your businesses website. Ensure images are a relatively small file size and correct format for loading up in an adequate time.

Focusing on a local strategy and gradually building up to a larger audience has its advantages, they include:

• Being cost effective: Focusing on a specific customer base allows you to focus your efforts and reach the relevant customers increasing your ROI.
• Increased referrals: Something that you cannot do online as well as in person is referrals ‘word of mouth’. Engaging with local customers & communities will increase your businesses presence in an area. The lowest cost but most effective form of local advertising.
• Get found online for local searches: Focusing locally and using directories for your business will help you get found online for searches relating to your location.
• Easier to maintain & manage: Working on a smaller scale will give your business the confidence to get stuck into Marketing activities as they are on a smaller scale and easier to manage.
• Allows for more dynamism: Engaging with local customers over different medians means you can work a tailored message per platform. It also gives you the opportunity to test what works and what doesn’t before launching your idea on a bigger stage.

Make sure it looks professional, promotes trust and reflects the brand and values of your business, and of course sells something. Your homepage especially needs to do this, but equally important, it must be flexible enough for you to easily update with your latest offers, promotions, best-selling products, content, social media campaigns and so on.

Try looking objectively at your homepage, if you're not happy with it then it's unlikely your potential customers will be. If you want an idea of just how critical this stuff is online, I found this article 'a real eye opener': http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/223150

Focus on marketing, your businesses biggest potential income generator. 

When all that hard work and effort you have put in to promoting your new or existing website starts to pay off and the orders, customers emails and phone-calls are coming in, whatever you do, don't send them back to the place they just came from (your website) to try again, 'cause they'll go somewhere else!

Making sure your website gives the best customer experience possible, and when you get to that dream position of how to handle all the orders then look at the rest of the stuff.

When is a Website Not a Website?

If you want a website that books the job in, does the proofing for you, creates the delivery note, sends the invoice, collects the payments and even makes the tea. That's not a 'website'! 

There's plenty of software out there that'll handle all that (maybe not the tea) and will serve you well. You can get it built specifically or integrate it with your website. We meet lots of people in our industry who tell us about how much time they spend on this kind of stuff, trying to do it themselves, trying to figure out how these systems work, attempting to upload a zillion products, worrying about whether they need to add more widgets or features to make it better for them. 

What about the customer? 

Excercise caution if you find something that promises to do it all in one, that's a tall order to be all things to all 'platforms'. 

What if you want to change your website? 

You shouldn't have to change your order processing system. What if you want to update your brand and improve your marketing or get a swanky new responsive website, you shouldn't have to change your proofing system or accounts package.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that this stuff isn't important, it is! But they are not the same and none of it will win you any business...

One last thought... 

Try setting up a new site from a website design company online, fully branded for your business to sell your embroidered or printed clothing. It will cost £10k+ and take months of planning and consideration.

For a sensible solution that helps businesses actually generates income get in touch on info@etraderwebsites.co.uk or call 029 2074 1663. 

We will happily chat to you and see if we can possibly help grow your business and its online presence.

There are many benefits as to why you should use Chatbots for your online business including:

• Chatbots have massive potential: In Marketing terms bots are still in their infancy. They will continue to develop and grow and will soon be at the forefront of most websites service efforts.

• Chatbots are simple to build: There are many providers out there who make building bots easy and a simple drag and drop exercise. Of course, there is bespoke but with bots in their infancy now is the time to explore the cost-effective options available.

• Chatbots help grow your brand image: A chatbot represents your business, its values and brand. It is a great way of brand building and helping convey a message as to what your business is all about.

• Chatbots simplify customer service: They take out the human aspect of dealing with an enquiry, stripping it back to its simplest form and provide users short, concise, clear information leading to greater customer satisfaction.

• Chatbots are actually cost effective: The cost of developing a chatbot is minimal compared to the cost of having someone dealing with online enquiries and issues. With the potential lead generation, they can also provide using AI, the bot become one of your most affordable sales tools. 

Improve your online efficiency

Social Media calendars help you to avoid scrambling. Sit back & relax knowing you have heaps of content planned on your accounts. This will also free up time to focus on other aspects of your businesses Marketing strategy.

Plan for multiple platforms in one place

A calendar allows you to plan for individual platforms instead of the same post on every Social Media account. Craft different messages for different platforms to improve engagement. The most obvious one is LinkedIn; ensure you post more curated thought leadership content instead of a generic post.

Track, plan, monitor & manage your strategy

Calendars allow you to track, plan and monitor what is working, what is not working, and you can tweak it accordingly as you are going along.

Reach more people

Using a calendar helps you reach a wider audience, plan content around events & holidays. Using these in the posts will help you reach a wider audience than a standard post.

One last thought...

It is great for businesses to be efficient and ensure they are on top of their Social Media strategy but there is still room for spontaneity. 

For those things that you never know may pop up that may be relevant to your business, customers and trends you can engage with keep a balance between planned and real. Customers want a business with a personality not just post after post.

Site Architecture & Crawling

As your business’s website develops over time, the site’s architecture needs to be considered to ensure that Google can regularly crawl, cache and index your pages. Google has little bots and ‘spiders’ which are used to crawl websites, the main one being the ‘Googlebot’ which scans the links from one page to another.

Indexing is how search engines categorise your webpage based on content, links, meta descriptions etcetera. Using an algorithm, they categorise each page in relation to a search term and give it a ranking based on this. Page caching is another method that can help you to improve the load time of your web pages and thus optimise your site for the search engines. Cached pages are served up as static HTML versions of a page to avoid potentially time-consuming queries to your database.

Categorisation

For e-commerce websites, categorisation plays a significant part in the site architecture (and makes user experience much simpler). Careful keyword research and planning should be carried out when planning your site categories – attention should be paid when assigning a URL with crucial keywords as this can play a role in ensuring that specific pages get ranked for your preferred terms.

Site Speed

Site speed is also pivotal for an e-commerce website to perform well in the eyes of a search engine. Customers want a website to be slick, quick and allow them the capability of checking out in a few moments. This can be quite a challenge for the garment decoration industry, where there are thousands of products available.

Costs

The costs associated with managing thousands of products on an e-commerce website on a managed server is high and something that needs to be planned for as part of your ongoing online budget – the common consensus here is less is more.

Show your customer a select group of garments rather than offering hundreds of similar ones will not only ensure that the load time isn’t compromised but will also make for a much simpler user experience.

One Last Thought

The best time to take care of the technical aspects of SEO is during the construction phase of the website. Do your research, ask developers the right questions and make sure that the technical bases are covered. Fixing these areas after your site has gone live can be costly and time-consuming.

We have put together our top five tips to get your business started on Instagram:

• Upload visually engaging content: For the garment decoration industry, Social Media is all about showing off your latest work and products. Curate posts showcasing your latest work, what is going on where you are and any office antics. Instagram stories can display a series of images or videos over a 24-hour period and appear at the top of the feed, a great way to grab potential customers attention. To increase a posts potential reach do not forget to include the relevant customers ‘handle’ in the post.

• Optimise your profile and call to actions: A basic tip but an important one, ensure your profile is optimised, a nice crisp clear hi resolution brand logo as your profile picture, a brief description of who you are and what you do and importantly add contact information. Similar with your posts don’t forget to add calls to actions, ways to get in touch and convert the lead.

• Embrace the #hashtag: A major bone of contention with many users, the use of the hashtag. Some love it, some loathe it, but Instagram is all about the hashtag - so embrace it. Users use hashtags to search for posts, it is almost a way of indexing your post in the plethora of posts online so ensure your post has all the hashtags it can to get found online by users and expand a posts reach.

• It’s not just a Marketing tool: A hidden gem within Instagram is the Notifications feature, perfect for research and keeping an eye on competitors and influencers, you receive a notification every time they post a new piece of content. Simple click (…) and click ‘Turn on post notifications’.

• Grow your local reach: Increase your local coverage with the locations feature.Instagram allows you to find local users, search for local businesses, people, influencers etc. Increased engagement with these can only enhance your businesses Instagram feed and increase potential business. 

Not everyone has the same passion for print & embroidery as garment decorators, so when it comes to recruiting staff this is key to achieving success.

Internal Marketing creates a dynamic work place and a strong culture within the workplace, it empowers your employees and encourage them to be pro-active, innovative and work on ways new creative ways of achieving success. Creating a dynamic pro-active workplace requires careful management, planning and a comprehensive Internal Marketing plan.

Successful Internal Marketing reduces stress and anxiety for workers and creates a happy workforce which makes for a much more productive team. Happy staff are proven to be more committed, determined and go above and beyond to make sure they can achieve success for your business; and provide your customers the best experience possible. Staff essentially become ‘Brand Ambassadors’ for your business…

Whether it is simply a case of incentivising your staff through things such as cash bonuses, time off, extra holidays etc or improving internal communications with monthly newsletters, competitions, social events or team bonding events there are several ways to market your business internally and engage with staff across all departments.

So, what does this mean for your business?

Your business needs to keep up with the times and prepare for this, with users going away from traditional search to voice search consider how your website will be found via voice. 

Things to consider include:

Aiming for position zero: Something that featured heavily in a recent blog we posted on ‘Featured Snippets’, Google Home & Google Assistant read these out first.

Consider what questions your customers commonly ask and pop up that relate to your core products & services and build content around this. But where traditional SEO in the past relies heavily on keywords & content, simply answer the question.

Keep the answers concise, conversational, almost to the point where it comes across conversational.

Perfecting your local SEO: 39% of voice search users are looking for businesses information, so ensure your Google My Business listing is optimised and complete. Complete your profile so when a user asks to find local businesses your business appears at the top.

Verify and authenticate your business on things such as Google Maps & Google My Business. Little things like a fully completed listing with store times, services and a bit about what you do go a long way to helping you achieve voice search success.

For example, when a customer asks, ‘where can I find t-shirt printing in London?’, ‘what time does the nearest printers shut?’, ‘where is my nearest printer?’, these little things will help your business get found using voice search.

On-page content: Steering away from traditional SEO where content is built around keywords and lots of content creation, content that will be found using voice should be concise, grammatical and answer the question appropriately. It should reflect how you might engage with another user and not a Google bot.

Focus on providing text that your customer may find useful and helpful, things like FAQs, help with print & embroidery, they want the answers and they want them within seconds. On average, each user will not listen to an answer for voice search over 15 seconds, you have that amount of time to get your point across to the customer – its all about “meeting the information needs of the customer”.

Important: There is still room for traditional SEO, do not go rushing to your website deleting pages of content. Just consider if this is authentic content, useful for the user and helps your customer with whatever their query might be.

The factors mentioned in this article also aide traditional SEO, things like writing content in a naturally, engaging and conversational way, optimising local search etc will all help your website get found online and visible in Googles SERPs. 

Focus on the subject line. The subject line is the most important thing to consider, this is the first thing the recipient reads and is make or break for whether they open your email or chuck it straight in the junk folder. First things first it needs to be eye catching, test out your email subject lines and analyse which achieves the highest open/action rate.

Strive for inbox placement. A difficult one to measure, but not all email campaigns need to be actioned straight away, they just need to leave a lasting impression on readers. Just focus on the brand, the core product and services not super salesy jargon – you don’t want a reader to think it is spam and treat your email like junk.

Ensure the email is mobile optimized. Most email software will provide a mobile view of your email, ensure that it can be optimised for any device. Approximately 65% of emails are read on a smartphone/tablet (Marketing Land, 2017) so ensure your email looks the part on any device.

Personalise where possible. Use tags to deliver a personalised message to your customer, use their name, business name etc to give an email a more personal feel. People know emails are being sent to thousands at a time, but you don’t want to make them feel like another name of your mailing list. This encourages better engagement with readers!

Segment your email database. To go one step further and provide an even more personalised touch segment your database. Funnel down your customers and sort them by interests/industries etc into small niche mailing lists and send them a highly personalised email specific to their niche. For example, don’t just send your customers emails about workwear, filter the type of business and got a bit further.

Reduce text and optimize call to action. As much as Marketers hate it, people won’t spend a lot of time reading your email once opened – consumers decided within a split second if it is of interest or not. Be short, sharp & concise with any text to grab any attention. Focus on providing clickable calls to actions and leading them to enquire, order etc.

Make social sharing available. A simple but very over-looked one, ensure your email can be shared using Social Media buttons. Many email providers make this a simple click of the button. This helps grow the reach of any campaign you might send further than your customer database and reach potential new leads. Provide clear share buttons for your readers to engage with!