Which Web Design Company

Very pleased to note that Ape Red Media made it onto the front page of Which Web Design Company for UK searches, on the second page for global searches, not bad out of 5000 plus web design companies to be voted into the top 20 in the UK and top 30 globally by our clients, thankyou all very much.

New Blog

We've started a new blog on the link below to coincide with apered.com's redesign.

New Blog on Tumblr

Gazette Publications

Gazette Publications

Eco Friendly?

Now hears a question, Crocodilla a local client markets the Solamagig range of Infrared Patio Heater. I designed an advert for them for the BBC Gardeners world and to my amazement the ASA had a problem with the term - Zero Direct CO2 Emissions, even though there are no direct CO2 emissions! Infrared does not burn oxygen when producing heat. Of the electricity used, to power the machines over 90% is converted into Infrared heat. The electricity being produced to power the machines may create direct CO2 emissions, but not on my patio!

The 7 Basics of Safe Redesign

28 April 2011 Published on Which Web Design Company


7 Essential Basics to set in action to avoid damaging any established ranking on the search engines when redesigning a clients website.
Clients often have old or tired websites that no longer meet their needs and search for a redesign. Designers are often focused on how a site should look and function in their humble opinion and as designers there's little wrong with this.


However, in the ever increasingly competitive world of internet search, designers who pay little to no attention to how a clients existing site is already established with the search engines could seriously damage any existing power that a site has generated through its existance and in turn damage their client's business.


The following 7 points should be the very basics set in place prior to a redesign and relaunch of a client's website.

1. Perform a Page Rank check on the existing site to see how it stands, and a links search to see what sites are linking to the existing site.

2. To ensure that no links are lost make sure the redesign maintains the existing URL's and that the content of the original is reflected in the new.

3. If content &/or pages are to be removed, rather than deleting them 301 redirect them to the nearest relevant page or topic.

4. If a domain name change is essential 301 redirect the old pages to the new on the new domain name until the new site and domain is established on the search engines. Allow 90 days for this to take place assuming the client has SEO support.

5. Try to avoid using techniques that search engines cannot read like Flash unless really neccessary. And if used add no script tags with honest keyword rich descriptions of the content, especially if the content includes text.

6. Consult with the client about their keyword use and utilise H1 & H2 tags as a minimum and reflect in the page title. The clients SEO support can amend if needed but the designer should make sure they are in place from the launch. Untitled pages or incorrectly titled pages on client sites will not help those pages to be found by the search engines and also make the site look ill considered. Not good for the client.

7. Before launch, if the site has been designed and tested on a server for client viewing but no index tags have been set to stop the search engines from indexing until the site is on its own domain, don't forget to strip out the no index tags.

There are many SEO considerations that are essential in this day and age and many designers take the view that it's not their job. Fair enough, a designer is not neccessarily an SEO specialist. But a designer should make sure the foundations are in place for those specialists to enhance.

Everyone wins, the client gets a brilliantly designed new website which has maintained any SEO power generated by the previous. Their SEO specialists have an easier job of not establishing basics and think well of the designers, and if the client launches without SEO support, they're off to a good start with decent basics in place courtesy of the web designers.

Advertising, what worked in 2010?

Looking back over 2010’s marketing to see what worked and what didn’t work for Ape Red Media throws up some interesting (but maybe slightly predictable) results and reminds the business of one or two basic principles that should never be forgotten.

Advertising, often a touchy subject for a lot of businesses, after having forked out a small fortune and perceivably got little result from some all singing all dancing ad medium heavily promoted by a telesales person who could sell ice to Eskimos.

But is all advertising bad? Does advertising work? What is advertising exactly?

I love the phrase bandied about by a direct marketer who shall remain nameless on this blog, he doesn’t need any further promotion. His Phrase? Advertising doesn’t work, but ADVERTISING DOES WORK!

What I take from this phrase, or how I choose to interpret it, can be described as three principles, and following these three principles has been rather effective for Ape Red Media through 2010**. But not wishing to bore you quite yet  I’ll start with the key ad mediums and their results for 2010 in our local area.

‘Stimulative’ Advertising*

We have appeared in only one ‘stimulative’ advertising medium in 2010 and they were the Romsey Gazette, The Totton Gazette and the Eastleigh Gazette. The results were very pleasing (if not surprising) and we received enquiries and work from each issue.

The return on investment, taking into consideration the ongoing value of a new client for an average of 12 months, was reasonable. The total return will be 840% or 8.4 times what was spent on the ads. At worst, should those new clients cease to use our services next week the total return on investment would be 560%.

The results highlight 2 clear points for Ape Red Media, the Gazettes provide a great return on advertising spend, the reason for which is a subject in itself. Secondly the reminder that measurement is key. If we hadn’t kept track of where the work came from, how much the initial income from all jobs related to advertising spend, we wouldn’t have been able to identify the Gazette as a profitable advertising medium to be maintained.

Directive Advertising*

We utilised 4 channels of directive advertising in 2010 including Yell.com, Yellow Pages, Google Natural Listings and Google Adwords.

Yellow Pages printed directory has not seen out a full year yet so it’s a touch unfair to comment however we haven’t taken out a large semi display or display advert but a simple bold face entry to ensure that  when somebody looks for us in the Yellow Pages that we are easily seen. We don’t anticipate any direct result in terms of new work from this type of entry but regard it as a safety net should an existing client or referral be looking for our number.

Yell.com as mentioned in a previous entry was a disappointment. The advertising spend resulted in a 100% loss but highlighted potential avenues for the future. A local listing covering Romsey and Winchester didn’t produce any enquiries which may suggest that people are more likely to use Google. Although Yell.com receives traffic via Google it would be difficult for a small town local search to produce Yell.com natural listings because of the competition from SEO’d* local more relevant web sites.

Google Natural Listings. We have benefited without question from appearing between position 1 and 3 for a number of local search enquiries. For 2010 the results are without question the best for all mediums when taking into account the time spent on creating the site along with the SEO work put in place for local results. The total return on investment is 1077% not taking into consideration ongoing income, after deducting the investment the return for 2010 is 977%.

Now I am happy to view this as an out of the ordinary return on investment as sometimes the cards fall in your favour, but you have to be at the table in the first place and we were there winning the work. The point we will carry forward into 2011 is the importance of staying at the table, in this case Google’s natural listings, even just in the local area. SEO is an ongoing task but worth the effort and time involved.

(We also place between position 1 and 3 for the same search terms used on Yahoo and Bing but Google is the big one.)

And finally Google Adwords which is directive advertising with a difference. As I’m sure you’re aware you only pay for results with Google Adwords but again this is where measurement is essential. Why? Paying for clicks is all well and good, but those clicks need to convert into sales.

Our results for the campaigns we ran in 2010 were satisfactory in that the total return on investment was 380% after deducting costs just on 280% in the first year. We knew from our testing that the campaigns produced around 1 new client in every 16-20 clicks. At the close it was 1:15. We paid £3.67 per click so the client cost was £55.05, £25 under the £80 we had targeted, you can work the figures out for yourselves I’m sure. Good results, however if we work on our client lifetime value being just 3 years the return on investment is considerably more.

Google Adwords is a fantastic service when you get your ads and landing pages working together to get you showing higher for relevance and for selling your services when clicked. Then when working out your client cost and return on that client cost the rest isn’t rocket science is it? As a great marketing guru of mine puts it, “If a customer costs you £50 from the corner shop and every one you pay for gives you £150, how many times a day would you visit the corner shop?”

On the basis of our results we would have no hesitation in recommending in order of preference trusted local advertising mediums such as the gazettes and Google Adwords campaigns (managed for you initially if you’ve never done one before or if you haven’t the time). This is both stimulative and directive advertising to generate fairly speedy results.

However, one of the most important concerns for all business, regardless of size, is a business website, showing high in Google results for search terms that you can fulfil.

For 2011 our print advertising budget will fall with the local Gazettes. The online budget will be split according to needs, ie. as large contracts come to a close Adwords campaigns will be launched, tested, modified, tested and modified to get them working as well as they can for the necessary duration.

*Stimulative & Directive Advertising

There are 2 types of advertising in general terms, Stimulative, ie Advertising deigned to stimulate you into taking action of one sort or another, TV ads, Magazine Ad’s, Online Banner Ads are good examples. Directive advertising is designed as a service to be turned to when you need to find something ie. You’re already stimulated to take action. The leaders in the field in the UK were Yellow Pages, BT and Thompsons until the internet and in particular Google change the playing field. Google is now probable the most used ‘Directive’ service on the globe.

*SEO

Search Engine Optimisation. The process and practice of optimising a website to appear high on the search results of engines like Google and Bing. For example on 8/2/11 a search on Google for Web Design Romsey returned 76,000 results in quarter of a second. With ten results per page that’s 7600 pages of web site entries! Ape Red Media were in position 1, Giantpea in number 2 , All The top Bananas (recruitment) were in number 3 and Which Web Design Company were in 4^th. These sites have been optimised to appear for the phrase web design Romsey and Google has returned them in the results as being the most relevant and useful sites for the phrase web design Romsey.

**Advertising doesn’t work, but ADVERTISING does work

My interpretation of this statement is that a half baked attempt, a poorly created advert, ill thought out tag line and content, lack of or confusing direction and no testing and modification and retesting, regardless of medium will most likely fall flat on it’s face.

However, Clear Direction and understanding of the business objective, Carefully thought out Creative and Textual Content, and Testing, when all working in harmony towards the goal of the advert, does work. I would like to say regardless of medium but that’s not the case. Foot fall, readership, circulation, click rate, creditability, trustworthiness of the medium plays a huge roll and needs consideration.

A full page advert in an irregularly distributed publication that has poor recognition or is miss targeted will like as not on a percentage basis produce poor results when compared with a regularly distributed, commonly accepted publication that is easily identified for what it is and well received by the target group. Case in point the Romsey & Wellow Gazette. 18 years in distribution, it’s 11,500 circulation are more than familiar with it, and trust its content to hold ‘Local’ trades and service advertising.

Not testing and/or not reacting to test results is fools play that we have been guilty of because of time pressure. A small Adwords campaign produced 59 clicks to the landing page which resulted in 4 new clients, great. However the testing showed that the number of times the ad was shown amounted to just short of 13,000!! So just under .5 % We didn’t have the time to modify the advert and/or the landing page as we closed the campaign to devote time to a significant new client who came to us through our natural listing results on Google. But you don’t need to be a Philadelphia Lawyer to figure out the result of  running a duplicate ad with slight modifications to see if the .5% can be lifted to .75% or 1% to hit the same landing page which was converting close to 1:15. The result would have been an extra 2 clients at .75% and double the new clients at 1%.

A significant advantage to testing Adwords campaigns and keeping note of the results is that what you learn works online can be transferred to print if you do both. If one set of wording produces a higher response online, isn’t it likely to produce similarly higher results in print?

Advertising doesn’t work, but ADVERTISING DOES WORK!

Romsey & Wellow Gazette

Paper and Machines, it never ceases to amaze me how the most unexpected mediums in advertising prove to be very successful.


Earlier in the year, Ape Red Media did some local advertising in Romsey & Wellow Gazette, the Totton Gazette and the Eastleigh Gazette. All three publications produced enquiries and work, easily paying for the adverts and resulting in profit, however they raised a question.


Why did they work? Google Adwords has proven very successful for Ape Red Media along with our natural listing for local searches, ie. Web design Romsey, and 2010 has seen a steady stream of work. Our biggest client however found us by our natural listing on Google.


So why does local advertising material like the Gazette continue to work alongside the Goliath that is Google, while the Yellow pages would appear to have suffered over the last few years with the markets reducing it’s share price from circa £4 3 years ago, to circa 20p, although in the last three months 20p has dropped to 10p.


Well my thoughts are as follows; the Romsey & Wellow Gazette, the Totton Gazette and the Eastleigh Gazette as my examples are delivered onto the doormat every month. Everyone old enough to know what an advert is knows what the Gazettes contain along with their editorial content. They repeatedly fall into local hands, month after month. In comparison to the Yellow Pages, or the BT directory the adverts in this local advertising medium are delivered into a local businesses local market 12 times a year rather than just once. Secondly the A4 or A5 Gazette is around 40 pages and easily flicked through in comparison to 2lb 10oz 1000 page Yellow tome. Convenience being king these days, the Romsey and Wellow Gazette wins hands down. And convenience being the key here, their adverts find their way into the hands of the local population without them switching on their computer and making a search.


And what intrigues me is Ape Red Media advertises business to business where as the Gazettes mainly land on the doorsteps of the domestic population, so if they work for Ape Red Media as a web design business, they must work for businesses advertising into the domestic market.


(That’s not to say the Yellow pages isn’t used though, I do use it, but it hasn’t generated Ape Red Media any business where as the Gazette has. And Yell.com after a £500 plus spend didn’t generate a single enquiry, 1 Google Adwords Campaign at less than half the spend generated 4 jobs. But I’m getting off the subject.)


What followed later in the year for Ape Red Media was great. The Gazettes needed a local web design business to take over the design of their sites, and guess who they called! Local advertising? Does it work, I think we are a perfect example that yes it does!