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If you are considering starting or increasing your marketing spend online then you should enlist the help of a web marketing agency. An agency can have the skills, experience and resources to make a huge difference to your business and often the fee they charge is more than made back in the increase in sales you will achieve.

It is important that you find an agency that you trust and can work well with. Often it is easier to use a local agency as you will be able to meet with them and build up a relationship with them, although with much communication being done through video or phone callas at the moment anyway, this is not vital.

So what should you look for when finding a web agency? You need to try and find honest and independent reviews for the agency and you may even be able to contact some of their existing customers for a reference. Often you cannot get a true feel as to whether you think you can work well with an agency until you have met them. They need to take the time to understand your business and exactly what it is you do. If they are not willing to do this, then they are not the right agency for you.

Marketing is very important to all businesses and is something that should be be constantly under review.

It can be a bit of a mine field for many businesses and if you don’t know what you are doing, you can end up wasting money. Often, if a business owner doesn’t understand a certain type of marketing, they may just completely ignore it. This could mean that they are missing out on a potentially huge amount of business.  

Over time technology advances and consumers change the way in which they buy products and services. If businesses do not keep up with these trends and adapt their marketing they can quickly fall behind. You need to track your return on investment and if one type of marketing is not working well for you, change and try something else. A marketing agency will often be able to advise you what sort of marketing you should do to see the best results. Although they will charge a fee for their services, you can often make this back in the increase in revenue.

You may even wish to hire a marketing team or individual if you have a large business and feel that you have the funds to support this.

If you have had a new website built or have had major changes made to it then testing is vital and something that should be done prior to it going live. You should avoid having any big changes made directly on to live site as if can cause issues for people browsing the site or trying to place an order. A good web agency will take a copy of the website and work on that to ensure that all changes are done correctly prior to transferring it over to the live site. This means that everything can be check thoroughly to make sure it is working.

If you set a new website live that has not been tested vigorously, then you risk losing customers straight from the off. If something doesn’t work correctly, the visitor is likely to leave and may not return to your site again. You may not only of lost out on their business that time but also any future repeat business you may have got.

If the site is new then you need to go through and check every page in detail. Make sure that all images are loading, the layout is correct and that all links work and go to the right place. You need to check the compatibility of the site in several browsers to ensure a good customer experience. You should also check that it is compatible on all mobile devices too.

You need to check that pages are not taking too long to load. Slow page loading can put people off and can also negatively affect your search engine rankings on Google and Bing etc.

Even if you have thoroughly tested the website prior to it going live, be sure to do some basic tests again once it has swapped over. You will need to check that any checkout process is working as it should and that any contact forms are being submitted and received correctly.

If you have replaced an old site with a new one and the URL or structure of the URL’s has changed, then you need to set up some 301 redirects to ensure that any existing links internally, in the search engine results or on external sites go through to the new page. If you do not do this you risk losing rankings on the search engines and taking visitors to a page not found error.

One common question that people often ask when it comes to creating their first website is, how long will it take to build? This question can vary drastically depending on a number of factors. Once the programmer has been given a full brief and understands what they need to do they should then be able to give you a more accurate timeline.

If you decide to go with an individual rather than a company for your website then you need to bear in mind that they may not have the resources that larger organisations have. They will also have other projects that they need to continue working on, so they are unlikely to be able to dedicate all their time to your site. Working with a agency will cost more but does give you peace of mind that should one person be off ill for example, someone else should be able to pick it up for you.

Once you have a timeline in place, you need to understand that any changes you make to the specification may well have an impact on how long the site takes to build. If you start adding in extra functionality or changing sections that have already been agreed, then you may delay the site by a few weeks. This will also often incur additional costs.

If you are looking to have a website created then it may help to think of it in phases. It is very easy to get carried away and want your website to be all singing all dancing but actually this can result in delays. You need to think about what is most important when it comes to your website. What is the main focus and what you want it to achieve?

Sometimes it is best to split your website project in to phases. Phase one will be to get the website up and running with the main functionality that is needed. From there you can create a phase two plan which could start to be developed as soon as the site goes live. This will allow you to get the site live and potentially start bringing in enquiries and/or sales whilst continue to develop it. Often after the website has been live for a while, you will start to notice what it is lacking or what needs to be changed. You may be able to get this information from customer feedback or you may use information from a statistics package such as Google Analytics.

You may of seen a number of companies offer simply, low cost websites which allow you to build a site yourself with a simply drag and drop function. These sites attract a lot of businesses due to there low monthly fee and hassle free experience that is promised. If you are just starting out in business or have a business that doesn’t have a website then you may be tempted to use one of these sites.

These types of website can be ok for those looking for just a few pages to detail what their business offers, but many companies who are looking to grow their business over time or need to start off with additional functionality may struggle to get what they need.

Often people start off making their won website on these website builders and it all goes well until they come across a problem. Because they don’t understand coding and how programming works, they may try notice an issue but not know why it is going wrong or how to fix it. In the end they may have to get a programmer to look at the site for them and help them which often costs more as the programmer has to familiarise themselves with how the site works.

If you have a website then you will probably understand the importance of search engine positioning. For those that sell online or use their website to gain enquiries, where your website shows in the results can have a huge effect on your traffic. If your traffic drops down, it is likely that you will see this in the number of enquiries and / or sales you have.

It may be that you don’t realise that you have experienced a drip in rankings until you notice your sales dropping off. It is important to keep track of this and there are a number of ways in which you can do it. If there is only a handful of phrases that you want to track then you may manually track them by typing them on Google etc. You do need to be careful when doing this as Google can show you personalised search results based on your previous search history and location etc. Ideally you want to use a third party software that is built to check the rankings through a proxy to give you more accurate results. You should do some research in to the company before agreeing to use their software and ideally get a free trial.

When you have a new website built there is a number of tests that should be done prior to setting it live. It can be very easy to miss a simply setting that has been left ticked or unticked that has a big impact in the search engine results. For example, when a test in in development you may set up a robots.txt file to tell the search engines not to index the site. There is also an option in WordPress settings that you can tick to discourage the search engines from indexing pages. If when the site is set live this box is still ticked or the robots.txt file is not updated, then you will find that your URL’s do not get listed in the Google search results. If you are having a new site built and have already gain several great positions on the search engines from the previous site, you will lose all these positions until the issue has been fixed and Google reindexes the pages. Another common problem that can cause a sudden lose in rankings when launching a new site is that the old URL’s have not been redirected on to the new site. Ideally you want to keep the URL structure the same but if this is not possible you need to redirect the pages to the relevant new pages. Avoid redirecting all pages just to the home page as this is not good practice.

When it comes to the costs of websites, they can range massively. There are even companies who will allow you to create a free website or one that is only a small monthly fee. These websites are often ok for people who just want a one- or two-page site to put on to their business cards but they are often very restrictive in terms of what you can do. They also often are not programmed in the best way for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) which means you may struggle to get the site ranked highly on the search engines such as Google.

You may get hugely different quotes from different companies, especially if the website is quite complex. This may be due to their pricing but it could also mean that they may have misunderstood the brief. Be sure to explain in as much detail as possible what you need the site to do and how you want it to look as the more detail you can give the more accurate the price is likely to be. If you do go for a really low cost site you need to bear in mind that it may have been built using a template that many other websites also share so you are likely to find other sites that look the same.

If you run your own business then you will understand the important of marketing and raising awareness of your brand. There is a number of ways in which you can market your business online and offline. If your marketing budget is tight then it is even more important that you invest it in avenues that are going to give you the best return on your investment.

Social media is being used by many businesses now to bump up their marketing and allow them to reach masses of people in an instance. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter rely upon you building up a network of followers in order for you to connect with them. There are a number of way in which you can do this and it is important to give followers engaged once they have started to follow you. You may wish to run a competition asking people to share and follow your page or post to be entered into a prize draw. This can work really well but once you have gained these followers you need to ensure that you continue to offer them reasons to follow you otherwise you will find they leave as quickly as they came.