SEO in Hertfordshire

Search engine optimisation versus traditional style advertising for the small business.
Directories are dead?

I'm not saying Yellow Pages and other telephone directories are completely dead but "when was the last time you used one" is a phrase i never stop hearing. As well as this Yell.com itself and the other Internet directories don't seem to be much better.

Monitored numbers expose the truth

Based on our own client's experience. With a monitored telephone number and a stringently monitored answering service (where every call is logged by an operator) out of approximately 200 telephone calls last month only eight of them were actual enquiries. The rest of them were sales calls, he actually got over 15 calls in one month from the same people trying to sell a local magazine and another a lot of people trying to push a policeman's diary or fireman's diary advertisement.

The past is... well... past

When you look at it,The traditional choices to the small business were, in the past, few and far between. You really only had newspapers, leaflets, Yellow Pages and Thompson's and perhaps if you were adventurous a little bit of cinema, outdoor and (if you were being ripped off) the old post office counter rubbish.

Everybody is talking about how much of a hard time newspapers (especially the local ones) are having, Now is it because people don't read them any more? or is it because you can see what you get from the Internet in terms of response? Because with newspapers it really was just a punt in the dark.
To a properly designed website with good search engine optimisation and inbuilt analytics, there is literally no comparison.
Come to think of it, were leaflets any better? You know you got an upsurge in telephone calls to 3 days after you delivered them but in real terms how much did it cost per telephone call?

Before the internet Advertisers NEVER monitored

In my experience of the 20 years of dealing with the small businessman I have often found that they were just so happy to get phone calls they never really gauged the cost of each individual one. Think of it this way... If you are walking down the high street with a chunk of money to invest you wouldn't just blindly put it into the bank that had the nicest looking cashier, you would put it into the bank that paid the best interest rate.

However every day people used to do this with their advertising cash, they would give it to the newspaper because they sent a girl with a short skirt on week in week out to build up a relationship. The guy from the Yellow Pages, Thompson or other yearly products only had one chance per year to build up rapport and then do the deal.

Clicks are NOT sales

When the Internet first came along with people became obsessed by the fact that they could see the response in the form of clicks to their website, at the beginning this was enough because they really couldn't see response from anywhere else. I lost count of the customers who thought getting lots of clicks was the way forward but had absolutely no clue what sort of clicks these were and whether they're turning in to business in any way.

Conversions are King

It took people pay few years before they realised clicks didn't actually mean anything, it was conversions that counted. But how do you track these? Talking to most small business people about Google analytics, or putting other analytical processes on their website is like talking to a toddler about the benefits of quantum mechanics in the modern age.

I suppose that is why we get paid.

Ecommerce tips and ecommerce SEO

The question with a local e-commerce website is how best to market it. There are two issues obviously there is the on-site search engine optimisation or SEO as well as the offsite SEO and advertising geography does have a severe bearing on how you are to go about making your client find your goods.

On-site optimisation will often take form around the product you are selling, for instance if you're selling Levi's jeans and obviously you're not too bothered about the geography of the customer but you certainly want to be presented immediately at the top of Google if someone types " I would like a pair of Levi's 512 boot cut jeans." .

All the big retailers like Amazon, Argos Tesco's et cetera obviously have multiple warehouse locations where they can send their perishable goods from. What happens if you are in the perishable goods business and you are a local retailer that only has one location? Also why would you want to fight the big operators across National geography when you can do better just becoming more popular in your own area.What if you're a local tool and planthire operation with one or two locations in a very specific county? There is no way you're going to be able to compete against someone like HS S or the big players. There are obviously specific plant Hire type directories you can advertise but in the end this sort of advertising does add up, and erodes any budget you may have to put towards making your website more findable. 

Therefore if you're a local operator aiming at a specific geography which could be County based or even neighbourhood based in an urban environment or even city wide ...you must spend almost as much time concentrating on optimising the words that describe your area as much as the words that describe your products.

Now this obviously applies over all forms of website optimisation not just specifically to e-commerce sites. However, it's a classic mistake that many new Internet entrepreneurs make... They tend to concentrate too hard on branding of the products they are selling or descriptions and pay no attention to the likelihood ( or not as the case may be) of a client ordering from a certain distance away.

To be fair, it's not that long ago that people were quite resistant to doing supermarket shopping online, but these days if this is the norm for many people. Personally, I never get it right and I do need to walk up and down each individual isle to see what products I need and want to buy, and I do find it difficult on Tesco's website. But that's just me.



Think about it though, why did Tesco's, Domino's pizza, Waitrose and all the others do it? The reason is twofold ...they can centralise an awful lot of their fulfilment and warehousing. And they save the extreme amounts of money by being able to employ less staff because there is less foot fall in the stores.

But how does the same ideology translate to the small business operator?

Imagine the situation, where you are completely run off your feet, the phone never stops in the office but actually you are able to get round all the deliveries without putting your drivers under too much strain.

Having a very basic and simple e-commerce website would enable you to take orders without actually picking up the phone and still do all the deliveries.

This means you save money in house by not employing extra staff to answer the telephones and you get around more customers.

This sort of ecommerce website really doesn't cost very much money and is exceptionally easy to manage, so it pays dividends across the board.

Another statement from the average small businessman is that e-commerce websites are no good for local businesses. This is in fact a complete fallacy there are many ways you can use an e-commerce website to save money and increase productivity. A typical scenario we came across was with a local tyre dealer, the client mentioned when we first went to see him that was a bit sick of getting constant telephone calls just asking for prices. However, he did mention that he was particularly competitive and often did convert the enquiries into a sale after the client called back a couple of times. His concern was he could save time if the client phoned him last, simply because his prices were that good. What most people were doing was checking his price first as he was their local guy.... then calling some other dealers - finding out that they were more expensive and then coming back to him.

Most people want to use a local guy but only if he is competitive .. they don't want to be ripped off. This meant that if they got the price from his website and then looked at some others and got prices from his competition they would always come back to him .We discovered that the client could save wasted time on three or four phone calls if he put the prices on his website straight away .....but obviously the logical step is then to enable to clients to buy the tires on the website and book the appointment for the fitting on an automated system. that way he didn't have to manage the diary and he was able to see what money was coming in at the beginning of the week and save time on multiple telephone calls that were unnecessary

E-commerce for the small business

The main thing with e-commerce websites deciding on products and area coverage.

A lot of local customers will only want local businesses .The main issue with the local businessman  running a local e-commerce website is how far he doesn't want to customers from.

What distance is advisable to advertise over? how effective the advert's effect comes the further you get away?

For things like Jeans or CDs it doesn't really matter. But if it's local furniture or something like that people are more weary about purchasing from a wider distance.


Most businesses want an e-commerce site of some sort so they can keep their shop open 24 hours a day seven days a week. One of the issues is what type of clients they are aiming at.

It's a fallacy to say that old people or the older generation aren't comfortable with buying online... but if you go back 15 years nobody thought you would never order your groceries from Tesco in this way.

What you've got to decide is who your target market is, more  importantly where they are, and then what terms they are using to look for your product.

It's all very well using the term curtains but does that imply cleaning or purchasing?

Another big issue can be how people perceive your product and how they go looking for it... what is the best way to appear in the right places and be trusted to sell it...  ultimately its all about presentation as well as being  right there once the user has become a bit bored of searching.

The average search must be about three or four goes until they get what they are looking for a new need to be geared towards the end of that not at the beginning.