Websites, Witchcraft and Wizardry

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of ensuring that your site meets as many of the necessary criteria as possible, in order to rank as highly as it can.  A higher rank means being closer to the top of the list for the search terms associated with your business.

Google is the big name, it’s the one that we here at YVTS will harp on about to a certain extent when we’re building a new site. With around 85% of online searches being carried out by this search engine, you need to know that your website is meeting Google’s criteria.   To a large extent Google’s ranking algorithm can be thought of as a mystical force that no-one outside of Google fully understands, as they don’t share the details of how to be the best as that would not pave the way for fair competition.

A few key ‘ingredients’ for this mixture are:

    • Keywords on your site – Think “What searches might people carry out to find a business like mine?” and ensue the relevant words are on there!

    • Domain name – Your own domain means you can have professional looking email addresses, a website that doesn’t advertise someone else’s business (your-business.co.uk rather than your-business.wordpress.co.uk, for example) AND it counts as a keyword!

    • Links to the site – I cannot stress this enough.  Your site could be the gold standard of web design and have the ultimate UX (User eXperience) but if no one is looking at it, it’s not much use.  A website needs to be linked to in ALL of your company’s marketing.  The rank will increase as the number of people using your site does!

    • Submission to business directories – At the very least you need a Google Business listing, your customers should know where you are and Google should be able to place you geographically so that when someone uses ‘near me’ at the end of their search, it knows that you are near them and offers your business in the results!

There are more, but I don’t want you to nod off!

It’s Not About You. 

Interestingly enough, and somewhat surprisingly to many of you Apple disciples, Google is also iPhone’s default search engine, so it doesn’t matter whether you are true to Android or a loyal fan of iOS, Google is part of your life. This is all very interesting from an “I didn’t know my phone did that” standpoint, but it is extremely important from a “how will my customers be finding me?” perspective.

The reality is that even if you yourself are using an ancient phone with 9 buttons and no internet capability at all, it is irrelevant, you have to think about where and how your customers will access your online offering.  More than half of the world reach for their phone first so you have to make sure your site is responsive (meaning that it will scale or rearrange to better fit the size of screen it is being asked to display on) and that it looks good and works well on a mobile phone.  Desktop users account for a little under the other half, so having it look good there too is imperative.  The last piece of the pie goes to tablet users but with less than 5% of the share and behaviour that is pretty much just ‘big phone’ they don’t really need to be worried about in the same way. Which browser is being used is also relevant as they will all handle the information in generally the same way, but just occasionally they’ll do something surprising (I’m looking at you Safari).  This is why we check our sites on all common browsers before the customer sees it!  Chrome currently has around 66% of the market share, where browsers are concerned.   Safari is the next one down at around 17%. There are a few others, but these two are the ones that you need to cater for first and foremost.  

Don’t Social Distance This Media

A Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter account are worth their weight in gold (or rather, as they don’t really weigh anything, they are worth my post lockdown weight in gold, which is not insignificant!). I do appreciate that it just seems like another thing to worry about in the world of business admin but it’s FREE so take advantage of it!

In my experience it is easier to get a Facebook page to be high in the Google Search ranking quickly than it is for the website itself, and the Facebook page will link to the website and help to build it up, win, win!  Posting regularly on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram builds business visibility and allows you to communicate what your business is actually doing.  Adding your website link in every post means more traffic to the site and a big stir to the magical SEO mixture, which leads to higher ranking in searches and more visibility to new customers! They do say a picture is worth 1000 words, it really is! 

Customers are easily distracted

Your site’s search engine ranking is affected by how quickly it loads and shows your business to a visitor. Your site’s search engine ranking is affected by how quickly it loads and shows your business to a visitor. People are very impatient too – a site that shows the visitor a good experience in 10 seconds will often find the potential customer has wandered off – note how quickly online shop websites load (Amazon, for all their faults, have made an art form of selling people things.)

Careful design means the customer can be looking at a nice web page in less than a second on their screen even while the rest of the page is hurrying along behind the scenes.

So the long and short of it is, as you probably now realise, there’s loads you can do to be seen online and if you don’t want the hassle of arranging it yourself, we’d be happy to give you a quote!

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In the modern world your IT resources are set up to guard against viruses and keep your IT infrastructure working, sadly though the IT guys can’t do a great deal to protect your staff from the kind of viruses that people are vulnerable to!  What we can do is help you to weather these difficulties in a more productive way. It’s so often the case that businesses have little in the way of emergency strategy for dealing with those days when the employees simply cannot attend the office.  It doesn’t have to be this way! The current advice regarding self isolation if you suspect you have been exposed to the COVID-19 pathogen is designed to prevent the exponential spread of disease. It means that you could find yourself in a position where an otherwise healthy and fit for work employee has to sit at home and wait it out, both that employee and your company would benefit from a plan that allows them to carry out their duties remotely so they can login and get on with some work whilst keeping their germs to themselves!  This is also useful in the event that your employee needs to be home to wait for a delivery, or has a sick child they need to stay home with and it can keep your whole office working when snow brings our transport network to a standstill.  

The cost of setting up this kind of back-up plan may be less than you would expect as most of your employees will already have the equipment they need at home and will just need access to the necessary systems granted to them.    

They will need:

• A Windows 10 laptop or PC
• A copy of Microsoft Office (2007 or newer, already covered if they are an Office 365 user)
• A phone
• Internet access

With a modern SIP system the physical location of the user isn’t normally a problem, your employee can both answer calls and make them on your business number.  With the older phone-line based systems call forwarding is usually possible but your employee will only be able to receive inbound calls to the business number, outbound calls will come from their own phone number.  To receive business calls the employee will need a phone, this can be a desk phone, cordless phone or even an app on their existing mobile.

Note that while remote working from a Windows 7 Laptop or PC, or a Mac is possible not all options work so well – we recommend a company-supplied Windows 10 laptop for remote working to avoid home applications, children and games being mixed onto a work computer.

YVTS can help to set up this system for you.  If you need any of the above equipment we can advise which ones would be best value for your needs.  Once the equipment is in place the employee can remotely access emails, shared calendars, network drives and remote printing.  Meaning business as usual whilst the quarantine is in place.

Get in touch and let’s get your business ready for this!

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There are options for replacing your core server and Active Directory with a later version (Server 2019 is current) or moving some or all services to the Cloud – not many people run their own internal Email server now, as they’re often more work and security liability than moving these systems to a cloud provider, such as Microsoft Office 365.

Whilst changing to new systems may seem like an unnecessary expense, it will save you time and money in the future, both by having faster systems and by preventing down time caused by old hardware failure, or malicious attacks. Current supported software also means ensuring that your card transactions continue to be PCI compliant, as not being compliant opens your business up to an easily avoided liability, and costs typically around 1% of card turnover – which can be a large sum.

Contact us if you want to talk about what to do about this. We can offer some advice and work with you to make a plan to move to newer systems with continued support.

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