Services

Digital Strategy

I can offer full review of your online business with recommendations, including a short medium and long term plan for your digital strategy. It is vital in this current business climate to have a fully thought through strategy that promotes your business effectively and efficiently online. A digital strategy can cover a number of areas but needs to be focused to the particular objectives of the product and organisation. For example looking at:

  • How well your site/s work on search engines
  • User acquisition strategies  – ways to encourage new and existing users to the site.
  • What are the site objectives – are they being achieved, how do you know?
  • Could your conversion be better, how is it being measured now?
  • Review of existing web site from a user’s perspective
  • Form a medium to long term online strategy

From all the research a strategy can be formed that will allow your organisation to benefit from the investment in the online market.

Web Site Reviews

A full web site review can reveal a number of potential issues with a site e.g. low conversion, poor usability. By using an external source to carry out an independent review can help form a plan of quick wins that can be implemented straight away, medium term areas and long term strategies. These can then be planned in to the site development and monitored through each iteration to ensure that update has a positive effect.

  • Review of existing web site from a users perspective
  • Review a new ‘in build’ site – from wireframes or design candidates
  • Report on simple potential quick wins
  • Form a medium to long term online strategy
  • Analyse SEO effectiveness
  • Report on site analytics

Ecommerce

Having worked for many years on full ecommerce websites I can bring this level of experience to small online ventures through to multi-million pound businesses. There are many areas of ecommerce that are full of legislation e.g. user details, PCIDSS, distance goods trading etc. which can be a minefield, I can simplify all this and bring some sense and order to the website. Case study –bricks and mortar website

Internet Consultant

Is your website working for you? Could you improve the lead generation from your site quickly and easily? I can work with you to improve your site performance with a simple site analysis. A typical start point is an in-depth analysis of your site, benchmarking the ranking of the site, and using log data to analyse all key pages of a site. This analysis can help identify areas for improvement, use of keywords, problematic site structure and highlight issues that impair site conversion (conversion can be any objective you have set for the site e.g. more sales, customer enquiries). Much of my recent work has focused on site review and search engine optimisation, successfully improving both the user experience and the search engine ranking of the client sites while optimising site conversion and increasing sales. Get in touch for an initial chat about how this can help you get better returns than your competitors. Over 17 years working in the online market gives me years of experience to offer in a consultative role looking at how organisations structure themselves for the Internet arena.

User Acquisition Strategy

A User Acquisition Strategy should cover everything that are going to do to ‘acquire’ new users to your new or revamped site. It is a process of research and finding out who your users are, how they are attracted to your product, how they view your market place. A great web site is classed as a failure if it does not have the right kind of visitors – you need to shout about your products and services but to the right audience.

Management Consultant

Having managed many teams over the years and built departments and companies I have a wealth of experience that can be utilised to ensure that your organisation is running as efficiently as possible. Acting completely independently I can come into an organisation and ask questions that are sometimes difficult to either ask or get the right answer to for example:

  • How are teams being utilised
  • Could there be a different process that could be used
  • How staff are motivated

I have been asked by a number of organisations to carry out full management reviews and the produce a report and recommendations that have been successfully implemented.

Case Study – a digital agency

Information architecture

The IA (information architecture) will go into more detail than the wire frames and start to explore the relationship between each element of the interactivity.   The IA is a very important part of the process it maps out the site before any costly programming occurs, and allows for verification of the user needs and user acquisition findings.   If necessary the IA can be user tested at this point to ensure that navigation is clear and easily navigable.   The functional specification (how each element of the site works) is produced as a blueprint for the developers to follow during implementation.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is critical to ensure that visitors to your site can find you. In a recent survey only 6% of users will click through to page 2 of a search results page –with 42% clicking the top position. I am a Google Certified Professional (nearly) so understand fully the processes to make your site appear as high up the listings as possible by utilising a number of processes including:

  • Organic search
  • PPC
  • Social marketing
  • Backlink strategies

All of the above used together or individually will help improve the visibility in search engines. But the key is to form a User Acquisition Strategy so that the relevant parts can be utilised to the best effect for your product and target audience.

Social Marketing

An ever important part of any digital strategy is social marketing – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn YouTube etc. If this is handled correctly, as a full on marketing campaign, then the results can be very rewarding. The more backlinks to a site the higher the search engine rank, in a recent report Google places 20% importance on backlinks and 5% on social marketing – a total of 25% is used to establish your search engine rank. I can put together a full, but easy to follow, social marketing strategy that will detail what needs to be posted to where and when – keeping the activity constant is key.

Online PR

Online PR is similar to offline PR and should be part of the whole PR strategy for an organisation. Using a number of tools it is possible to reach a vast online audience. Joined with your Search Engine Optimisation and User Acquisition Strategy will generate better results.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is critical to ensure that visitors to your site can find you. In a recent survey only 6% of users will click through to page 2 of a search results page –with 42% clicking the top position. I understand fully the processes to make your site appear as high up the listings as possible by utilising a number of processes including:

  • Organic search
  • PPC
  • Social marketing
  • Backlink strategies

All of the above used together or individually will help improve the visibility in search engines. But the key is to form a User Acquisition Strategy so that the relevant parts can be utilised to the best effect for your product and target audience.

Business Analysis

Coming into an organisation and reviewing the current practices is a skill that I have used often in a number of companies. It is often better to use a fresh pair of eyes to look at current systems and put forward recommendations for efficiency and quality. There are often ways by tweaking certain practices that can lead to a faster turnaround of production or better quality control. It is still surprising how many companies scrimp on the quality control processes when time is tight, which only leads to added costs further down the line.

Hosting

Hosting is an area very important to a website, get it wrong and you could lose a potential customer for ever. With years of experience I can offer advice on how to avoid the pitfalls of seemingly ‘cheap’ hosting. Users are very easily put off websites if they cannot get to the information they want to view quickly, if hosting is not up to the requirements of the site then users will very quickly go and never come back. With a few simple steps it is possible to ensure that hosting is not only cost effective but is also fit for purpose.

Capacity Planning

There is an area of website that is nearly always either a last minute thought or completely forgotten about – hosting and capacity planning. If you have the best website in the world but the hosting platform is slow, under-specified or behind so many appliance that means users can never travel through the site then the site will fail. Also if the amount of traffic is not thought through and planned for then the website may stop working altogether – there have been many examples of this for high profile websites over recent years. I can offer to look at your current hosting infrastructure and advise on best practice, any potential security issues and also how many concurrent visitors the site will be able to handle at any one time – this can then be mapped to the number of users currently visiting the site and any trends or patterns that may produce a spike in traffic.