The brief was to create an eye catching layout to reflect the brands image whilst maintaining important functionality and SEO aspects throughout. Working closely with Direct Air the site was designed, built and made live within one month to co-inside with a strict time frame, speedy work! 

The site now offers a well rounded user experience with a modern appearance, sleek functionality and important SEO elements creating a truly bespoke website design. We think it speaks for itself so why not take a look: 

http://www.directair.co.uk 

Old vs. New 

Here is a comparison of the old site to the new design, we think it looks fantastic! 

 New 2013 Design                                                                        Old 2009 Design  

 

Direct Air’s Industrial Website Design includes: 

• Rotating banner highlighting key Services.

• A cutting edge Design that looks sleek and is easy to navigate.

• Refined navigation and drop down menus that allows quick and easy access to the main pages of the site. 

• Powerful call to action with a Request a Call Back form & 24/7 Emergency Callout image.

• Fully optimised design built to the highest and most important SEO standards.

• Social media integration, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & YouTube 

 

These are just some of the improvements we’ve made to the new website design; we could go on and on! Working closely with Direct Air we have created a unique website design that fits the brief and most importantly looks superb!

 

What do Direct Air think?

"The staff at Spiderscope have been friendly and helpful every step of the way in the re designing of our website. We have already had numerous people comment on how great the new site looks and what an improvement it is to the previous version. The new website from Spiderscope has given us a much improved, professional online image to match our company reputation."

Best regards

Ryan Todd, Direct Air & Pipework Ltd

So what are you waiting for! Contact us today for your Industrial Website Design

Are you looking to improve your website? We have expert web designers that will deliver an Industrial Website Design just for you! We don’t use templates and all designs are manually crafted by our expert designers.

Contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss your requirements, or see our page on SEO Website Design. 

 

Parkside Tiles came to us asking to modernise their site and simplify the user experience. They had a wealth of fantastic product photos so we had to do justice to these while providing a sleek and easy user experience.

A new website design

Below, you can see how the old site compares to the new one, or you can check out Parkside Tiles live.

The new design features:

• Attention grabbing photos that stand out against their competitors and make you really interested in their products.


• A cutting edge design that looks modern, is easy to use and completely manageable.


• A fully featured blog that allows Parkside Tiles to continuously add content to the site in a well optimised manner, perfect for building an audience around their brand.


• Gallery of images which is managed through the CMS to display products in an attractive manner. One of the great advantages working with this site is the amount of great images available.


• Fully optimised design built to SEO standards, meaning the site will have no technical issues when trying to rank for keywords.

These are just some of the improvements we’ve made in the new design. The site is modern, fresh and a pleasure to browse and really does show off the product range for the visitor.

Attractive product display design

One of the most important aspects of the Parkside Tiles design was getting the products to stand out and be the focus. We achieved this with a wonderful looking product display page that really entices you to find out more.

Get a New Website Design Today

Are you looking to improve your website’s look and feel? We have expert web designers that will deliver a bespoke design just for you. We don’t use templates and all designs are manually crafted by our expert designers.

Contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss your requirements, or see our page on web design.

From February 2013, Google Shopping will be moving to a fully commercial model. It was fun while it lasted and yes, maybe some of us took it for granted that we could have all our products listed nice and easily in Google Shopping for free. Alas all good things must come to an end and now Google has rolled out a new paid version for their shopping service, meaning, obviously that you’ll need to start paying for your products to appear.

When Google announced last year that it was going to start charging for e-retailers to promote on Google Shopping through its Product Listing Ads (PLA’s), not everyone took notice, but now its here, alarm bells are ringing amongst many who are finding themselves left behind.

So, what has changed? And more importantly, what do I need to know?

Essentially, changes will be made to the search engine results page, (SERPs) in Google Shopping so that only PLA’s are displayed. We know the new PLA’s are going to be similar to AdWords in that it is cost per click based and it will actually become part of the AdWords programme, managed through the AdWords control panel. Effectively meaning that retailers now need to ‘pay to display’ in Google shopping.

Ok, so does that mean I don’t have to use Google Merchant Centre any more?

No, unfortunately it doesn’t mean that. You will have to use both. You’ll use your Merchant Centre Account to upload your product feeds and you'll need to use your AdWords to manage your PLA’s and other Ad’s.

Basically, the updated Google Shopping will charge on PPC or CPC basis. Retailers apply a maximum bid to individual products or to product target groups, through their AdWords account.

What does the end result mean for me and my business?

Well this is once again where Google gets crafty. Google will determine rankings based on what bids advertisers choose. Instead of establishing a minimum PPC or CPC rate, Google will decide where to rank your site depending on what bids you chose to enter.

Here is a popular example: If seller A bids 10p, and seller B bids 15p, seller B’s products will rank higher than seller A. Positions for specific key phrases will then be decided by primarily by your bid and secondly by how appropriate Google deems your product to be for a specific query.

What are the Pros and Cons of the new Google Shopping?

First the positives:

1. Rankings, If your site doesn’t currently rank too well organically, a little extra investment can go a long way in driving your site up those rankings.
2. More control, you’ll have more control over what Google shopping displays because you’ll be creating your own ads.
3. Quality Results, theoretically you’re only going to spend big on a keyword if you know your going to get results from it, which should lead to more relevant, quality results.
4. Less competition, companies like Amazon and Apple most probably won’t bother with paying for Google Shopping as frankly they have no need to. This opens the door for smaller e-retails to invest a little cash and jump the rankings. So long as you have an up to date quality e-commerce site, you’re golden.

Now the Cons:

So, what’s causing this? Was it a poor year? Have your results gone down? Are less people searching for your top keywords?

Of course, these are all possibilities. However, we also have to consider how the tracking and reporting of organic search is changing. For those of you unaware of these changes, this post will act as a starting point to understanding what is happening.

First, a brief history of organic tracking

Before we delve into what exactly is changing and how this affects you, it’s first worthwhile to establish a little bit of history to add perspective to things.

Prior to the last quarter of 2011, organic search traffic was recorded unimpeded by most statistic programs. The way these programs track this information is simple, but fairly technical.

To put things simply, when you browse from page to page on the internet, your browser will pass some information across. This usually includes things like what browser you’re using, the last page you were on, etc.

This information is used by tracking programs to see where the visitor came from, what keywords they use, etc. In reality, it’s a little more complicated than this, but all we need to know is that this information exists and is used by programs like Google Analytics.

Starting at the end of 2011, Google decided that for privacy reasons, it would hide some of the information within this data for users who are logged in to a Google account when performing a search. At the time, it was predicted this would only affect a small percentage of search queries... however; this was not the case at all.

The rise of ‘not provided’ keywords

This was the first major change to how organic search traffic was being reported. Any search that was performed by a logged in user would appear as ‘not provided’ in Google Analytics (and perhaps something similar in any other stats program).

What this meant is that you cannot see which keyword the visitor used in search to find your site.

Originally, this change only applied when you performed a search while logged into a Google account. However, during 2012 other updates have occurred which have increased the likeliness of keywords not being recorded.

One of these changes is that the Firefox browser will now encrypt any search through Google automatically, as long as it’s performed using the built in search bar.

This has led to a surge in ‘not provided’ keywords. Unfortunately, there is yet more bad news for those of us who want to monitor search keywords: Google Chrome is set to encrypt search traffic by default too. This will likely propel ‘not provided’ numbers much higher.

Why are vendors suddenly doing this? Well, they claim it’s to protect the privacy of their users. Whether this is accurate is a whole different debate, so we won’t elaborate further in this post.

To visibly demonstrate the effects ‘not provided’ keywords are having, we have collated some data from a sample of the sites we work with below. This graph shows how the percentage of keywords being counted as ‘not provided’ has grown (by average) throughout 2012:

A huge jump in March and continued growth throughout the year has led to just under 25% of all organic traffic having their exact keyword masked in Analytics.

What does this mean for me?

In practical terms, this means that it’s much harder to see exactly what keywords are sending traffic. To illustrate this, let’s provide an example.

Say you have a set of 10 keywords you actively monitor because they’re important to your business. You want to compare the performance of Q4 2012 against Q4 2011 to see how these keywords have grown.

Because of the growth of ‘not provided’ you could potentially see a 20% decline in the visits your 10 monitored terms have sent, due to these being masked in Analytics.

While this is possible, in reality it’s unlikely your stats are going to be that black and white. However, it’s easy to see how the ‘not provided’ keywords can be affecting the monitoring of your organic traffic. If someone inexperienced is putting together these reports, it’s very easy to paint a black picture of your site’s performance during 2012.

What else is affecting organic traffic?

While the above will affect the figures for individual keywords, it won’t show a decline in overall search. So, if you had a better year for organic traffic in 2012 compared to 2011, you would be able to see this within your Analytics.

Well, that was true until a significant development occurred over the last quarter of 2012. Those who are unprepared for this development could be seeing some disastrous figures for their organic traffic!

Enter Apple and iOS 6

iOS6 was launched in September 2012 with the iPhone 5 and shortly thereafter filtered to older Apple devices. This update included a significant change to how the default Safari browser handled sending information that analytics programs rely on.

Remember the information that the browser keeps when you browse through pages? The one that Analytics programs use to determine the source of traffic? Well by default, Apple has completely encrypted this in iOS6.

That’s nice, but what does it mean? In simple terms, it means that any visit from a search performed through an Apple device using iOS6 will no longer be counted as a search visitor; it will instead be counted as a direct visitor.

If you’re unaware of this, it’s extremely easy to under report your search performance. For example, see below which is a chart of organic traffic per month for Q4 of 2012 compared to 2011 (this is actual data from one of our customers).

First, the yellow line represents organic traffic as reported in Google Analytics from Q4 2011.

The blue line represents the organic traffic as reported in Google Analytics from Q4 2012. These are the unedited total figures from the organic report and suggest there has been a drop year on year, especially in December and January.

The red line represents the Q4 2012 figures corrected with the inclusion of iOS6 devices. Once corrected, the organic traffic comparison looks much better and you can see a big improvement year on year.

As you can clearly see, if you’re only looking at the figures in the organic report in Analytics, you could be scratching your head wondering why your figures are down year on year.

Monitoring your organic traffic

Monitoring your organic search traffic is no longer as simple as checking the organic report in Analytics. You need to use real expertise to determine where the growth is and to get the full picture.

We’ve elaborated on two key factors that are changing how organic search reporting must be conducted. As we move into 2013, there is bound to be more changes and updates like this as search becomes increasingly more complex to track and monitor.

It will therefore become even more important for businesses and individuals to be aware of the search space and the changes occurring if they want accurate reporting, especially if you’re using this data to consider where to use your marketing budgets.

Spiderscope website optimisation

We are experts at website optimisation, specialising in a data analysis approach first. If you would like us to help you, including with understanding your stats and analytics, please don’t hesitate to contact us on 0800 081 1688.

“Many brands still view social initiatives as short-term and experimental… it is time for social media to be taken more seriously.” 

The reports highlights the need for business to get into planned “social mindsets” by implementing clear strategies for each social media platform; that means updating your Facebook, Twitter or YouTube on a regular basis (the horror!).  

Ever growing Social Media

The impact of Social Media on business cannot be overstated with search engine giants like Google and Bing incorporating an increasing amount of social media content into their search results. 

Any business or brand that lacks some form of Social Media interaction will miss out on golden opportunities of customer engagement, product/service promotion and most importantly giving your business that personal touch.  

Benefits of an Effective Social Media Strategy 

1. Customer engagement – Social Media platforms can be a central hub of activity which allows you to promote news, special offers or generally engaging with and providing support to customers. 

2. Customer acquisition – Provide an ideal platform to attract potential new customers. Customers can discover your business through friend recommendations, likes, discussions, comments or even seeing their friend’s activity on your page. 

3. Drive traffic to your website - By making your Social Media pages a place to be for your customers, you in turn can then push traffic to your site with updates, to new content or areas of interest that you want people to see.

4. Effective Marketing - Building a targeted Social Media following will ensure that your marketing messages are exposed to the correct target markets creating effective campaigns. 

5. That Personal Touch - Giving your business a public persona will help your company seem endearing and approachable, pushing you ahead of the competition!  

Effective Social Media Management: Example 

Back in May 2012 one of our customers, a French Home Accessories brand called La Vie en Rose signed up to our Facebook Management package, this included: 

1. Creating an attractive and inviting Business Page. 

2. Updating the profile with new images (profile & cover image). 

3. Ensuring company information was up to date. 

4. On-going plan to update the page on a daily/weekly basis. 

Why not take a look: https://www.facebook.com/www.lavieenrosesales.co.uk

Within only a few months their Facebook Business Page was beginning to show vast improvements from our Effective Social Media Management:

Users exposed to Page Content rose by 32%
Engaged Page Users rose 35%

Get ahead of the competition today with our Social Media Management

Here at Spiderscope we have a wide range of Social Media packages suitable for businesses of all sizes and requirements. Whether you are looking for a branded Facebook Business Page, Twitter management, YouTube Marketing or even your own Pinterest page we can help!

For more information regarding our Social Media Marketing and Management packages contact us direct on 0800 061 1688 or fill in our online enquiry form. 

Don’t get left behind in 2013!

Visit our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/spiderscope

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Spiderscope

Well, according to the BBC article:

"PwC suggests a potential £4.4bn could be put back into the NHS with better use of information and technology."

That’s a huge amount of money which can be saved by becoming paperless. Take a look at your own processes; are they as efficient as they could be?

Realistically, most businesses are not operating at optimum efficiency and this leads to wasted time and effort on processes that are not profitable.

The NHS is a primary example of this and by modernising their systems; they expect to save a fortune.

In fact, we’ve done our bit in helping the NHS meet this goal by developing a new and efficient booking system for the Birmingham and Solihull NHS Cluster. This is a totally new booking system built for maximum efficiency that has already transformed their work processes – successfully delivering value and savings.

Moving Away and Becoming Paperless

Recently, we worked with a customer that was processing orders through a sales department. Their sales team would work collecting all orders made that day (through various means, including phone) and build a central spreadsheet with all the appropriate details.

At a designated time, orders for the day were cut off and the spreadsheet was printed. This could be quite large and span multiple pages depending on how many orders came in. The next step was to fax this over to their warehouse for processing.

The warehouse would pick and pack the orders and individually mark down on the faxed sheets the status for each order. When the warehouse was completed, they would fax back to the sales department so they could manually alert each customer to the status of their order and when to expect delivery.

As you can see, the process is very manual and there would be no real time updates. If the sales department needed to know the status of an order, they would have to call the warehouse and hope the office was manned and that they had the paperwork nearby (i.e. not on the opposite side!) to check… realistically, this meant they couldn’t determine the order status until the warehouse were finished.

How an Online System can help you

This inefficiency was costing the business money and sacrificing the level of service they could provide their customers. They asked us to step in and with our knowledge; we were able to deliver a system that:

• Used a central online order tracking system where all orders would appear alongside their status (e.g. payment processed, packaged, dispatched, etc).


• Was able to filter orders by status, type, location (and any number of other ways) to display a customised screen suitable for business needs.


• Allowed all members of the staff and warehouse to use a real time list of orders. The warehouse would then process orders as they came in (as apposed to waiting for the sales fax) and the sales team could see real time updates.


• Automatically alert customers to the change in their order status, so the sales team no longer had to manually take this action. This means they can concentrate on what they need to do; sell.

These were some of the bottlenecks in efficiency we solved for our customer. We developed a system that worked for their business and by helping turn them paperless, we saved them money.

Choosing the Right Partner for Moving to Paperless

It is precisely this reason that we were picked by the Birmingham and Solihull NHS to develop their new paperless and efficient booking system.

We were able to aptly identify where improvements could be made in their current process and translate this to an application that is reliable and delivers on everything such a large organisation needs. This is us playing our part to help them become a little less paper dependant!

If you would like to see similar improvements for your business, be sure to contact us today on 0800 081 1688. We have worked and developed many systems that have saved businesses thousands, including warranty systems, online CRM software, staffing recruitment software and more...

We can do the same for you.

We’d like to extend a big congratulations to our stopwatch specialist friends at AST for achieving top rated seller status on eBay recently! A lot of effort has gone into improving the eBay shop and they have rightly been rewarded with this status – making them the absolute best place to buy stopwatches on eBay!

Some of the benefits they can look forward to receiving from this are:

• Highest final value fee discounts
• Promotion in Best Match search results to boost sales
• Exclusive access to Featured First
• A prominent Top-rated seller badge on listing and profile pages

As you can see, it’s very much worthwhile going the extra mile to achieve this status. It will make their eBay shop even more successful and generate more sales and profit; which is great for the upcoming Christmas spending!

How did we help AST achieve this?

The eBay shop started with small beginnings, as only a select few products were uploaded and managed manually. Templates and listings were manually created and not conformed across the entire product range. This is how a lot of eBay shops start, with businesses testing the waters to see how viable the market place is. Initial sales were good and competition was low, so eBay looked like a very promising sales channel to explore and target.

However, with an extensive product range like AST has, it soon became a problem of how to manage and scale the store in an effective manner, which wouldn’t eat up too much administration time. It was not an option to simply manually upload every single product onto the store one by one, which is a position a lot of eCommerce businesses will find themselves.

Automating eBay for efficient scaling and success

We have developed a tool that bridges the gap between AST’s eCommerce store and eBay. This tool successfully allows you to import and export products from your shop onto eBay in a quick, effective and reliable manner.

This is what we utilised with AST to deliver a solution that would easily allow them to manage their eBay shop. Combined with a shop and listing template design that was attractive and stuck out against any competitors; sales quickly grew and eBay was a very promising profit driver.

Optimising your eBay products for improved sales

Importing and handling your products on eBay is only one part of the battle though. The products also needed to be properly marketed and optimised in order to be found and eventually sell to customers. This is a huge problem for a lot of eBay traders; getting sales is always difficult and there are definitely subtleties to the eBay market place.

We developed a strategy of targeting a range of different ways that people searched for stopwatches whilst keeping admin and overhead low, letting our systems handle all the work. In addition, we suggest subtle price breaks and categorisation to further enhance the attractiveness of AST listings.

Now you can search on eBay for a huge range of keywords containing ‘stopwatch’ and you’re likely to see AST products top or very close to. This has resulted in more sales and achieving top rated seller status.

Looking to expand on eBay?

If you’re looking to expand your business on eBay; then talk to us. We’re experts at getting your products on there, found and more importantly; sold. We have a wealth of services, including eBay Optimisation and eBay Expansion for eCommerce Traders. For something more bespoke, talk to us on 0800 081 1688.

Spiderscope have been awarded a contract to build a new electronic booking system for Birmingham Integrated Language & Communication Services (NHS). This new booking system is set to take over 70,000 bookings annually from NHS patients in Birmingham and Solihull and includes a new multilingual public facing website.

The goal is to create a website and backend booking system that is easy to use by staff and residents alike, available in a number of different languages. This large project involves:

• Designing and building a user friendly, public facing website
• A bespoke appointment booking system
• Login and account creation and messaging / alert system
• Multi language content management system

The system needs to support a large number of concurrent users and associated booking data. Multilingual options are also extremely important so our solution needs to cover an easy to use language selection tool throughout.

Developing Bespoke Web Applications

Our proposed solution will provide a complete usability overhaul, building from the ground up to ensure reliability and ease of use. The solution will be split into two main areas:

Public Facing Website

The public facing website is an important portal for the local residents and must be usable for people that speak in a range of different languages. The site will offer content and information on services in multiple languages, accompanied by short video clips in multiple languages.

Key features of the site:

• Multilingual content display
• Short embedded video clips
• Easy to browse and find content
• Cross browser compatibility including IE6
• SEO friendly
• Easy manageable CMS

E Booking System

The E Booking system is the heart of the project and will take over 70,000 bookings annually. Obviously, with this many bookings passing through the system, it’s important  that it's efficient, usable and reliable, our solution will deploy:

• Postcoder / address finder for quick lookup
• Auto calendar with date selection
• Scrolling start / finish time
• Help bubbles to support users
• Pre-populate known data to selection lists
• Auto email alert confirmations

This is just a snapshot of the features of this project, designed to support users and clients alike.

Bespoke Web Applications

If you’re looking for a bespoke application that suits your business, contact us today on 0800 081 1688!

No where is this more evident than with eCommerce. Product reviews are common throughout eCommerce sites across the web and their propagation and popularity proves that customers love to give feedback.

This type of feedback is no longer just for eCommerce sites. For businesses that don’t have inbuilt systems to manage customer feedback, your customers may just turn to another source to have their say.

Online Reputation Management

Many sites like Yelp, Review Centre and even Google provide a forum for your customers to leave feedback about your business and their experience when interacting with you. It’s easier than ever for your customers to voice their opinion; so the pressure to deliver a great experience has never been higher.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the process of managing how your company or brand is perceived online – and will directly involve gathering and interacting with these customers leaving exactly this type of feedback.

In most cases, a business or individual looking for ORM is probably suffering from overexposure of bad reviews or negative feedback and is looking to address this. Perhaps when searching the company name or brand name, the search results are highlighting pages that aren’t flattering to you.

This scenario can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Research suggests that 1 in 3 visitors to your site will research your reputation online before engaging with you. Imagine if a third of your visitors find negative reviews while deciding to purchase – see how easily this can affect your sales?

What can I do?

Every situation is different, but there are a number of things to look out for. The main goal of any reputation management would be to reduce the visibility of these negative reviews as much as possible. There are various ways of achieving this, all of which will depend on your personal circumstances.

However, not all negative reputation is equal. For example, what if a competitor of yours was purposely spreading this false info across the web? It doesn’t happen very often, but the possibility is there and spotting it can be difficult.

Ideally, the solution is to optimise the search results for your keywords in a way that promotes positive reviews and feedback and eliminates the visibility of any negative pages. Of course, this isn’t as simple as it sounds.

Own your feedback loop

Another tactic is to own your feedback loop and capture as much negative feedback internally as possible. If you can achieve this, it can be an extremely powerful way of developing positive feedback that is far more useful than your typical, generic, overly praising “I love this company!” style of reviews you often see.

Consider the following example:

A customer has a complaint about your business, but your feedback loop is well prepared so this is directed internally (rather than them leaving feedback on other, public websites). You go above and beyond to fix their issue and deliver outstanding service – as you typically would.

At this stage, the customer is now impressed and happy with you, and is more likely to leave positive feedback. This may include the initial complaint, but it will demonstrate how you solve issues and this will go much further in establishing trust than the above example.

Online Reputation Management for your business

If you’re in a similar situation or experiencing any of the above issues, contact us today. We can help in managing your reputation and ensuring your business is viewed in the best possible light. Contact us today on 0800 081 1688.

While the opportunities for increased sales are definitely enticing and real, expanding to cover such channels can lead to unexpected headaches in the way you manage your orders and accounts.

Entering a new marketplace means playing by their rules, especially when it comes to following the processes they put in place. This can increase the complexity of not only your order fulfilment process, but also your accounting and customer management processes.

In most cases, it’s a complicated judgement on how to introduce these new processes to your business. If this is wrong, it can result in many more hours wasted on admin tasks, rather than work that increases your profit.

What options are available for businesses?

Many businesses are unaware that you don’t have to completely manage your orders and accounts directly through these marketplaces. In fact, many will allow you to export and import changes in bulk, which means you can lift out your order processing, accounts and customer management and bring it to your own, in house system.

For example, we have developed a system that allows for products to be managed through a central admin system, with any updates proliferated through to external marketplaces. I.e. if you had an eCommerce site, you could update a price on this and our system would automatically adjust the price of your eBay listing.

This type of automation and synchronisation can save hours and hours over the course of a year. In the situation above, a five minute job quickly escalates to a 30 minute job when you have to update your eCommerce site, eBay listings, Amazon products and any other marketplaces.

Manage your business how you want

The initial investment for a system like this pays for itself in time saved through the alternative of managing all market places individually. While you may want individual prices, descriptions and options per marketplace; it’s unlikely that the way you handle orders or accounts will change depending on where the item was sold.

It is therefore beneficial to bring this into a centralised and unified system. This will have the immediate benefits of:

• Centralised order management – never miss or delay order fulfilment again


• Keep your existing processes in place for managing orders and accounts


• Less chance of mistakes happening as staff are using the same systems they always have


• Snapshot of all business activity in one location – no need to log into multiple accounts

The main benefit is the cost savings that is made through reduced admin. These can be significant over the course of a year and will allow for your business to grow and scale effectively; resulting in more profits over time.

Customise your system for improved efficiency

We have helped customers achieve this with our integrated marketplace systems. Whether you have an existing system or are new and looking for retail website development, it can really benefit to consider how to integrate all your channels effectively.

In addition, the systems we can supply are highly configurable so they can match your processes exactly. You won’t have to change to match the system; our development will ensure that the system works for you in the most cost effective way.

Centralised management for your business

Moving your admin into a centralised location is a great efficiency gain and is suitable for growing businesses looking to expand. If you’re looking to manage multiple marketplaces from one location and increases productivity, then contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss your requirements.

However, it amazes us how many times we see customer reviews poorly implemented on sites, where businesses don’t reap 100% of their potential. One of the most common areas we see that isn’t implemented well is the star rating.

Star ratings on customer reviews

Specifically, when talking about the star rating, we’re talking about the rating that each reviewer will give a product or service. This isn’t necessarily in the form of a star (it could be a number, text or any other form of rating) but will determine the score that the reviewer applies in the review.

Using this effectively can be a great benefit to your search results and can increase click through rates for your product pages.

You may have seen in Google results when searching for products that star ratings are sometimes included directly on the results page. See below:

These star ratings come from the reviews on the product page. They represent the average review score as calculated from the reviews left on each product page. This has two main advantages:

1. It can give users a good impression about your product or service before they have even landed on the page.


2. They can appear bolder, bigger and more eye catching than competitors, which can lead to more click through.

Data suggests that most companies will see a 20-30% rise in click through from search results that display star ratings like this. Not only that, but these clicks are more likely to stay on the pages longer as they know what to expect before clicking on the click – another big positive.

How to get star ratings to appear in Google for my site

Star ratings like those in the screenshots above won’t come automatically. Whilst it’s possible that Google could crawl your reviews and extract value from them; we’ve never seen the result pages update with star ratings without applying the needed code.

Basically, in order to give your site a chance of displaying results like this, you’ll need to ensure your customer reviews are encoded with rich snippets. This involves editing code and can be tricky for sites that are using custom or specific customer review systems, as it will most likely involve editing templates; which is not for the average user.

The benefits of deploying rich snippets are obvious for you to see and will help your listings in search. Combined with other rich snippets like product encoding and special offers, you can really make your products stand out against your competition and see your click through rates soar.

Customer reviews on your site

Customer reviews are becoming a critical component to all eCommerce sites and the increased visibility that can be gained through Google is something that you should not miss out on.

If your site isn’t taking advantage of customer reviews or rich snippet encoding to generate attractive listings in Google, then you should consider our customer feedback system. Alternatively, you can contact us today on 0800 081 1688 and we can discuss the best way to enhance your site.

What does this mean for your website optimisation?

Well, it simply means that it’s more important than ever to be in the right position for the right keywords. Google Instant is deployed in such a way that it takes a large amount of screen real estate. This in turn pushes PPC ads further down the page, which means… yep, organic results are even lower!

For any one search query you may only see 1 or 2 organic search results before needing to scroll down the page! When you add universal search snippets into the search results too, it can be even worse for organic listings. See below:



With a wealth of options available to the searcher, how likely are they to scroll down? In this example the searcher has a whole load of targeted search results with only two being a generic organic result before scrolling.

While we’ve picked a fairly specific example search term here, this is a common type of search that users will be performing. So, how do you combat this? Well, simply put, you need to ensure the website optimisation you have in place is working! It will also be important to ensure your site is found well within the universal snippets, like Google Map results for location based searching.

Correct Keyword Optimisation

Google Instant is still an early development and determining the full impact on SEO is a long way off. However, what is true now (and always has been) is ensuring your site is in the top positions for the right keywords.

For more information on how you can ensure your site is in these top positions, see Spiderscope’s website optimisation services.

Are you missing sales with a poorly optimised Google Product Feed?

These are the two questions that really matter and will give you the most to think about, but do you have the answers? The likely answer is no, which means how can you tell if your feed is optimised? And how can you tell that you are not missing out on exposure and sales?

Anybody can set up a Google Product Feed. It’s deceivingly simple to do so, which is where the problem lies. Because it is so simple to set up, it is so often done in a way where you see little click through and even less sales. Many businesses will view Google Product Feeds as a set and leave job, where this is far from the truth.

Get your Google Product Feed optimised today!

A fully optimised Google Product Feed will:

   • Increase your product exposure in Google, for free.
   • Build brand awareness as your products are more visible.
   • Allow your products to rank for keywords your site may not.
   • Drive relevant search traffic that are more likely to buy to your product pages.
   • Increase sales!

So, are you 100% sure that your Google Product Feed is delivering the best results? Probably not.

A properly optimised Google Product Feed is a highly effective way of marketing your products online. If it’s not optimised, then get it done today! If you don’t have one.... Then better get moving fast, your competitors are already ahead of you (psst, contact us for one!)

Check out how your website looks on an iPhone with our website for iPhone demo.

Mobile Website Design

The creation of the iPhone and other high-tech mobile phones has paved the way for internet companies to redevelop sites to suit the new standards. New technology is constantly arising (like the new tablets such as iPad from apple) which is going to make internet browsing more accessible all over the world. By making your website adaptable to this new technology you are increasing the chances of users visiting your site and the possibility of conversion.

Ensure your site is designed and optimised for mobile devices

This is where Spiderscope comes in to play. We can provide your current site with the appropriate code it needs to be mobile ready. This new code will detect requests as they come in from mobile users and to respond back with webpage to suit.

Spiderscope has developed specialised, mobile website designs perfectly suited to the iPhone and smartphones such as the Nexus One. If your site doesn’t lend well to mobile browsing you will be loosing out on a large potential market of customers as this market continues to grow.

Benefits of making your site Mobile Friendly

• Makes navigation easier for users
• Allows you to target key information to show to the users
• Increases the chances of people visiting the site, even on the go.
• More chance for conversion
• Greater exposure

Contact Spiderscope to get your website ready for mobile browsing and purchasing today, or read more about our websites for iPhone or websites for smart phone. Don’t be left behind!!

Sell your products on Amazon and eBay

Benefits of eBay Selling

• High levels of customisation
• Additional avenue to sell products and can work well alongside existing eCommerce operations
• Can be linked to existing Content Management Systems or stock control systems
• Easy to use and to manage

Benefits of Amazon eCommerce

• Large audience
• Easy cost determination
• Fixed price selling
• Loyal customers who are willing to pay more because they trust the site

Although eBay is easy to use and to manage, setting up the eBay shop takes time and knowledge of how to target specific markets. This is where Spiderscope comes in; we setup the right eBay solution for you and ensure that you see a return on your investment.

In addition, Spiderscope provides advice on the best way to target products and makes the transition onto the Amazon site easy and painless. We do all the work while you reap all the rewards.

eCommerce website design

Spiderscope can setup your site to handle Online Purchasing and eCommerce. This includes having a shopping cart system, terms and conditions, shipping, costs, payment types, Sage order exporter, etc directly on your site. All of this will be added to your site and we will also update your product pages to reflect these changes (cost of product, link to purchase or save for later, etc.).

If you want to include purchasing on your site or would like to setup either an eBay shop or Amazon business account, please feel free to contact us. For more information, see our eBay Selling Services or Amazon eCommerce Services pages.

Facebook has recently launched a new registration tool for site owners which will conveniently pre-populate fields on your sign up form with user data from Facebook. This extends to showing the user what information is being shared and also which friends are already signed up for the service.

This is an attractive feature to add to your sign up forms as it could potentially reduce the number of fields which need to be filled in; increasing the likeliness of registration from your users. The unique proposition of showcasing friends which have already signed up is another feature that will almost certainly help with converting site visitors.

How to implement the Facebook Registration Tool

The Facebook Registration Tool is implemented by adding the usual Facebook code to your mark up. What’s interesting is that it can be applied to any sized registration form – so you can easily add fields to cover information that Facebook won’t necessarily have; credit card details for example.

This type of functionality allows for visitors who are not registered with Facebook or do not wish to use their Facebook details to also use the same sign up form.

Admin the registration data

So, what effect does this have on your admin? Well, effectively once a user has completed your form the same data can be sent through as with your standard form that is in operation right now. With minimal modifications, there would be little, if any, extra admin work!

See the Facebook Registration Tool in action

Yelp is a site that is currently taking advantage of this tool. When signing up, if you’re already logged into Facebook then a number of fields are pre-populated. Take a look below:



As you can see, the email field and birth date are already completed (with options to change if needed). Alongside this, the first name, last name and gender fields are also automatically populated with data from Facebook and removed altogether. (You can view how the default form looks by un-checking the tick box).

In this particular example, the sign up form only requires the user to enter and confirm a password and submit their postcode – dramatically cutting the amount of information and more importantly, time, needed to complete registration.

Integrate Facebook Registration on your forms today

Does this look like something your forms would benefit from? Of course – practically any eCommerce site would benefit from this tool, especially those that already have a social media presence.

For more information on how we can integrate Facebook tools onto your site, please contact us on 0800 081 1688. Alternatively, see our Facebook Marketing Services or Social Media Marketing pages.

Their latest algorithm update is trying to address this issue and present more fresh results where relevant. An estimated 35% of all search terms are likely to be affected by this update; meaning any fresh and new content could receive a significant boost in rankings if it is relevant and well targeted.

This obviously presents a huge opportunity for increasing traffic to your site by creating new and fresh content on a regular basis. As confirmed by Search Engine Land, one of the methods Google uses to confirm freshness is by when the page was first crawled. This suggests that one of the factors will be newly created pages and not changes to existing ones – so it’s important to create new content (pages) regularly in order to benefit.

How does this affect my site?

If you do nothing, then this update is unlikely to affect you. However, you will be missing out on opportunities to receive more traffic and rank for more keywords. By creating relevant, well constructed content, you are likely to benefit from this update by seeing pages indexed quicker and ranking higher. It’s also probably safe to assume that producing fresh content more regularly will encourage Google to crawl your site more often.

How can I take advantage of this?

Google has specified different areas which are likely to benefit from this freshness update; for example, current affairs. But, if you’re not a news site, don’t worry. There will be other areas where benefits will be seen. Take reviews of new products – if you’re looking for a review of a product, you’ll probably want a review of the latest version and not last year’s model, so this is a good area to target with fresh content.

Implementing an idea like above is simple – get a blog. Blog’s are excellent ways of creating new content and encouraging discussion. They blend well with social elements too, so this would be an effective and actionable way of providing fresh content to both site visitors and Google (contact us for one!)

What fresh content should I create?

Regardless of this update, adding new content to a site is a great way to improve keyword targeting and attract more visitors. Therefore, you should think about the type of content you could create that will be beneficial to your visitors (and also target keywords you want to rank for).

Some ideas include:

• Target industry specific news – become a hub for news in your industry by providing write ups and explanations timely to the latest events and developments.
• Create a regular series of products reviews, or ask someone else to – sending out a product to be reviewed is a small cost for the content you could receive in return. Additionally, you could expand on this by contacting other review sites in your niche for reviews & links.
• Provide write ups of recent shows or events – anything that you attend regularly or annually is a great source of fresh content that your site would benefit from.

These are just some very brief ideas. With some creative thinking, you can easily discover many ways of creating fresh and interesting content to take advantage of this new update. If you think of any, feel free to leave a comment. ;)

Next steps...

To receive a bespoke, tailored solution for how your site could take advantage of the Google Freshness Algorithm update, don’t be afraid to contact us. We can provide you with a bespoke, comprehensive blog solution that will allow you to fully take advantage of this algorithm update or develop a content strategy that is right for you. Contact us today on 0800 081 1688.

There is a myriad of possibilities as to why someone may drop an order, some of which are due to external events forcing them away from the computer. In this instance, the potential customer may want to return to the site to finish their order. Therefore, a little encouragement is a good thing. However, you will never get to this if your checkout process isn’t user friendly to begin with.

Is cart abandonment really a problem?

For customers that we’ve helped, simply put: yes, it is. Lots of our customers have difficulty tracking their checkout processes and leave it to us to measure. Often times, the first time we do this reveals some amazing results that customers are completely unaware of. We’ve seen cart abandonment as low as 15% (of the traffic who started the checkout process) to as high as 46%, and everything in-between.

Just picture that: 46% percent of the customers who started the checkout process left before it finished.

That’s a huge number of potential orders. Again, there could be lots of reasons for this, including things like: is your cart user friendly, easy to navigate and not overwhelming your potential customers – all of which are factors. What can be done to improve this?

Improving your checkout completion rate

Improving your checkout process can be difficult. After all, if you how it all works, you can sometimes be blinded as to what is causing your visitors problems and increasing your abandonment rate.

Let’s give an example: we once had a customer that came to us after having a brand new site designed. Everything looked great, but they were failing to get orders. Traffic was high, prices were competitive, but their conversion rates were low, so they came to us asking what can be done.

Here are some of the issues we identified and fixed:

• Whenever you clicked to add an item to your basket, a popup would appear asking you to confirm this choice. This wasn’t optional; it was almost like an error dialog appearing in your browser – not what the user was expecting at all. Something like this places doubt in the visitor’s mind, so after removing this we instantly saw an increase in items being added to the cart.


• The visitor was required to register before placing an order. Every checkout should give the visitor a choice to skip registration. Nothing infuriates me more than having to create a whole new account for just one purchase, so I’ll go elsewhere. Apparently, our customers’ visitors were the same and removing this as being required was a good step forward.


• The visitor was also required to re-log in after registering! To further infuriate the visitor, this checkout process didn’t automatically log in upon registration, forcing the visitor to view a log in screen again, before they could proceed to finish their order.


• The process was slow and layout wasn’t intuitive. Visual factors like these are extremely important for establishing trust with the visitor, and no body likes a slow checkout experience. Improving these was another key factor.

These were the most glaring flaws of their cart system, so we worked hard to upgrade their whole shopping experience. In the end, we plugged our cart system in. The result? Within days they had received more orders than they had in the last 3 months combined!

Automated cart abandonment emails

Shortly after this, we performed a review and noticed that while orders were better than ever, we were still seeing dropped orders midway through the checkout process. Determined to improve ever further, we decided to implement an automated abandoned cart email.

What’s this you ask? This is an automatic email would be sent to a visitor who had left the cart process after submitting their email address. The email would then offer the customer a chance to pick up where they left off, allowing them to quickly and easily finish their order.

You’re never going to get a 0% abandonment rate and often people will leave the checkout because something has interrupted them. This doesn’t mean they don’t want to order, just that they can’t right now. In this instance, a cart abandonment email is the perfect way to recapture this customer, and put your shop first.

This has resulted in an even more reduced abandonment rate.

Checkout process review

Call Spiderscope on 0800 081 1688 or contact us to get a comprehensive usability review of your shopping cart and checkout process. We’ll analyse every step and optimise this to be as user friendly as possible – resulting in more orders for your store!

The main reason for such a spike was likely the heavy distribution of high end mobile devices on Christmas day. How many of your received a nice new iPad, iPhone or Smartphone for Christmas? ;)

We were curious though; would this spike continue throughout 2011 and become a trend? Well, let’s find out...

Mobile Traffic 2010 vs. 2011

We sampled some of our top customers covering a range of different industries, site types (including those with mobile optimised sites and those without) and traffic sizes. Immediately, we could see that mobile traffic has increased massively when compared to 2010. Out of the total data gathered, we saw:

• 2010: 32,025 mobile visits
• 2011: 78,661 mobile visits

This is an increase of 146%! We’ve still got one month left to go in 2011 too, so this will only climb higher! In the graph below, you can clearly see the growth of mobile traffic over the course of the year:

In 2010 the graph shows that our surveyed sites saw a continuous growth in mobile traffic for most of the year. 2010 then finishes with a peak in December that continues into 2011. The start of 2011 is a little wobbly, but this is down to some of the sites seeing exponential spikes on some months (like May) but then returning to normal growth levels.

With this in mind, it’s definitely time to ensure that your site is providing the absolute best user experience for mobile visitors. The scope for a mobile device to reach your site is absolutely huge now, so it’s crucial to get rid of those flash intro pages!

What Else Did We Notice?

We also picked up some other interesting bits from our data analysis that wouldn’t immediately be obvious. Some of the key points we got from this included:

• Smaller traffic sites were seeing larger relative increases in mobile traffic compared to more established sites.
• Sites with mobile optimised versions were seeing more participation with more conversions, page views, time spent on the site and less bounces.
• Adwords is sending more and more mobile visits, with the lowest increase from 2010 to 2011 being 80% in our sample!
• eCommerce sites were seeing exceptional growth in mobile traffic, especially those who are highly active in social media.

What Does this Mean?

It's pretty obvious that mobile traffic is growing and you can expect more visits to your site from this source. As more of these devices become available alongside faster data plans, more people will be doing their internet browsing through a mobile device. Therefore, as a larger slice of your site visitors enters through such a device; it becomes critical to ensure they are presented with the best user experience possible.

While most devices can render full websites, in most cases they are no where near as usable as a dedicated, mobile optimised version. This is true if you use a lot of Javascript on your site, especially if it’s for navigation.

This trend is set to continue well into 2012. We’re positive that in January we will see another big spike of mobile traffic (we’ll report back with a new blog post!) so we’re busy preparing for this. It's important that you are too. Do you know how many people go to your site on a mobile device?

Optimise Your Site for Mobile Now!

The time is now to get your website ready for more mobile visits. It's not just for huge companies and large eCommerce sites anymore; smaller sites also need to ensure they are optimised for mobile. Contact us on 0800 081 1688 today and we’ll create a thorough mobile usability report to get your mobile strategy up to date and working for you.

We have extensive experience developing and supplying online management systems for both agencies and recruiters. To comply with the AWR we have revised and upgraded our online recruitment management system. The upgrade covers all the areas of the AWR regulations that are relevant to agencies, making them a breeze to manage.

This series of blog posts details how our systems can benefit you and make management of these regulations much easier.

How does the AWR affect Agencies?

The new Agency Workers Regulations (AWR) come into effect on the 1st Jan 2012, and many agencies will need to record extra data and information on temporary workers. The AWR is a big change and will have a significant impact on how agencies operate.

In essence, the AWR is designed to ensure that temporary workers receive the same benefits and allowances as employees after working for a period of twelve weeks (in the UK). So, if any temporary worker has worked at the same company, in the same position for twelve weeks, they become entitled to the same benefits as regular employees.

It is a little more complicated than this, but a full explanation of the AWR is outside the scope of this article.

Recruitment Agencies now need to record more accurate information on their workers

What effects will the AWR have on agencies, their operations and their IT systems? The onus will be on the agency to monitor and record relevant information, this may require significant changes to systems and working practices. For example:

• You must track how long each worker has worked with each employer
• Your system must now indicate when a worker qualifies for benefits
• You have to alert your client when a worker qualifies
• You have to keep a record of your clients benefits so you know what your worker can expect when they qualify

An agency must now monitor a lot more information and the means to record and retrieve this data may not be available in legacy systems. Accurate data recording is essential to ensure you comply with the law.

Tracking Temporary Workers

Probably the most complex part of the AWR is determining when a worker qualifies for benefits. As any agency will tell you, the AWR qualification rules are complicated. But, your worker will qualify if:

• The worker has worked in the same role in the same company for twelve weeks within any 18 month period
• A break between employments at one employer is no greater than six weeks
• The twelve week qualifying period is paused for sick leave / holiday

This can lead to some complex situations that will be very difficult to track manually to find out when works qualify. Many recruitment systems will not record the correct information required to do so, making this even harder to determine.

Our management system has been re-designed around the AWR, ensuring that any combination of qualifying criteria is recorded and easy to monitor. See below:

The above is a snapshot of the AWR management screen for our system. At a glance, you can clearly see worker status and benefit eligibility, what companies they may be approaching qualification for and one’s where they’re not close. The system automates this tracking making it extremely easy for you to manage.

Coming up in Part 2

This is only the first part of what’s required by the AWR for agencies. In the next post, we’ll detail how our system can alert your clients that workers now qualify. This is a legal requirement of the Agency Workers Regulations, so it’s important you have a reliable and complete alert system in place.

Contact Us Today

Are you a recruitment agency bound by the AWR? Contact us on 0800 081 1688 today to discuss how our system can benefit your business and streamline your admin.

How to Improve Your Quality Score

Your quality score is calculated from a myriad of factors, with the main ones being Clickthrough Rate (CTR), Relevance and Landing Page Quality. There a more factors than just these, but focusing on improving all three of these will have the best effect on your Quality Score.

This recent update has placed further importance on the quality of your landing page. Therefore, for a high quality score, you should be looking to have:

1. A good keyword that is relevant to your audience.
   Being as targeted as possible with your keywords is usually a good way to start and ensure you’re appearing in relevant searches.
2. A well targeted ad that is as relevant as possible to your keyword.
   Ensuring your ad is a tight match to your keyword will increase the likeliness of clickthrough, resulting in a higher CTR.
3. A quality landing page that is also closely associated with the target keyword.
   Finally, delivering visitors to a close match and useful landing page is what this update has focused on and will improve your quality score.

You can see here how all three factors combine to make up the quality score. A well picked keyword next to a well placed and keyword targeted ad will ensure you have good CTR and Relevance. Further, a then well targeted landing page that uses your keyword throughout will help with the third point, keeping your QS high.

Landing Page Examples

Here, we have built our own Google Adwords campaign with the above in mind. By segmenting our keywords, we can present targeted ads that lead to targeted landing pages. For example:

This is just an example of how to segment your keywords into targeted landing pages. You can clearly see how tight the landing page is to the keyword, which is good for our Quality Score. From here, we can easily measure the performance, effectiveness and how successful each landing page is. From this point on, it’s just a matter of applying further optimising until you receive the results you desire.

Improve the Performance of your Adwords Today

You can clearly see that targeted landing pages are important not just for your Quality Score, but also your results. Improve your Adwords campaign today by contacting Spiderscope on 0800 081 1688 or see our Optimised Google Ad Campaign page.

In Management Software for Agency Workers Regulations, Tracking Your Workers, we discussed the ramifications of the new regulations and how they might affect your agency management systems. Part 1 focused on tracking your workers using our updated management system.

Alerting Clients when a Worker Qualifies for AWR benefits

The AWR stipulates that it is the agency or recruiters’ responsibility to keep track of a workers qualification status. It is also your responsibility to alert clients when a worker qualifies and to have available a summary of the benefit entitlements that will be available to them.

Furthermore in the event of a dispute, it is down to the agency to show that they have taken reasonable steps to ensure the client was notified.

It’s clear that AWR management systems need to do more than keep simple records. A helpful system must keep track of entitlements and benefits, it should notify you when action is required and help you to take it, here’s one example.

Alerting Your Clients when a Worker Qualifies

Helpful enough to include triggers prompting automatic emails to be sent upon qualification but flexible enough to accommodate variations and individual needs.

A typical agency will take many repeat or regular bookings, these are often filled by the same staff.

Staff placed in these bookings will quickly qualify for AWR benefits so you will want to alert your client, but you will not want to send alerts out every week thereafter. Our system has this flexibility built in.

It will record every notification email you send out in a secure database, providing a full correspondence history should you need it.

See Our System in Action

This is a booking confirmation screen. It shows that this worker qualifies for the AWR benefits in this role, and accordingly the option to send out confirmation emails.

As you can see with this system managing entitlement qualifications for your staff under the Agency Workers Regulations is simple and straightforward, it’s done for you.

It’s easy to see who qualifies and it’s easy to notify the clients. Everything is kept on record. At your finger tips, you’ll have a complete client work history, for every member of staff, whenever you need it.

Coming Up in Part 3

The conclusion to our series on the AWR: keeping track of offered benefits. As an agency, you need to keep a record of the benefits your workers qualify for. Find out how our system handles this and how it can save your agency time and money.

Contact Us Today

Are you a recruitment agency bound by the AWR? Contact us on 0800 081 1688 today to discuss how our system can benefit your business and streamline your admin.

In Part 2: Management Software for Agency Workers Regulations: Alerting Your Clients, we discussed how you not only need to record when a worker qualifies for the AWR, but also how you must alert your clients when they do. It’s an important step that our Omiga system makes easy, ensuring your agency adheres strictly to the AWR.

In the final part of our series on the Agency Worker’s Regulations, we will discuss the last part that agencies are responsible for: recording the benefits that your worker will become eligible for.

Recording client benefits for your workers

The AWR stipulates that it is the responsibility of the agency to know which benefits that their worker will qualify for. The agency therefore needs to contact the client and request this information to keep on record. This is a big undertaking, so you need a system that handles this effectively.

Traditionally, this would be handled by sending out paper forms for your clients to complete. This is a long, slow and arduous process that is managed far more efficiently with Omiga.

Using Omiga, you can send out a simple email with a link to your form for your clients to complete online. This will allow you to contact as many clients as you want at any one time and encourage them to complete this form quickly online – ensuring you get your form completed quicker whilst making it easier for clients.

Easily manage your benefits tracking

By recording your client benefits online using Omiga, you will also see a number of other benefits, including:

• Able to send requests to any number of clients at any time


• Schedule annual notifications to your clients to check and update if required


• Track which clients have completed the form and chase up those who haven’t


• Full access to the form at any time


• E-signed to confirm that submitted details are correct and accurate

Your system simply must record this in an effective and efficient manner. This is a time intensive process and by using the Omiga system you can reap the rewards of improved efficiency.

Easily manage your AWR obligations

This series of posts has demonstrated how we’ve updated our Omiga system to fully comply with the Agency Workers Regulations. We’ve worked closely with our biggest agency clients to ensure that our system meets all the requirements and exceeds in delivering usability and efficiency.

If you’re an agency looking to easily manage your AWR obligations, contact us today. The close relationship we have formed by continuously working and updating Omiga puts us ahead of other developers and gives us a unique understanding of your requirements.

For more information, please see our Staffing Recruitment Software or AWR Legislation Software pages.

It will be a joyous event for sure and one not to miss. This counts double for the boat tour operators on the river, as they are likely to be very busy and have a great weekend of business!

Thames river boat tour operators are likely to hugely benefit from people desperate to snatch tickets. Many different companies will be supplying boats for the day with tickets ready to be sold to the public. This presents a truly unique, once in a lifetime opportunity for Thames river boat tour companies that should not be missed.

So, how can River Tour Companies take advantage of this opportunity?

Tour operators should be thinking now about how they can take advantage of this amazing event. In fact, many probably already have and in some cases are fully booked. But, if you haven’t done anything yet, then why not consider some of the below:

1. Give away tickets to generate interest.
Getting on one of the boats on the river will be of interest to thousands. With only limited tickets available, this could present opportunities to broaden and widen your brand. For example, you could run a competition to give away a set of tickets by requesting Facebook Like’s or Email signups.

This would be an effective way of building an audience that you can later market to using either of the above methods. If you’re more social inclined, then you could run this competition across all your profiles and accounts to significantly expand your fan base. With good updates thereafter, this would become a valuable asset.

2. Heavily promote the Jubilee on their site to target related keywords.
As we draw closer to the date of the pageant, it’s likely there will be a growth in keywords like:

• Jubilee Pageant Tickets
• Thames Jubilee Tickets
• Thames Jubilee Cruises
• Queen Jubilee 2012 Pageant

As these terms becoming increasingly popular, it will be worth targeting these on your website in order to draw search traffic. This is especially important if you still have tickets to sell. So right now, you should be planning on how you can effectively target these keywords and then captivate the visitors who land on your site.

3. Update their site to give the best user experience and increase conversion.
Once you’ve attracted the visitor to the site from either of the above methods, it then becomes a matter of conversion. Usually, if you can deliver a good user experience and answer their questions, you’ll stand a good chance of converting them.

This is why we would suggest implementing an online ticket booking system that can show availability, prices and cruise options all online in real time. This will allow your visitors to quickly and easily select their tickets and book all in one place without having to leave their desk.

How Spiderscope can help

These are just a fraction of the possibilities available to River Tour companies for this momentous event. If you feel that you can do more to take advantage of this unique opportunity, then please don’t hesitate to contact us. We have website optimisation, social media plans and online ticket booking systems that can work with the above ideas to deliver results to you.

What were they looking for?

Our client was looking for a CRM system that:

• Managed their customers in a flexible manner


• Managed prospects and partners


• Provided suitable staff tools to ensure follow ups and tasks are kept


• Included a scheduling and alerting system


• Provided bespoke features for the service they offered (event management)

While our existing CRM system could provide many of these features; further modifications were needed to match their requirements exactly. This is one of the advantages to our system – it’s flexible and extendable enough to fit a wide range of business needs and requirements.

Flexible and Efficient CRM Software

Many of the existing features in our CRM system already matched our clients’ requirements. For example:

1. Customers and prospects management
Our system allows you to quickly view customers and prospects, their details, main contacts, notes and who’s managing them all in one place. This includes tracking them through your sales funnel.

2. Automatic alert system
Automatic alerts are dispatched on a daily basis (configurable) to ensure your staff knows which customers need attention. This means that you’ll never again forget to chase any hot leads or prospects.

3. User scheduling
Manage your sales team and their priorities to maximise performance. At a glance you can see who’s working on what and their schedules.

Bespoke CRM Software

Despite our CRM software handling some of the requirements, we still had to expand to cater for specifics needs. This mainly focused around the service they offered, which was event management.

These needed to be managed much like customers. So for example, some requirements were:

• Assign event managers
  A separate area was also created here to list key personnel, like speakers and presenters if required.


• Manage supporting documents (PDF files, etc)
  For management of supporting documents like brochures, marketing materials, directions, etc. Everything is stored in one central location per event.


• Budget management
  Accurately keep track of event costs to and record where budgets are being attributed to.


• Note keeping
  Record all vital information pertaining to one event in one location. This provides a central place for people to keep up to date with the specifics.

The modular design of our CRM software allows for us to easily apply these customisations to deliver a truly bespoke offering to our client.

Furthermore, the client also needed the ability to quote and invoice events directly through the CRM software. This ensures that everything is managed in one central location, from initial contact, to quoting, to sale and to payment.

The new system matches the client’s needs exactly; providing all the advantages of CRM software tailored to their business needs at a reasonable price.

Get Your Bespoke CRM Software

Are you looking to efficiently manage your sales and operations in union? As demonstrated above, our CRM software is perfect for meeting this goal. Contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss your requirements in detail.

If you don’t handle the transfer of your website properly; you will lose all the hard work you’ve put into achieving your rankings.

Not only will you lose your search rankings, but your emails and domain names will go down too. It’s important that you address this issue prominently in a thoroughly well thought out manner.

The closing of Office Live puts small businesses in an awkward position. Do you try and transfer your site over to the new Microsoft service and risk losing your search positions? Or, is it better to take control of your website with a full hosting set up?

Full hosting offers complete control

For most businesses, the second option is the most flexible and infinitely more suitable long term. However, handling the transition is complicated and must be done carefully if you want to retain your current search engine rankings.

Not paying care or attention at this crucial step will result in lost rankings, lost traffic and lost sales.

Therefore, it’s critical that you discuss a migration strategy with an expert. They will be able to pinpoint any and all potential issues and ensure that any transfer takes everything into consideration. This will result in a transfer that is far less disruptive to your search rankings and in many cases; you won’t notice a difference at all.

A more traditional hosting set up will have more benefits too, which include:

• Fewer restrictions with what you can do with your site
• More flexibility with email accounts & domain names
• Easier and advanced SEO tactics become available
• In a far better position for expected traffic growth

Migrating away from this service to a traditional hosting set up will also give your site greater protection from events like this in the future. This type of hosting is easier to transfer between suppliers; giving you an added layer of security.

Save your rankings and hard work today

We are optimisation experts and understand how the internet works. From design & development to SEO; we understand how websites work. If you have any questions about migrating your Microsoft Office Live website to a new provider in a way that won’t negatively impact your business – contact us today on 0800 081 1688.

Our analysis suggested that there would also be a good rise in mobile traffic in January; just after everyone got their new shiny devices for Christmas. Would it be the same for 2012? Let’s find out.

Mobile Traffic Increases in January

Every site that we sampled saw an increase in traffic in January 2012 compared to Jan 2011. The single biggest increase was a massive 624%; this was for a strongly Adwords driven site – which saw amazing organic growth throughout 2011 too.

Other good increases were seen from eCommerce sites, with these averaging at 302% increase in mobile traffic year on year. That’s huge! When you also consider that UK mobile shopping is predicted to top £4.5bn, can you really afford to not be in the mobile space?

In fact, mobile commerce is expected to account for 8% of all online orders in the UK in 2012.

The average mobile growth for all the customers we sampled was 333%. In Jan 2011, the sites we sampled saw exactly 5000 mobile visits. In 2012, this has risen to 15,631. Clearly, mobile traffic is growing rapidly and it’s becoming more and more important to ensure your site is optimised for this new audience.

Mobile Optimised Websites

It’s important that your site is now optimised for mobile devices. Even though today’s smart phones are more sophisticated than ever, they can still have problems rendering full sized websites.

It’s important that your website delivers an optimum mobile experience. Setting up your website to automatically detect mobile traffic and adjust accordingly is easy to do and will help your visitors. From the customers we sampled above, the lowest increase in site activity between sites which had a mobile optimised version and those without was 23%.

Mobile Commerce

As pointed out above, mobile commerce is expected to account for 8% of all online orders in the UK in 2012. Also consider that many people now check prices online for items they are viewing in store; me included!

What if it was your website they landed on, but your check out was too complicated to complete on a phone? That sale could be lost.

Mobile commerce is set to explode and you don’t want to miss out. Ensuring your eCommerce site is mobile optimised, including the checkout, is extremely important going into 2012.

Optimise Your Site for Mobile Today

Contact us today to review your mobile optimisation. We can thoroughly analyse your mobile traffic and gauge how effective your site is for these visitors. We can optimise your site to display correctly on mobile devices and optimise your checkout process to deliver an optimum and consistent user experience throughout.

Our Web Design Pitch

Our pitch was to focus on how our in house developed systems would work alongside a new site design and offer great integration with expert SEO features. One of the major benefits of our systems is that they’re all built in house with our specialist SEO knowledge, which results in total control over to create a very highly optimised site.

This flexibility would allow our potential customer to manage their site effectively with SEO in mind at all times. On page SEO is a matter of following the details and our system is perfect for this, leaving customers to focus on more off site SEO.

This was our main benefit. Our systems can be catered and tweaked to suit; meaning that updates are easily applied to match specific business needs. Things like eCommerce, Mobile Optimised Websites, a Email Marketing System and Customer Feedback Systems are all easily tweaked and integrated into our system.

We even have a great range of social components like the blog with Facebook and Twitter integration. This would have given them a solid platform for managing their social campaigns, which is designed to supplement manual management.

Pitch Design Samples

Alongside our systems, we pitched two design concepts which are below. These represented two different approaches which could be modified to match what the client considered important. Website search and language selection was required, so both designs sport these features.

Our concepts were strong and represented a good online strategy moving forward. When combined with our backend systems, this would have led to an online presence that is easily manageable and meets all SEO requirements as well as delivering a great user experience.

They were looking for a new design that reflected modern web trends, showcased their products and provided ease of use for their visitors. Behind this, they also needed a powerful content management system to manage their site independently and update pages, products and images whenever they liked.

We were able to provide all of these things and the end result speaks for itself. See below or visit the sit eyourself at www.comp.co.uk.

A New Website Design

Here, we can compare the old design to the new to instantly see how we’ve completely refreshed their online image:

The new design features:

• Attention grabbing banner image that uses fantastic images to draw visitor attention and entice visitors into wanting wheels.


• News ticker to keep up to date with the latest news and promotions no matter where you are on the site.


• Refined drop down menu that allows quick and easy access to the main pages of the site. Certain parts of this are manageable through the CMS.


• Powerful call to action with a contact form displayed on every page.


• Gallery of images which is managed through the CMS to display products in an attractive manner. One of the great advantages working with this site is the amount of great images available.


• Fully optimised design built to SEO standards, meaning the site will have no technical issues when trying to rank for keywords.

These are just some of the improvements we’ve made in the new design. The site is modern, fresh and a pleasure to browse and really does show off Compomotive’s product range for the visitor.

Website Management with our Content Management System

The new website sports an up to date, SEO friendly Content Management System. This is our custom developed system that offers total control over all aspects of the site. Its modular nature allows for us to build in only the features that Compomotive will need to manage the site.

For example, there are different features for adding content pages, product pages and gallery images. All easily managed through the CMS, this allows Compomotive to update the site whenever they wish.

Combined with a powerful SEO toolset for complete customisability of all things like Titles, Headings, Meta tags, and URLs; this means that the site is ready for all technical, on page SEO.

What do Compomotive Think of their New Website Design?

"The new site looks great and I cannot wait to see it up an running!"
Barry Dixon, Components Auto

Get a New Website Design Today

Are you looking to improve your website’s look and feel? We have expert web designers that will deliver a bespoke design just for you. We don’t use templates and all designs are manually crafted by our expert designers.

Contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss your requirements, or see our page on web design.

eBay shops are your store front on eBay. Buying on eBay can be impersonal at times and bland, which can make it difficult for your brand or products to stick out. eBay shops are an effective way of distinguishing yourself from the competition and bringing your brand to eBay.

Branded eBay Shops

Your store front on eBay can be personalised, branded and made unique when you join the shop programme. It’s easy to then apply this branding throughout to your product listings and then deliver a completely unique shopping experience through eBay. Visitors will instantly be able to recognise your products simply by seeing your brand above the normal eBay templates.

This gives sellers using shops a unique advantage over their competition. In addition, eBay shops will also include a wide range of benefits to help you sell:

• Automate repetitive tasks with bulk editing


• Get special access to marketing features, such as Cross-Promotions on Item pages


• Trigger repeat buying with Shops Promotional Flyers and Email Marketing


• Customise Up To 300 Categories


• Economically list for longer durations

Why open an eBay shop?

Opening an eBay shop will take your sales to the next level. 75% of sellers have said that opening a shop improved their sales. It’s simple. A shop gives you a more professional image, enhances your brand and makes your products stick out – all of which will encourage and build trust in the buyer; resulting in more sales.

eBay Shop Design

One of the most unique elements of opening an eBay shop is the ability to create and use your own design on pages and listings. Don’t waste this! This is your chance to stick out from the competition and professionalise your products.

Recently, we have worked hard to design new shop layouts for our customers. The design on the right is a recent build for The Stopwatch Shop.

We have been designing and building eBay shops for a wide range of customers. Our expertise in this area has led to the transformation of many eBay sellers; turning them into truly professional shops.

Likewise, we have opened new sales channels for established eCommerce sites by bringing their brand to eBay. With our easy integration tools, it’s simple to start professionally selling on eBay and double your sales.

Should you open an eBay shop?

The simple answer is yes. If you’re serious about selling on eBay, opening a shop is the way to go and will expand your sales. You can deliver a more professional, branded experience that will really improve your sales.

Contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss your requirements and see how we can help you.

We do not and have never built links in this manner, which is why we were extremely surprised to see that one of our clients was served with an unnatural links notice from Google. Immediately, panic occurred as this can be extremely serious for a business that relies on traffic from Google – we had to fix this, and fast!

Identifying Unnatural Links

Immediately, we checked to see what kind of links we had been building for our client. It turned out, that with this particular client, a link campaign hadn’t started yet. In fact, we were still optimising and working developing the site, which meant that these links must already have been established.

At this point, we decided to run the site through some link analysis tools, including SEO Spyglass, Majestic and Open Site Explorer. All three turned up a slightly different set of results, which was also different to the links reported in Webmaster Tools.

We started by looking through our link analysis tools and seeing what kind of back links were reported. We didn’t notice anything strange. All the links seemed to be from fairly legitimate sites and directories which are typical of a small business site’s link profile.

So, where were the unnatural links coming from?

It was at this point we decided to cross check our link tools with the links that Webmaster Tools reported. On comparison, the two lists looked very, very different. It turns out that Webmaster Tools was reporting on lots of links that were missed by our other analysis.

Could it be that Google had identified – and placed value on – a wider range of links? Well, no. After checking the domains thoroughly we found no trace of links to our client’s site. So, why was Google reporting these as linking to our client’s site?

It’s almost guaranteed that at some point these sites did link to our client – most likely built from their previous SEO company. It’s our suspicion that this was a link strategy used by them and when our client changed SEO providers, the links were removed.

Were these unnatural links?

On the surface, these additional links from Webmaster Tools didn’t look too suspicious. They were from a wide range of different domains that covered different subjects. However, some digging around on these sites revealed that:

• They were all blogs
• They were all updated fairly regularly
• Every post contained keyword targeted links to other sites
• No comments or evidence of user participation
• Content looked auto generated or cheaply produced

A picture was starting to form. However, we still weren’t 100% sure that these sites were the cause; although they definitely weren’t valuable sites so are not helping.

We did some additional checks:

1. Checked the owners of the domains. They were all owned by the same company, which just so happened to provide SEO services.


2. All these sites were not indexed in Google. No history or evidence of these sites could be found in Google, suggesting a total purge of each of these domains.

It was clear now that these are the infringing sites. It would be fairly trivial for Google to identify that these sites are similar in nature and that the outbound links are purely for SEO purposes. They then removed all these sites from their index, eliminating any link value and then probably sent all out bound linked sites unnatural link notices.

What’s the next step?

There was still the problem of our client’s site being identified for unnatural links. We checked all the domains and pages that we identified above, but not a single one was linking to our site at this point. Somehow, Google either thinks these sites are still linking to us, or (more likely) the client site has been targeted because at some point these bad sites did.

This was last week and we have still not seen any penalty for our site in the SERPs. On the contrary, our organic traffic has only continued to increase:

So where do we go from here? We’ve decided to wait it out, rather than apply for a reconsolidation request. Our strategy will be to build some good, beneficial links into the site and wait and see what happens.

We confident that Google won’t penalise the site and that eventually these links will be removed from Webmaster Tools and replaced by the more stable, better quality links we’re building now.

Our tips for indentifying unnatural links:

1. Build up a profile of your back links from multiple tools to get a good idea of what’s going on. Using multiple tools will give you more data none of these have a complete grasp of your entire back link profile.


2. Compare this with what Webmaster Tools counts for your links. While they won’t give you all the links, you can start looking through each list to identify discrepancies. Looking for sites that only appear on one list is a good start.


3. Look for common themes between sites and see if you can spot patterns. This is how we identified the blog networks above.


4. Once you have a list of suspect sites; check their domains on Who.Is, check whether or not they’re indexed and see what sort of patterns you find.

This will vary for every site. If you know you’ve been building links in this manner, then the above won’t apply – you just need to get rid of the bad links and get some good ones! Otherwise, if you’re like us and there is no obvious bad links, this is a good method to begin with and worked for us.

Spiderscope Optimisation

If you’ve been served with a notice of unnatural links, then contact us today on 0800 081 1688. We can you identify which links are causing problems and help get your site back on track.

What is the EU Cookie Law?

The EU Cookie Law primarily about getting consent from visitors to your site for placing cookie’s onto their computer. Cookies are small files that websites will use to store information about their users. Their use ranges far and wide; however, you will typically find that many login or shopping cart systems will have features that depend on cookies.

Cookies can also be used for other purposes, which can include tracking users. A typical application of this might to be monitor what pages a user visits so you can serve targeted adverts unique to that particular user, based on their history.

Many users will be unaware that cookies are responsible for this – and this is what the law is for; to inform and more specifically, gain consent from the user to set cookies on their computer.

Who is the law aimed at?

The law is aimed at anybody who owns or operates a website. If you’re running a website within the EU; then regardless of whether or not is personal or business related, the law applies to you.

Whether or not your website uses cookies will depend on the features of your site. It’s possible that your site doesn’t set any cookies at all, in which case you need to do very little for this law. However, if your site does set a lot of cookies, then you need to do something and fast.

Does my website set cookies?

You need to find out if your website sets cookies. In most cases, it’s very likely that your website sets at least a few. Therefore, you need to find out what cookies are being set and what they’re responsible for.

There are plenty of cookie detection tools out there which you can use. A quick browse around your site with these tools will give you a list of every cookie that is set. These lists are often complicated though, and if you’re not a web developer it can be a nightmare trying to figure out exactly what each one does.

Types of Cookies

There are many different types of cookies that are responsible for a wide range of uses. But what type of cookies do you need consent from your visitors to set?

• Cookies that affect the fundamental functionality of a website do not require consent.
  For example, this could include the cookies set throughout the checkout process of your eCommerce this. In this scenario, you do not need to ask for consent to set these cookies.


• Cookies not critical to site functionality will require consent.
  This would include, for example, a cookie which is set once a user logs in so that next time they access the site they don’t need to enter their username and password. This is a common feature, but one where you would require consent as it is not critical.

As you can see, not only do you need identify which cookies are being used by your site; but also exactly what they’re used for.

What types of cookies are exempted?

We’ve mentioned that cookies which affect fundamental functionality of the site are exempted from needing consent. But, what is really considered fundamental functionality?

Unfortunately, the law as it stands is full of grey areas on this particular issue. When the law was first announced, it was speculated that cookies set by tracking programs (for example, Google Analytics) would require consent as technically, these aren’t critical to a site’s operation.

However, the Government Digital Service takes the view that these cookies are in fact essential to a website’s operation and are therefore exempt. If we’re following their example (which no doubt, many sites will do) then we don’t need to get consent for cookies set by your analytics software.

Keeping updated

As you can imagine, there will be a lots of areas where someone can justify all types of cookies as being critical. It will likely be some time before we have the full picture of the type of cookies which are exempt and those that are not.

It will be important to review your cookie use and compliance with the law on a regular basis to determine if your site is still adhering to the law.

Will this affect how my site is used by visitors?

Website owners are rightly worried that forcing users to consent to cookies as soon as they enter their site will affect conversion rates, sales and usage. This is close to the reality of this law and therefore it will be a big issue for sites that set and use lots of cookies; how do you get consent without diminishing the user experience?

No body knows the answer to this yet. Understandably, many sites do not want to start putting roadblocks up unnecessarily and once again we’re back to a ‘wait and see’ approach that many businesses are taking.

One example that is live now though is the BT site. Clicking the cookie settings link at the bottom right opens a panel for you to choose your level of consent. This is suitable for a company like BT, but is not for a small business site.

What do I need to do now?

The first thing you need to do is to determine what cookies are being set by your website. From this list, you’ll then need to find out which cookies are essential and which are not.

For many small businesses with typical websites (including small eCommerce sites) you won’t be setting a lot of cookies outside of the checkout, your analytics and possibly login pages.

Therefore, for these site owners we would recommend creating a full privacy policy and cookie policy that is accessible on the site which describes in detail your use of cookies.

As you’d expect, there will be a lot of businesses that are playing a ‘wait and see’ approach with this law. But, ensuring these two pages are in place won’t cost much and will go a long way towards compliance for smaller businesses.

Get your site audited today

If you would like an expert opinion on the cookies being set by your site, please contact us on 0800 081 1688. We can provide you with a full list of cookies and their use, so you can determine the best course of action for your site.

The new site targeted one brand of products specifically and aimed to be an expert in these. This immediately gave the site a core set of terms to focus all our efforts on, which helped as the site had no links or traffic because it was so new.

So our very first job was to get the site ranking for brand related keywords that we knew were popular.

Optimisation drives increased organic traffic

Whilst the site was well built on a platform that didn’t harm any SEO efforts; there were a number of improvements we needed to make to the structure to ensure pages were properly keyword targeted. As with many eCommerce sites, it’s the detail that matters for driving organic traffic, so we had to thoroughly analyse and update key parts of the site.

The majority of our starting work focused on this, moving from area to area on the site and getting everything optimised properly. With a good set of pages that were keyword targeted, it wasn’t long before we had a sniff of success with some pages almost immediately ranking well for brand terms.

Then disaster struck!

Changing domain names doesn’t always mean bad news

The original domain name contained the name of the brand too; and unfortunately, they asked us to stop using this. In some instances, this could spell disaster and be a major problem. However, we were quickly able to pivot onto a new domain with some optimised redirects that ensured our hard work up to this point wouldn’t be in vain.

With a new, long term domain name established, we just had to wait for the new pages to be fully indexed and we can continue. At this point, we introduced a properly optimised Google Product Feed.

We take care in optimising Google Product Feeds and know that there are a couple of areas which if you get right, you can see some good results very quickly. It also helps that our client had some very competitive prices, which made their products extremely attractive to the end users, further encouraging Google to rank these well.

Internal linking still important for driving organic results

The next step in our optimisation strategy was to look at the internal linking structure and ensure this was as optimised as possible. It’s easy to overlook internal linking, but we find that this is very important for eCommerce sites and getting this right will often have a big positive effect to your organic results.

A sound plan was deployed here that resulted in the site having a complete internal linking overhaul. The effects of this weren’t immediate though, because Google took a little time to re-crawl and index all the pages.

Off site SEO to boost organic traffic growth

At this point, the site was looking well optimised for the brand terms we wanted to target, so we turned our attention to off site efforts. While social media is important for any online marketing, we decided to begin focusing on traditional off site methods before any social campaigns were to start.

This naturally started with some link building with focused on two main areas: top level directory links and guest blogging with good content. For the first, we didn’t spam request our site to be placed into every directory known to man, but instead just focused on valuable directories that benefit UK sites, including local and national levels.

The guest blogging focused on providing good content to relevant blogs. This worked well as it not only improved linking, but also the traffic generated was good for the site.

What effect on organic traffic growth did this have?

This body of work was undertaken over the last 7 months. Organic search traffic in October compared to April saw a 264% increase. This was only from search engines and doesn’t factor in the additional traffic from referrals, which also saw a big increase too.

The site now ranks very well for brand related terms and traffic continues to grow. The current plan is to continue expanding traffic by slowly encroaching on more general, industry related keywords to further promote the site. All signs look good!

We can drive an increase in your organic traffic too

Are you looking to increase the amount of organic traffic to your site? We can help. Contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss with our experts on how we can improve the success of your site and drive an increase in organic traffic.

Many of our customers rightly assume that the way to increase sales is to increase the amount of traffic a site receives. Of course this is a valid method to achieving more sales; however, often times you can see quicker sales increases by looking closer to home.

Obviously, there is a lot to ensuring your site is performing optimally for sales, spanning a wide range of areas that are too much to cover in any single blog post. But the one thing every eCommerce site has in common that affects sales is the major barrier to entry: the shopping cart.

Common shopping cart issues that prevent sales

There are many different shopping cart implementations and software around. Many of the customers that we help day in day out, use custom designed shopping carts. There’s nothing wrong with a custom designed shopping cart, but we often find these aren’t optimised to provide an optimal customer experience.

In the past we have helped our customers increase sales simply by making small adjustments to their shopping carts to enhance the user experience. For example, we have come across shopping carts that:

• Alert users with scary (system error lookalike) pop ups when performing actions such as adding an item to the basket or checking out.


• Switch between designs, layouts or templates on each step of the checkout process.


• Provide extremely unhelpful validation messages when user input is wrong.


• Require full user registration before placing an order. Handled correctly, this is fine. But it’s not when you require a full range of unrelated details and then require users to click links in emails and log in manually before an order can be placed.

These are just some common issues that we have come across when optimising shopping carts. But sometimes, a shopping cart is so bad that it is just better to start from scratch.

This is why we have spent time developing our improved shopping cart system that places emphasis on user experience in a way that enhances and increases the chances of making a sale.

Increasing sales with an optimised shopping cart

Our shopping cart uses a modular design which ensures that it can fit and work with a wide range of eCommerce websites. While it would be best to have a full system that manages your products and site, this isn’t needed for our shopping cart and one of the core features is that it can stand alone.

We’ve used our experience to create a checkout that delivers a fantastic user experience, meaning that you’ll no longer lose sales because of a long or complicated checkout procedure.

Features of an optimised shopping cart

• An up to date, professional cart design that establishes trust and impresses your customers. Ensuring your cart looks professional goes a long way to improving sales. If your cart looks like it was designed in 1995, then it will cause your potential customers to start asking questions.


• Step by step navigation to guide the user through the checkout. This gives the user a clear indication of what step they’re on and how long the process will be. Customers can easily navigate back and forward to amend or update their orders.


• Optimised data requirements. Our checkout can be configured to ask for only the required details to complete an order. These days customers don’t want to fill out huge forms, so making sure the data you’re collecting is streamlined will go along way.


• By default, our cart is configured to only ask for a billing address with an extra checkbox to add a different delivery address. This means there are less forms on the page, which gives the impression of a quicker checkout.

Can I really increase sales with an optimised shopping cart?

Yes. Of course the shopping cart is only a single part of increasing online sales; however, we have found time and again that ensuring your cart is optimised and user friendly can have a dramatic effect on increasing your sales.

If you’re an eCommerce site owner and think that your checkout could be optimised, then please contact us. Even if your site has an already existing shopping cart, we’re sure that we can help generate more sales from your existing traffic. Contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss how we can deliver more sales for you.

The Launch of a new website for Thames based Leisure firm London Rib Tours sees the release of an updated and enhanced version of our online Ticket booking and Table Reservations system

Just had a look at the new web site, it looks great! you and your team have designed yet another fantastic web site, thank you....

Please send my thanks to everyone who helped with the site....

First introduced three years ago on LondonPartyBoats.com the system has been significantly upgraded to accommodate a variety of demanding new requirements for the London Rib Tours website.

Using experience gained refining the original version this new Booking System has been completely re-written by the development team, it's cost effective, easy to use and easy to manage.

The booking system is very flexible and can be put to use in a variety ways to provide online ticketing, online bookings and online reservations.

If your website does not support applications of this type, or you have restricted access you’ll find it’s very easy to link into the Ticket booking system for off site use. On the other hand if you require something a bit more bespoke it’s easily integrated by our developers.

Online Ticketing System, features and benefits

• Easy to use, password protected online administration
• Separate management control for events and tickets
• Real Time ticket allocation control
• Multiple Price Points for Adult or Child tickets
• Calendar based web booking tool showing real time availability
• Tickets multiple Time slots on any given Day with availability easily set to user defined pattern, with or without exceptions.
• Integrates with Shopping Cart system to enable tickets to be purchased for multiple events simultaneously
• Full Integration to payment system of your choice
• E-Ticket delivered online for print out by customer, as well as via email
• Email confirmation of order sent to website administrator with full details available within secure online administration area.

If you’re interested in a ticketing system for your online business we’d be delighted to hear from you.

Spiderscope have helped hundreds of businesses to improve their online performance by providing sensibly priced solutions that are reliable and easy to use, products that deliver what’s expected of them.

"We're on the case, you'll just have to make sure you let us know if you're inundated with calls".

Rob, relieved and satisfied countered

"(laughing!) Thanks Tracey, if I'm inundated with calls I'll buy you a case of Champagne".

Nick (SEO Consultant / Ad Campaign Management) got straight to work preparing a revised mutli-point strategy for the Campaign and carrying out agreed amendments, shortly thereafter the Ads were back on top, performing better than ever. At the same time we made some revisions to improve organic results for Dangerous Driving Offences and this is now achieving a Page 1 listing on Google.

Did it work? you bet!, here's a clearly delighted Tracey with the promised case of Champers, which arrived early on Saturday morning.

I'm sure she's going to share (some of) it with Nick, who'll no doubt be putting in even more effort than usual having received this sparkling gift.

Finally of course it's Cheers to Rob Bimpson and trafficLawyer4u.com.

Thankyou.

They say that all dark clouds have a silver lining so, with this in mind, we're going to use this as an opportunity to expand our development team. In addition to a replacement for RG we're going to be taking on two more Web Developers and a dedicated (Internet) Marketing Consultant