All Posts by Spiderscope on the Spiderscope Blog

  Vacancies: web developer jobs | SEO & Internet marketing jobs

Comments (0)

Bespoke Brochure Website Design for Parkside Tiles

Today, we’re pleased to showcase one of our newest sites. This is a bespoke brochure website that has been designed for Parkside Tiles. We built their old website back in 2007. The old site was still functional and looked good, but the internet doesn’t sit still and a refresh of your site’s design can go a long way to improving your visual impact.

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.

Old 2007 Design The old 2007 design that we did.

New 2013 Design A brand new 2013 website design.

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.

Old 2007 Products The old 2007 products display.

New 2013 Products The new 2013 products display.

 

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.

 

Comments (0)

Everything you need to know about Google Shopping!

As many of you reading this already know, Google Shopping is Google’s very own and very large comparison site where e-retailers promote and advertise their products and where consumers go to search and compare and eventually purchase products online.

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:

 

Comments (0)

Why is my organic traffic decreasing?

There have been a lot of changes throughout 2012 which has affected the reporting of organic traffic in Google Analytics (and other stats tracking software). It’s becoming easier and easier to look at organic traffic reports and see declines or slowed growth; especially over the last quarter of 2012.

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.

 

Comments (0)

Enhance Productivity with Paperless Online Business Applications

As pointed out by this BBC article, the NHS is on a mission to reduce waste caused by inefficient processes. This should be a goal that all businesses aim towards, but is often held back by a desire to keep comfortable and stick with the ‘status quo’. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right?

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.

 

Comments (0)

Achieving Top Rated Seller Status on eBay, Congratulations to AST

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.

 

 

© 2013 Spiderscope Ltd.
 |   |  Privacy Policy |  Legal |  Sitemap