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Back in February we wrote about the Kent Classic Rallies web site which we developed for free to help launch the event.

We were really pleased to hear from Graham, the event organiser, last week who said that it was a huge success and they are hoping to run the event again next year.

Graham was kind enough to mention us in the article in the local paper as well, which you can see below.

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sme business growth

Russell runs SME Business Growth. Russell works with other businesses to help them grow by identifying gaps in the market, reducing costs and improving their marketing.

Russell asked us to take a look at his old web site, to see whether we could give it a boost in the search engine rankings. Unfortunately it was running an old version of WordPress so we suggested that an upgrade would be a better way investment, making his web site mobile friendly and it would allow Russell to work on the search engine optimisation of the site later on, if he wanted to.

Over the years, Russell had built up a large web site, consisting of hundreds of blog posts. These would provide a great source of content for Google to index and boost his site in the rankings however, moving them over from his old site to his new one looked like a difficult process.

We worked out a way to transfer all of his posts from his old WordPress site, over to his new Joomla-based site, quickly and easily. It was then simply a case of moving the rest of his content across.

After showing Russell the newly created site on our test server, we asked him to ensure everything was looking and working how he expected it to. We then made the new site live by moving it over to the live server for everyone to see.

If you are interested in what Russell might be able to do for your business or you'd just like to see his new site, please take a look here: www.smebusinessgrowth.co.uk

 


We genuinely love our jobs. I know that's unusual as most people love to have a good ol' moan about work some times. It's one of those things that, almost without exception, you can relate to when you meet someone knew - everyone likes to moan about the 9-to-5 grind.

However, we do genuinely love our jobs. And not because we're swimming in money - just check our prices and you'll see that that is not the case(!) - but because we get to help people.

This week highlighted an all too common issue with people working in search engine optimisation and it gave us a chance to help someone out.

We took on a customer recently who has been given some poor advice in the past. Their web site was doing poorly in the search engine rankings due to a combination of poor web site design / management and bad SEO advice.

This was compounded by their previous SEO company taking themselves on and their largest competitors - a clear conflict of interest.

One thing led to another and over the course of a few years, they bounced around and eventually ended up in a very poor situation where they are now spending £3,000 a month(!) on Google Adwords, just to generate enough sales to keep the business going.

Now, there are clearly a few problems here. Adwords works on a per click basis, meaning that if someone sees your advert and click on it, Google take a fee from you. Depending on your market sector this can range dramatically from 25p to £25. The thing is, although a useful tool in some circumstances, Google will take that payment from you regardless of whether the person makes a purchase from your site or not. Therefore if Google charge you £5 per click, you could easily spend a lot of money very quickly and not be making much money from it.

Back to our story... The company that we took on were spending £3,000 a month on Adwords and nothing on SEO. The key issue was how to reduce overall spending whilst maintaining and increasing sales levels.

We convinced the company to proceed with spending some of their marketing budget on SEO. Why? Because SEO will bring longer term and cheaper results than Adwords.

Once a site is at the top of the Google search results, it often stays there for some time. Obviously this depends on your market and what your competitors are doing but once a good ranking has been established, it takes some time for the site to disappear again. So even if you stopped spending money on SEO, your site would still be found by your customers for some time. Adwords however, the second you stop paying them, your customers cannot find you.

Gradually we are reducing the amount of money that our customer spends on Google Adwords as the SEO work that we're doing is taking hold. Eventually we will reduce their Adword spending to zero, and just have a low on-going SEO budget to maintain the site's rankings across their full range of keywords.

Now all of this may make it sound as if Adwords are not a useful tool. They are in certain circumstances but they should not be your primary source of generating customer leads. It's far too expensive and short-term for that.

 

Confused? Need help with your Adword spending or SEO, just get in touch.

 


passfaster 

Passfaster is Liverpool's largest driving school and has been running for over 15 years. It's a family business, run by Chris and they have over 20 instructors working across the city.

Chris contacted us a couple of years ago and asked us to build him a new web site with more features. He liked the old site design so he wanted the new site to replicate this as much as possible but crucial was that the new site would work well for SEO purposes.

The old site lacked some features, meaning that it was difficult to update but it was ranking well in the search engines. Part of the build process for the new site was to ensure that these rankings were not lost.

We started work building the new site and launched it back in 2014. Since then we have been steadily working on the SEO for the site for these search terms:

  • driving lessons Liverpool (ranked number one)
  • Liverpool driving school (ranked number one)
  • driving school Liverpool (ranked number one)


Although most of the hard work has been done, it is important to continually maintain a site's SEO work as other sites come along from time to time to try and knock our site off of the top spot.

You can take a look at the Passfaster site here, or try for yourself by entering one of the search terms above, into Google.

 


 

Well, January has been a bit of a blur. Not because it has gone quickly but more because we've been working really hard and here's why.

Around Christmas time a virus was released which was targeted at the content management system that we use for most of our web sites. Unfortunately this caused us, and everyone else around the world that uses Joomla, an awful lot of work.

The virus was very well written and managed to infect millions of sites around the world. Luckily for us, we caught it quickly and patched all of our customers' web sites which meant that only a couple were seriously infected. All of our sites were updated, cleaned and secured and our customers were not affected.

We've been monitoring all of our sites as normal and I'm pleased to say that we can now get back to our usual day-to-day jobs.

Over the next few weeks I'm aiming to update our blog with the latest sites that we've created and have gone live. In the pipe line we have an ecommerce web site for a gym equipment company, a tourism web site, a car sales company in Sittingbourne, a site for an award winning hair dresser, a mobile app development site and a gardener based in Ashford - we like it when's it's busy!

 


About Us

We're a small team who support hundreds of web sites, small and large, across the UK and beyond.

We love, web sites, SEO and helping your business grow.

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Contact Us

01795 385023

info@favershamdesigns.co.uk

Cyprus Road, Faversham, Kent
ME13 8HD, United Kingdom

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Short Testimonial

Jill, Church Oast Bed and Breakfast

They were able to reflect the ethos of my business, highlight the strengths and responded very quickly to any suggestions I made. I was very impressed with the service and thought it good value for money.