"Yerp!"

Bing Vs Google

2010-01-07T14:13:00.010+01:00

At the risk of writing the gajillion-and-first post on "Bing Vs Google", I thought I'd nonetheless pen down my own impression of these two engines, just based on my own findings.

Without question the search results I get for some of my websites are very different between the two engines - to the favour of Bing, I have to say! However - and maybe tellingly - the results between Bing and say Yahoo, Altavista and Ask are not that far apart.

All the websites under my care are new startups. And whilst I am able to write and optimise the content of each of these sites whilst staying within the rules - i.e. not getting spammy - it seems to be "this" activity that gets my sites - e.g. infrared-heating-redwell.co.uk to page 1 line 1 of Bing, whilst leaving it nowhere to be seen on Google.

Also, all the sites under my care, as new startups, have very little web history behind them and we're only just beginning to break ground into link building estate, so our history with Google and consequently our reputational score, will be low.

As if to prove the point, one new client of mine is a well established, 'old' site which is very-well linked into for a number of historical reasons but poorly optimised, covering about 3 or 4 major and very diverse topics. However, look up any phrase for any of those topics and "blammo!" page 1 on Google and often-times nowhere to be seen on Bing.

The trouble is that this client's site, offering such diverse services and not very well optimised is confusing - if not offputting - to customers. So despite their good SERPS results on Google, quite often you'll be searching for one thing and land on a page about something else.

Can I presume therefore an over-preponderance of "age and in-links" to Google's ranking and maybe a bias the other way (towards highly optimised "niche" sites) on the other engines?

I don't have enough evidence to suggest that is "the definitive" answer and nor do I think it will be a long-term one. Clearly over time I believe a balance of the four forces (niche; content; history; inlinks) will be in everyones best interest to obtain great results. Perhaps at the moment the greatest value in Bing is to "nudge" the people like my new client into looking at their propositions and content and seeking to bring both up to date!

A triumph for web over real-world

2009-10-09T16:44:00.005+02:00

Here's a great example of the virtual world (the internet) beating present-day real-world "Europe" with all its structural rigidities, mis-allocation of goods and services (currencies, politics and psychologies etc etc) that still define this continent.

Have a look at Sterlingshopping.co.uk. Many will know how far the pound has slid against the Euro (it's less than parity at the moment). And groceries anyway in France are expensive. So for any Brits living in France and transferring pounds to euros - groceries are even more expensive.

Well, Sterling shopping allows you to buy online at Tescos, Asda, (you name it) in the UK and will then deliver to France for £15!!! They arrange a fixed number of drop-off locations and set times.

Needless to say they are inundated. You can more than redeem the price of the delivery off the same goods bought direct in France so long as you buy in bulk.

This is how things are going to be whilst real-world Europe still possesses such currency, psychological, cultural and structural rigidities. The virtual market is pulling the rug from under the real-world's feet!

Google analytics interface - fantastic

2009-08-04T17:15:00.010+02:00

OK, so your site is all designed and optimised. All that traffic is coming screaming to your (virtual) front door now. Well done!

Except, they stay for 10 seconds and leave the site.

But there's really no excuse not to use Google analytics, and they're absolutely free.

And I have to confess they've saved my bacon and that of my clients

You see: search optimisation is a relatively straightforward activity: follow certain rules, apply them to your site and you can expect traffic to come to your site. (OK, its a bit more involved and ongoing, but you can see huge results from relatively simple initial steps).

But you need traffic analytics to actually determine how people are interacting with your site. This is not SEO, but rather Internet Marketing, but it does improve your overall reputational score and therefore your rankings. Things that have really benefitted me hugely:

a) Merging or deleting files with low click-through. This improves your overall "time on site" statistics and page/search relevance. (I kid you not, I merged 9 files for a client which had about 6 clickthroughs a month each,into 3 files relevant to a specific subject, EACH of which obtained over 59 clicks in the remaining 2 weeks of the month.)

b) Tuning page contents and navigation. If your page is exhibiting high "bounce rate" and low "time on page", then you need to tune your contents and navigation. High bounce rate says people are leaving the site without doing anything else on site. "Time on page" is exactly what it suggests: the length of time people are staying on a particular page. Ideally you want a low bounce rate (<40% is good) and a representative time on page (I can't give you an ideal figure: but perhaps time yourself reading through your page contents and if people are generally exiting well before that, then your content is not appealing).

c) Determining where people are exiting your site. Google stats show you (% Exit) where people are leaving your site. Of course everybody leaves your site at some point. Ideally you want them to leave having taken an action - if you have any sort of action confirmation page (e.g. A thank-you message for contacting you), this is the best one to have the highest % exit from. Any pages prior to that are worse news, depending on your content and desired action.

I'll post a separate article on "how" to tune your content - things to look for.

How success kills companies

2009-05-25T15:32:00.005+02:00

I originally wrote the fuller article (see link) in 2001 for the Institute of Management Consultancy. Unfortunately due to a reorganisation at the time they did not publish and I did not follow-up. In retrospect I should have.

Expectations of business longevity should be set low. Of the 100 largest UK firms in 1917, only 28 still existed by 1987 and only 18 of those were still top 100. In 1935, an S&P top 500 firm had a life expectancy of 90 years. By 1975 this had dropped to 30 years and by 2001 was 15 years.

Survivors do not perform. The market index (Dow, FTSE etc) consistently leads survivor performance and is not defined by it. Survivors systematically underperform both the market as a whole as well as their industries within it by up to 300 points. Indeed, were one to base the S&P on long-lived companies, the index would have depreciated 20% year on year from 1962.

New companies outperform incumbents and decay over time, suggesting that effective market competition is based on innovation (product competitiveness), not efficient operations (price competitiveness).

Why is the above the case?
Most CEOs spend most of their time pursuing operational efficiency of their company (a management task) as opposed to new markets (a leadership task).

Consequently incumbents fail to change at the pace and scale of the market. They tend to innovate around a continuum of their core products. Higher market value accrues to companies that introduce brand-new products (i.e. disruptively innovate).

Consequently incumbent companies enter "cultural locking" of their market position and product into the corporate psyche and build. Disruptive innovation heralds dilution of present earnings, organisational disruption and cannibalisation of existing fixed capital.

What should companies do?
They should act more like the markets. Create, operate and then "trade-out" their business units.

Create at the pace of the markets and destroy at the pace of the markets.

Buy companies at the early end of the growth curve or on the periphery of the established market at the same pace of investment as the capital markets.

Seek the business units they should sell-off - that is, those at the top of the market - to use those dollars better for new businesses at the bottom of the market. This also allows them to discount the top-end performer to the buying company who can use the saved capital to rejuvenate and re-tool the "incumbent" unit.

White label sites: white lies?

2009-05-07T11:02:00.007+02:00

One of the more recent trends with successful, proven web technologies is to re-publish them to other would-be entrepreneurs as "White-label" sites that they can buy, brand (under their own label) and then run as a business themselves. Sounds great.

The trouble is - like the California Gold Rush - its not the diggers who make the money, it's the people who sell the spades. If you buy a whitelabel web engine (be it online dating, car hire price comparison, car insurance comparison, whatever) just think "how competitive is the market and how far down the food chain is my startup going to be?".

Seriously. These are highly successful products that have already dominated their market. The Pay-Per-Click advertising cost for the "obvious" phrases that sell is going to be high (however well you optimise). The conversion-rate of people clicking-to-buying from you is going to be low because there is a lot of choice in the market (and a lot of people with competing white-label products).

And remember, with a lot of these engines, you only earn a commission, by way of being an "introducer" to the engine. You don't earn the full value of what you sell.

So, say you earn $20 per successful sale at a conversion rate of 1 sale to 60 visits (yes, that bad and worse). This means your PPC ads are going to have to be $0.25 or less to have a chance of making you money (in this case you'll get $5 from a $20 commission).

What PPC ads for phrases that sell in a competitive market are going to be that cheap? For Car hire, these phrases cost $20 a click! You could have spent $1,200 on advertising to make $5!

You can go for "long tail" phrases (rarer: cheaper) but equally remember that you will get less click-through - Say 5 clicks a day - unless you open up the ads on the "Content Network".

You'll then get your click throughs, but they will be poor quality ones and your conversion rate will plummet (say 1 in 200).

I'm not saying "don't go fo it". I am saying "Do your maths before you part with your cash".

Do SEMs make better web designers?

2009-04-17T12:30:00.008+02:00

Here's a little word equation for you.

If a well marketed website requires great search engine optimisation (SEO) to be found, great Internet Marketing techniques and design to bring potential customers to take your required action (i.e. buy from you), and then great Web analytics to see what has occurred...

...then it is true that a website designer who is not qualified in SEM is about as useful as a chocolate fire-guard. Whereas a Search Engine Marketer (SEM) who is perhaps not a brilliant designer is OK (but improvement needed, obviously) and a good designer qualified in SEM is fantastic!

The point is, if your website is not searchable it lacks a huge part of its armoury (some of my client websites get 40-50% total traffic via search). If the website is then insufficiently "sticky" to attract visitors and get them to take action it lacks 99.5% of its entire business purpose; and if you have no idea what is working and what is not you can do nothing about it.

So I think the above equation balances.
Designer not qualified in SEM = Chocolate Fireguard.

I am finding a sea change going on in my business. Some of my work is ab-initio creation of a website. But a lot of my work is what I'd call "second-generation" site design - i.e. a rewrite of an existing design to get a business properly marketed on the web and "working" for the client. This pre-supposes the client has an existing website which, however pretty, is doing a whole lot of nothing for them at the moment.

Now Briquesetclics.fr provides Internet Marketing, SEO and Design for small European businesses in South-west France: that is: the Limousin, Aquitaine and Poitou-Charentes. Small businesses either write their sites themselves or go to small business website designers. All it presently takes to become a web designer presently is to say you are one. I believe the writing is on the wall. In the current climate, clients have to get their websites working for them. If their designer is not accredited in some for of internet marketing, they will soon be out of business.

When dinosaurs ruled the earth

2009-04-12T10:13:00.013+02:00

I had to put up this post, because what happened gave me a real giggle.

Part of an SEO's "off-site" Search Engine optimisation tasks is to submit a website to respectable directories to try to obtain links back your own site to try and gain referral to your site and therefore business (in the real world) and reputation (on Google).

Now, there are millions of directories out there and you can grow old and grey pursuing these links. Best to choose wisely. Don't linger on time-wasters: move on.

So naturally enough, I presumed a directory promoting IT professionals in the Limousin ("Pole excellence eDesign" - it sounds the business) to be a sensible choice (act local before going global, right?). So although I live just outside the border of the Limousin, I applied. (You know, turn right outside your drive you get to the Limousin, turn left, you stay in the Charente).

Ha! I received an email from the administrator telling me (sic) "You can't apply to this directory. You work in the Charente. Go away".

But I am an SEM expert and web designer. I work IN the Charente, but I work ON the web. I can work anywhere for anyone and the only border I have to respect is tax (and as far as I know, Charente and Limousin are both in France).

Well, I didn't reply to the lady: there are millions of directories and noone can stop me turning right out of my drive to get work (in the real world or virtual). But was this a directory promoting "competition in the Limousin"? In a time where Europe is trying desperately to promote cross-border trade (see http://ec.europa.eu/youreurope/business/index_en.htm) the parochial and protective behaviour displayed by Pole Excellence eDesign belongs to an age millennia past.

Author's footnote: Readers will be shocked and saddened to learn that "Pole Excellence eDesign" was recently taken over by "Elopsys" due to a lack of business. Even if you don't like this post, I thought you'd enjoy the pictures of endangered species.

Electonic Information - A blur of large numbers or the precision of just one?

2009-03-24T15:59:00.016+01:00

There are 63 billion web pages out there. SPAM filters are now so aggressive even bona-fide emails don't get through. The Blogosphere is creaking under the weight of measured observation and insight (ya!). There are hundreds of "mainstream" social networking tools - and on just one - LinkedIn - a consultant in London has now reported a network of 9,300 "friends". (Must make Sunday lunch interesting).

The stats are so overwhelming and just the array of choice is so big, the odds are seemingly stacked against the small guy's websites, emails, blogs to the point they may feel they are never going to make headway. Never going to get seen, read, acted-upon, whatever, unless they either find that needle in the haystack... or cheat.

First off, let's not deal with cheating. Cheating is about playing the numbers game and Google will sniff you out. Large numbers (Spam mails, spammed keywords in websites or blogs, spam search impressions generate a lot of noise. You'll be found and blacklisted. DON'T CHEAT!.

And you DON'T have to find a needle in a haystack, either.

Just go on the basis that the best social networking tool is still word of mouth and that an effective website and marketing can only enhance, not create, an effective business behind it. In this way you are forced to focus on the basics Google wants you to and you will be found amidst the numbers soup. i.e. HAVE SOMETHING DECENT TO SELL AND HAVE PEOPLE REFER YOU. T'was ever thus.

A word is worth a thousand pictures

2009-03-03T13:11:00.007+01:00

Long live the king! No, no, not a flesh and blood monarch, but the "King" of internet traffic: CONTENT. And not static, never-changing, content, but vibrant, intertesting, dynamic content that sends the Google spider-bots scurrying around websites like a re-make of "Arachnaphobia".

It is a mistake of most small business websites I see in the South West of France, around the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Dordogne, that they try to copy big company websites by using lots of flash graphics and being spartan with words. But big companies already (by definition) have brand presence and reputation and a customer base that guarantees them a certain amount of internet traffic. They can afford to be more flash.

And in similar vein, small companies then ape the big by using such generic industry phrases about their offering that those words really don't work for them at all (either for human visitors or the Google-bots, both of which sets of visitors leave the site no wiser than when they visited!).

Again, big companies and small companies necessarily must differ in their use of words on the web. Big companies typically target large customer bases with commodity-type products, requiring "one-size-fits-all" marketing words too (whose advertising they can also afford to pay for). Small companies really don't generally cater for a mass market with commodity products (and generally can't afford the $20 per click costs that go with them). Their language by definition should be far better targetted (and this always ends-up cheaper for advertising too).

On the internet, content is king. And if you really can't naturally work enough relevant text into your website pages - or it really does look end up looking like an old school text book - then this is what blogs and Article pages can help-out with. All these pages can be linked to your website to increase your verbal "real estate" on the web over time without cluttering up the visual presentation of your message.

For small businesses the mindset should not (a priori) be about pretty graphics (whether or not relevant to your content). Of course you need a good-looking website, but the prevailling mindset should be marketing first, and good looks and funky technology second. So few small business designers seem to understand this. A Word really is worth a thousand pictures.

Welcome to the era of "Nano careers"!

2009-02-13T12:19:00.027+01:00

Tough times call for a change of mindset and expose weakenesses in the old one. You get this "duh!" moment when you cotton on.

I think we all became used to the idea in business of "making it big" (granted we did at least accept the rarity - but it was still our goal). That is, of having these "Branson" episodes where an idea (whatever it is) suddenly seems to become big overnight and the Dragon's Den is on the end of the phone desperate to get you on board. ( Or was that just me dreaming...;-) )

I grant most of us probably thought that however unlikely we all were in our own business ventures of "making it big", this was still very much the target, and mindset, wasn't it? Of making it big ...or going back to the 9-5?

But in a credit-absent environment, where the likelihood of being funded enough to make anything 'big' is smaller than it ever was, and a 9-5 job is the new "Big" deal, let me introduce you to the "Nano Career", or the idea of "making it small". The point about the nano career is you just have to make lots of "very smalls!"

If you could create a business opportunity which would make you £100 over the course of a year, this would not be very interesting to a "making it big" mindset.

Supposing you could ensure that creating this opportunity cost you no more than £10 over the year, about an hour of your time and could pretty much be left to itself after that. This is then a "nano career"!

I have attached an example "Nano Career" into the header of this blog! (Click on the title.) It builds on the themes in my last two posts "Maintain deepen & niche" and "Is Pay Per Click a bottom-less pit?"

The nano career is obtained by having something to sell that people will want to buy, obviously - but by setting up the Pay-per-click advertising campaign to have such a rarefied set of search criteria that you spend no more than 10p on a click and cap the campaign costs at say £5 a month. What are the results?

On the one hand) You will likely get less than 100 clicks on this campaign during the year;

On the other) The people searching for those "rare" criteria have now driven right up to your front door and are therefore very likely 'buyers';

You ensure the sales commission for the product is sufficient to justify a single sale from just one of those 100 people (i.e. you will earn more than the £10 you spent).

Plus you can add your specific links into emails, blogs, etc etc etc to increase your chances of being clicked on.

Do this several times a day for every day of the rest of your career.

Welcome to the age of the "Nano" career.

Pay Per Click - needn't be a bottomless pit

2009-02-01T10:50:00.015+01:00

"Pay Per Click" is the form of internet advertising in which a company opts to pay for an advertisement, which is then presented via the Search Engine Search results or via peoples' own websites. If someone happens to 'click' on the advertisement, a charge is incurred by the advertiser and the 'clicker' is carried through to the website of the advertiser (hopefully to then purchase something).

Pay Per Click (or PPC) is therefore also known as sponsored search. i.e. it is a funded "push" by the advertiser to get noticed, as opposed to an organic (free) "pull" by the search engines to display company information in the search results. Google offers this service via "Adwords"; other service providers are Yahoo; Miva; 7 search; Epilot; Looksmart, MSN and others.

Advantages of PPC? Advantage 1. It can promote a website to public view far faster and much wider than reliance on 'organic' search engine optimisation. Equally, the effectiveness of the advertising campaign - unlike in the physical world - is traceable to the 'click' - so there is a whole load of information an advertiser can glean very very quickly about the effectiveness of their campaign. (I have also used PPC as 'market research' for keywords to be used in my organic search engine optimisation - because you can see very quickly which phrases are being displayed and clicked-on and which are not. Even though I don't then continue with the actual PPC campaign itself.)

Advantage 2? There is a lot less mystique around "how to rank in the search results" around PPC than there is around organic Search optimisation. And whilst undoubtedly you can still fail utterly and spend hugely with a poorly optimised PPC campaign, the advantages in '1' above still generally obtain. If you pay, you will be displayed.

Disadvantages of PPC? Really stem from its advantages! On the surface it seems any altruism displayed by search engines in providing 'free' SEO utilities for organic search results go out of the window when it comes to PPC. Indeed if you click and drag your cursor over a Google search results page, it highlights the PPC results first, the organic search results second, demonstrating how Google itself prioritises its website construction and popularity rankings within its own pages! So - yes - with PPC, you, er, pay for it. The more competition there is in a particular market, yes, the more you pay to make your ad competitive (i.e. display higher up the rankings). No kidding, Search Optimisation keywords themselves (as an example close to my heart) in big urban areas can cost as much as $30 a click!!!! You can see how PPC can indeed be a bottomless pit. This has led to a conspiracy theory amongst SEOs that Search Engine companies keep their rules about organic search optimisation deliberately obscure and ever-changing, exactly BECAUSE they want you to take out expensive PPC campaigns.

Which leads me to the point of this post, and why I have titled it as I have. (Is PPC a bottom-less pit?) Because actually "for the little guy", the PPC market superficially is, exactly that. (A yawning chasm into which they throw lots of money, without ever seeing where it goes or what comes out of it). PPC is therefore (on the surface) a reasonably 'unfair' and exclusive preserve of big companies and deep pockets. This runs contrary to proclamations by search engine companies of how they level the playing field and champion the little guys.

This is where, of course, I provide a synthesis of exactly how "little guys" can do well, piercing through the mumbo jumbo, conspiracy theories etc, right? Right! For a clue, look back to my post titled "maintain, deepen and niche".

You see, PPC (as indeed SEO itself) can be viewed as a bottomless pit for large companies selling "one-ize fits all" commodity products. Their organic SEO also has to optimise the words everybody else uses on 11 million other pages across the web. Because if you are going to pursue commodity products, you have to sell to a commodity market. So at this level, I think actually the search engines are pretty ALTRUISTIC in their sneaky hidden algorithms and expensive PPC bid mechanisms. They work absolutely against the big companies playing to a wide field. (The rules and tools keep you guessing and keep you paying).

But little companies should not be trying to compete on this playing field. If small companies (I provide Search Engine Optimisation Services for small European Businesses in the Limousin, Poitou Charentes and Aquitaine regions of South West France) pursue "Maintain, Deepen, and Niche" strategies, my experience is:

a) I can land them on Google Page 1 using "deepend and niche" type terms just through organic search results and I have a pretty good results record behind that (otherwise bold) statement;

b) Their use of PPC has to be very targeted and specific.

Both PPC and SEO are mass market disciplines supported by mass-market tools.
Small companies generally fail to make headway with either because (if they do SEO at all) they equally bring a mass market mentality to their activities: they try to rank on Google using really generic terms; and equally conduct PPC campaigns (if at all) with the same mindset.

So I think there is neither an SEO conspiracy going-on against the little guy, nor do I think PPC is a bottomless pit. It is just that in most cases, the literature and body-of-knowledge has been created for the big companies tossing huge sums after very generic search terms. And small companies themselves lack the knowledge and skills-base to conduct adequate marketing (which at the end of the day is what underlies good SEO).

Briquesetclics exists exactly to offer Search Optimisation services to small European businesses in Southwest France: specifically the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine.

Are "Online Brochure" sites for the birds?

2009-01-26T12:13:00.023+01:00

First of all, what do I mean by "Online Brochure sites"?

I mean sites - especially small business websites - that are simply an electronic rendition of a paper-based brochure. You and I have seen them a thousand times - we may even run one or two of them ourselves (my hand is definitely 'up'). The greatest concession to "Customer Interaction" may be a small "Contact us" form but there is certainly no cash-generating capability in the web site itself. Its whole being exists to drive people off-site and spend money on a physical interaction of some sort. That is a LOT to ask a small website to do. To bring in any potential business (cash) these websites are totally reliant on a) being found; b) being interesting and c) the prospective customer going "off-channel" (for example switching to the telephone) to complete their transaction.

"Are they for the birds?" I mean - "Are they therefore just about completely (just about) useless?" (No insult meant to our avian friends. I didn't make the phrase up).

These brochure sites are perhaps the mainstay of micro and small businesses on the web, and of the designers and developers who serve that market. So is this not an absurd question? (I mean surely, Richard, so many Lemmings can't be wrong?)

Now - I do not dispute AT ALL, that there is a convenience and a small cost saving in having an electronic brochure to point a potential client to and be able to amend (website designer willing) pretty much on the hoof. This is as opposed to being locked into a static print version of something that might go out of date reasonably often, and the expense (and time delay) of posting it around the globe.

But there, the utility value of these sites stops, in 990/1000 cases.

The paradox is that in order to arrive at these sites, the potential client must either know - or have been referred to - the business owner in question ("oh, I must look up so-and-so's site"), or they must have found the site via 3rd party advertising either on paper or a directory site - which is likely to have been paid-for at considerable expense. The two problems with this model are:

1) The site in itself is not a marketing tool in its own right - i.e. by existing on Google Page 1 million, it does not have a hope of ever being found and therefore of being a "Beacon" to all prospective customers saying "I'm a really good site and you'll find what you are looking for here". At least with paid-for advertising, for all that it is expensive, at least the "effective" marketing mechanism you are purchasing acts as surrogate for your own "absense" of marketing mechanism and it brings you sales leads so you are happy.

But whether or not it is pound for pound as efficient as having a searchable website of your own is arguable. Paid-for advertising by anyone else's mechanism is either geographically constrained (like a physical newspaper) or targeted only at the audience THEY have to attract to meet their own marketing needs. This is not the same as being able to market effectively to anyone, anywhere according to your own criteria. Which brings me to point 2.

2) When landed upon, the small business website is very unlikley to be a commercial propostion in its own right with a means of generating its own cash. Its "business justification" relies totally on the sale that is going to be made in the physical world. If small businesses understood how easy it is to place revenue streams on their own sites - irrespective of a sale in the physical world - then it might make them think twice about the value of getting their own marketability right. If the website itself is at all commercial, success via your own marketing is arguably far far cheaper than 3rd party advertising. (Something the big sites and advertisers definitely DONT want you to know). It is by no means free; but it is cheaper and it is all within your control.

So brochure web sites are not completely useless, but they are perhaps only 10% as useful as they could be. Note I do not slam the content of the sites themselves for this issue - a poor proposition or badly worded copy is as terminal for a business in the physical world as it is on the internet. So I am not talking about "design" or the actual business itself so much here. I am talking about the "improper use of the vehicle".

What I find a pity is that the small business owner probably does not KNOW (and the small business designer either does not know or does not let on that they don't understand) that the above is the case. And both business owner and designer conveniently overlook the fact that in order to make the site of any commercial use, additional further expense of time or effort (most likely both) HAS to be incurred to drive people to the site itself, via listings via agencies or physical media (like newspapers) or via email.

To that end, I have set up free "Masterclasses" on my website now, to help people learn the basics about starting an online business. My bias is Southwest France, around the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine, as that is where I work.

I will add to these Masterclasses as I go: but see http://www.briquesetclics.fr/en/Internet-Marketing/Articles/ and
http://www.briquesetclics.fr/en/Web-Site-Design/Articles/
as examples of everything I have said in this post.

If small businesses understood that they could have "searchability" BUILT-IN during their web design, and that this should absolutely be an intrinsic part of the overall design cost, and if the understanding from the get-go is that keeping the website competitive would also require a certain ongoing contract that is cheaper than long-term advertising costs, then not only would much more traffic potentially arrive at the site: but the costs of the ongoing maintenance would be very competitive versus the ongoing costs of advertising on paper or via an agency. Food for thought, uh?

Let me be absolutely clear it is completely possible for a small, adequately differentiated business to appear on Google Page 1 search terms without using 'obvious' terms like the company name or URL. I presently have three companies under my wing that appear exactly like this. (One company lands on Page 1 line 1 for even reasonably generic search terms). This is not cuckoo land. (No picture of a cuckoo, sorry).

The pity is that small business website owners (and the designers that serve them) do not understand that if they do nothing about search - then "nothing" is exactly what they will get - nor do they understand the essentially "free" nature of search by building it in from the start and the cost-efficiency of this mechanism even under an ongoing maintenance contract.

Making a website commercial in itself is both a marketing and design question and again, for 90% of small businesses, one that is not addressed at the start. Small business brochure sites typically have no means of generating cash in and of themselves (this is easy to do and again, "Free food" if built in from the start). They also lack sufficient "Action Orientation" to get the customer over that "Motivational Hump" that they will confront when you invite them to pursue their purchase with you over the phone, by email or by letter, instead of via the medium they are already on (the web) and as part of the "flow" they are already in. These are business and design questions that need to be addresses from the start and again, tend to be overlooked if the business owner is unfamiliar with what the web offers...and, er, so is the designer.

I'll get off my soap box now! Are Small Brochure web sites for the birds?
Having "been there" myself and now finding myself on the other side of that coin (ew! how many metaphors do I want to mix up?) I believe 90% of brochure sites ARE for the birds. But 100% of them also NEED NOT BE if the business owner and website designer know what they are doing on this very different and exciting medium from the word 'Go'.

"Maintain, deepen and niche"

2009-01-19T09:33:00.015+01:00

European small businesses do not have a hope of competing in the mass market with big players. This is almost wholly due to supply-side constraints: they cannot afford the marketing and generate the brand presence; they cannot commoditise their products enough to compete on cost; they do not possess the capacity to fulfill mass demand or service mass after-sales.

I said this is a supply-side constraint. Because this is the playing field that big players play on. But is it currently also their undoing. I say "currently". Actually, arguably, the seeds of the current recession go back at least to 1997 when it became evident that mass production, across almost every market, was over-supplying the market with un-differentiated goods. Think about it: Banking, electronic goods, even holidays: walk down the high street even in 1997 and every single offering in every single shop was exactly the same (or as near as no difference) to any other. The only possible distinction came down to price. Every major player could supply the demand of the entire market on its own. The only means of competing was through continued operational cut-backs and adoption of technology and operational efficiency. There was absolutely no - or nearly no - competition between actual products any more. This is why we saw the flurry of mergers in the late 1990s and why things nearly came undone in the dot-com burst in 2002. The economy required further concentration of mass producers (i.e. merger) to concentrate productive capacity in fewer players. It is what is also desperately needed now - although politically unacceptable because of the jobs implications. (Which made less of a noise, of course during the good times!).

The flip side is that companies darn well need to start focussing on demand - and this is where small businesses are at no disadvantage. Let the big players focus on concentration and further operational efficiency. Small players need to be moving like billio to grab customers and that's why I title this post "Maintain, deepen and niche". Have you seen that dreadful Thompson holiday advert currently doing the rounds? Where it looks like they'll put you in a studio: bring in the sand, fabricate a pretty view; "massage-away" any black clouds and turn on UV lamps to give you a fake tan? I mean, this expresses the "mass-commoditisation-ultimate-eccentricity" that big companies now face. There is no distinction any more.

For European small businesses to stay competitive: "Maintain, deepen and niche":

- Maintain - seems clear enough - but you need to be working like stink to keep your existing customers. Do this and do this step first.

"Maintain" DOES NOT mean "keep doing exactly what you do". It means going all out to improve what you already give existing customers. If you can't improve your product, at least give it a facelift. What about a total makeover of the tired website that is sitting gathering dust in cyberspace (and never brought you much traffic in the first place). If you can't actually upgrade your product, delight existing customers and improve your chances of hooking new ones by taking positive and cheap steps to "Maintain" your existing pipeline. If you have a shop: paint it.

"Deepen" means "ADD" stuff to what you offer. That means offering more to existing customers than you already give them (i.e. "deepen" their relationship with you) or add "more" to your proposition to attract new customers. Do "more" to attract new customers. Have you considered optimising that now re-vamped website to become more competitive in search terms. European business! Are you actually selling in more than one language? (Small aside: but doing this saved our holiday business' bacon in the last 18 months. And it seems so obvious.). Deepen your market.

!"Niche" means work out what it is you do that everyone else doesn't and sell to that. Look: small businesses can't afford the marketing budget that big ones can, but there are loads of free tools on the web you can use (or Briquesetclics.fr can help you use). Simple example: do a search on Google for what you think you offer: Say "Gites". Oh dear: 11 million pages return this. :-(
So try "Gites in France". Better. Only 4 million pages return this. But apply "Niche" to your thinking and you realise that there are fishing lakes within 5 Km of your "Gite". Only 418,000 pages return "Fishing in France". Mmm interesting. So now search for "Fishing in France accommodation" and you're down to 300,000 and actually starting to get competitive. With a 10 page website offering a good mix of "niche" phrases like this and properly optimised - you're actually very likely to possess search terms that will get you onto Google page 1 if not page 2.

Briquesetclics.fr enshrines "Maintain, deepen and Niche" in its Internet offerings to European small businesses. You can compete in this tough time, but you must not compete on the same playing field as the big players. Their pitch is presently water-logged

"French News" - exactly what I'm talking about

2009-01-08T16:44:00.002+01:00

"The Times" 6/12/2008 published an article on the demise of "French News" and the death of this english journalistic institution and with it, some 31 jobs. The article cited the disappearance of the Brits from France and "The internet" (wo-evva - ed) as root causes.

This is exactly the point of "Briquesetclics.fr" though and the message the last 2 posts on this blog are about. Running a modern business in Europe in one language only (not even the language of the country you are in!) and without embracing electronic distribution... Should we be lamenting the passing of these institutions or helping them go?

The choke point for European small businesses has arrived

2009-01-01T15:27:00.000+01:00

· Costly over-reliance on physical economic and transportation networks. Only 15% of Europe’s transactions are completed on line;

· High wages. In response to high domestic costs, manufacturing and service activities are being outsourced to Asia because it is cheaper to perform these tasks there, putting pressure on competitiveness, costs and wages in domestic markets;

· Tight credit. The world is presently in a recession witnessing a permanent structural change to the way we’ll get credit. The cost of loans is going to become higher: property prices will level off or fall – certainly in the short term – and businesses will come under extreme pressure to remain profitable – all putting pressure on cost and competitiveness in physical markets and peoples’ wages;

· Europe is a market of Multiple languages. Yet most small and medium-sized enterprises are single-language and therefore totally dependent on their domestic markets. Most SMEs cannot afford to participate in a multi-language environment and are therefore constrained to their domestic market;

It forms a vicious circle binding SMEs to their local domestic markets. To break this we need to bust open the ability to trade in multiple languages and the technology to make this cost-effective! Leveraging Electronic Business in multiple languages is no longer an option.

First post

2008-12-18T23:33:00.000+01:00

So - running a family business in a foreign country: what two moments of epiphany started all this website design, marketing and translation thingy off?

1) Most of my customers spoke a different language to me and I wasn't reaching them (in either their language or their marketplace)
2) My websites were like brochures - and nothing more. Nobody came knocking...

OK, So I got the SEO and Translation idea early on. Those to me were both the marketing side of things.

The webdesign I was more forced into:
a) Because so much SEO is an on-site activity that your designer should be doing. But if they understand nothing about marketing, then they can't possibly help anyone sensibly with their website copy (the words). Oh! But then I saw "B".

b) Because I looked around at the competition and I saw these eye-candy sites that were entirely content-free. Ah! Cappiche! Techies not understanding marketing = website that won't sell. So I decided I had to offer websites designed to be FOUND just to restore the balance and give people a choice.

This blog is for me and people interested in what European small businesses are going to have to look like; to discuss their needs, obstacles, hopes, fears. Welcome to "YERP".