Info + Tips

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Recently I heard someone say that nobody uses WordPress anymore and it made me wonder if that is the impression that people have been given. Perhaps because other platforms do A LOT of marketing whereas WP quietly does its thing, people seem to be under the impression that Wix or Squarespace are the most popular ways to build a website now.

WordPress WP

Never one to make assumptions, I did some research to see what the market share is like in 2021 and I have to say I was not surprised by the results I found.

A whopping 64.9% of websites are built on WP. The next most popular is Shopify, the e-commerce platform, at just 5.6%. Joomla is next and then the ones that I mentioned, Squarespace and Wix, are at 2.6% each. That is 8% of the WP market share between the 2 platforms.

Tooltester: CMS Market Share Trends – What’s Changed in 2021? – Jun 14, 2021

Why is WP still so popular?

There are many reasons, but I will go through a few of the top ones (as I see it!)

Price

With some of the other platforms, the pricing is subscription-based. Whereas with WP (WordPress.org, specifically) the only cost for your base website is your domain and hosting. WP itself is free to install and use.

You can spend on plugins, themes and development for extra functionality, but all of that is optional.

Some of the platforms advertise as free but they often cost more than expected when all things are considered.

Flexibility

WordPress is almost as flexible, if not as flexible, as a custom-built website. If you know how, you can develop any functionality linked in with WordPress. The other platforms are more restricted in what you can do, which some people prefer as they feel safer with something that doesn’t let them do “the wrong thing”. However, as your business grows and you want your website to grow with you this lack of flexibility will often get in the way. We see many people who have started with something like Wix and hit a barrier in terms of what they can do at which point they decide to move to WP.

WordPress grows with you from a simple website/blog to a full-on e-commerce site.

Usage

Strange as it may sound, the fact that almost 65% of websites are built on WP works in your favour if you use it too. The high level of usage means that if you run into bother or are trying to figure out how to do something with WP you will pretty much always find someone else who has already been there and figured it out so that you don’t have to!

The high level of usage also means that there are a ridiculous amount of plugins, themes etc that have been developed to customise WP to your exact needs in terms of how it functions or how it looks.

Consistent

Fads come and go but WP has been consistently leading the way for many years and is continually evolving to make sure that it isn’t going anywhere.

Ownership

With WordPress (again, I am referring to WordPress.org, WordPress.com is a different setup), you own your stuff. It is so important to ensure that you have control over your online presence and with a WordPress website it is entirely owned by you. With any of the subscription platforms as well as any of the social media platforms, the content that you add is out of your control as is the platform itself.

This is why we always recommend that you put your website at the core of your online marketing efforts, post your content to your website and share so that everything else is spokes in a wheel and the piece you own is at the centre of everything.

That way if one of the platforms you use is disabled, for whatever reason, it is a spoke in your wheel and not your entire wheel that is taken down.

Is there a case for using another website platform?

In some cases I can see the reasons why people will prefer to use another platform:

  • if they want to do the entire thing themselves and don’t have the technical knowledge to set up a WordPress site
  • if they want to get online quickly and are not too worried about their site design
  • if they want something easy to use and don’t know how to set WordPress up to be as easy to use as some of the other website builders.

Where it makes sense for someone to use another option I would generally recommend Squarespace as it gives the option to migrate to WP later if/when the need arises.

We do have another option available as an alternative for the DIYer

Our WP Starter Kit

We think this is a great compromise – gets you started on WP so there’s no migration later, but keeps the initial setup as quick and easy as possible. In addition, this is a DIY option but you have Coppertops support available if needed so you are not on your own.

With this package, we set up a hosting account, install WordPress with the essential plugins for functionality and design. We include things like a page builder which makes it super easy to add your content and design your own site.

We then provide you with training videos to get you started on building your site, and we are always available to help on an ad hoc basis if needed. Contact us if you would like more information on this offer.

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You may not have considered this consciously but if you have written content then you have in some form made a call on whether to write a deep dive on a topic or to write beginner content.

So what’s the difference, what are the benefits of each and which is the better option for you?

What is deep dive content?

deep dive content man in gray long sleeve suit holding a pen
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

Exactly what it sounds like, a deep dive blog post takes an in-depth look at a topic and gives a high level of valuable information and insight about the subject. The reader will feel like they have had a full lesson and achieve a high level of understanding on reading (or listening/watching!).

This type of content takes time to research and develop and will not appeal to every part of your audience.

What is beginner content?

Beginner content is, funnily enough, aimed at a beginner. It is a surface-level look at the subject aimed at people who have little or no previous knowledge to give them an introduction. Beginner content is a great way to let people who don’t have knowledge of your area know that you know what you are talking about, as explaining something in a clear way indicates a good level of understanding.

beginner content

This type of content is quicker to write and will have broader appeal as anyone who has an interest in your area will be able to quickly and easily read and understand it.

What are the benefits of each type of content?

Assuming that your content is of high quality, let’s look at the benefits you might expect from producing each type of content.

Beginner content appeals to a wider segment of your audience, it gives people a quick hit of information that they will find useful and does not require them to spend a lot of time or energy consuming it.

That means that this type of content tends to provide you with shares and increased traffic as your audience can quickly consume it, see the value and will pass it on to their own audience as they know that a large section of people will find value in it.

Deep dive content, on the other hand, appeals to a narrower segment of your audience but will have a higher value for the people that it appeals to. They have taken the time to consume something that requires more of them, on reading your post they have gained a thorough understanding of the topic and as a result, will feel connected to your post.

The bottom line of all this is that deep dive content tends to provide you with backlinks, as people who have found value in your content want to share but are willing to do that in a more committed way.

Which is better?

The answer is, naturally, it depends!

Sometimes you want to fire out quick hits of information with wide appeal to increase traffic to your site and raise your profile with a larger audience of people who may not have a lot of knowledge of what you do.

Other times you want to put more effort into a deeper explanation on a specific topic, providing extremely useful content that a smaller section of your audience will connect with and link to, giving you a permanent source of traffic.

So the best approach is generally a mix of the two. Some pillar posts with a deep dive into specific topics with a scattering of beginner content in between. Done well this shows all of your audience that you understand your area extremely well, generates search traffic as well as referral traffic from sharing and introduces you to new people as an expert in your field.

What are your next steps?

I do like a plan!

Plan out your potential topics, pick a few that you can do a deeper dive into and a lot of topics where you can write some killer beginner content. Keep a list of ideas as inspiration strikes.

And then start writing! As you think of info on each topic, populate each of your ideas with text, imagery and even video that will explain the subject.

The main aim with a blog post is to connect with your audience in some form, it is helpful when writing to keep in mind the kind of connection you are aiming for as well as who you hope will read your post, as it will colour the tone of your writing and directly affect how successful your blog is.

Once you feel that you have all of the info that a post requires and that your tone is correct, fine-tune your text and publish.

person holding iphone showing social networks folder Photo by Tracy Le Blanc on Pexels.com

Make sure to share your posts to social media channels as well as promote them on your website to maximise visibility and traffic.

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These are the mistakes that will cost you the most and are generally the easiest to catch and fix so they are a great place to start in improving your digital marketing strategy.

1. Skipping to the “how”

This is probably the most common, we get caught up so easily in the tricks and tools we hear about for web, social media etc and dive in to figuring out how to set them up. So what should we do instead?

Take a step back and think about what and why. What you want to achieve, and why it is important to you. Using that information to figure out which pieces of digital marketing trickery to make use of means that you are always working towards your goal and working on things that will work for you, reducing wasted time and effort (and which small business owner has more time and effort available than they need for other things!?)

2. Doing “all the things”

Do you feel like you are everywhere, firefighting to keep up with blog posts, email marketing and posts to multiple social media channels? This can feel exhausting and relentless as well as giving diluted results.

Check your analytics and reports to see which channels are actually delivering for you, then double down on those and drop some of the ones that are not giving you any actual results. It is better to be on 2 “good for you” social media platforms consistently than trying to post to 6 randomly selected ones in a hit and miss way.

3. “Rush job” content

Think about this for a second, because I am willing to bet that you have made this judgement of content published by other people!

If your content looks rushed, scruffy and unprofessional then that is the impression your content is giving of you and your business. If your content looks like care was taken to do a good job then that is a much better impression to give of how you operate.

The difference here is in the small things:

  • proof read and ask someone to proof read for you so you don’t miss spelling errors or typos.
  • create graphics that represent your content and your business in a professional way – create a template graphic so that you can swap elements out for each post to save time.

4. Writing from the wrong point of view

So often we see this, content is written from the point of view of the business rather than taking the potential client’s needs into account.

It’s a tough lesson, but your clients do not care how you do what you do. They only care about how you can help them. So tell them about the problems you can solve, not the technical details of how you are going to do it.

5. Generally “missing the mark”

Using the wrong tone, posting to channels where your ideal client is not spending time, posting at times when your ideal client is not online to read or posting content that is not interesting to your ideal client.

It’s important to pay attention to these points so that the time you spend creating content is giving results and hitting the target effectively. Otherwise you are wasting your time!

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We are sorry to say that on 4th August 2021 Ciara resigned from her position at Coppertops.

This will naturally lead to further changes, we will of course keep you posted!

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The definition of ECommerce is: commercial transactions conducted electronically on the internet.

It really is as simple as that, if you are taking payment online then you have a form of ECommerce in place.

There are many types, I will look at the most common and most useful ones here to get us started.

Payment via form

This is the simplest setup and allows you to accept payment via an online form. Your client enters some information and either enters an amount, selects a product or pays a preset amount by submitting the form. This can be linked to payment gateways like Stripe or PayPal to process your payment.

For simple payments this is a quick and painless way to get started.

Online Shop

For most people this is what we think of when we say ECommerce. An online shop offers products or services for sale via a website. Payments are going to be processed via something like Stripe or Paypal as in the forms example, but an online shop usually has some form of checkout process.

Your client will generally select products or services from your website and add them to a cart or basket, then proceed to checkout where they submit payment information.

This option can be as simple or complex as it needs to be so it has the capability to be a lot more powerful than the forms option.

There are a handful of items that you will need to put in place for an effective online shop, we’re going to go through this at a top-level now and go into more detail in a future post.

Platform

There is any number of platforms that you can use to build your online shop, too many to go into here. We will compare two that are representative of most of the options available as an example.

First is the Shopify option, an example of an “off-the-shelf” eCommerce solution. The pluses here are that it is quick and easy to set up and to manage. The negatives are that it is limited in customisability and that it can work out much more expensive as it is subscription-based.

The second is the WooCommerce option. This is an add on for a WordPress site and the negatives are that you need a WordPress site (unless you already have one) along with hosting plus it involves a bit more setup, depending on how complex your online shop needs to be. In the plus column, it generally costs much less in the long run and it is highly customisable to your exact needs. We have several clients who use WooCommerce to take bookings as well as those selling products or services.

With either option you will need to think about and decide on how integrated it needs to be with your website and how the flow from website to shop should work.

As with anything, there is a reason that both exist. You will need to select the option that is the best match for you and your business needs.

Products or Services

As I mentioned, bookings are also possible here but generally you will be selling products or services.

Each product needs the following information:

  • Product name
  • Product description
  • category/sub category (depending on how many products you have but set yourself up with room for growth here)
  • Product images – a main image and, depending on how photogenic your product is, a gallery of images to show the products other sides.
  • Price
  • Taxes – VAT? Inclusive or Exclusive?
  • Shipping – if you are selling a physical product how much does it cost to ship?

Your product page should be clear, attractive, and provide all of the information to allow the customer to purchase in as simple a format as possible.

It is worth taking time to set this up correctly as it makes it easier to manage as you go and also makes your shop easier for your customers to use.

Behaviour Flow

Sounds more technical than it is, this is the flow users will take as they use your shop. It is crucial that a visitor can find what they need quickly and easily and also that they can complete the process to purchase in a painfree way.

Test it out as a user, ask your friends to test it out, so that you can see what it is like for your customers and remove any pain points.

Offers

Do you want to offer special deals or discounts? What format are these likely to take?

For example:

  • discount – percentage or flat rate, which products/categories does the discount apply to
  • coupon code – codes can be used to apply discounts, these can be auto applied or shared with customers to manually enter at checkout. Be careful about limiting usage on coupon codes to avoid losing too much money
  • BOGOF – buy one get one free, doesn’t really need explanation but again you’ll need to define which products/categories are included and whether the free product is the more or less expensive one.

Again, it’s worth taking the time to test this out and make sure you’ve considered all angles so that it is enticing for your customers without hammering your profits.

We would also always recommend not doing the eternal sale thing where you always have discounts on your shop. This devalues both the discount you are offering and the product/service itself.

SEO

We couldn’t not, could we?? It’s really important to make sure that your products and categories are picked up by search. These pages should be showing in search results where they are relevant for the search term.

Using relevant keywords and checking other SEO factors are covered will make sure your products are seen.

You can also submit your products directly to Google and link to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, to sell directly from there. Just make sure you are doing things for a reason rather that just because you can!

In conclusion…

ECommerce is a topic that feels really daunting so we would suggest giving some thought to what you would like to do. Consider whether you have used online shops that you found particularly easy to navigate (or particularly difficult!) as this will give you a good idea as to what you want in your own shop.

Figure out the what first before considering the why as what you are trying to do will dictate the other decisions you make.

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We get endless emails from people/companies offering us SEO services to “get us to #1 on Google”. We know that there is no magic bullet to getting found online.

Following on from our post about how search works, we are going to take a look at how to improve your results on search engines to get found online.

SEO is made up of many parts of varying relevance and difficulty. We are going to review some of the biggest impact items so that you can check that you are not falling down on any of the top barriers to being shown in search results.

Things have changed dramatically over the past few years, with a shift from trying to satisfy search engines and trying to create a great user experience to a situation where creating a great user experience is the top item you can work on to improve your search engine results.

Put your ideal target audience first in what you do online and the search results will follow.

Speed

Is your website loading fast enough?

There are many ways to improve the speed of your website, as always the first step is to review where you stand currently.

Check our Resources page for a link to Google’s tool to test your speed. The tool will give you a score with a traffic light system to show you where you stand as well as some recommendations and tips to improve.

People are impatient, if your website takes too long to load then they will bounce away and find one that loads faster. Google knows this and will select faster websites to show in its search results, its aim always being to provide the most relevant and highest quality search results for each user.

Responsive

Is it mobile friendly? Does a user on mobile get the same experience as a user on desktop – or as close as possible?

Google knows that the majority of search is on mobile and will only show mobile friendly sites in search so that users will not be sent to a site that doesn’t work on their device.

Again, check our Resources page for a link to Google’s tool to test whether your site is mobile friendly. This tool also gives a score based on the traffic light system with tips on what to improve.

Safe

Google offer a safe browsing check tool, check our Resources page for a link, which allows you to make sure your website has not been labelled as unsafe. This can happen to a legitimate site that has been compromised but this label will prevent your site from being shown in search results so it is well worth checking to make sure your site is not on the list.

Up to date

Do you regularly update and add content to your website? This is one of the best ways to let Google know that you are still in existence and that you have useful content for searchers.

Don’t post for the sake of it, make sure you are writing posts that are relevant to the audience you want to attract and that your content is valuable.

Content

Write useful, relevant, valuable content. Make sure that it is well written. Use images and video, making sure that any media is tagged so that Google’s spider can identify it as it is crawling your website.

Share your content on Google My Business, via social media, email newsletter etc. This increases traffic to your post, telling Google that it is useful and valuable, as well as creating links to your content around the internet. Relevant links will also improve your search results.

If you use a CMS like WordPress, make sure you have an SEO plugin installed which will allow you to review your content as you go and make sure you are ticking the boxes to improve your chances of getting found.

Keywords

As you read in our post about how search works, keywords are how the search engine knows what your content is about and which search terms it is relevant for.

Make sure to use the correct keywords – the terms that your ideal audience will search for and the terms that your content is relevant for. Both are important. If you don’t use the keywords that your ideal client is searching for you will not get your content in front of the right people. If you use keywords that are not relevant then your content may be shown as a match where it isn’t relevant, in which case the person who clicks through to your site will bounce away quite quickly which will count against you.

Don’t overuse the keywords, trust the search to understand what you are writing about.

You can use the Google Keyword Planner (it’s free with a Google Ads account) to plan and to find new keywords. Bear in mind that your customers may search differently than you will, eg we tend to think of the solution where they are more likely to search for the problem.

Trust

Creating trust on your website is vital if you want users to take the next step to buy from you.

Give them information that will build trust in knowing who you are, what you do, that you will take care of them and that you are an expert in your field.

No Gimmicks

Avoid too many popups and ads, they distract from your content and can make it difficult for the user to navigate your site. They can also impact the trust factor as well as usability, speed and mobile friendliness.

Use them with care (or not at all!)

User Testing

This sounds so technical and complicated, and when we build a website we do some very thorough testing to make sure that everything works as it should do. I’m not suggesting that you go to that level, that’s what we’re here for!

What I really mean here is simply to actually use your site! Visit it as if you were a stranger, navigate it, follow the flow you expect your customer to take and make sure that each step works as it should and is intuitive and easy. Find and remove any blocks to that flow so that there is no reason for your customer not to complete the process and purchase from you. If you can, ask some friends and family to test it with fresh eyes, too.

I do like an example! I was on a number of networking calls this week and for many of the people I connected with I visited their Instagram profiles to follow them. Instagram is best used on phone and I was able to look while on the call. On one of the accounts I saw an interesting post with the usual “link in bio” so I clicked through to the profile and on to the link which brought me to the website. All good so far, easy to access the page that the business wanted me to see. Then the website loaded and the great experience ended. This lovely person’s website had a header that didn’t resize so I could only see a narrow part in the middle of it, the content on the rest of the screen was a little better but still not very easy to read. The content was interesting enough that I persisted and did my best to read it… for a couple of seconds, until a popup bounced up in front of the text asking me to subscribe!

Mobile responsiveness should be a given now on any website, if your site doesn’t work on mobile then you are effectively shooting yourself in the foot.

Don’t load a popup within seconds of a person landing on your site. Why would I subscribe to your newsletter without having had a chance to read any of your content? That just annoyed me and I left, feeling very disappointed.

Test it, test all of it! Make sure that it works how you would want it to work if you were visiting as a customer.

feeling lost

Feeling lost?

If you are still feeling unsure on where to start to check and/or improve the search performance of your website we can help.

Check out our SEO audit for a full review of your website and social media. We’ll review your online presence and provide you with a report outlining where you stand on each element as well as opportunities to improve. This can be done with no further commitment – you can choose whether you would like us to implement any fixes or improvements or whether you would prefer to do them yourself.

Alternatively, you can book a free Discovery Call, a 30-minute video chat with us to discuss your digital marketing needs and how we can help you to improve your results.