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A Product Development Cycle

January 14, 2018 By: trafucomment

Product developmentWhere does development and marketing meet?

We think earlier than you probably think.

The Harry Ford blog is pretty quiet nowadays as we have been building digital assets. Platforms, software and have been making a lot of money in the process whilst providing great solutions to the end consumers and clients. This is why the search engine marketing side of things has started to decrease. We partnered with a bespoke web development firm based in Cardiff and now have a working relationship that not only helps both parties, but allows us to quickly build digital assets and businesses that we can later sell at a profit (although we tend not to sell them.)

But where does design and dev stop and marketing start?

Marketing

This is the single biggest issue we see with start ups. They want to get an MVP out to market as soon as possible, but marketing does not start then, marketing starts inside the design and development stage in itself. If you look at the guys behind basecamp and the culture they created, you can see how this works in the real world. A product is created out of a need in the market, that is usually a need by the people who first actually made the product.

Think about every large company that exists nowadays. They started because there was a demand in a market that was not being satisfied. This is the core element of starting a business in general but its even more important nowadays when software developers can actually build you a great product within 30 days! That means you can have a Saas business within 2 months that potentially in 2 years can be doing 1 million a month in revenue. If you take a look at the guys behind basecamp and the exponential growth they achieved in a very short period of time, you can see this. Growth is not linear and marketing starts in the product development stage and not after.

Aston MartinDon’t think money – Think users

When doing marketing think about how users themselves can promote your product. Do you see any Google or Facebook ads? Probably not. But this works for physical products too. Think about supercars, they never have ads, at least not Bugatti or Lambo’s. There’s 2 reasons behind this but one of them is down to people who watch TV are not their target audience, but 2 the individuals who promote the products are the people constantly talking about it in a good way and positioning the product as the “god of cars” or however you decide to phrase it.

Thanks for reading.

 

3 Business tips for a scaffolding company

November 29, 2017 By: trafucomment

Scaffolding is very important and necessary when it comes to building and constructing large and tall structures. Scaffolding is a structure that is set-up temporarily to provide support to construction crew when constructing buildings. This temporary structure is made out of steel poles or sometimes bamboo which is assembled in a certain way to provides support to building crew when they do their construction jobs. It can also be used to support builder when doing building repair works, and cleaners when doing maintenance and cleaning on the building. Scaffolding is a tall temporary structure that allows people to reach the height of buildings and structures in order perform needed construction tasks such as building, repairs and cleaning.

CONSTRUCTION IMAGE

Scaffolding for hire is a popular business of providing the needed scaffolding materials to construction companies. A scaffolding company makes it convenient and easy for construction companies to construct and build structures. It is common for construction companies to hire scaffolding companies for their scaffolding needs so they can focus on their construction jobs. Construction companies outsource scaffolding materials to scaffolding hire companies to avoid hassle and loosing time and money on their construction projects. Scaffolding hire companies can be a small business or large enterprise to get into. The market for scaffolding hire companies is difficult and business can be tough. Here are 3 business tips for a scaffolding company to consider in order succeeding in the business.

  1. Seek Advice from a Good Source

Scaffolding companies especially those just starting out in the business should seek advice from reliable and good sources. These sources could be fellow scaffolding company owners but are infaraway places or local entrepreneurs and business owners who have experience in the scaffolding business.

  1. Be Resourceful in Acquiring Solutions & Equipment

Scaffolding companies should be resourceful when procuring for their own scaffolding materials to provide in their business. They can either check and acquire scaffolding materials from local construction stores and selling scaffolding companies or purchase new ones. Companies should compare prices and choose the best option for their materials.

  1. Market and Advertise Effectively

Scaffolding companies should make use of the different ways to market their business in order to attract clients. Scaffolding companies can make us of social media, offline advertising, events and more, to reach out and attract potential client to start business.

These are just a few tips that scaffolding hire companies can follow in order to achieve growth and succeed in the business. We’ve done this for a number of Cardiff based construction agencies, including this one. It is also important for scaffolding hire companies to consider the products and services that they offer and make sure to provide quality and reliable scaffolding materials and services to their clients.  Aside from offering quality and reliable scaffolding services, they should also keep in mind to promote safety as a main priority to their clients in order to build better relationship and trust. Following these 3 business tips for scaffolding company to be successful can be helpful for the business to achieve success and sustain growth.

Case Study 3 – Ranking in 2 Months for Security Plymouth

July 13, 2017 By: trafucomment

Keywords ImageWith our third SEO and marketing case study we wanted to rank a new client of us for an extremely competitive keyword they were looking to rank. The client is called K9 Security Plymouth and they were looking to rank for the keyword security Plymouth – Makes sense right?

Anyway long story short we managed to rank them on page 1 within a 2 month period and close them as a full time client as a result. We did the same thing with another client called ecoflor (case study coming) This is great as it’s essentially a pay per result basis for SEO, which is something you don’t want to get into the habit of doing, but I mean it’s great when it works out perfectly like this.

Here is the strategy we used:

Very simply it was a very specific mini seo campaign for 1 specific keyword. When you do a full seo campaign there is so much that you need to consider, but for mini campaigns you have so much flexibility. So what we did in stage 1 was simple on-page optimisation for that specific keyword. We didn’t worry about over-optimisation as the site had never been SEO’d in the past and obviously we aren’t going to over-optimise it. This was pretty nice, so the following on-page elements we included:

  • Title: Keyword in title tag in full + other relevant information to make site look clickable and try to improve conversions and increase click through rate.
  • H1 tag: Another huge ranking factor that of course got our primary keyword in. This also included some secondary keywords and a bit of text about the company.
  • Description: The description was already pretty long so implementing the keyword about 2 times in the text gave us a nice KD to go off – But please never JUST use Keyword Density as a factor… That’s a bad idea.
  • Image: In the image I put a secondary keyword but ensured they were actually better optimised than previously, although this wasn’t needed by any stretch, people just optimise images incorrectly so I had to change that!

Once these changes were in place we jumped up to about page 2 and within a few more days were mid page 2. The issue of course is that no one ever goes to page 2 to search for a business? That’s actually the best place to hide a dead body if you didn’t know.

SEO Meme

This left us with some off-page to do.

This is where everyone goes wrong. To get from page 2 for this keyword to page 1 I estimated we needed 5 high quality, relevant links.

Guess what we did?

GO OUT AND GENERATED THEM.

Total time spent to generate these links: About 2 hours.

Cost of links: About £100.

Value to client long term: £1000+/month.

Worth it even if they didn’t come on board?

YOU BET!

Thanks for reading.

3 Unique Marketing Ideas (And Tips) For Furniture Companies

June 27, 2017 By: trafucomment

WelcomeI decided to write this post after having a very creative session with one of our clients. They are called Hereford furniture and below is the strategies we used to generate them an additional 2000 visitors in 3 months. All of these are very creative but also incredibly simple to replicate to any business, but more so in the furniture niche.

Tip 1 – Local Flyers

Very simple and very old school but something that works really well if you live in an upper/middle class area and you have a unique offering, such as furniture that is reclaimed. You want your flyers or leaflets to look professional but also not to look corporate. Talking about how you are a family run, local business is a good start and also distributing yourself whilst knocking doors and just talking to people will have the same effect too.

FB AdsTip 2 – Locally Targeted Ads

When people usually do facebook ads or use Google Adwords they spend a lot of money and don’t get a lot of clicks. This is mainly because they are targeting too many people. Instead you should try to stay very specific to your local area and niche and should only be paying for clicks that could potentially result in sales through your business. For example if you have a local store in a specific location then do not bother to bid on any keywords that aren’t in that exact location. You might be prompted by FB or Google that your target audience is too small, but that’s simply because they want to get more money from you. Just hold your ground and advertise to the relevant local parties only!

Coffee SHopTip 3 – Local Shops/Coffee Shops

People talk and people go out in their local area. If no one knows about your business then they are likely to not visit you (makes sense.) To find out about you they need to a.) Either see a piece of your marketing. Or b.) Hear it from a friend. The best way to get B to happen more regularly is to try to place your message throughout your local area. For example in local coffee shops, local mini store and anywhere that has a good reputation. You can also attend small business events, talk and network with other people and just generally get the word out about your business. This is a long term plan but one that does work well in the shorter term too.

Our New Project – Driving Test Cancellations Software

February 1, 2017 By: trafucomment

It’s been a while since our last post on the Harry Ford blog and that’s mainly due to our new project. This is something we have been working on for a number of months now and has finally launched at the end of last year to a highly appreciative audience, not least individuals who like to get things done faster! This of course as the title suggests our driving test cancellations software. This is a piece of software that myself and a friend have created with a very unique and large target market – Individuals who are looking to pass their driving test quickly.

It revolves around looking for late cancellations in or near the specific area you are looking to do your test. The interesting thing about the software is it is fully automated from checking, notifications straight to booking the actual test. This is one of the reasons why I am so excited about this project as it is automated for both us (the creators) and the end user. It works by notifying the individuals who have signed up in a given area of late cancellations. Late cancellations are usually made when someone can’t go to their test at a specific timeslot, say 3.00 on a Tuesday for example.

This slot is then open to the public but there is no service that lets people know when this slot is available, unless you manually walk into the driving test centre everyday you will not know. As a result these slots usually go unused. Instead you can book quickly into this slot. This can mean passing your test in as little as 2 days! Slots come open all the time and people are always looking to pass quicker, hence the software’s purpose and reason for creating it. You can see a few screenshots below of how it works.

It really is that simple.

We hope that individuals will find it as simple as we have aimed to create it, although it wasn’t easy to create! If you have any questions about the software then feel free to go directly to the site and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for reading.

Case Study 2: The Importance Of Long Tail Keywords

November 7, 2016 By: trafucomment

nortech-controlOver the past 2 years I’ve been increasingly busy with larger corporate clients. When we started we took on small local businesses, nowadays we only take on larger national ones. Why? Has our process changed? No. It’s the understanding about the businesses and the ROI that we now have changed. For example: in early 2016 we took on a client that wanted to rank for a variety of keywords, and as usual didn’t know about what budget. They talked about funny keywords like card access systems and key fobs, when they really wanted to rank for the big ones. But the issue wasn’t knowledge, it was the understanding of keywords and long tail keywords.

That’ why today I’m going to talk about our card access systems client and why I personally believe they are the single reason we now make 7 figures a year in turnover. Because they helped us talk to individuals who didn’t or don’t know much about SEO, and only understand ROI (Return on Investment.)

The Importance Of Long Tail Keywords

When most clients come to us (as probably with many other digital marketing companies) they say “We’ve got these keywords we want you to rank us for.” Now that’s a great starting point, but it is only that. A starting point. Let’s take our client example above and let me talk about what and why this is the worst way to go when it comes to keyword research.

Keywords ImagePoint 1: The keywords your clients give you are usually cr*p. Let’s be honest. They are good at whatever they do. In this case it was security and access control, and they are great at that. But the keywords? They are just things they think people have searched. Instead you should ask clients if they know their most profitable keywords, highest converting traffic, best landing pages, and if they run PPC campaigns, ask for the highest converting phrases from these. This is the best way to do it rather than to simply ask what people what keywords they want your company to rank you for.

Point 2: Short tail keywords are more expensive to rank, take longer to rank, and in the end will provide the lowest ROI for your client (and hence earn yourself or your company less money) by this I mean the following – I have a client in this industry that had 21 “core” keywords they wanted to rank for. Now that’s a lot of keywords, we are also talking highly highly competitive phrases here too. Now instead of simply quoting them £5,000 a month and watching them say “this is out of budget” – I took a different approach.

return on investmentI still made the large quote but it came with a secondary quote and a reason behind why this is so expensive. I also outlined how I knew this would be out of a budget and why I think it wouldn’t be the best way to go anyway. Instead I outlined that we take 5 of these key-phrases and make longer tail keywords from them. For this I would charge 1/5th of the price and they would see results faster, cheaper and not only that but would generate a higher ROI in the end too. This benefited all parties involved and they came on as a client. It was a win-win for both. These are the situations that we love.

Another Example

A few weeks ago we ran another relatively straight forward keyword research campaign for our client (http://lamborghinihire.co.uk/) they came to us looking for an analysis of the keywords they should be ranking for in Google and also bidding for in Adwords. Most of the other companies had just given them the basic large primary keywords such as “lambo hire” “lambo rental” etc etc. But we decided to dig deeper and found 20+ keywords which added another 300+ searches per month and these were also keywords that were easy to rank!

The first stage was to add variations of the terms. For example the keyword: Lamborghini hire could become hire Lamborghini. Very simple but different keyword search volume. Once this was complete we looked at the models they offered and added those with both the brand + model + hire/rental, as well as the just model + hire keywords. For example Avendator hire and Lambo avendator rental. All of this gave us some really nice keywords but nothing compared to the final 5-7 keywords we generated. To do this we used events.

So when someone hires a supercar its usually for a specific event, whether that be a trip away or a corporate event or a wedding or just to go to the countryside with your partner. People who have some additional income (but who obviously cannot afford to buy a supercar) will be very interested in renting one. And it terms out people searching “wedding Lamborghini hire” and keywords of that nature was extremely high! Not only that we found that these keywords worked incredibly well too!

Conclusion

So in conclusion – Educate the client on what is best for them, not in terms of rankings, or in terms of what will line your pocket the quickest, but instead talk about return on investment both short term (3 months) and longer term (12 months) – They can then go and make a calculated decision to what they want to look into.

Performing SEO for Technology Companies | WTF Keywords?

August 26, 2016 By: trafucomment

techIt’s been a while since I posted on the blog and that’s mainly down to the fact I’ve been so busy with our seo agency. Most of the time when I have a free hour I’ll create a post for this blog, but recently we’ve been that busy that I haven’t had time. But today I wanted to take an hour out and write a pretty interesting short post on what we have been doing with a number of technology companies.

What Makes this different from normal SEO?

Well when it comes to normal SEO as you probably know you have your keywords and you optimise the site and build backlinks geared around ranking in Google for these keywords. The issue comes when these companies have created something that is relatively new, so they don’t have any search volume for them. We had this problem with Quadcopters and we have had it multiple times since.

The main issue is that there is no monthly search volume (by consumers or buyers) for products that have not yet gone to market. For example if you looked at the Hoverboard trend in late 2015 then you see a huge influx around this time, but nothing before this in terms of search volume. But once the products went to market the explosion of traffic was crazy! There was nothing like it, with thousands of people flocking online to purchase these items. Below is the screenshot from Google trends for these Hoverboards, vs quadcopters. As you can see there is a huge curve in December 2015. This is when the products began to get popular, and also the Xmas rush happened too.

Google Trend Screenshot

This brings me nicely onto the next section of the article.

What Can You Do?

So let’s say your a tech company owner or an SEO agency owner who has a company without generic (obvious) keywords. Chances are you will be looking into what keywords to rank for and having an issue, as we mentioned above. Now I have 3 techniques for you to try, to implement the correct keywords into the site, and rank the client as quickly and early as possible. Making them (and yourself) the much profit and ROI in the long term.

intuition Strategy 1 – Personal intuition – This involves using your brain! I know some people don’t like this but its very important. What you would do in this case is have yourself, your team and any members of the client that you can get into the same room and ask them what they think your primary keywords would be. Chances are its how you describe a new product. For example a Quadcopter might be referred to as a “flying drone” or just a drone. Other keywords might include personal flying devices, and all sorts of random stuff you might not have thought about. Once this is completed you can go onto strategy 2.

Strategy 2 – Take to the streets – If you live in a techy city this would be even better, so London, Paris, San Fran are your best options but any busy city will work well. Then you need to ask the individuals what they would call the item, if its a very complicated product then you might need to explain what it does and ask them 3 options into what they should call the item. This seems like they are giving you market research but really its keyword research!

Strategy 3 – This involves going to Google Trends and searching these keywords you have already found out. Abondon any that don’t make sense to the product or have no trend at all. Anything that has started to rise recently should be kept very near the front of your potential keyword document. Others that might not have rised yet should be kept in the middle. And that’s it! Hope you enjoyed the post.

Top 5 Reasons Why You Need Citations for Local SEO

June 28, 2016 By: trafucomment

  1. Local SEOWhen you have citations in your website it will be more accessible to a lot of customers. It will be accessible because citations do not mean that the exact link or URL of your website is present on other websites. Citations now a day are the ones where your site is listed in business listing sites like sites where you can search for a list of businesses in a particular line of business or industry. Once your information is listed there or in local SEO, or the contact information of your business, then that is already a citation, which means possible customers can immediately reach you.
  1. Another reason is that you will be able to know how tight the competition already is in your industry because you will be able to search who are your top most competition, though only the ones that are using enough citations online but that would mean that those are the ones that are actively working in making their sites to be on top of search engines. The competition is actually not just to get more customers but to get on top of search engines, like Google for example. If you are someone who does a lot of research online, then you would understand how important it is for a site to be on top or even to be on the first page of search engines.

Citation

  1. When you have a good number or citations in the local SEO online then it is already a great validation of your business or site. One thing that you will benefit from citations for SEO purposes is that search engines will regard you as reliable because Google for example has its way of detecting the legit sites and not. The process is actually called crawling, where Google would send some crawlers or basically it is actually kind of spiders that will be sent virtually and look for valid citations. For example if your site has a lot of valid citations then you will have a big chance to be placed or will have a nice rank post in the Google. This logic, explains why you will not be able to see the same list of websites everyday if you type a certain keyword on the search bar of Google.
  1. Also, one reason why you need to have citations for local SEO is because you need to let the search engine, again Google for example that your site is legit and if it already acknowledges that it is legit and reliable, and then the search engine will categorise you to be in line with your line of business. This means that, for example, if your site is about makeup then if an internet user will type in makeup, then your site will come up in line with other websites that has makeup contents on their site.

  1. And then, the most important thing about citations is that the search engines will not only read how many links of other sites that are going to your own site, it will read plain texts that has exact name, address and other information of your website and this is how it is different to other styles or procedure in getting a rank in those search engines since that is how SEO usually works. This why also that when you make citations for your site, it should be the same exact info every time no matter how small the detail is like a period, that is how important and crucial citations are.

Tom BucklandAs Tom Buckland, a local seo expert based in Cardiff says (image right) citations are the cornerstone to a successful local seo campaign. They not only are a ranking factor in themselves but are also trust signals to Google, letting Google know you are looking for additional customers and clients. This in itself a huge benefit for building our localisation authority. Many people think they need to be a huge national authority to rank, but building localisation authority is actually more important.

Thanks for reading.

Introduction to Amazon Marketing

June 24, 2016 By: trafucomment

SuccessAmazon is one of the world’s largest retailers. Anything and everything is sold on Amazon, with the company itself even going into food and drink in the near future. Originally established as an online book store, Amazon now has thousands of businesses on their website selling products through FBA – Fulfilled by Amazon. This means the merchant sends all the items to an amazon warehouse, which then pack and deliver the items for the business. This frees up more time to focus on product design and quality as well as marketing. Generally this is seen as the future on business and why I am giving it a try too.

To get started is pretty easy, you simply have to have a product, build a listing for that product and send those products to amazon directly. The process has been outlined on a number of other websites, so I’m not going to talk about it today. Instead I am going to focus on the key element on how to actually rank a product in Amazon, as ranking high in the Amazon search engine itself, is the best way to make a large amount of sales. Generally this is referred to as amazon seo and although it is similar to Google SEO there are some key differences. There’s an epic guide on perfectly optimised listings for Amazon if you want to check that out.

How to Rank in the Amazon Search Engine

SEO Image

Ranking in Amazon is kind of the same as ranking in Google, the primary difference is the key metric. So lets cover the basics first and then get onto the main difference.

As you probably know, including your keywords in your title, url and on your website is key to ranking for these keywords in Google. This is much the same in Amazon and On-page optimisation is basically the same thing. So if you already know the key element for on-page SEO then implement these into your amazon listing and that will give you a great start. Ensure your listing contains all of your keywords and the description is very long (over 500 words.) You also don’t need to worry about over-optimisation with Amazon.

Once the on-page optimisation is complete its time to get sales and reviews! Unlike with Google (which is all about backlinks) Amazon bases their primary metric on sales. Now a high number of sales will improve your rankings, and a high number of reviews will improve your conversion rate and click through rate as well. This all has an impact on how high you will rank on the amazon search engine itself. But primarily you want to focus on a.) Sales – Getting as many as possible and b.) Reviews-  Getting to 10 reviews as soon as possible!

For more information on the amazon ranking strategies you can watch the video below.

Update – April 2018

Amazon is becoming more and more competitive by the day, we’ve recently helped the ASC guys build a massive list of top tools for sellers, this list is mega and awesome, would highly recommend giving it a read if you are serious about your Amazon efforts.

[Video] Stop Being So Boring with Your Marketing

May 28, 2016 By: trafucomment

If your anything like me then you know that there is nothing worse than good businesses with bad marketing, they can’t generate sales and as a result they can’t increase their marketing budget. It’s an evil evil cycle, but recently I spoke to the guys from supercarhire.co.uk and they spent me to a short video that talks more about viral marketing and how not to be boring in your marketing efforts. Tom and Jeff from supercarhire had a lot of capital tied up in stock (supercars) and as a result they weren’t able to market that much, but they used some pretty sneaky marketing techniques to get there brand in-front of buyers. 

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Harry Ford is a digital marketing expert based in the UK. Over the past 10 years Harry has helped over 100 businesses develop online marketing strategies to help generate more sales and expand their locations. For more information on any marketing, business, investing or tech consultations visit the contact page.

Recent Posts

  • 7 Effective Design Tips for E-Commerce Stores That You Need To Know
  • A Product Development Cycle
  • 3 Business tips for a scaffolding company
  • Another Case Study – Cardiff based client
  • Case Study 3 – Ranking in 2 Months for Security Plymouth

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