The graphic design on your website can play a major role in your conversion and bounce rates. The bounce rate of a website is the rate at which people leave the site within the first 5 seconds. This should be kept as low as possible at all times. The conversion rate is the rate at which people visiting the site are turning into customers and buying from it. Both are very important with internet marketing and promotion.

Having your graphic design done to the highest of standards can lower your bounce rate as it can help to draw attention to the site. People are more likely to stop and take a second look at a site with interesting and well designed images or graphs. If an image is unusual or colourful it is sure to grab the attention of the user and from there the user is more likely to explore the site more. Once they’ve explored the site a bit more, they’re a lot more likely to buy the product or service the site is offering.

Just having a well designed banner can mean the difference between a sale and a potential customer leaving straight away. Graphic design is often overlooked with marketing and it can potentially be a game changer in the industry.

Following a recent survey, it has been found that around 20% of Google searches are performed looking for local services. This figure is doubled when mobile searches are taken into consideration too. Bearing this in mind, why does this seem to be the case?

Starting with the more obvious, mobile search is pretty easily explained. When you’re searching on your mobile, more often than not it will always be for a local service because you’re trying to find a number. This could be for a taxi firm, plumbing firm electricians, builders and etc. When you’re looking for a number, you want one for a local business, rather than a company far away.

Google places and social media signals are changing search rapidly and are becoming more relevant all the time. This is because Google are trying to make search more user involved. Google places are user created pages displaying key information about a company and social media is user shared and created content. It’s the perfect measure for relevancy within the results.

Without a Google places page, you stand little chance of ranking for local terms. The same goes if you’re not keeping relevancy throughout adverts and citations. For example, if your business address is listed as “123 Example Street” then throughout adverts you should always reference that and not “123 Example St”.

When developing a site, we will often visualise a function or display and then struggle to bring the idea to life due to its complexity. In static website design, many of the advanced functions of websites can be very difficult to achieve. Not while developing in WordPress though.

WordPress is an advanced, yet simple to use Content Management System (CMS). This meaning that you can use advanced functions with great ease. This can usually be done through the use of the many plugins available. WordPress plugins can be used to perform a wide array of different functions such as creating Meta data, side scrollers, Ecommerce sites, linking posts to social media and much more.

There is an endless pit of plugins available, some free and some at an expense. To be honest though, most plugins you would use can be found for free, or at least another version. They are also extremely easy to add to your site. A new plugin can be added to your site within a matter of minutes.

WordPress is extremely easy to use and can form pretty much any site you can imagine using plugins, widgets, themes and more.

So it’s coming round to that time of year and everyone is getting a bit festive. But what does that mean for your SEO campaign? We know that when it comes to the festive season, nobody wants to work, which is why it’s so important to perfect ones SEO before leaving for Christmas. Who would want to spend their holidays worrying about rankings?

You should want to cover every angle in preparation for the break. Always ensure that your content is up to date and relevant to the topic. This is to prevent the loss of rankings from irrelevant content. Not only this, but often when reviewing a site, you’ll come across mistakes you previously missed. Mistakes in grammar and spelling can also affect rankings.

Update your blog. Updating your blog is a great way of providing fresh content for Google. In order to still have continuous posting throughout Christmas, you basically have 2 options. The first is to go on your blog and post manually from home if you’re not in work. The second (and perhaps most preferred) is to schedule some posts to be gradually posted throughout the holidays.

In terms of you offsite SEO, there isn’t that much you can do in preparation for a break. About the best you can do is to perform some link building as a last action before you close up for Christmas. If you can get some links cemented in place then it will put you in good stead to keep or even gain rankings over Christmas.

You may take a holiday, but Google doesn’t. Who knows what updates or changes they will do whilst the Christmas period runs. This is why it’s important to be fully prepared for the winter break. It’s always better to be safe than sorry.

Although there are a lot of different methods for search engine optimisation, you need to apply a certain level of structure if you’re to be successful within the rankings. SEO is a very diverse field with varying techniques. Every company operates differently but there are specific actions that should be carried out in particular orders.

For example, always do your keyword analysis and research before performing any SEO. How are you meant to optimise a site when you don’t know what keywords you’re optimising it for? Always ensure that you use internet tools (such as the Google keyword tool) to ensure the accuracy of your research. Never guess with your keywords as this could lead to missed opportunities or to you targeting keywords that aren’t going to drive you any traffic at all.

Once you’ve carried out all of the preliminary keyword research, you can begin on your SEO campaign. Now as a rule, we would always start the campaign with the onsite factors being implemented first. This is because there is little point in link building and promoting a website that isn’t optimised yet as there may be errors on the site. This goes double for fresh sites that are having the content generated for the first time. It is always advised to develop the site prior to promoting and linking to it. Not only will this give a more professional impression but it will help with the rankings.

After you’ve gained a good standing with onsite and offsite optimisation, it may be a good idea to begin or focus more on your social media marketing. This is because your site will have already established authority within the search engines and chances are, you’ve developed it some more since beginning, raising the chance of conversions through social media. People like to trust a well known brand and so once you’ve gained a few rankings, they’ll be able to see you in the results and will more likely respect that. Social media is all about interacting with your customers and creating communication channels.

Following your social media marketing, while still carrying it out, you may want to begin advertising elsewhere. By now, if you’ve been successful with the actions taken so far you should have an increased income and so can work towards expanding your advertising campaign beyond SEO and the internet (should you wish to of course.) This post has merely scratched the surface of the techniques and implementations that you can carry out. This is a rough guide as to how many believe the structure of an SEO campaign should be set out. You can have a much greater chance with the rankings if you have a well thought out and structured SEO campaign in place.