Off-Site SEO: Maximising Your Search Potential

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The world of web design is a complicated and often confusing one. Most companies will have a professional to handle their development, along with someone to handle their marketing. But, out of all of this, most businesses will need help with SEO most of all. It’s likely that this aspect of your website is already handled for you. But, this doesn’t mean that you’re doing everything you can. There’s a lot of work you can do off-site which will make a huge difference to the search rankings your pages are given. To help you with this, this page will be covering some of the ways you can achieve this goal.

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Backlinks

Over the years, search engines like Google have had to make their algorithms more and more complicated. This is the unfortunate result of people taking advantage of older methods to get their sites into unrelated searches. As a part of this, search engines like to make sure that your website is trustworthy before they display it to their users. Having links from other sites going to your own website will help to do this, as it shows that you are significant to them in some way. Building a backlink strategy that works will take some time, and you might need some help along the way. Thankfully, there are loads of resources available across the web to help you out.

Social Media

Social media has had a huge impact on the way that people live their lives over the last few years. Of course, though, on their own, they probably won’t do much for your SEO. Using a tool like this, you have the chance to spread loads of backlinks which will come from a reputable site. Along with this, having people visit your site from social media will be very likely to increase your website’s viewership. This will help to improve the ranking of your pages, as search engines will see that your site is popular.

Google Search Console

There are loads of tools out there to help you with SEO, and a lot of them are completely free to use. Google’s Search Console is a great example of this, and a must for any website looking to get good rankings. Using this sort of tool, you can have search engines re-index your pages as you make changes and improvements. Along with this, you can get detailed data and information about your keyword success. Using this data, you can start to make easy improvements to the SEO on your site, as well as being able to make sure your efforts are successful.

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The Benefits

Doing this sort of work is almost guaranteed to have a positive impact on your website. Along with increasing the amount of hits your site gets, it will also increase the chances of people buying from you. People trust websites with higher search rankings, and will rarely go onto the second page of a search engine. To stand out from the crowd, you have to make sure you’re at the top.

Hopefully, this post will inspire you to start working harder on your off-site SEO. A lot of business will ignore this sort of work, assuming that their current standing will last forever. It’s important to keep improving this area, though. Otherwise, search engines will stop favoring your website.

The Only Guide You Need For Creating Strong Customer Relationships

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Creating strong customer relationships is positively key if you’re going to keep them for the long run. If you don’t mind whether they run off to your competitors, go ahead and leave this article. If you want to make sure that your customers love you and stay with you for the foreseeable future, then you need to know how to create a strong customer relationship. Read on to figure out how you can go about this!

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Be Honest About What You Can Do

If you’re not honest with your customers about what you can do, you’ll likely tarnish your reputation in the process. You might really want to do what they’ve asked of you, but if you know that you can’t or it won’t be very good, just be honest about it. They’ll respect you far more and you may even be able to come up with a solution. Always be as honest and authentic as possible.

Go Above And Beyond Expectations

Make sure that in every customer interaction you have, you go above and beyond their expectations. Doing more than they expect will make them remember you and come back to you again and again. Look at what your competitors do and figure out what you can do that will set you apart. Always aim to offer incredible value for money, unrivalled customer support, speedy delivery, and other things that will make you stand out.

Keep Things Lighthearted

Keep things lighthearted with your customers and they’ll feel more ready to open up to you about what they need. If they feel you are rude, indifferent, or unhelpful, they’re going to go somewhere else and ask questions. Be as helpful and happy as you can.

Learn As Much About Them As Possible

Learning as much about your customers as possible is important. After all; each one is individual – they are far more than just a number. You can learn about them in various ways, and there’s even software you can get that tracks the visitors who come to your site and gives you information about them so you can start building a strong relationship right away. One option is visual visitor. But is visual visitor worth signing up for? You do your research and decide!

Email Marketing

If you’ve met a few potential clients recently, perhaps at a conference or expo, you need to make sure they remember you. Often, no matter how friendly you are, they won’t remember you or what you do right from the get-go. Make sure you follow up after a meeting immediately, so that you stick in their minds. Personalize your emails to them if possible. Remember though; people are rarely ready for what you have to offer when you first meet them. This is why getting their emails and giving free insight is a great way to stick around in their brains for when the right time comes.

Remember that happy, loyal, engaged customers will be the best free marketing you will get. They will become like sales people for you, raving about your business and making sure everybody knows what they think. Make sure you use these tips to build strong customer relationships and you’ll create exactly this for your business!

When You’re Tied Up In Supply Chains, You Need A Strategy

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According to estimates by supply chain management organizations, the global supply chain market is worth more than $10 trillion a year. In short, it’s an enormous business, consuming some 6 percent of total world GDP, more than military spending and education combined. Getting our goods from one location to another is just really, really expensive.

As a company, managing your supply chain, organizing shipments and coordinating your efforts with other companies takes a lot of planning and effort. Here’s how to execute a great supply chain strategy without getting tied up in knots.

Get Better At Returns

Even in the most solid of supply chains, there’s a risk that either you or those further down the chain will receive goods they don’t want. This is an inevitable part of business and something which can never truly be eradicated. But it can become costly, especially if you don’t have the processes in place to reprocess or return items quickly.

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Returns management should be a major focus. You need to inform all staff on a standardized return process so that if a return is required, it can be dealt with as quickly as possible without imposing further admin costs. With a good returns policy in place, your company can stand to benefit too. If you notice the same items coming back to you, again and again, you can collect data and use that information to improve your processes. Collecting proper records of returns helps to reduce defects and deliver a better quality product to your clients.

Monitor The Performance Of Vendors

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As a business, you also depend heavily on the performance of your vendors. If they continually make late shipments or fail to supply adequate products, it can have a knock-on effect on your business. Making sure that your vendors are regularly monitored is essential. Monitoring provides you with direct evidence of their performance and allows you to target specific issues of concern. Today’s modern vendor management software provides all this information on an easy-to-understand dashboard, allowing you to see their performance in real time.

Improve Your Distribution Network Through Standardisation

If you’ve ever watched a large commercial logistics operation at work, you’ll have noticed something: everything is standardized. The reason for this is that standardization makes things predictable and easy to manage. Having the same model of truck, or the same kind of docking bay at a warehouse helps keep maintenance costs low and predictable. If you need a particular kind of truck, you can find a dealer here. Utilising the same equipment across your entire fleet allows workers and drivers to use any machinery that happens to be available without having to be retrained.

Use Data At Every Stage Of The Process

Businesses are beginning to realize that data holds the key to greater efficiency and profits. With the right data collection methods, you’re able to collect information about precisely what’s in your inventory, what’s on its way to your warehouse or facility, and what needs to be shipped in the next hours, days or weeks. The gives you an unprecedented ability to control and manage your stock and provides you with clear guidelines about which jobs have to be done by when.

Reduce Waste, Shrinkage, And Fraud

Supply chains aren’t impervious to human error or malicious acts. They can be exploited by criminals within your organization, or become the victims of accidents. Some companies never fully investigate leakages like this, while others make a point of it. A leak in your supply chain could ultimately wind up costing you a lot of money. That’s why leading companies always make sure that the numbers reported in their software matches up to the figures after a physical count.

The best way to do this is to use scanning technology. Rather than have workers go out and manually count all the items in your inventory (with all the human error associated with that process), it’s much better to count items both in and out of your facility so that you can isolate problems in your supply chain. Running a tight ship will quickly tell you whether shrinkage problems are arising upstream or downstream from your facility. Once this happens, you can then pass on your data to the affected parties and help them resolve any security issues they may be having.

Automate Everything

Automation technology has come on leaps and bound in recent years. The annual demand for tactile robots is doubling, and by 2020, the market for robots will be nearly 10 times what it was in 2010. With so many robots coming onto the market, the cost of automating supply chain processes is going to fall dramatically: in fact, it is already.

Currently, the majority of robots are software-based. They do things like buy inventory automatically if levels start to fall, negating the need for human administrators. They’re also able to monitor inventory levels and issue warnings if levels fall too low and production is jeopardized.

In the future, robots will become an increasingly important part of the entire supply chain process. Driverless trucks will deliver payloads to robotic warehouse robots, which will then ferry components to their designated areas. The only job for humans will be to supervise the process, and fix the robots when they go wrong.

Get Your Team To Understand The Cost Of Managing A Supply Chain

A supply chain is an interdependent economic construct. Each element in the chain depends, indirectly, on the costs imposed by every other link. Although it is difficult to communicate across companies and coordinate, getting your own team to cooperate on matters of cost is a lot easier. Make sure that senior managers in your company are talking to each other and understand how costs they impose on their part of the supply chain impacts other departments. Knowing exactly where your business is spending money is a surefire way to improve the performance of parts of the business which are not so cost-sensitive. Having a central database of departmental costs across your entire company will make it easier for you to streamline your operations.

Starting A Business? Utilising Experts Can Help!

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When you start your own business, you are putting yourself in a position of ‘jack of all trades’. As a one-man-band, you are effectively doing it all yourself until you get enough traction in your company to bring in more people to help you with your business growth. Not every business owner wants to handle every area of their business, and contrary to popular belief, this is okay! It’s not a failure to want to concentrate on your own strengths and to do this, you need to know where the experts are. Part of your business plan will include a portion on expansion and to be able to facilitate this, you need to be able to focus on the areas of your business that are strengths for you. It’s not a bad thing to know your weaknesses as a business owner, but if you don’t own those weaknesses from the beginning you could find yourself drowning before you’ve even begun.

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The best way to ensure that your company doesn’t fall at the first hurdle is to explore outsourcing. Most entrepreneurs are aware that they have a plethora of talents, if they didn’t they wouldn’t have what is required to get a business off the ground. However, this doesn’t mean that you have every single tool at your disposal to make your company a success. You may not be at the point yet where your company is ready to expand, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have the budget to pay the experts to help you! The hard work of starting a business doesn’t end with a successful launch, it only starts at that point. Not being able to do it all in your company means you need to know where to look to find help. There are many pieces of a business that get outsourced, and the most common are IT, marketing and human resources. If you aren’t aware of how you can outsource, you can read this more in-depth article for more information.

When you start a business, you have to take in as much advice as possible so that you can be a success. Business growth starts with asking for help and it’s that help that can keep your business afloat. When you get advised to outsource some of your business processes, you can feel like some of your company is being taken off of you. Taking steps toward outsourcing can be a long process while you decide how to manage your business. As a progressive entrepreneur, playing to your strengths is the smartest business strategy you can implement. The thing is, to be able to concentrate on your strengths you have to allow outsourcing to happen.

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Knowing when you should outsource your daily, time-consuming activities is difficult. If you have a team in-house who are ready to take on the work, timing your outsourcing will centre around you and your staff being unable to continue with the workload. You want your business to grow, but if you have no time left in the day to pursue the growth, then consider outsourcing. You don’t need to have absolute control over everything in your business, so read this article here and learn how to delegate tasks effectively. There is a lot of advice online that can tell you when the optimal times to outsource is, but popular advice says that outsourcing from the very beginning is the best idea. You could start by outsourcing your payroll processes to an external accountant or finance company, and grow into other ventures from there.

We mentioned earlier that IT, human resources and marketing are the most common business elements that are outsourced and the chances are you are already outsourcing your finances. Any task in your business that you haven’t got the time to dedicate your attention to can be outsourced. Using a digital marketing agency to handle your campaigns instead of managing them yourself can be hugely beneficial and money very well spent. Marketing is such a big deal for businesses, as you have the choice of print marketing, digital marketing, email marketing and mobile marketing at your fingertips. You need to spend time on business growth and all of these marketing elements are going to be a big part of that growth. If you hand over your marketing campaigns to an outside company, you end up with a whole team of people working for you that you have allocated your budget to. The beauty of this is that you are not going to be the one to manage personalities, salaries or ego as you have taken that outside of your office. All you have to do is approve the campaigns that your outsourced marketing team comes up with.

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When you are choosing which areas of your business you should outsource, you should ensure that you are doing it for the right reasons. Your area of expertise may not lie in data management and analysis, nor would it lie with data protection, so outsourcing your IT services to a company that specialise in those areas is a smart decision to make. Business management is all about knowing where your strengths lie and capitalising on those. You can pay outside companies to be strong in the areas that you are not and this is something very important to remember. Finding the right IT companies, HR companies and marketing companies to work on your behalf is rather like interviewing individual staff. You have to know your long-term aims and goals before you can go ahead and sift through the many businesses that offer those services.

The key to finding the right businesses to work with will come from recommendations, reviews and personal experiences of those in the same niche of business that you are in. If a trusted mentor tells you to use a particular company because of their efficiency and value for money, it’s worth looking into. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will be the right company for you, but it’s always good to trust the word of someone you know. Once you’ve found the right providers for the work you need, it’s time to check and recheck references and draw up contracts. You must be sure to effectively communicate your expectations to the companies that you want to outsource to. What you have in mind may be completely different to what a new, trendy company has in mind. You have to be clear about the service you want to pay for and as time goes on, a relationship can be built. It isn’t easy to let go of control of parts of your company that you have grown and nurtured, but the only way to keep that vision successful is to trust that there are people out there who have more expertise than you do.

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The last thing you need to do as a business owner is let go. The control that you have to hand over is not simple, but the collaboration of working with other companies can open so many more doors for you. You need experts on your side in all fields to be able to be a success, and it’s less about the logic and more about the mindset behind it. You may be the only person who knows exactly what your business needs, but it takes a village to achieve that vision with you. There’s no need to run everything yourself when as a team, you can get your business to the heights you’d like it to be.

Sign in Why Your Sales Figures Are Low & How To Improve Them

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One thing that a lot of newer businesses struggle with is sales. Have you noticed that your figures are down on your monthly sales report? Are you concerned about the reason why that is? The important thing is not to panic. Your sales might be low, but that doesn’t mean that your business is doomed to fail. Sure, it may fail if things don’t pick up, but if you can turn things around, that doesn’t have to be the case.

In order for your sales to pick up, you need to understand why they are low in the first place and how you can improve them. Bearing that in mind, below is a guide to some of the most common reasons why businesses have low sales and ways to change that. For everything that you need to know, read on.

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Your product isn’t needed

If there is one reason why products do not sell, it is because they aren’t needed. If you are offering a product that has no value to it or is too similar to another product, the chances are that it won’t sell. Most people won’t buy products that they don’t need, so what you offer needs to be something that is needed. If this isn’t the case, as a brand, you need to convince people that they need your product. Take bottled water, for instance; it isn’t a necessity because water comes out of the tap, and yet, billions of bottles of the stuff are sold each year. Why is that? Because customers have been convinced that it tastes nicer and is better for them than tap water. Want your product to sell? Yes – then you need to convince people that they need it.

There’s no urgency

Have you seen those TV infomercials where the company offers 40% off for a period of 30 days. They always state things like ‘get yours now before it’s gone’ and ‘buy yours now at our reduced rate’. These kinds of messages and deals create a sense of urgency, which encourages consumers to make a purchase there and then, instead of putting it off. This is a fantastic marketing ploy and one that all businesses should use.

Your marketing isn’t on point

If people don’t know about your product, then they can’t buy it, can they? Sometimes the reason that a product isn’t successfully selling is because it is not being marketing in the right way. The key to success is using multiple marketing streams, including both inbound and outbound marketing. What you want to ensure is that your marketing is professionally planned and managed, so say you want to incorporate PPC, it’s worth using a service like Falcon Digital Marketing PPC, instead of attempting to deal with this yourself. As by going professional, you can ensure that the methods in place are effective, and will help to boost sales.

There is a lack of trust

For a product to be successful, consumers need to trust the brand. If there is a lack of trust, this can mean that a product doesn’t sell as well as it should do. To build trust, it’s a case of building a rapport with consumers. The best ways to do this is via offering the best customer care and using tools like social media to help boost the rapport between your brand and your consumers. Think networking chats, competitions, and giveaways – anything that helps to build a relationship is useful.

There you have it, a guide to why your sales figures are low and ways that you can improve them.