Importance of Google Reviews for SEO

Whether it’s from word of mouth or testimonials reviews have always been an integral part of a business’s success. The positive impact of great reviews for a business cannot be underestimated nor can the negative impact of bad reviews.

Reviews help potential new customers to decide whether they should choose your business over another, having positive reviews from past clients will instill confidence in them that they will experience the same satisfaction as those before them who left the positive reviews. If your website for instance had no reviews then a customer may feel unsure whether they will receive a good service as they have no past precedent or frame of reference to base their decision off. Having reviews can provide this much needed clarity.

While getting reviews from customers has always been an exercise that is beneficial to businesses, the importance of Google Reviews for SEO has never been greater. By having Google reviews you can actively improve the visibility of your business on Google so this means that Google reviews are good for your SEO.

The reason Google reviews have become so important for SEO is that when people use the Google search engine Google will aim to generate the most relevant and beneficial results for local web searches as the quality and quantity of reviews on Google is one of the most important ranking factors for local SEO. Google looks to see how many reviews your business has and what your current average rating is and from here they will determine where exactly in the listings of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) you should appear. Google themselves have even stated in the past that the “highest-rated” businesses near you will be returned when you search with local intent. By having your listing appear high with a great rating and a lot of reviews potential customers will be a lot more likely to click on to your website over your competitors and you will be a lot more likely to get conversions from these people.

A great part of any SEO strategy is to ensure that you can regularly get customers to give your business a review.

The best way to encourage people to give your business a review is to ensure the following:

  • Great Customer Service

By offering all customers a great customer service they will be happy and happy customers are a lot more susceptible to give you a positive review and share their good experience.

  • Simple Review Process

As well as ensuring that the customer service you offer is great, the second thing you should do to encourage reviews is to make the actual process of leaving you a review simple, straightforward and easy. The easier the process is the more likely people will be to take a second and give you a review. Don’t make the customer work for it!

2Cubed provide award-winning web design and mobile app development services. If you would like to give 2Cubed Web Design a review please click the link below:

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PPC Campaign

Is my PPC Campaign worth it?

April 30, 2019

Pay-per-click, commonly known as PPC, is a paid advertising strategy which is used to get your ad in front of your target demographic. When your PPC campaign is effective it can become a brilliant source of lead generation to your website. However conversely if your campaign is ineffective and is costing you money without giving you the leads and results you envisioned it can quickly become a very dear misadventure.

If you find yourself spending a lot of money on ads and PPC but still aren’t seeing good results then you need to take a step back and ask yourself the question “Is my PPC Campaign worth it?”. By taking a step back and evaluating the effectiveness or lack thereof of your campaign you can determine whether you need to tweak your campaign for better and improved results or whether you need to pause your campaign entirely and go back to the drawing board.

You need to be sure before you delete a PPC campaign because when you do you will lose all of its data and will be unable to retrieve any of it back. Before you delete an underperforming campaign you should first evaluate it and see if you can apply some tweaks to fix it and turn it into a strong performing campaign. To ensure your PPC campaign can perform as strongly as possible ensure that you have considered and took the following into account:

Evaluate Your Chosen Keywords:

For any PPC campaign to be successful it needs to incorporate the right keywords. These keywords need to be relevant to your target demographic. By undergoing proper keyword research before you start your campaign you can minimise the risk that you will incorporate irrelevant keywords in your campaign.

Landing Page Optimisation:

Your landing page will be the first impression for the users who you will get through your PPC campaign. Thus it is vital that your homepage gives a good first impression, by ensuring that the page is correctly optimised to give a good user experience you will increase your chances of getting conversions from your paid traffic. There is no point getting people to your website just for them to have a bad user experience and bounce, that will simply cost you money and give you nothing in return.

Created Ads:

Lastly you need to ensure that the ads themselves that you create need to be appealing and enticing enough to get people to click on them. To ensure that your ad speaks to your target audience incorporate the main keywords (which you will have discovered from your keyword research) into them and include a snippet that will act as a powerful and intriguing call to action.

Before you give up on your PPC campaign make the tweaks. By making these tweaks you should see an improvement in your PPC campaign and generate better results. For advice and information on having a successful website get in touch with 2Cubed today!

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Three Ways Your Web Design May Be Damaging your SEO

3 Ways Your Web Design May Be Damaging your SEO

April 25, 2019

As we have touched on before having a great Web Design employed throughout your website is very important to ensure that your website delivers a great user experience. We all know that a great user experience is great for SEO however if not properly done correctly web design can inadvertently end up actually damaging your SEO.

Three Ways Your Web Design May Be Damaging your SEO that you need to look for are:

Bad or no optimisation of Header Tags

Header tags (H1, H2, H3 etc..) are important for SEO as they help Google to determine what the content on your page is actually about. H1 should always be your page title and H2 tags need to accurately clarify what the page is about and what it contains. The other tags can be used when you go more in-depth.

Image Optimisation

A major factor in any web design is that it needs to visually be beautiful and pleasing to the eye of any user. To ensure that your images are successfully optimised you need to ensure the following three things have been done:

      • Ensure that relevant alt text has been applied to all your images.
      • Ensure that your image is compressed
      • Ensure that you have the correct image format

Non Mobile-Friendly Design

Since Google introduced Mobile-First Indexing the question of whether your website and web design is mobile friendly or not has become an extremely important one. Mobile-First Indexing means that Google will look at how your website performs on mobile first rather than on Desktop and from this judgement they will determine where your website will rank. Therefore if your web design for mobile is poor your SEO will be severely damaged.

If you can ensure that these three things are done then you will greatly reduce the chances of your web design damaging your SEO.

Mobile-First Indexing

Mobile-First Indexing and SEO

April 23, 2019

Mobile-First indexing was introduced by Google as an effort to make websites on the internet more mobile friendly. According to trends more users use mobile than desktop when browsing, so in accordance with this user behaviour trend Google have placed a higher emphasis on how a website is designed and works on mobile than on desktop. At its core mobile-first indexing means that when Google index websites and determine their ranking on a wide range of factors that they are basing their judgement firstly on how the website looks and performs on mobile rather than desktop. Since Google now actually indexes sites on a mobile first approach it means that they are first ranking your site on how responsive and how well designed it is for mobile.

If you are unsure whether your website is being negatively impacted it’s important to remember not to panic. According to Google themselves if your website is already responsive on mobile or if both versions on mobile and desktop are the same already then your rankings may not be affected at all.

However, it should be noted that even if your website is a very responsive site to rank well with mobile-first indexing in practice you need to ensure that both your website’s mobile page speed and it’s load time are fast and efficient and that all images are optimised correctly so that the user experience on mobile is not compromised or hindered in any way. By ensuring that your website looks great on a mobile device firstly you can be safe in the knowledge that it will then translate brilliant to other devices. That’s because if you design for the smallest screen first it will be a lot easier to successfully replicate on a big screen rather than if you were to take the opposite approach.

Designing for mobile first means that you have to design within it’s tighter limitations, while initially this may sound like a negative, it is actually a good thing because it will force you to really prioritize the content you display as you will have no room for extra fluff or fat. This helps to ensure that the all important user experience you deliver will be the best possible. When Google looks at your website as part of mobile-first indexing and determines that you are delivering an optimal user experience as well as having a website that looks and works well on mobile they will look favourably upon you and you will rank well so obviously it is great for your SEO.

For advice and information on having a successful website get in touch with 2Cubed today!

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Web design quote

3 Questions You Need to Ask When Getting a Web Design Quote

April 18, 2019

When you have made the decision to embark on the journey of getting your very own website for your business you may start to feel overwhelmed with where do you actually begin in this entire Web Development process. Well unless you are a web developer yourself the first step is to seek out a web design agency and get a quote from them to develop a website that you have envisioned.

Getting a web design quote is easy, what’s hard is wading through the plethora of quotes and finding the right web design agency who offers you a web design quote that is not only suitable for your budget but also that you can entrust to make your vision of the perfect website a reality.

Whilst money and cost is obviously a big deciding factor when choosing a web design quote there are also some other very important factors that shouldn’t be ignored when choosing which web design quote is the right one for you. In fact, ignoring these factors in favour of a “cheaper” quote might well cost you more in the long term when it comes to fixing website issues and problems that could have been easily prevented by going with the right web design agency for you. The following are questions one should always ask themselves:

    • Will the Website be bespoke?

      This is a very important question to ask as this well ensure that you weed out any web design agencies who simply just use templates when developing websites. By ensuring that the web design agency you choose creates bespoke websites ensures that your website will have it’s very own unique web design and style which will make it stand out from the competition.
      • What Platform will be used?

        It’s important to know what cms (Content Management System) your website will be developed on such as WordPress, Magento, Drupal etc… It’s important to know what platform your website will be designed and developed on because at the end of the project when you take control of the website you will need to be familiar with the CMS to actively be able to make changes and run the website yourself from a content management point of view.

     

    • What projects has the company worked on before, portfolio?

      Does the company have a portfolio of their previous work? If so make sure to check out some of these websites. By looking at how they are designed and working you will get a good insight into what your website will end up being like when fully designed and developed. If your website is focusing on a certain industry such as beauty or pharmaceuticals make sure to check if the web design agency has past experience with creating websites for other businesses in the same industry as yours.

Choosing a web design quote from a web design agency is a huge decision and one that shouldn’t be made lightly. By asking yourself the above questions you can minimise the risk that you make a bad choice.

2Cubed are an Award Winning Website Design company in Ireland with offices based in Wexford & Dublin. 2Cubed provide a range of online services for small and medium enterprises including Web Design, Web Development, and eCommerce Website Design. We offer well-designed and appointed websites for all levels of business. 2Cubed Web Design Wexford and Dublin also helps monitor and assist your progress post-launch, so that you’re given every chance of growing your website or application into a booming online business.

Please click on the link below to get a web design quote.

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The importance of an SSL Cert & HTTPS for your Website

April 15, 2019

If your website does not have an SSL cert then you are severely limiting the chances of your website being successful. In August 2018 Google began to flag websites who had not gotten an SSL Certificate for their website. This means that Google will mark all websites that have not already migrated to HTTPS as being “not secure”.

An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browsers remain private and integral. If you don’t have the SSL certificate, a secure connection cannot be established, that means, your company information will not be digitally connected to a cryptographic key.

When you wish to ensure that your website ranks consistently well on search engines you need to make it clear not only to Google but also potential new users that your website is safe to use and to browse on. By having an SSL Certificate your website will display as HTTPS and will not have the “Not Secure” message which will instill confidence in all users on the website that it is safe to browse and to use their credit card details to purchase any products/services that you may offer. Having HTTPS also instills confidence in Google who will reward you by pushing your website up the rankings higher than it would if your website was still HTTP.

Switching to HTTPS is simply the logical move, not only does it give your site more security, but it will also improve your rankings. To get your site to switch to HTTPS you will need to have an SSL Certificate. To inquire about getting an SSL certificate for your site get in touch with us today!

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Great Web Design Wexford

The Importance of Great Web Design for Great User Experience

March 28, 2019

In the world of Web Design & Web Development the goal of User Experience (UX) is to ensure that all users who visit your website have a positive experience whilst browsing on it. To ensure they have a positive User Experience the Web Design of the website should be done in a way which means the user can easily interact with the website and all of its respective functions and that none of their time is wasted and they are not frustrated in any way. Basically at its core the goal of delivering a great User Experience is to get your website successful conversions and repeat traffic because the users who visited the website had a good experience.     

To ensure your website has a web design that will deliver a great user experience the web and graphic designers working on it need to put themselves in the mindframe of the target demographic of users who will be visiting the website. User Experience is so important as it is what bridges the gap between users and the website and when done well it will hold their attention and keep them on the website.

To ensure that your Web Design will create a website with a great User Experience one should do the following:

  • Take on board fully all user feedback when testing the website and all information about user behaviour from tools such as Google Analytics 
  • Ensure that your web design is consistent throughout the entire website which will give the website a natural flow 
  • Ensure that your website page speed is very fast and that the page load times are good so that users will not get frustrated/bored/leave the website. 
  • Tailor your web design always with the user experience in mind

By having a website that has a Web Design that delivers a great user experience you will actively increase your chances of gaining followers to your website and making it a success. The best way to achieve this is to have consistent web design that is easy to navigate, easy to use with great functionality all developed always with the user in mind.

If you would like to inquire about improving your website’s design and user experience please contact 2Cubed and get your business the traffic and success it deserves. You can call us on 01-9058114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie or else get in touch using the live chat on our website!

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Website Page Speed

How to Improve Your Website Page Speed

Category: Tips and Tricks
March 19, 2019

Website page speed is the measurement of exactly how fast the content on your page loads. This means how long it takes to fully display the content of your page. One of the best ways to evaluate your page speed is to use the free tool Google PageSpeed Insights.

In one of our most recent posts we went into great depth on how important having good results on Google PageSpeed Insights really is. In that post we made the point that page speed is a very important factor for SEO as it is known that Google uses page speed as one of it’s many signals used by its algorithm when ranking pages. As well as being important to Google, page speed is very important to user experience also which plays a part in how your website ranks.

There are many ways to improve your website’s page speed such as:

Fully Switching over to https:

Ensuring that your website has an SSL Cert not only shows that your website is safe to browse on and to purchase products/services safely with your credit card but it will also help with your SEO as Google looks favorably on websites who have an SSL Cert over those who have none. Where this affects page speed is when the http version of your website is cached and redirects to your https version. By ensuring that your website automatically redirects to the https version you can greatly enhance the page speed.

Rectifying Image Related Issues:

Images tend to be a common issue that cause an unfavorable page speed. Images can cause issues unnecessarily as they can be a huge size and of too high of an image quality than required or needed. To rectify these two issues it’s recommended to take a look at all your images and to both compress and resize them as necessary. By resizing them to a more appropriate size and by compressing them to a more appropriate image quality you will reduce your page load time which will in turn improve your page speed.

Browser Caching:

By implementing browser caching on your website you are telling visitors to your website exactly how long their browsers should retain information/memory of your website for. This means that a message would be sent to the users browser that images on the website should be cached (remembered) for three weeks so that when this specific user visits the website again within this three week period your website will load more quickly as the resources to remember the images are being pulled from their device instead of your website. This takes some of the workload away from your website and in turn this will improve your page speed also.

Improving your page speed is a never-ending goal and something that should be continuously worked on to improve it as much as possible as it is so important not only to SEO and User experience but the overall success of your website.

If you would like to inquire about improving your website’s page speed please contact 2Cubed and get your business the traffic and success it deserves. You can call us on 01-9058114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie or else get in touch using the live chat on our website!

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The Importance of Ecommerce for Retail Businesses

The Importance of Ecommerce for Retail Businesses

Category: Tips and Tricks
March 15, 2019

Ecommerce has grown dramatically in its importance and its ability to be the deciding factor between whether a business is a success or not.

This was more clearer than ever from the findings in the 2019 PwC Irish Retail & Consumer Report which provides a vast array of interesting insights about consumers and the current state of the retail sector in 2019.

One of the prevailing recurring themes of the report was the need for retail businesses in this day and age to not only have a website but an Ecommerce website where customers can purchase products online.

Two key insights found in the report in relation to Ecommerce was that 20% of Irish consumers shop online weekly or more often via their mobile devices and also 30% of consumers purchased online weekly or more often in 2018, compared to 24% in 2017.

There are many reasons why you should consider having an Ecommerce website for your business if you haven’t already. Here are 3 great reasons why you should have an Ecommerce website:

Better Customer Experience

By having an Ecommerce website it is extremely convenient and easy for customers to browse your online store and purchase a product whenever they wish. By having an online store you remove the need for the customer to make the journey to your bricks and mortar location and purchase their product of choice. By giving them the convenience to do this at home they will be more at eased and relaxed. A happy customer is a buying customer.

Reach a Broader Global Market

By bringing your retail business into the digital market you will open yourself up to a whole new market that can potentially have a global reach. When you are a bricks and mortar business your customers will be generally just those in the immediate area as it would be inconvenient for others from further afield to travel just to shop at your store. By restricting yourself to only the local populace you have not only greatly reduced your target market but also reduced your potential earnings. By having an Ecommerce website you remove this restriction and your market is virtually endless in its reach.

Passive Earnings

By having an online store you are always open for business 24/7! This is a great advantage over a traditional shop which is open for a certain amount of hours and usually only on certain days also. When your store is online and always open for business people can purchase off you any day at any time. By giving them this convenient option you have endless opportunities to earn money as you are no longer restricted by traditional business hours.

While there is and will always still be a place for traditional physical retail businesses it cannot be denied that those choosing to shop online are increasing and will continue to do so into the future. By not having an Ecommerce website you’re not only restricting your potential earnings but you are ignoring an ever growing and important part of the retail market.

If you would like more information or would like to inquire about getting an Ecommerce website created and developed please contact 2Cubed and get your business the traffic and success it deserves. You can call us on 01-9058114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie or else get in touch using the live chat on our website!

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Wexford Business Awards 2019

Wexford Social Media & Digital Marketing Excellence Award 2019

March 11, 2019

The Wexford Business Awards which are now in their eleventh year, are county wide awards which recognise the entrepreneurialism, innovation, diversity and talent of businesses across all sectors in the county. The Wexford Business Awards honour Wexford’s industry leaders through the acknowledgement of their innovative business processes, product development, enterprise, sustainability and overall business success.

This year 2Cubed are delighted to be the official sponsor for the Wexford Social Media & Digital Marketing Excellence Award. The purpose of the Wexford Social Media & Digital Marketing Excellence Award is to recognize and honour Wexford based businesses who have achieved success in their sales and marketing by successfully utilizing the very best of the latest business thinking, creativity and technology to put themselves apart from all competition and to be number one in the frontier of social media engagement.

An independent panel of Judges will come together to discuss and decide who will be the lucky recipient of the 2019 Overall Wexford Business of the Year Award. They will choose the recipient of the  2019 Overall Wexford Business of the Year Award from the pool of winners of each existing category. The winners and runners-up in each of the award categories and the overall Wexford Business of the Year Award 2019 will be announced at the official County Wexford Business Awards Gala Ceremony, on Friday, 24th May 2019 in Clayton Whites Hotel, Abbey Street, Wexford.

2Cubed wish the best of luck to all involved in the 2019 Wexford Business Awards.

For any and all website support and queries please contact 2Cubed. You can also call us on 01-9058114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie or else get in touch using the live chat on our website!

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