Preamble by Jan Klin:

The last time I met Colin was during a SEO course I was running. Surprisingly he had little content on his homepage and NO metatags (no title , description or keyword tags) but still ranked number one on Google for ‘Nile Cruise’.

This is a great example of the importance of building quality links to get top rankings. After the interview below Colin explains in detail how he went about getting these links. A great lesson for all of us….

How would you describe your company and its mission?

We are an “online” retail travel agency business. We used to have 3 “high street” bricks and mortar shops on Merseyside but sold them to Going Places and moved “online” about 10 years ago.

Initially we had a “generic” travel website that allowed clients to search for almost any type of holiday but over the last few years we have started to create “niche” travel websites where we target specific specialist destinations, such as “Nile Cruises”, “Cape Verde Holidays”, “Cuba Holidays”, etc, etc.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

We have had websites for about 10 years but have had our “niche” websites for about 3 years and are adding to them all of the time. Our first real “niche” website was www.Nile-Cruises-4u.co.uk and our latest are www.ChinaHolidays4u.co.uk and www.goaholidays4u.co.uk

The great benefit to being online is that when we had our bricks and mortar agencies we basically only had our passing trade and when that passing trade had booked their holidays we found it hard to increase our sales. Plus there was great competition on the High Street which made getting our share of the passing trade that much harder.

Of course there is great competition online but I think the playing field is much more level. By that I mean that you can be a tiny company “offline” in terms of employees and resources but if you are reasonably interested in grasping “online” optimisation and strategies you can compete with the big players. In fact, because a small online company is usually able to create their own sites quickly and economically as well as alter them in an instant I think that they are much better placed than a major player to act very quickly to react to changes in the marketplace on a daily or even hourly basis. Plus its’ much easier to be “proactive” rather than “reactive” as a smaller player.

Does the site work for you? i.e. deliver the benefits you were expecting?

Yes the sites really do deliver the results we were looking for. Obviously it has taken a bit of time to reach the position we are currently in but now we know a lot more about what we are doing we can create and get a new “niche” site online within days, and, using an initial Google Adwords campaign, can be getting potential clients to the site the same day. In fact its’ a fantastically exciting business model. Un-reaptable in any other format.

What is your online marketing strategy? – which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

Our main strategy is based on trying to reach the first page of Google’s natural search results.

Our Nile Cruise site is currently fluctuating between number one and number two for the key phrase Nile cruise out of 567,000 and we are number two for the second search term Nile cruises out of 189,000.

Thanks to attending a breakfast seminar led by yourself last November and really taking onboard your recommendations, particularly back-links, we have reached those current placements pretty quickly and the difference is amazing.

Prior to being at number one or two on Google we conducted a Google Adwords campaign for the site that meant we spent £40 a day to bring in traffic. We usually paid about 60p per click which meant we were guaranteed to get a least 66 visitors a day to the site.

Now being at number one we get an average of 600 visitors a day to the site and as you can imagine our conversions from site visitors to actual sales has risen tremendously.

In January we received approximately 18000 visitors. If we were paying Google 60p per click/visitor that would have cost us £10,800!! Which we just could not have done.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

To be honest we do not have any “offline” marketing strategy or budget. Everything is done online.

How much business do you do on the web?

100%

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

To keep on developing “niche” travel sites, following on the “long-tail” concept that even though some of our “niche” sites will not do massive sales by having a large number of such specialist sites the combined sales figures will be excellent.

Plus, of course, implementing the various strategies I have learnt from attending your recent full day “Search Engine Masterclass” which I found fascinating, exciting and marvellously practical. So I’m very excited about our future online development.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

That it takes time, effort and enthusiasm. Plus you need to seek out the experts, (like yourself) and learn all you can from them. Then…keep on keeping on.

Can you imagine life without a website?

No. Our websites are our business. I would never go back to operating on the High Street. We now have thousands of clients from all over the country and from many countries overseas. This could never have happened without us being “online”.

How I Build my quality links.

Normally I will take my top 5 competitors for the same keyword/phrase that I’m trying to compete on and do a search for their links. For example I will use the “link:www.firstcompetitorsdomain.co.uk” search on Google to find out how many backlinks each of my competitors has. (Actually a more accurate way is to go to www.linkpopularity.com and click on the Yahoo ‘click to view’ option.) Then I’ll take that list of back link partners and visit each one individually looking for an “add your site” button so that I can obtain a backlink too.

I then go through each competitor in the same way, searching out their backlink partners and asking them for a backlink to me. I sometimes have to provide a backlink from my site but not always.

I also use the list of directories supplied by SEOMOZ.com and I have also paid the $299 to Yahoo Directory as I have read many times that this is worth paying for.

Finally, I search out for “on-topic” blogs that I can add a post to ensuring that I add my name as whatever anchor text I’m trying to create backlinks for. So if I’m trying to be found for “Florida Holidays” I will “sign” my blog post answer as “Florida Holidays” which means that my name is my chosen “anchor text”. I know that some blogs have a “no follow” rule for posts but just as many dont’ and I have found this method a good way of getting good backlinks.

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How would you describe your company and its mission?

Small with a big website! Everyone who contacts us presumes that we are a large national company. I don’t think we are misleading them, I think because we have good rankings they assume we must be big.

Our mission is to design and build top quality additional living space in our client’s gardens. We solve accommodation problems in a unique way by building ‘housing quality’ home offices in people’s gardens.

We also design and build en-suite guest rooms and granny annexes for the bottom of the garden. A great alternative for people who don’t have the space to extend their house.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

We have had a website since the day we started trading four years ago. Our website is our only route to our customers. Because our clients come from diverse backgrounds and interest groups and can live anywhere in the country, contacting them through targeted, printed media is difficult.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

The site does work for us, but I do need to work on expanding our marketing to drive more prospective customers to it.

What is your online marketing strategy? – which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

Our on-line strategy is purely based on search rankings. Thanks to your effort (Jan) we are positions one and two for our two main search terms.

More specifically for the term garden office we are second out of 157,000,000 competing pages! and for the term garden offices first out of 4,700,000!

Adwords for niche markets such as ours is prohibitively – up to £2 per click.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

The market we are trading in is new and I have yet to find a reliable form of off-line marketing. I am always open to suggestions for off-line activity!

How much business do you do on the web?
100%

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

I find it alarming that we have to rely 100% on the web, so I do value your work (Jan) as a way of protecting our valuable position.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

We have to fight hard to keep our position using ethical methods. Some of our competitors aren’t interested in trading ethically on the internet and use cloaking and other dubious techniques. I think this makes them the losers in the long run.

Can you imagine life without a website?

It would be nice, but I wouldn’t have a business

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How would you describe your company and its mission?

Based just south of Chester, Blue Chip Technology designs and manufactures a range of embedded boards and industrial grade, rugardised computer systems.
Our single board computers bring the functionality of a complete computer to a very small board, roughly the size of a beer mat, which is then embedded into niche applications such as blood analysers, factory lasers, intelligent security cameras etc.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

The website has been in existence for best part of ten years, our target audience are mainly engineers who will go to the web as their first port of call when researching potential products.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

We updated the website about four years ago – bringing in more material such as case studies and improving the structure. However, our Google referrals dropped, Google has always brought us the most enquiries and subsequent business. We worked with Jan Klin&Associates to improve our organic rankings – it didn’t require any huge changes in content just more focus with things like key word placements, page titles and link building. Over a period of a few months we have seen huge improvements bringing us to a top five position across many of our key search terms.

For example if you do a search for “ industrial computers “ or “ single board computers “ we come 4th in Google out of 156,000,000 and 75,200,000 competing web pages respectively!

These terms get searched for tens of thousands of times per month and our positions bring in loads of enquiries.

What is your online marketing strategy? – which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

As well as SEO we pro-actively seek out industry relevant directories to appearin with a link back to our site. We also have a programme of e-shots, including a general newsletter and specific promotions/product launches. All communications include an opt-out. Respondees who do opt out are automatically blocked from receiving further communications from Blue Chip Technology.

Any activity like this is only as good as the database behind it – we’re starting a program to clean and segment our data making it possible to tailor future communications.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

We tend to combine a number of communications in any one campaign – e-shots, traditional post and telephone follow up. For example, we have metrics in place which collect open and click rates on e-communications which we can then use to prioritise any follow ups.

How much business do you do on the web?

Most of our sales – over 80%, our generated from web searches whether they come through via an enquiry form, e-mail or telephone call. Our customer base is proficient in using web technology and our product range is technically sophisticated – making the web the perfect marketing forum.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

I see improving our organic search engine rankings as phase 1, the next stage is to analyse the way people are using our site. Where do they come from, how do they navigate, what’s popular, is there anything turning them off?

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

When designing your website you will obviously strive to make it accessible and informative for your potential customers but don’t forget about the Google spiderbot. On the whole, a website with a good repository of well structured, up to date information forms the basis of good search engine ranking but it does need to be optimised to really achieve it’s full potential and put your name ahead of your competitors.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Absolutely not – it’s our window on the world, today I’ve found out about the Low Pin Count bus, applying for a Russian visa and a recipe for Onion Soup.!

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How would you describe your company and its mission?

www.doyourownpr.com teaches small and growing businesses how to do their own PR, saving them thousands of pounds in PR agency fees every month. I’ve been in PR since the early nineties, first working for other agencies and then as owner of a PR consultancy myself. However, as the owner of a business with offices and staff to pay for I found that the clients I ended up working to pay the bills with weren’t necessarily the most interesting for me. I wanted to help the smaller guys, the one that couldn’t really afford big PR contracts. These were the companies with the innovative ideas that still had the passion for their business. So, Do Your Own PR was born. We now show businesses how to do their own PR in a variety of ways. These are :

* A straight forward email 30 day PR course that takes them through how to plan and run a PR campaign
* PR coaching where we have a monthly teleconference to work on their PR campaign
* A full PR consultation, where we put together a PR plan and write a press release for them.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

I have had a website since 2002, this particularly version since 2004, and its main purposes are to sell the courses and also encourage people to sign up for my newsletter. After they’ve had a few months of getting our suggestions of how to do their own PR they often get in touch to move onto becoming clients.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

We can definitely see it growing and see SEO as a vital part of our overall promotional mix.

What is your online marketing strategy? – which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

I write articles and post them on article sites, offer them to other business people for their website or newsletter. We obviously do a lot of Pr too! I used to do a lot of online networking which worked very well when we were starting up and had more time. I just don’t get the same time to do that now but it’s something I feel is important. Our own newsletter is vital – we get about 80% of our business through it.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

Offline I do a fair bit of networking and speaking which works well – we have people coming to us who heard me speak four years ago and remembered it. I also write for business magazines on the subject of PR.

How much business do you do on the web?

Numbers of sales are split equally, although our offline sales tend to be larger.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

I want this to increase. We have a number of courses, not just the PR course, but also courses on creating a newsletter, networking, copywriting and cold calling, and I feel that we haven’t really even got going on the marketing of these yet. We’ve also just put together a course of how to start and run your own PR agency which I feel has huge potential.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

Persistence – little and often seems to work both for the business and for us as it’s not too overwhelming and can be incorporated easily into the working week. I aim to do something promotional every day, whether it’s visiting a networking lunch, posting an article on the site or someone else’s site, or just dropping an email to an old contact.

Can you imagine life without a website?

No! not at all – it’s part of me and what I do now. Even my kids want one now – my 11 year old wants one to sell his home made comics and my 9 year daughter to sell her home-made cards. Good to know they’re learning about business early!

DoYourOwnPR – specialises in PR strategies for Businesses

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How would you describe your company and its mission?

Bump Magic is an online store, information centre and community forum for women who are pregnant, trying to conceive or new mums. Our goal is to become the preferred online resource for every pregnant woman in the UK.

Bump Magic was conceived while I was on maternity leave in 2005 following the birth my little boy, Ethan, largely due to the desire not to have to go back to work in an office while he was still young and the fact that the internet was my main source of entertainment and information while I was on leave! Every mum-to-be has a thirst for information about the changes affecting them during pregnancy, a struggle to source good maternity clothes and products, and an insatiable need to share their experiences with others, so I set to work creating Bump Magic based on my own needs as a mum-to-be.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

The Bump Magic website was launched in September 2006, and is an online presence only operated from my office at home.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

Yes and no. I was initially expecting the online shop to be the major source of activity on the website. With so much competition in the market place however, it became clear that that was not going to be the case straight away. The forum on the other hand, was initially an after-thought which my web developer suggested to me a couple of weeks before the website launched. I was familiar with forums having used them on occasion in the past, but the Invision Power Board software which he demonstrated to me was so much more advanced than what I imagined that I agreed straight away to add it as a feature to the website.

Ironically it is the forum which now generates 90% of the website’s activity.

Originally the online shop was targeted at products required by pregnant women. The forum has however attracted a huge number of members who are trying to conceive, and so the online shop is expanding its product range to cater for that market also.

Whilst the online shop remains an important feature of the website, it is clear that the main attraction is the forum. This has opened up a potential new income stream for me and

I am arranging to have Google Adsense and other third party advertising on the forum pages as a means of generating income. The forum also has the functionality to require members to “subscribe” to otherwise “locked” areas of the forum, which only become accessible to the forum member upon payment of a regular subscription. Whilst I have no intention of introducing subscription payments to the Bump Magic forum members for the forum as it currently stands, I do have some ideas for new and optional aspects to the forum and for which it would be appropriate to charge a subscription payment and which I will be exploring over the next few months.

What is your online marketing strategy? – which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

At the launch of the website I followed the guidance detailed in your blog to and spent a month’s worth of evenings in September 2006 creating one way links to the website in the recommended search engine directories, creating articles to add to online article banks and also creating some reciprocal links. In order to keep costs down, I primarily listed the site in directories that didn’t require a payment, the few that did require a payment I only listed if the requirement was no more than £5 for an evergreen listing.

After a month, I moved away from search engine optimisation as other areas of the website required my focus.

Over the last 4 months I have focussed on advertising the forum aspect of the website through Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcentre, the response was phenomenal and the forum has taken on a life of its own. Today we have 386 registered members and over 14,000 individual posts. Although it was very labour intensive for me in the beginning (try creating conversations with yourself online and then remembering which conversation you have had with which of your other aliases) it now requires minimal time management from me– I now have 5 forum members who have taken on the responsibility of being forum moderators, and on a voluntary basis.

The forum is an amazing tool which generates rich content and search engine saturation relatively easily – the members create the content themselves. As a result my organic search engine listings are high and so I have recently been able to reduce the budget on the Adwords and Adcentre campaign by over 50%.

In February 2007, I was pleased to discover that the website had a Google Page rank of 3/10. An incredible achievement considering I had only focussed on search engine optimisation in the initial month of the website’s launch back in September and had paid little attention to it since!

The statistics speak for themselves:

Hits: September 2006 – 4,908 March 2007 – 628,701

Visits: September 2006 – 137 March 2007 – 17,276

Once I have the website in a position where it generates income from third party advertising, I then intend to place affiliate advertising for Bump Magic on third party websites and spread its online reach that way.

I have also yet to advertise the online shop aspect of the website via Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcentre, and so that is also a campaign in waiting too.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

For the first 3 months I invested in advertising in the classifieds in the glossy magazines aimed at our target market, it was expensive and generated a poor response, and I have vowed never to go down that line again.

A particular product line which we have in the online shop is imported from the US, and the UK market is not yet fully aware of it. It will therefore be necessary for Bump Magic to spend some time and money advertising this particular product within the editorial section of the magazines aimed at our target market over the coming months, but that is a product specific activity as opposed to marketing the Bump Magic business generally.

How much business do you do on the web?

Bump Magic is an online resource only and so 100% of our business is online.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

Having seen the benefits of my initial search engine optimisation activity I am about to start another period of SEO activity to maintain and improve the website’s ranking, focussing on improving the presence of the online shop.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

Don’t be afraid to let your business idea change direction if the opportunities which open up to you are not the ones which you originally planned to follow.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Yes (I would probably have an early night once in a while!), but generally I couldn’t imagine life without the internet I would feel lost without it.

Anything else you want to add?

I often read that people who start their own business felt like giving up on many occasions but were pleased that they persevered. When your business is only a part time business/hobby then you really do wonder what you are doing it all for! But I’m pleased to say that I am persevering and beginning to see the results of the risks I have taken.

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How would you describe your company and its mission?

Our mission is “To lead in high quality, truly international education whilst being immersed in Manchester’s unique cultural setting.”

Manchester Academy of English is an international English language school. Established in 1991, we welcome more than 50 different nationalities each year. We are accredited by the British Council, a member of EnglishUK and English in the North, a consortium of recognised English Language establishments located in the North of England.

The company was sold in 2005 and the new management has raised the turnover by 20% approx.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

Since 1998.

The main purpose of our website is to promote our company, our products and our services on a worldwide basis round the clock.

The website is a great tool to generate business for direct bookings (which arrive to us without any commission given to an intermediate). But also a good reference to potential agents which we are targeting for new businesses development.

Does the site work for you? I.e. deliver the benefits you were expecting?

Yes but we need to look at tapping into the potential the Internet offers, e.g., e-learning, virtual classroom, correspondence courses, etc…

What is your online marketing strategy? – Which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

Our online marketing strategy is not strong enough as the correct tools to measure our results have never been developed by the Sales and Marketing department. We need to develop it further. We do sometimes take part in special offers targeting some segmented market (i.e. Asia) or get an exposure through Google.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

Our Sales & marketing strategy is not sophisticated as an example, we just start building some marketing intelligence through country reports.
We have a data system “Class” but we don’t maximise its use.

In the future we should eventually:
- measure the correlation between direct enrolment and statistics of hits
- Measure the number of agents using our website/ ask for their results
- Change our approach to communicate with our clients/Use Skype
- Develop intranet for agents

How much business do you do on the web?

Traditionally the direct bookings are 60% of the whole business and 40% agents. However the development of new businesses will be toward new niche markets which will be developing though agents.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

Not to neglect it and think that it is a secondary function within the organisation. The web is the “face” of the organisation. We must keep up and take a more dynamic approach.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Yes, only if mankind did not use the Internet.

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How would you describe your company and its mission?

We are a firm of solicitors serving a client base centered around Lancashire & Cumbria. We cover Commercial Property, Corporate law, Commercial and Personal Litigation, Family, Probate and have a specialist Rural Business department. More than 50% of our business is with business clients and a fair amount of that is repeat business.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

We’ve had a website for around three years now. This is its second incarnation and we are already looking at a redesign to keep it looking fresh and new. The is essentially a brochure site, with news items to keep clients updated about areas of law that affect our client base, and news of the firm. We have also recently added a password protected Extranet area where we can hold documents such as auction packs, and property information so potential buyers or agents can download them.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

I don’t suppose initally we expected much from our site. It was set up as a defensive measure, we had to have one because everyone else had one.
There was never any intention to “sell” any services through the site, we have seen various other firms try that and none have really succedded. In Law, the personal service is very important. We did hope that if anyone was looking for a new lawyer, they might see the site, contact us and eventually become a client. As there was no optimisation, we got few visits to the site and it generated little new business.
It was mainly there so people who had seen our web address on stationary, etc could visit, or via one of the links from various directories such as the Law Society directory, Yell.com etc.

What is your online marketing strategy? – which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

We now have an optimised site that appears well up in the rankings for our chosen serach terms. We also utilise PPC advertising on Google as well and have increased the number of links from other sites.
The strategy is to try and get people viewing our site

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

What we are starting to see now is an increased number of new clients who have initally viewed our site and then made an appointment to see us, turning into clients

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

Unless there is a significant change in the legal lanscape, then I feel our website will continue as a non transactional presence. The firm is growing rapidly and is in the process of merging with another sizeable firm in Preston and East Lancashire, hence the present redisign to match our new corporate branding.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

If you don’t get your website optimised, its invisible. Prior to optimising our site I searched under one of our chosen phrases. I got down to page 50 on Google and we still hadn’t appeared. With the right tags in place we now have most of our chosen phrases on the first page, some in the top 3. It takes some thinking about and some work but if you want your site to be seen, its worth it.The stats package we now use use shows us how many hits per day and which pages are viewed so it makes it easy then to see whats going on.

Can you imagine life without a website?
I can when I’ve got updates to make and precious little time to do it!. In truth the website is an excellent tool for what we want and we are starting to see new business as a result of it. I certainally wouldnt want to be without it now.

Thanks Bob – Napthens Solicitors Preston

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How would you describe your company and its mission?

Cloggs.co.uk is an online retailer specialising in fashion footwear, jeans, denimwear. The website evolved out of a locally-successful independent retail store based in Birmingham. After the first website went up, we immediately uncovered people willing to search for and buy our brand name fashions through the internet. From a handful of weekly orders, we now handle many thousands of monthly orders.

Our mission is to provide a first-class alternative sales channel for our brand-focussed customers at the forefront of ‘Etailing’ technology, supported by the highest standards of fulfilment and customer service.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

Our first website was created in 1999. It was hard-coded with an out-of-the-box shopping basket and complimented an original small-scale mail order operation. We showed to ourselves fairly quickly that there was a market for interactive online fashion mail order and that we were in a position to service that market. By the end of 2002 we began to properly promote the site and expand the offer significantly, causing us to require a much more sophisticated website infrastructure and backend administration platform. This allowed us to manage our growth and continue to provide a high quality of service to existing and new customers. The main purpose is simply to provide a competitive online sales channel for the products we sell.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

Our current choice of platform works in the sense that we are able to take a large volume of orders in a scalable way and is fairly robust from an operational perspective. However, the technology never seems to be entirely free of glitches or errors that have varying degrees of knock-on effects to the business. We have to take a pragmatic approach to this though – as long as you can step back and look at a business that works for our customers, our staff and commercially, that is the main thing. I think that it is very hard to find a perfect technology partner or solution that is as flexible as you need it to be commercially and does everything you would need it to without problems.

So, ‘yes’ it ‘delivers’ pragmatically speaking and ‘no’ it doesn’t always in a strictly commercial sense.

What is your online marketing strategy? – which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

We first and foremost try to encourage repeat business. That means delivering a valuable service to the customer that beats alternative sales channels, fulfilling orders quickly and providing excellent after-sales service, amongst other things. It is very easy to gain business through the internet in the short-term but if you can’t meet customer expectations, the marketing costs of gaining those first-time customers are too great to be profitable. Our online marketing costs can only be justified if a high proportion of customers liked their experience enough to come back and buy from us again.

We have a number of partnerships to support traffic to the website – pay-per-click campaigns, affiliates, shopping channel agreements. These diversify dependence on any one particular source of traffic but are very costly to justify in simple sales terms; you have to look at it as investment in a customer database. Because of this, we are focussing most attention at the moment on our position in natural searches which deliver free traffic.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

Our offline marketing consists only of communicating with existing customers through short-run pamphlets promoting particular lines and encouraging them to remember who we are and to come back again at some point. Offline advertising is something we are yet to explore – as a small independent business it would be hard to justify the expense when the returns may take some time to materialise and may also be intangible.

The attractiveness of online marketing is that returns are very visible in real time and you can just work with the numbers to justify or discontinue any expense.

How much business do you do on the web?

About 65% of our business is now online, but rapid growth is pushing that figure higher all the time. It is hard to see us being a pure-play online business because our brands like to work with bricks-and-mortar businesses and there will always be customers who won’t buy footwear and clothing online. Sales online do not always reflect shop sales either – certain lines do better in our store than they do online and vice versa. They will always be complimentary operations for us, although online success may now provide the opportunity to expand the offline business.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

We want to continue to provide a service that is valuable to customers and will push the growth of that business as far as we can take it. We want to be at the forefront of the technology because customers are more and more demanding and it is so easy for them to shop elsewhere – we have to provide the best all-round experience available. People have been saying it for years and we are still only just seeing the beginning, but the internet represents the future of shopping and an online component will be almost unavoidable for retail businesses in the future.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

Concentrate on two key working relationships. Firstly, focus on building a strong partnership with a reliable technology partner who understands the commercial requirements and can deliver upon them. Secondly, find an effective, affordable online marketing partner and/or strategy which concentrates on highly qualified traffic. Don’t be so concerned with cost and would only ever select partners with proven track records, provide excellent references and already handle businesses bigger than your own.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Yes, it would be lot less stress, I could being involved with technological issues on a daily basis and the world would be simpler. But it would be commercially disastrous for us.

Anything else you want to add?

There is no one single solution or model for everyone else to copy. The things I’ve described above apply to our experience and has worked for us but it may not be relevant for lots of businesses. A pragmatic approach is the key – if it works, keep doing more of it; if it doesn’t stop doing it. Accept that there will always be flaws and work around them.

Cloggs handle many major brands including Levi Jeans, Merrell Shoes, Oakley Sunglasses and many others…

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How would you describe your company and its mission?

ASG Services is a service based company that manufactures and installs location labels, signs and line marking solutions to the materials handling industry.

We supply to mainly large distribution companies as well as directly into the materials handling industry, racking manufacturers and IT providers.

We have offices in Warrington and Atlanta, Georgia. Where we employ approx 26 people comprising production, installation, sales and support staff.

Our mission is to provide our customers with the most appropriate solution available that represents the optimum value to the client.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

Our initial web site went on line approx 8 years ago now and was aimed at supporting our sales team as a reference site to direct potential customers too.

Our next site was quite technical with several down loadable data sheets and information about or products. (www.asgservices.co.uk)

Then we started to look at e commerce as a way of generating sales enquiries and this is when we started discussions with you about how to completely shift the focus of the site towards tangible returns.

This subsequently involved a complete redesign of the site so that it was as completely search engine optimised as possible.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

When you mentioned in a meeting that search engine optimisation could easily add in excess of £200,000 per annum to most small companies turnover I was quite sceptical.

After getting embarrassed about my current site when you informed me of all it’s short comings we put down an action plan to go forward.

Search engine optimisation has added significant benefits to the company.

Once we added pay per click advertising and blogs etc I can safely say that over £200,000 has been achieved already and we are changing our business strategy and products because of it.

What is your online marketing strategy? – which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

Our online marketing structure is very direct. We had done very little traditional marketing other than through our sales team. Subsequently most of our work came from within the industry.

Now we produce more quotes every month from sales team of fewer people and subsequent cost. That means we have been able to employ a full time marketing manager to manage not only E commerce but also other marketing activities that we weren’t doing before such as press releases etc.

It remains to be seen how more direct work will affect our average order value within our business but it has certainly reduced the cost per quote by a significant margin.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

Online marketing is a great way of providing the sales team with direct opportunities to quote customers.

These customers need to be responded to very quickly as compared with our other routes to market such as referrals etc. We keep a very tight control on branding but this is done not only by our marketing manager but also by our designers that are constantly able to offer fresh materials within the same brand image.

This is vital as keeping a tight brand image adds value to customers perception of the company.

Other minimal forms of marketing such as advertising within the trade press and exhibitions are done on a very minimal budget and on the same basis of our Web culture. i.e.to provide the maximum amount of active sales leads for the minimum amount of spend.

I believe within marketing circles brand awareness marketing such as exhibitions is called “Willie waving!”. I am of the opinion that markets are changing and with customers being less loyal if we aren’t constantly focused on lead generation we may in future not have a Willie to wave.

How much business do you do on the web?

I suspect we now generate approx two – three leads per day from web based activities. While many of these are for small order values of just a few hundred pounds we have received massive enquiries for both the UK and USA market which have directly lead to contracts. We have had particular success around some of our most important keyphrases – Floor Marking Systems and Warehouse Rack Labels

Some the 42% sales growth we achieved last year was from an improved UK materials handling industry market but it was by no means all of it. We have been able to offer more products and services to a larger customer and industry base as a means of our web based activities.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

I have changed my opinion of e commerce completely over the past 18 months. I now view search engine based marketing as a priority in our marketing activities and don’t see how that we change in the foreseeable future. I am conscious that as other businesses look at how to capitalise on search engines as a way of generating business that this may impact on the cost of pay per click advertising but feel more than confident that our generic search engine results will continue to strengthen and reduce the opportunity for competitors to compete.

On top of that I believe that with the support of SEO knowledge gained from you and also constant detailed reviews of how search engines operate I am sure we will be able to stay ahead of our competition in this field as well.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

Ignoring the bigger picture on e commerce could have cost us the lead on our competitors in the UK. Spending a few months getting this section of your marketing correct can give very big returns to your sales figures.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Life without the web would be a lot slower like it was in the good old days when you could drive to an appointment and enjoy the drive as we didn’t have mobile phones either!

Anything else you want to add?

The web tools available to provide essential marketing information, that in traditional marketing are difficult and costly to find, make making web based decisions easier to make.

Having an open mind to new ideas in this as well as other fields should provide larger benefits to companies than the cost of implementation.

Thanks Tony and happy willie waving

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