Read More]]> Google My business is the ultimate business directory with relevant business information accessible to customers instantly. Many businesses will already have Google My Business pages, but not know they have them. Google regularly generates new pages based on what its “spiders” find online. There are distinct benefits to claiming your listing if you have not already done so…

• Your business may be seen in Google Maps as well as “normal” search results.
• All information is clickable, including your phone number and website address.
• The information is optimised to look great on any device, including smartphones.
• Local and online businesses can use it.
• You can post pictures and videos to your page to showcase your products or services.
• You have access to metrics to see how many people are looking for and finding your site.
• It drives traffic to your business website.
• Customers can read and add reviews. Unlike unclaimed business pages, you can monitor reviews, helping you protect your online reputation.

Maybe you don’t have the time, or are not confident about claiming your Google My Business page. If that is the case, we can do it all for you for a VERY small fee.

Please click here for more details

Read More]]> Google’s latest update, due on 21 April 2015, is set to have more impact than many of it’s well know predecessors.

The general gist is that Google will ONLY display mobile-ready sites in the search results of users on mobile or tablet devices.

The worry is that almost 50% of all searches are now done on these devices, and mobile search is set to exceed desktop searches this year.

While this update is good news for smartphone and tablet users, it is a major concern for businesses who have non-mobile-friendly websites. After April 21, websites that are not deemed mobile-friendly will lose rankings on Google’s mobile search results, in turn negatively impacting traffic and conversions.

Wide Blue Media are ready to help you avoid the latest Google slap. Get in touch and we will assess your website and make recommendations as to what you need to do to prepare yourself.

No charge, but obviously, we’d like to help if you’re not able to do the work yourself.

Read More]]> Mobile usability has been a factor in Google’s search algorithm for some time, with mobile-ready sites ranking higher than their non-optimized counterparts. But the preference has been limited.

But, starting April 21, that’s all going to change.

According to a recent Google blog post, a major algorithm change that will revolutionize the way mobile friendliness is determined.

Many of Google’s updates are just data refreshes that have little bearing on existing search rankings. However, the new mobile-friendly algorithm change will have more of an impact on search rankings than either Panda or Penguin, two of the largest and most impactful search algorithm updates Google has ever launched.

We do know that it will change the way Google evaluates the mobile-friendliness of websites, and it’s a reasonable assumption that the majority of non-optimized sites on the web could see significant decreases in search visibility.

Mobile search trends

It is estimated that more than 60 percent of all Google searches are now performed on mobile devices, so it’s reasonable that Google wants to capitalize on this traffic and ensure the best possible experience for its users and clear that the companies who cater to mobile users best will earn the most visibility from Google.

What you should do

If your site is already mobile-friendly, you shouldn’t have to worry. But, if your site is not mobile-optimised, it is now CRITICAL to get it done.

Make sure the mobile version of your site is active and works across the site. Whether your website is a responsive design, or you have a separate hosted mobile version of your site doesn’t matter to Google, so long as mobile users’ experience isn’t interrupted.

Make sure that Google’s mobile bots can crawl your site.

Google offers two tools you can use to check whether your site is mobile-friendly. First, you can use the appropriately named Mobile-Friendly Test to see whether your site meets the criteria. Google Webmaster Tools also has a Mobile Usability Report you can run to to see how Google sees your site. Any errors, and you have until April 21, 2015 to fix them!

The April 21 Google update is the biggest mobile-related algorithm change we’ve ever seen and if you don’t have a mobile version of your site in place by April 21, your search visibility could be seriously hindered. And your business could be seriously affected!

We are more than happy to offer you a free assessment of your website, as it relates to this pending change at Google. Please contact us with your web address and a contact number, and we’ll get straight on to it for you.

Read More]]> So you did your research, read our previous post on the 5 reasons your business needs a mobile site and you understand the importance of building a mobile web.  That’s great.

You are truly ahead of the game when it comes to the world of online marketing.

Now you need to know how to build the most effective mobile site possible.

And, no, it is not the same as building a traditional website.

A mobile website is a new brand of site, and it involves a unique set of considerations.

Content.  

You’ve most likely heard the phrase, “content is king.”

However, mobile web design relegates content underneath navigability.

Mobile sites

Sure, it is still important that your content is accurate, relevant, informative, and easy to understand.

However, the most important thing is that your content is short, concise, and free of any unnecessary verbiage.

A good rule of thumb is that it should all fit on one page (and on a tiny mobile device screen, at that).

And you should consider the type of content you are going to display!

Typically, mobile users will want to know how they can contact you and buy from you.

They wont be so interested in your last 10 blog posts!

Graphics and navigation buttons.  

Keep the touch screen in mind when designing a mobile website.

Any good mobile site should have thumb-friendly navigation buttons.

Additionally, other graphics should be kept to a minimum.

Single column layout.  

You don’t want your site visitors to have to work to view your page.

It should not be necessary to zoom or scroll to fit your site’s content on the screen.

The most effective way to display your mobile website is in a single column, which will be compatible with most smart phone screens.

Use the mobile device’s inbuilt functionality.  

This refers to all of those things a mobile device can do that a desktop or laptop can’t do – phone calls and GPS, for example.

To aid the user experience, provide a way to access these features so that your site visitors can call or locate your business with just the touch of a button.

Navigation layout.  

In addition to having simple, large-scale navigation buttons and search boxes,

you should also arrange your site’s navigation tools in a way that integrates well into the column format.

You may opt to stack them, put them in a drop-down menu at the top or bottom of the page, or present them as the home page.

As you can see, mobile web design is a whole new ballgame.

It is important to keep all of these factors in mind if you are to build an effective mobile website.

If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you with our fast and affordable mobile site packages, please get in touch.

Read More]]> A mobile website is more important to your business than ever. Here are five compelling reasons why

A mobile website is just what it sounds like – a website specifically designed to be viewed on mobile devices.

So, why does your business need a mobile website if its traditional site is doing just fine?

Aesthetic appeal.

We got it right for Knight!

You may wonder why people can’t just view your existing traditional website on their mobile devices.

The truth is, they can.  The other truth is that your traditional website simply doesn’t look very good on a mobile device.

Do this: shrink the view on your web browser by zooming out until you have to squint to read the text. Or scroll left and right just to read a single sentence!

Not a good viewing experience, right?

The statistics.

You can’t argue with numbers.

Basically, more people today use their mobile devices to access the Internet than they do their desktop or laptop computers.

As a matter of fact, many people accessing the web today ONLY do so through their mobile devices.

Can you afford not to cater to this considerably large market sector?

Data transfer costs.  

Many mobile users must pay data transfer fees.

Traditional websites have much more data than mobile websites, and therefore can cost a lot of people a lot of money to view.

How often are customers willing to pay you to market to them?  Enough said.

Navigation.  

As previously mentioned, traditional sites are much smaller on those tiny mobile device screens.

That means site visitors must do an awful lot of scrolling to take the whole site in . . .

and let’s face it, web surfers don’t want to have to work to read a web page.

Also, it can be nearly impossible to hit navigation buttons on such a tiny screen when the website hasn’t been optimized for mobile devices.

Today’s web audience.  

The fact that most people access the Internet via mobile device also means that most people use their mobile devices for any of a

wide variety of things – shopping, searching, entertainment, and more – and these are all aspects you could add to your mobile website to increase your reach and broaden your customer base.

As you can see, there are a number of very good reasons to build a mobile website for your business, and as soon as possible.

Wide Blue Media provide a cost efficient service to get your mobile site up and running – often within 24 hours!

Contact us today to see how we can help you.

Read More]]> Facebook offers tools that you can use to help build your business. These include:

Social Ads
Pages
Beacon
Insights
Platform
Polls

Each of these is designed to help you build your brand on the site and get customers and clients. Your first step is to learn about these tools. In the next section, you’ll learn how to tie all of this together so that you can find your success on Facebook.

You can take advantage of these features further by visiting http://www.facebook.com/business.

SOCIAL ADS

Social ads are a unique feature because they interact directly with the News Feeds of the people on your friends lists. This means that anyone who has you added as a friend will be able to see information about your business directly in their profile.

This also means that you can directly control who sees your ad and achieve targeted traffic rather effortlessly. When it comes to making sales, targeted traffic is what you want.

FACEBOOK PAGES

If you have a business, you should create your own Facebook Page for it. This is the same as your profile. By having a page for your business, you take full advantage of the site by allowing people to interact with your business. It also helps build your brand.

When someone on Facebook participates in your site, you know that you’ve won their support and potentially their business. They treat this page as they would any of their friends. People can write on the wall and participating in the experience of your page or profile.

It’s your job to encourage this interactive experience by adding applications, quizzes, games, starting a group, etc. Basically, you need to pick the activities that make sense for the brand you’re trying to build.

FACEBOOK BEACON

This is another service that Facebook offers that can help your business by promoting it to your Facebook friends. Beacon allows Facebook to interact directly with your site by posting news about your business on your friends’ news feeds. For example, you may specify that you want your friends to know when someone purchases a product or when a new product is released. In order for it to work you need to paste some code to your site.

This feature works because it helps enhance participation with your Facebook Page, with your company’s site, and with your brand. It can also help increase the word-of-mouth potential for your company, service, or product.

Are you afraid this will affect the user’s privacy or your business privacy? The people on your friends list have the option to deny the updates. This helps protect your privacy as well as their’s.

FACEBOOK INSIGHTS

If you want to run a business and use Facebook as a tool, it’s natural that you’ll want to know some statistics as to who is participating in your Facebook Page and clicking on your Social Ads. This is exactly what Facebook insights are. It’s a tool that gathers data so that you can determine if your campaign is successful.

Once you gather this data, you can determine if your business, product, service, or brand are spreading virally or not. Facebook is powerful because of the word of mouth aspect. Facebook Insights helps you gauge just how successful your attempts truly are. Not only that, but it also helps you get data concerning demographics, which can help you target your promotional campaign even better.

FACEBOOK PLATFORM

Facebook Platform allows your programmers to design applications that will interact with the site and help enhance the user experience. In order for this to work, you have to make an application that will be fun for people to use. The idea is that they’ll enjoy the application and pass it along to their friends, which will give your business more reach and expand your user base.

There are different kinds of applications you can design. Quizzes, games, and interactive tools are all popular. For ideas, visit the Applications page on Facebook to get a feel for what designers are coming up with and which applications are the most popular. Whatever you design, it needs to help build your brand on the site.

FACEBOOK POLLS

Facebook Polls is a valuable tool that you can use to determine certain things about your business. For example, if you’re thinking of launching a product that can target a certain demographic, you can give a poll to those who pertain.

This feature works because you have access to the demographic information such as age and marital status if the users are on your friends list. You can use this information to focus your efforts on only those who are relevant.

Taking advantage of these tools can be an advantage for your business.

Read More]]> Social media marketing in Sussex just got a whole lot easier now that Wide Blue Media Ltd have launched their new Social Media Marketing services!

From just £127 per month (less than you probably spend on a small display advert in a local paper), our team of social media experts will profile your business, build a campaign, and tweet and posting engaging content on Facebook that will:

• boost your brand,
• increase your website conversions,
• engage your existing customers, leading to more repeat business,
• expose your business to a huge new market, and
• drive more visitors to your website.

Our team will write daily promotional and interesting content and schedule it a week in advance via our social media control panel.

Through our control panel, you can

• track your campaign’s success,
• review our content,
• edit and schedule your own items and offers, and
• track relevant news items that you can post out to your followers.

We make it simple for your business to benefit from the huge popularity of Twitter and Facebook.

Contact us today for a personal demonstration of our scheduling control panel.

We’ll schedule 4 or 5 bespoke tweets and/or 2 posts per day and even upload custom made images a couple of times per week (depending on which account you choose).

We’ll still be posting while you are working on building your business. We’ll still be posting when you are on holiday or off sick. We’ll still be posting when you are called out to an urgent meeting that runs on all day.

It’s hard work to post four or five times per day with well thought out content. We are experts at it.

The contract

There is no contract! We are so sure you will be delighted with what we write for you and the results you’ll get from the campaign that you are free to leave at any time. We are confident you won’t.

We supply you with:

• A social media scheduling control panel.
• 4 or 5 bespoke tweets and/or 2 posts per day – all by our native English speaking team.
• You will be able to log in and monitor the content we have created for you, as well as view your traffic stats and schedule your own tweets, posts and images.
• Access to a bespoke news searching system that allows you to post industry news to your followers.

Please drop me a line back either way, I’m interested in your feedback.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Read More]]> Mobile marketing is growing fast! Why? Because just about everyone has their mobile on them at all times and use their mobile to find local businesses and make purchasing choices. When someone is looking to justify their decision, it seems that they can make statistics say anything that they want them to say. However, when it comes to mobile technology, and its place in modern day life, the statistics really do not require any interpretation. They speak for themselves. If you are in business for yourself, and you have connections to customers, it is likely that you will need to do something in order to adjust to the fact that an increasing number of people are spending more time on their mobile devices.  They are doing many of the same things on their mobile devices that they once did either sitting in front of their television or in front of their computer screen. This does not mean that people are getting rid of their television sets or their personal computers.  What it does mean is that there are statistical indicators saying that mobile technology is a large part of how we, in our society, are connecting. This article will examine some of those statistics:

1. People are using their mobile to access the internet.  Marketing analysts say that over half of those who connect to the internet, are using some kind of mobile enabled device.
2. People are using search engines while on their mobile phone.  Search volume from mobile enabled devices is rising at a shocking rate of over 50%
3. Most of the people who access local searches and local related directories are using mobile phones.  Over 20 million users per month are accessing local business directories and review sites.
4. People who purchase and iPhone do not necessarily spend a good portion of time talking on it. iPhone users spend less than half of their time making actual telephone calls.

Looking at these four statistics alone is enough to provide insight on how people are using mobile technology.  To ignore the fact in your business means that others who don’t ignore this may get the opportunity to service some of your best customers. While it is true that you can keep your clients with good service and going the extra mile; competitors are doing new things to make shopping and buying easy to do from a mobile phone or device.   Customers are now starting to expect that a company that is serious about their business will make that kind of effort for them.  Making the effort will help you to meet new clients and continue the relationship with the ones that you have. If you would like to reach more customers through their mobile devices, contact us today.  We will be able to get you set up with the right tools in order to properly market your business. You will have the right things in place to take care of your existing customers to meet new ones also.

Read More]]> Wide Blue Media Ltd is proud to announce that we have been invited to support Sussex Futsal Club and the associated Hastings Futsal Club.

We have agreed to take on the management of the website and will also be helping in marketing online and social media.

The Sussex Futsal Club and Hastings Futsal Club provide a really valuable service in the community and promote the fastest-growing sport in the country, offering training and facilities to everyone from 3-93!

Keep an eye out for the new Sussex and Hastings Futsal Club websites coming in the next few days!

Read More]]> Mobile Site Design

Mobile sites are designed specifically for mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers. Regular sites that are designed for PCs don’t look quite right on mobile devices. They can also be hard to navigate

So, I’ve got bad news for folks who like sitting in front of a PC – the desktop computer is going the way of the dodo. Every day about a gazillion new mobile devices are sold. That’s not an exact figure, but it’s bound to be close.

So matter what kind of business you run, you need to have a mobile website.

The World Loves Mobile

Mobiles are taking off because the technology on our phones has finally improved to the point where you can basically do everything. You can surf the internet, check your Facebook account, email people, chat online, shop, play games – and you can even call people. Yes, people still occasionally do that on their phones.

The preferred mobile of years past was the laptop, but they’re too bulky. A smartphone is a pint-sized computer that you carry in your pocket. Mobiles also offer a ton of features desktop computers don’t, like geographical capabilities and the ability to scan QR codes.

In fact, the mobile boom has led to local SEO, which means optimizing for geographically specific web searches. The reason is that one of the things people are doing most on their mobiles is looking for local businesses. If your business has an easy-to-use mobile website, they’ll find it.