Blog Archives - Energise Digital Limited

Using Local Web Services: The Ultimate Guide for Small Business Owners

Utilizing local web services is becoming increasingly important in today’s digital age. From small businesses to large corporations, having a robust online presence is crucial for success.

Our local online services offer a variety of solutions to help local companies to establish and maintain their online presence, from website design and development to search engine optimization and social media management.

One of the key benefits of using your local web companies is their ability to tailor solutions to the unique needs of each business. A local web service provider can work closely with a business to understand their goals and objectives and develop a customized plan to achieve them. This personalized approach is essential for businesses looking to stand out in a crowded online marketplace and attract new customers.

Another advantage of local web services is their focus on community. SEO and web development providers are often small businesses themselves, and they understand the importance of supporting other local businesses. By working with a local web service provider, companies can improve their online presence and contribute to their community’s growth and success.

What are Local Web Services?

One of the key benefits of using local web services is that they can help to promote your local businesses. By providing a platform for businesses to promote their products and services, local web services can help to drive traffic and increase sales.

Another benefit of local web services is that they can help to build a sense of community. Local web services can foster a sense of belonging and encourage people to get involved in their community by providing a platform to connect and share information.

Whether you are a business owner looking to promote your products and services or a resident looking to stay connected with your neighbors, local web services can help you achieve your goals.

Benefits of Local Web Services

Local web services offer a range of benefits to businesses looking to establish or improve their online presence. Here are some of the key advantages:

Cost-effective Solutions

One of the most significant advantages of local web services is that they offer cost-effective solutions for businesses of all sizes. By working with a local provider, companies can avoid the high costs of hiring an in-house team or outsourcing to a more expensive provider.

Local providers can also offer customized solutions tailored to the business’s specific needs. This means that companies can get the services they need without paying for unnecessary extras.

Personalized Customer Service

Another advantage of local web services is that they offer personalized customer service. With a local provider, businesses can work directly with their service provider to ensure their needs are met. This level of personalization is often lacking with larger, more impersonal providers.

Local providers are also more likely to be invested in the success of their clients. This means that they will go above and beyond to ensure that their clients are satisfied with the services they receive.

Improved Search Engine Ranking

Finally, local web services can help businesses improve their search engine ranking. Businesses can take advantage of their provider’s knowledge of the local market by working with a local provider. This can help them create optimized content for local search terms and improve their visibility in local search results.

In addition, local providers are often more familiar with the unique challenges of the local market. This means they can help businesses create more relevant content for their target audience.

Overall, local web services offer a range of benefits to businesses looking to improve their online presence. Companies can use cost-effective solutions, personalized customer service, and improved search engine ranking by working with a local SEO and web services provider.

Mastering The Google PageSpeed Insight Test: How to Get 100%

Achieving a perfect score on the Google PageSpeed Insight test is a crucial aspect of website optimization. This test measures the loading speed of a website and provides suggestions on how to improve it. A fast-loading website not only provides a better user experience but also has a positive impact on search engine rankings.

To score a perfect 100% on the Google PageSpeed Insight test, website owners should focus on several key factors. These include compressing images, minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code, eliminating render-blocking elements, improving server response times, and using a content delivery network, among others. By optimizing these factors, website owners can significantly improve their website’s loading speed and achieve a perfect score on the test.

In this article, we will explore the top methods for achieving a perfect score on the Google PageSpeed Insight test. By following the tips and tricks outlined in this article, website owners can optimize their website’s loading speed and improve their search engine rankings. With a faster website, businesses can provide a better user experience to their customers and increase their chances of success in the online world.

Understanding Google PageSpeed Insights

What is Google PageSpeed Insights?

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that measures the speed and performance of a website on both desktop and mobile devices. It analyzes the website’s content and provides a score between 0 and 100, with higher scores indicating better performance. The tool also provides suggestions for improving the website’s speed and performance.

Why is Google PageSpeed Insights important?

Google PageSpeed Insights is important because website speed and performance are critical factors for user experience and search engine rankings. A slow-loading website can negatively impact user engagement, conversion rates, and bounce rates. It can also lead to lower search engine rankings, as Google considers website speed as a ranking factor. Therefore, optimizing website speed and performance with the help of Google PageSpeed Insights can improve user experience, increase conversions, and boost search engine rankings.

In addition to providing a score and suggestions for improvement, Google PageSpeed Insights also provides detailed information on various aspects of website performance, such as:

First Contentful Paint (FCP): The time it takes for the first piece of content to load on the screen.
Speed Index: The time it takes for the visible parts of the website to load.
Time to Interactive (TTI): The time it takes for the website to become fully interactive and responsive to user input.
Total Blocking Time (TBT): The time it takes for the website to respond to user input.

By understanding these metrics and improving them, website owners can enhance website speed and performance, resulting in better user experience and search engine rankings.

Optimizing Images for Google PageSpeed Insights

When it comes to website optimization, images play a crucial role in the overall performance of a webpage. Google PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page and generates suggestions to make that page faster. One of the key areas where you can improve your website’s performance is by optimizing your images. Here are some tips for optimizing images for Google PageSpeed Insights.

Choosing the Right Image Format

The choice of image format can have a significant impact on the performance of your website. There are several image formats that you can use, including JPEG, PNG, and GIF. JPEG is the most commonly used image format because it provides a good balance between image quality and file size. PNG, on the other hand, is a lossless format that is ideal for images that require transparency. GIF is mainly used for animations.

Compressing Images

Compressing images is an effective way to reduce the file size of images without compromising on image quality. There are several tools available that can help you compress your images, including Photoshop, GIMP, and online tools like TinyPNG and Compressor.io. When compressing images, it’s important to strike a balance between file size and image quality. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to check the file size of your images and see if there is room for improvement.

Resizing Images

Resizing images is another effective way to reduce the file size of images. When resizing images, it’s important to maintain the aspect ratio of the image to avoid distorting the image. You can use tools like Photoshop or GIMP to resize your images. Alternatively, you can use online tools like PicResize or ImageResize.org. When resizing images, it’s important to keep in mind the dimensions of the image as well as the file size.

In conclusion, optimizing images is an important step in improving the performance of your website. By choosing the right image format, compressing images, and resizing images, you can significantly reduce the file size of your images without compromising on image quality. This, in turn, can improve the loading speed of your website, which can have a positive impact on user experience and search engine rankings.

The 5 Most Effective Ways To Build Traffic To Business Websites

So you have your pristine new business website built – ideally it’s fast, SEO friendly, responsive and running on a secure server (https). As many business owners will have experienced, that’s often the easiest bit – now the real challenge begins – driving consistent, converting traffic to your website day in, day out.

There is always a temptation to believe that making an amazing website will lead to traffic just happening, but this is rarely the case. Unless you have an established brand or many other websites already linking to your URL, your site will likely echo with the sound of multiple crickets.

Driving traffic is key to the success of your website and in many cases to the survival of your business or brand. Building website traffic can involve a lot of work, especially if you are working to a limited budget and need to gain traffic that is essentially free or very low cost.

Paid traffic can be much faster, far more consistent and effective but obviously you need a fair sized marketing budget and to get the best results you will need to spend a reasonable sum each daily, at least £50 per day to gain consistent momentum.

So here are 5 proven ways to build traffic to your business website, both paid and free methods. Depending on your business method, profit margins, human resources or capital available, you will need to decide which traffic methods are most effective to focus on for you. Many businesses will use a combination of all of these methods.

Method 1: Facebook ads

I would have to recommend Facebook ads as the go-to traffic generation method for anyone who has at least £50 a day budget to spend on digital marketing. Facebook is by far the world’s most effective customer acquisition platform, and the cost to acquire leads and sales are drastically lower than other paid advertising such as Google Ads or YouTube ads.

Facebook ads are quick and simple to set up (the platform is self service), and utilising video creatives – along with the in depth and precise targeting options Facebook Ads Manager provides – businesses can target their ideal customer with a winning ad endlessly. To say that Facebook audience is huge is an understatement. In fact, it’s difficult to visualise in your mind just how many people use Facebook daily.

Facebook ads performance can be improved further by adding the “pixel” to your site – a piece of code which will help optimise your ads – ensuring that you are constantly driving down ad costs and increasing the quality of your conversions using Facebook’s powerful, built-in AI. The more you use Facebook ads, the better they perform, which is why it’s worth sticking with a Facebook ad campaign for at least 6 months at a time.

Read more about how we can help your business succeed with Facebook Ads.

Method 2. Organic traffic via SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is almost the default traffic generation method for most business websites, especially those which choose not to advertise via the paid ads route.

The principle of SEO is to serve websites and content based on what people are searching for every day on popular search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

SEO is huge – not least because people search for things multiple times a day – and often they are looking for businesses and products that can solve their problem, either very locally or in a more general sense.

By succeeding at SEO you can drive almost limitless targeted traffic to your website for free, pretty much forever. There is a catch however, in that search engines like Google will only show your website in the search results if they meet a set of criteria, and that list is long.

Due to the hundreds of factors that influence your success with SEO, here are a few of the most important ones (and really – if you focus on these you can more or less forget about the rest):

Make sure your website is responsive, which means it will adapt to fit any mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. The text on the website should not shrink greatly, and must be readable even on small screens. Google ranks websites that are responsive higher than those that are not.
Use a .com domain or other top level domain extension such as .org or .net. Many U.K. based websites use the .co.uk extension but if you can find the .com version, it is better to use that for SEO.
Make your website loads up blinding fast! Check your website speed in Google’s new PageSpeed Insights tool, if you scored below 70 on desktop and 60 on mobile, you will need to make changes to speed up your website, such as compressing images. If your site is built on WordPress this is simple enough using a couple of free plugins. Google increasingly ranks faster loading websites than those that are slow.
Write useful, relevant content that serves to answer the problem the reader has. All websites that intend to use SEO as a primary and fruitful traffic source will need to invest time into creating unique, relevant written content (and ideally video too) that answers the question the user has entered into their search field as effectively as possible. Gone are the days when you could throw a few keywords into an article title and you will hit page one of Google search in a few weeks, now Google is smart enough to understand such abstract concepts as intent and if your aim is to provide an excellent piece content to solve a problem people have rather than try to game the system, you will be rewarded with plenty of free, organic traffic from search engines.

Learn more about how we can help your business drive traffic with Search Engine Optimisation.

Method 3: YouTube videos

YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, and has become the place people go to learn new stuff. By making helpful, informative and above all entertaining videos geared to the YouTube audience base, you can drive free organic traffic to your website for years to come.

The best thing about YouTube is you can link to your website as freely as you wish, so promoting your business on YouTube could not be simpler. The search engine YouTube employs is not as sophisticated as Google uses for its main search engine, so you can get away with using such archaic methods as keyword lists, and loading your video descriptions with keywords.

YouTube also has far less competition than search engine based traffic, because making great video content is time consuming, difficult and business owners don’t often want to get in front of a camera and expose themselves to the world. But if you do muster the courage, the rewards can be profound and transformative for your business.

Method 4: Pinterest pins

Pinterest is a great traffic source for many business niches such as food, women’s fashion and crafts, to name just a few. Gathering a following and pinning interesting content is quick and straightforward, and you can freely link to your business website with every pin.

It is possible to automate many of the time consuming Pinterest tasks with scheduling apps such as Tailwind. Creative apps such as Canva are a great way to create eye catching and informative images to pin onto your Pinterest boards.

Method 5: Google Ads

Google Ads have been a go to for small business owner for a decade and a half and despite increased competition from young upstarts such as Facebook and Instagram ads, selling products and gaining leads via Google Ads remains a cost effective and reliable method to ensure quality traffic to your site.

Google Ads work particularly well for products that solve a problem people commonly have, or for services that are searched for frequently online, such as pest control or boiler repairs. Results tend to be consistent and steady, rather than fast and viral as they can be with social media ads.

Google Ads do not scale as effectively as Facebook ads, due to the limited number of searches made each day. If you wish to show your product or service to a consumer who may not even know they need it, then Facebook ads might be a more suitable platform for you.

There are many hundreds of ways to drive traffic to your business website, and these are just the tip of the iceberg. The most important factor to getting footfall to your website is to just do something – whether that is enhancing your website SEO, writing useful articles for your target niche or setting up Facebook Ads campaign – because unlike the movie “Field Of Dreams”, if you build it, they most definitely won’t just come!