Are you thinking about rebranding your website?
Have you decided you are no longer going to use the domain name in use on your current website?

There has been a number of occasions where a business has said “we are going to rebrand our website” or “we are not using domain name X any more, instead we are going to use domain name Y”. This flags up a number of issues and you will have to take a traffic hit when you conducting a rebranding of our website, or your going to consolidate all the websites you have live into one site, and just how long will it take before we see some positive results from this move. Lots of decisions here and lots of questions that need answered.

Rand Fishkins Whiteboard Friday has tackled many subjects over the years, but we are grateful to Rand who has come forward to address this subject. Rand offers some guidance and clarity on the steps you should consider if you are going to either, rebrand your website or redirect the old domain name and associated pages of the website you have right now to point at a new website development. Watch the Video:

Should You Rebrand or Redirect Your Website Domain and Pages – What is the Way Forward?

These are very difficult decisions to make and yet we have watched businesses simply throw away the old website and replace it with a new one. Your website no matter what condition it is in should be seen as a pumping heart. And if you are going to undertake a transplant and move the website from one architecture to another or you are going to use the same hosting arrangement and retain using the same Content Management Software, but totally redesign the website and use a new domain, well. you have to be careful as to how you approach this task.

Did Your Website Rebranding or Redirect Lead to Website Failure

On many occasions ICTADVISOR and its OnlineXcellence Marketing Practitoners end up arriving at the bedside of your business – after – the operation has been done, and in a number of cases by someone who simply was not qualified and knowledgeable enough to carry out such a complex operation and this has led to website failure. There are a number of freelance developers and small website agencies who are more in the field of programming and don’t seem to take too much to do with the marketing of a website. In a lot of cases here this is simply because this is not the developers or agencies forte. We have lost count how many web agencies say “we only build websites, we don’t do marketing”. And even those who do make reference to website marketing on their websites, you can spot pretty quickly whether they are any good at doing internet marketing or not.

So, back to the operating theatre. The reason you might be conducting your website transplant is because you had more than one website and it has become difficult and to costly to try and manage them all. Or your business has decided to change it’s name and maybe its direction so you want to be known by a different name or you have decided that this new domain name that you have purchased is what you want to use now and get rid of the old domain name. How do you go about that?

If you are considering making some serious changes to your website and if you and your developer/web agency want support, then get in touch and let us know what you are considering doing with our website and explore whether we can help you in the operating theatre!

Website Marketing – What do SEO People Do Everyday?

If like us you are in the business of providing SEO Website Marketing Services to your clients, or you are the in-house website manager doing SEO tasks at your place of work and responsible for the company website to keep bringing in new business, then what is actually being done either by you or us to achieve that?

Why is it a web marketing practitioner or the person you have taken on as an employee to manage your website, gets challenged so much about – how much time they are spending doing website marketing? There are people out there in the SEO industry who are the most trusted voices that can tell you exactly how it is at the coal face when it comes down to marketing a website. One of those people that helps us do our job back here in Scotland, is Rand Fishkin CEO of SPARKTORO and former founder of MOZ  over in Seattle. Watch the following video and find out from Rand what us SEO’s are now doing every day in order to bring traffic to the company website.

All of us who deliver SEO Marketing Services are constantly asked to justify what we do in order to get paid. But trying to explain to business owners what is involved and how many hours will be required on a monthly basis to achieve improving the websites performance is often challenging.

If you are a company owner then once you have watched this video hopefully it will migrate many of you who are still locked into the old ways of doing SEO and introduce you as to how you should be doing SEO website marketing today. You need to forget about the old SEO model of here are some keywords, and some content now get me to position 1 on Google. And then have your website manager or support simply rinse and and repeat the process. That model does not work any more. This is not the reality of the way SEO tactics are applied today. And trying to get business owners to understand this is the challenge. Plus many cannot seem to grasp how much time us or their in-house website manager needs to create a page and a marketing strategy to support that page.

More often than not now, I have to find ways of actually educating those business owners I come into contact with who insist on using their own pre-conceived ideas towards trying to market their website rather than listen to sound advice from someone who has been working in the web marketing industry for nearly 20 years.

Let us ask you this question. Most of you want a car, a van or a truck to support your business activities. Do you really just turn away from all the brand names out there and say – no – look I can build a better truck than you myself. Now just how long is it going to take you to build that vehicle? You will probably spend more time trying to get it right rather than get on with what you set out to do and that was to deliver either your services and products, and do so with a reliable vehicle at your disposal built by someone who knows a thing or two about how to build a car, van or truck.

So, some questions for you business owners:
How are you tackling implementing your SEO website marketing?
Are you really confident you can do this all by yourself without the help of real world marketing practitioners who do this job day in day out?
Maybe you feel your employee needs help to become a website champion?
How much do you wish for that your company can achieve OnlineXcellence and beat off your competitors?

You know what you have to do now!