Web Design Hull and Yorkshire
What can you do to enhance your business in Hull and the Yorkshire region?
Well, I have an idea. Why not spend some time and money on your website!
Okay, of course being a Hull based web designer it’s pretty obvious that I’m going to suggest that one to you, but read on to find out why you should be investing in this aspect of your business today.
Imagine that your looking for information about under floor heating for your house, where would you choose to find this information? Forgetting about recommendations for a minute, you would pretty much either:
Look in the yellow pages (or Hull colour pages!) at the adverts
Fire up Google and search for a Hull flooring company
If you were to take the yellow pages route, how would you decide on a company to use?
- The biggest advert?
- The best looking advert?
- The advert which conveyed the best sense of quality / trustworthiness?
Whichever one you choose, you would then need to initiate some form of contact with them to find out further information about their services, arrange to go and see them if they have local premises, or book somebody to come and give you a quote.
Perhaps the yellow pages ad might have a website address on it which you would check out prior to calling. How would you feel if you went on the companies website and it looked as though it had been put together by a child? Would it inspire you to call for more information? Maybe, maybe not.
Your company could have many skilled flooring engineers, with years of experience and know how, but you might be losing valuable clients because some new guy, fresh out of flooring collage has put together a nice looking, informative website along with a reasonable yellow pages ad and is attracting your customers.
Right, lets now pretend you chose to use the Internet to find your flooring guru. Fire up Google and type ‘hull flooring’ in. I will save you the bother, there is really only one listing on the entire first page which has details and information about a Hull company specialising in flooring and to be frank their website is worse than poor.
Try changing the search to something else, maybe ‘underfloor heating in hull’, again similar results are found.
If I were looking for a underfloor heating company in Hull I would have given up on the Internet route already.
This doesn’t have to be the case at all though!
For less than the price of a decent yellow pages ad, you could have your very own, high quality website designed. The site could have examples of your work, areas covered, enhanced contact information, pretty much anything you wanted on there.
And guess what? It will still be online long after your yellow pages ad has finished.
With the annual costs associated with running a website dropping all the time, it really is feasible that after an initial design, you could keep your site online, and providing clients for as little as £80 per year.
Initial web design costs could vary depending on your actual requirements, and getting your site to the top of Google will add to this price. It depends on how much competition there is, but for many Hull related search terms I can tell you the search engine optimisation work will be pretty easy, and long lasting.
If this hasn’t persuaded you to get that new website created, or to overhaul that poorly performing one then I’m not sure what will.
—————— EDIT ——————-
I have received an anonymous email comment regarding this post basically saying that they think that I’m unfairly targeting the business which happens to show up on a Google search for ‘Hull Flooring’. This was never the intention, I randomly picked flooring as an example of a trade as it was the first thing that came to mind, to be honest it could have been any number of trades.
A manager from the actual flooring company which comes up in the search contacted me after seeing this article and agreed with every point I made. They informed me that they were in the process of updating their website, and mentioned that they may contact me in the future for further advice on SEO.
After receiving the anonymous email I have revisited the website in question and it is definitely a vast improvement on what they had before.
I have contemplated removing or heavily editing this article, but upon reflection I still think it is a fair appraisal of the local search market, and could be valuable to businesses in the area.
Popularity: 96% [?]
Darren Atkinson @ May 15, 2007