Lou Macdonald

BoilerwiseCentralHeating.co.uk

Lou — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:07:07 +0000

BoilerwiseCentralHeating.co.uk is a Bronze WordPress website. It was built for a local business owner and has been customized using his business logo, as well as the logos of trade organizations (in this case GasSafe was vital to support his professional credibility) and suppliers. Its colours match his business branding presenting a unified consistent appearance, from first contact either on the website or by business card, through quotes to billing.

ExeterHomeEducationCommunity.co.uk

Lou — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:56:07 +0000

ExeterHomeEducationCommunity.co.uk is a Silver WordPress website, built for a non-profit organization. Due to the subject matter of the website and ethos of the group it was important to project a very different brand than a traditional business website. This was accomplished by using a custom background and font for the header title, an embedded video as well as additional photographs in a home page slider.

LocalBusinessOnline.co.uk

Lou — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:50:27 +0000

LocalBusinessOnline.co.uk is another Gold WordPress website. It has been heavily customized both in colour and layout, the owner did not want a custom header graphic, preferring instead to concentrate full attention on the embedded sales video. It has full social media integration and is linked to an autoresponder to collect visitors details (in return for an eBook) and allow for email follow up.

VivCraske.com

Lou — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:42:51 +0000

VivCraske.com is a Gold video blog WordPress website. It has been fully customized to the business owners requirements, containing embedded videos as well as full social media integration. It also has squeeze page capacity which will be put to good use during an upcoming product launch.

It has been an enjoyable project, during which further business links between our two businesses have been explored, watch this space…..

About Lou Macdonald

Lou — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:54:14 +0000

My understanding of the internet enables me to create websites that work, also to identify the most effective ways of marketing businesses online.

My background is in education, teaching a wide variety of children at many levels. After achieving a Masters degree in psychology I turned to coaching and became an NLP Master practitioner.

In 2007 I built and began to market my own websites online. As a teacher and coach communication was at the centre of everything I did, however the internet has placed this subject on a completely different level.

My research skills are well used, uncovering the best keywords to target and keeping up to date with the latest cutting edge practices online.

A teaching and coaching background enables me to cut through the “techno speak” and explain online marketing in clear everyday English.

Marketing Online

Lou — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:06:25 +0000

Many people may think I am bias, being a Local Internet Marketing Consultant, they also would consider Google to be bias as they are the largest search engine on the planet. On the other hand the people on this video have experienced the benefit of marketing their businesses online, so don’t take my word for it – take theirs.

SEO Marketing

Lou — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:03:55 +0000

SEO marketing, or Search Engine Marketing to give it its full name, is the process of making your content be that a website, article or video rank well in the organic listings of search engines, in particular Google. As I have said in a previous post 92% of all U.K. searches were performed on Google in 2010, so when talking about SEO marketing I am really talking about Google marketing.
Google main concern is the user experience, it wants them to find useful relevant content when they use their search engine. To make sure they present the most relevant sites they look at 2 main factors on page and off page information, these are the lynch pins of SEO marketing. The on page information refers to the text content of the website, does it contain the words used by the user when they performed the search? Does it contain other related words and phrases? in other words if someone searched for an “Emergency Plumber” Google would expect to see not only the words “emergency plumber” on the site it might also want to see “24 hour plumber” “blocked drain” “burst pipe” among other related terms. To use SEO marketing effectively you need to make sure the right words appear on your website the right number of times and in the correct places – not as easy as it sounds at first.
The off page information Google is looking for is backlinks from other websites. They see these as votes of confidence in your website, SEO marketing makes sure you have enough – meaning thousands not 1 or 2 – these however need to be built up over time, any sudden surge will be viewed as suspicious and can negatively effect your website ranking. The value of all backlinks is not equal, the higher the authority of the website linking to your website the more value Google will place on it, in particular a backlink from a .gov or .edu website will be worth many times more than a backling from a page rank of 1 or 2.
SEO marketing is often seen as complicated and time consuming, although it can be at times if you look at your marketing budget as a whole it is extremely cost effective as if it is done properly it will deliver many more targeted leads to your business.

Marketing Online Generates Leads

Lou — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:45:58 +0000

Are you marketing online? If not why not? Offline marketing such as yellow pages and local newspapers are not as effective as they once were and can be prohibativly expensive, marketing online is not just effective but cost effective too.

Your prospects are searching for you online, it is no longer enough to submit to a hand full of trade directories and hope for the best. Marketing online by owning your own website and profiles and having a presence on high ranking social media sites, enables you to target your ideal prospects, leading to high convertion rates, satified customers and business owners.

A website on its own will not bring you the desired results. Effective marketing online needs a website to rank well in the search engines for your carefully chosen keywords -the words people type in when performing a search. If it isn’t on page one of Google it will not get seen, however pretty it is In the UK 92% of all searches were done on Google in 2011, it doesn’t matter if you usually use Yahoo or Bing to search the internet, 92% of your prospects don’t. Your website needs to be optimized for Google.