So why does all this matter beyond the point of me going on about what, how, where and who?

As we head into a recession the obvious reaction is to put the website on the back burner to save costs. This could turn out to be a bad move. More and more people are using the internet as their first port of call when looking for insurance and finance products as well as almost all other products and services. Your company online is competing with all those around you in trying to capture the attention of potential customers with your products, prices and service.

One of the easiest ways to loose the attention of visitors is to have a site that is not up to date and doesn’t present your company in the best way possible.I’m not just talking about making sure you have a pretty looking website (although the design and look of your website is highly important). All the bells and whistles are superficially great but pointless if your site is not up to date with your latest and most competitive products. You should also keep your site current with the latest news and unique content (like informative guides) about your company like awards, association membership and other credibility building information. Now is the time for all companies to work harder to generate new business and retain the loyalty of existing customers by communicating about your company on your website in the best way possible.

Specialist website design and SEO company, Areoff are proud to announce that they have just won the 2008 award for Outstanding Online Solutions by The Global Business Excellence Awards. The award has been granted to Areoff because of the excellent quality of work they provide to their clients and how this enables businesses to be more effective online. 

Areoff have been specialising in effective website design and SEO services for insurance and financial clients since 1999. The bespoke service and professional approach that Areoff provides helps clients to get more visitors to their websites, achieve greater sales and make increased profit. 

Commenting on the award, Andrew Areoff, Director of Areoff Limited said, “we do not get to attend a self-congratulatory presentation dinner for this award but instead we celebrated with a round of coffees and chocolate biscuits while integrating the awards logo on our website”. 

Simon Burgess of British Insurance who nominated Areoff Limited for the award said: “we believe Areoff are worth winners of this award because their service is indeed outstanding. Their website design and SEO service is a valuable asset to our online business and we fully expect that the team at Areoff will continue to build on their achievement by working for insurance and financial clients with renewed passion and expertise” 

Neil Inns of Trafalgar Risk Management, one of many satisfied Areoff clients echoed the sentiment by saying, “Areoff have been working with us successfully for several years and have given us excellent service and advice. We are now able to transact our entire business online and capitalise on the lucrative market that exists on the internet, reinforcing our position as a formidable insurance broker.” 

The Areoff approach to website design and SEO is comprehensive and they concentrate on the key issues of usability, functionality and credibility with careful consideration given to the technical and content aspects of a website. With a set of Quality Assurance criteria, Areoff enable clients to confidently promote their website, be seen by internet users and serve as an effective sales tool. 

Areoff Limited are always looking to work with professional firms within the insurance and financial industries and look forward to hearing from companies who want to achieve more from their websites.

Find out more about the Global Business Excellence Awards. 

The Global Business Excellence Awards awards aim to recognise and reward business excellence across all sectors, private and public.  Open to organisations of any size, based anywhere in the world, entries are encouraged from those that feel they are working smarter than their competitors to create a business edge. Entrants do not have to be conducting business globally to enter and you may enter your own organisation for an award or nominate a third party. 

There will also be more people shopping around online to see if they can get a deal during this time. So the internet can be a win-win situation for your insurance and finance company. It’s an industry that is ideally suited to marketing and selling online - your products are commodities that are sold mainly on price and features rather than the more tangible aspects of say, clothing or cars.

So what’s best of way of investing your budget wisely when it comes to your online finance or insurance business?

First you need to take care of the essentials. Make sure your website is up to date, works fully in all aspects (that include forms that work properly and don’t produce strange error message), has positive and prominent calls to actions, positive sales messages and both easy and intuitive for your visitors. These are the basics that you need to make sure of in order to ensure the user experience of your visitors is as good as it can be.

Then you need to address other usability features than can make your online business more compelling for users. These can also help cut your costs. Setting up live-chat and call-back forms are an excellent way of interacting with visitors to your website as well as clearly presenting the more traditional forms of contact like telephone and email (yes, this is now ‘traditional’) Such features are often far cheaper to run than call centres and give visitors to your website an added re-assurance that your are friendly, helpful and dedicated to customer service.

And of course our old friend, SEO. If you are relying on paid-search through pay-per-click listing on search engines, you are probably suffering from hyper-inflation. The rapid increase in the cost of clicks for insurance and finance related searches surely eats into the returns you make on a sale derived from this method of advertising. This is where technical and content based SEO comes into play. On a longer-term basis, investing in SEO that will achieve you better results on the non-paid sections of search engines is better value for money, although not the instant hit you get with pay-per-click. However a sensible strategy and a long-term approach often results in better quality traffic for a lower cost per sale than clinging onto the top-positions in paid-search advertising.

At Areoff, we focus on enabling our clients to succeed on the internet in the long-term. We help bring about sustainable and effective results both straight away with good website design but also professional SEO services and consultancy that will enable our clients to see their way through the credit crunch and be poised to exploit the economic upturn which naturally follows.

This is also true online and many locally based independent companies are missing out on the potential of being seen by people searching locally on Google. So ask yourself this important question: “Does my website come up one first page of google for my products in the local town and surrounding area?”. If someone searches for ‘farm shops in MyTown’ does your website appear?

Areoff was approach to design an e-commerce website by a local company. Their products are such that a majority of people want to be able to go and buy locally after finding them on the web for a local search. To create a fully fledged e-commerce site to sell their particular product range would be an expensive proposition due to the very high number of product variations and the price fluctuations inherent in their product type.

The cost of an e-commerce website design coupled with the the administration costs involved in constantly updating the product range and prices are one thing to consider. But then they also have to consider that national chains are their main competition and have established e-commerce systems with staff dedicated to running this aspect of their business.

An e-commerce shop unless it has an established reputation as an online trader is not usually being selected based on customer service but purely on price. So all you might achieve with an online shop in this type of environment is lots of visitors who are comparing your price for the exact make and specification against another online compeititor. Once they have found another online shop selling fractionally cheaper, they will leave your site and you have lost your opportunity to make a sale.

My advice to local companies like this is to look at your online business and website from another angle. It can cost less money to have your local website designed and optimised for search engines with potentially better long-term returns, especially if you ask your website developers to target local searches.

SEO handled in this targetted way can and does result in more customers coming through your shop-door after finding you on a search engine - you already have an established means of fulfilling orders so there isn’t the extra investment or learning curve associated with running an online shop.

So if you are considering how to make more money online don’t just think of the obvious route of setting up an e-commerce website. Think about how you and others use the web to find local products and services and that you don’t always buy online because it is more convenient to buy some products by visiting a local supplier that you may have found through a Google search.

I’m not arguing against e-commerce but instead advocating a sensible approach to how  you can best use the internet and exploit the potential of your website to make more money for your business without breaking the bank on expensive web development.

As I started to fill in the form I realised that this form didn’t display the gold padlock to signify it is secure and to reassure me that my details will be passed over the internet in an encrypted format. Neither is the page https:// which to all you techies out there also signifies that the page is hosted in a secure section of the webspace running the site.

However, there was a contradiction on the webpage before me. The form displays a Security Seal from Verisign. So is this page secure or not? Now I’m confused. All I want to do is get a free upgrade but my online life has just become complicated as there is absolutely no way I’m going to trust a website with my credit card information (and also the serial number of a relatively expensive piece of software).

I did a little investigation by looking at the page source and found that the actual form collecting my information is working within an iframe in the site. This actual form part of the webpage is it turns out hosted on a secure URL and therefore my credit card details should be encrypted and not open to all and sundry to steal.

But how many users are going to go to the level of investigation I did to find out that the form is worthy of me adding my confidential details and credit card information? And how many users are aware of and have the time to discover this information?

This is a good example of a major usability issue with website design and programming where too many E-commerce developers are requiring the end user to do more work than they should have to. The users part of the deal is to fill in the form with the required information and provide a valid form of payment. They should be able to see the Padlock and the page URL starting with https:// as well as the Security Seal. Users shouldn’t have to search around and perform an investigation to make sure a form is secure because they cannot see the usual signs that is safe.

My ears pricked up when two gentlemen from Ireland wanted investments for a online recipe video website combined with a social network arena with revenue generation through advertising.

All was going well for the duo and it seemed the Dragon’s were interested in this internet venture, until the bombshell was dropped. Their domain name was very similar to another website doing almost exactly the same thing and the only difference was their domain was in the plural rather than the singular. Even the .tv extension was the same.

I leapt out of my seat at this and exclaimed ‘the Dragon’s are out!’. And sure enough they all dropped out quicker than you can say ‘domain name’.

The Dragons know the importance of domain name ownership and how confusion amongst potential visitors can loose you important visitors on the web. Your domain name is absolutely crucial to the success or failure of your website when it comes to marketing. It’s true that for SEO there may not be such a major issue because your website may be better optimized and therefore rank more highly than a similar sounding name. But when it comes to getting your brand out there and marketing your website in you have to own all the versions of your brand domain name and be distinctive. A grape is distinctive from a banana but ‘4grapes’ is very similar to ‘4grape’.

How many times has someone told you the web address of a site you’re interested in, or you’ve seen it on an advert on a train or billboard, and you get home to tap it in only to have forgotten whether it’s a .com or .co.uk? Is it plural or singular, is a word or numeral substitute(4 instead of ‘for’). If you do a search on Google you still won’t be any the wiser as to which site is which if they sound so similar and the one that comes top gets your visit.

Our client British Insurance knows the importance of domain name ownership and brand protection and owns .com, .co.uk, and hyphenated versions of their domain names to ensure that virtually everybody can find their products online even when they haven’t typed in the exact web address they saw in, say a newspaper article.

So when choosing domain names for your brand, choose wisely and a bit of extra outlay to register as many versions of your brand name possible is money well spent to catch all of the potential visitors out there. That way you’ll avoid the possibility of people saying “was it areoff.co.uk or areoff.com?”.

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