JDR Group's 'Digital Prosperity' Blog

The internet is a wonderful thing. It is now easier than ever to find answers to questions, connect with others and purchase goods online. Most of us look at this as a good thing, which it is. However, with most good things, there is a downside. The sad truth is that, with the more we can do online, the easier it can be for hackers to steal our sensitive information.

If you've created a piece of content, you are going to want to see it have a positive impact on your business. You don't want to see content that you have worked hard on go to waste and not produce anything for your business. However, if you aren't analysing your content, how are you to know if it is helping your business at all?

Regardless of what you may have heard or what your perception of it may be, email marketing is as important for businesses today as it ever has been. In fact, according to Hubspot, email marketing gives a Return on Investment of over 4,300%! There’s no wonder over 76% of marketers use email marketing as one of their main marketing methods. From a business’ point of view, email marketing presents a great opportunity as it allows them to effectively market to their ideal customers due to the fact that so many people have an email account and most check their emails regularly. They also allow businesses to personalise their message for each contact.

If you own a business that offers a certain set of products or services, you are going to try to market those services, whether you realise it or not. For years now, people have seen marketing as businesses trying to sell you their products or services and, for a long time, that would probably have been true. Marketing used to be all about telling consumers they needed your products or services without actually thinking about their specific needs.

The importance of creating content to your SEO cannot be understated. Simply put, you are not reaching your full SEO potential if you aren’t creating content. However, while it is important to create content, it is just as important to make sure that the content that you are creating is helping your SEO efforts.

Imagine you’re going on a run. You feel you’re going along just fine, but you know you aren’t reaching your full potential. So, you decide to drink an energy drink to give you the energy you need to go further. Having the energy drink is one thing but if it doesn’t contain any ingredients that gives you energy, it’s worthless to you. Your content creation is the energy drink to your SEO potential and the actual content contains all the ingredients. If the right ingredients aren’t there, it will not help your business. So, are you following the best practices when it comes to content creation?

Images are a vital part of your SEO and you won’t find many websites without them. In fact, most websites will have images on most if not all of their pages. We live in a world where we expect what we’re looking at to be visually appealing and images on a website play a large part in making it visually appealing. However, there is so much more to images than meets the eye and many people forget about a very important term when adding images to a site: Image Optimisation.

As you may have guessed from our other articles, web design is not easy. There is a lot of thought that goes into the process, not to mention time and money. With all the important elements that must be considered when building and maintaining a website, it can be quite easy for mistakes to be made. A lot of mistakes can go unidentified if the site isn’t regularly checked and, while they may not be mistakes that will render your website unusable, if left untreated, they will certainly hinder your website from reaching its full potential. Here are 4 web design mistakes that could be hindering your website.

Can you believe it? 2017 has already come to an end! It has been a big year for SEO with many different rising trends. There has been the rise of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) when Google announced stricter rules on AMP. There has also been a huge rise in voice searches and location marketing. If you didn’t take advantage of these or simply didn’t know about the trends, you may have missed some great opportunities to improve your search engine rankings. It’s a New Year and that can mean only one thing – New Year’s resolutions.

We are now in the final stages before Christmas. Businesses will start to wind down for the year while business owners and employees look forward to the festive season. After Christmas, the New Year is just around the corner and suddenly businesses will spark back into life, ready to start the New Year. The beginning of the year is usually the same for many businesses, with many planning out the year ahead and setting goals and objectives.

Once upon a time, Search Engine Optimisation consisted of putting keywords into key areas that Google would look for. You could essentially use black hat SEO to spam Google with keywords in order to appear higher in search results. This is no longer the case. Businesses have had to change their SEO strategy in order to get any results whatsoever and it takes a lot more work than writing a bunch of keywords. Why is this though? Does this make SEO a waste of time and money?