JDR Group's 'Digital Prosperity' Blog

It may be a cliché to say this in 2019, but yes, it is essential for all businesses to create a website as soon as possible – even start-ups and local businesses. Many small start-ups used to depend on local advertising, referrals and word-of-mouth to get their first few clients, and only then invest in a website, but this is a risky strategy these days because of the way people research information.

It doesn't matter how much traffic your company's website is receiving if those visits aren't likely to generate leads and sales. Therefore, if most of the traffic you're getting is from visitors outside of the geographical areas in which your business operates, you may need to take action. Let's take a look at some of the techniques you can use.

When your organisation owns more than one company, the question of how closely associated these firms should be can raise complex issues. If you're in charge of branding and promoting these companies, one of the key decisions that you'll have to make is whether you should set up a separate domain for each one or design one website that includes information about multiple companies. Let's look at the pros and cons of each option.

In today’s competitive and digital world, successful businesses need to have an attractive and professional-looking online presence. However, there is little point in spending thousands of pounds on a website unless it works well for customers – both at a technical and a personal level. Unfortunately, clunky, unreliable pages or inadequate content means poor or zero ROI (return on investment).

So you have decided to set up a website for your business – congratulations! Now that you have started to visualise how your business website will look and all the benefits it will bring, chances are you’ll also want to know when it will be up and running. So how long should you expect your new website to take?

In the digital economy we live in, having a business website is a must. However, having a website alone is not enough: customers will not flock to your site just because you have it; they will browse around and choose the company with the most compelling online presence, and not just through Google either. B2B enquiries now frequently come through LinkedIn or Facebook as well as the company website, so if your website isn’t delivering the results you expected, it’s time to check how it fares when compared to your competitors.

Diversifying can be the road to success when it comes to business growth, whether that's in terms of introducing new products, services, or even brands. Do you really need a separate website for each of your SME's innovations, however, or should you promote them all on a single domain? Let's take a look at some of the things you'll need to consider in order to work out which approach to take.

Search engines are fantastic at matching search queries with informative, helpful content. That’s not so great if your business website performs more like a digital sales brochure than an information hub. If your website fails to provide a relevant answer to a search query you’ll miss out on organic search traffic.

Websites are not like fine wines – they don’t age gracefully. If your website is more than a few years old and you haven’t had it updated, the likelihood is it will look tired and out-of-date at best and lacking in functionality at worst. Older websites often need a complete redesign rather than tweaking around the edges, and this can be a considerable investment.

Leads are the life-blood of any successful business. Generating leads will help you to make sales and pull in more revenue. One of the key things that your website should do is to help find leads which you can then follow up on. However, some businesses can struggle with this - while there can be a variety of reasons for this, it could be that your website itself that is the big problem. You might get lots of traffic, but just aren't seeing it convert into genuine leads.