Author: raymond_gillespie

If you’ve ever sent an important email to a customer, only to discover several days later that it ended up in their spam folder, you’ll know just how frustrating it can be. It’s particularly annoying when you’re sending something completely legitimate, such as a quotation or invoice, and the recipient assumes you haven’t bothered replying to them. Unfortunately, email spam filtering has become increasingly sophisticated over the years, and while this is generally a good thing for those of us who don’t particularly enjoy receiving hundreds of emails about dubious pharmaceutical products, it can occasionally cause problems for perfectly legitimate businesses.

Having worked with various email marketing platforms and business email systems over the years, I’ve come across quite a few situations where companies have struggled to get their emails delivered properly. Sometimes the problem is relatively straightforward, such as an incorrectly configured email server, but in other cases it can be considerably more difficult to identify. The important thing to understand is that your emails aren’t necessarily being marked as spam because of something you’ve written in them, and fixing the problem can involve a little more than simply removing suspicious words from your subject lines.

How Do Spam Filters Actually Work?

When you send an email, the recipient’s email provider doesn’t simply accept it and place it directly into their inbox. Instead, services such as Gmail, Outlook and Microsoft 365 use various systems to determine whether the message is legitimate, potentially unwanted or outright malicious. These systems examine numerous factors, including the reputation of the sending server, whether the email has been properly authenticated, the content of the message and how recipients have previously interacted with emails from the same sender.

For example, if thousands of people regularly receive emails from your domain and immediately mark them as spam, there’s a reasonable chance that future messages will be treated with suspicion. Conversely, if people regularly open, reply to and otherwise interact positively with your emails, that’s generally a much healthier position to be in. However, the precise methods used by email providers aren’t publicly disclosed, meaning there’s no guaranteed way to ensure that every message reaches somebody’s inbox.

It’s also worth distinguishing between emails being rejected completely and those being delivered to a spam folder. If a receiving server rejects a message, you’ll often receive an error or non-delivery report explaining what happened, whereas a message placed in the spam folder might appear to have been delivered perfectly successfully from your perspective.

Have You Configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC?

One of the first things I’d investigate is whether your domain’s email authentication has been configured correctly. There are three main technologies involved here, called SPF, DKIM and DMARC, which help receiving email servers establish whether messages claiming to originate from your domain are actually legitimate.

SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, allows you to specify which servers are authorised to send emails on behalf of your domain. DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, uses a digital signature to help verify that an email was authorised by the domain responsible for signing it and hasn’t been modified in certain ways since being sent. DMARC builds on these technologies by allowing domain owners to specify how receiving servers should handle messages that fail authentication and alignment checks.

Although these might sound rather complicated, they’re generally configured through DNS records associated with your domain name, and most reputable email providers supply instructions explaining how to set them up. However, things can become more complicated if your business uses several different systems to send emails, such as Microsoft 365 for normal correspondence, Mailchimp for marketing and a website that sends automated enquiry notifications.

If one of those services hasn’t been configured correctly, you might find that emails sent through Outlook are delivered successfully while messages generated by your website regularly disappear into spam folders. This is why I’d recommend checking all the systems sending emails using your domain rather than assuming that everything is working simply because your everyday emails are being delivered.

Could Your Email Server Have a Bad Reputation?

Another important factor is the reputation of the IP address being used to send your emails. This can be particularly relevant if you’re using inexpensive web hosting that also provides email services, as your messages might be sent through a server shared with numerous other customers.

If somebody else using that server has been sending large quantities of spam, the server’s IP address could develop a poor reputation or appear on one of the blocklists used by email providers. Unfortunately, this means your perfectly legitimate emails might encounter delivery problems through no direct fault of your own.

You can check whether an IP address appears on various email blocklists using services such as MXToolbox, although it’s worth remembering that appearing on a particular list doesn’t automatically mean every email provider will reject your messages.

Personally, I’d generally recommend using a reputable business email service such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace rather than relying on the basic email facilities included with particularly cheap website hosting packages. That doesn’t guarantee perfect deliverability, but it removes some of the potential problems associated with poorly maintained email infrastructure.

Are You Sending Too Many Emails?

If you’re experiencing problems with marketing emails rather than ordinary business correspondence, another possibility is that you’re sending too many messages to people who aren’t particularly interested in receiving them.

Let’s say you’ve accumulated a mailing list containing several thousand email addresses over the last decade, but haven’t contacted most of those people for several years. Suddenly sending everybody a promotional newsletter might sound like a reasonable way to generate additional business, but it could also result in a substantial number of bounced messages, unsubscribes and spam complaints.

Email providers pay attention to this sort of behaviour, and a sudden increase in sending volume can also attract additional scrutiny, particularly if your domain doesn’t have an established history of sending large campaigns.

I’d recommend regularly removing invalid addresses, reviewing contacts who haven’t engaged with your emails for a long time and making sure you’re only contacting people who have a legitimate reason to hear from you. For UK businesses, you’ll also need to consider GDPR and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, particularly when sending unsolicited marketing emails.

Using a dedicated email marketing platform such as Mailchimp can make managing these requirements considerably easier than attempting to send thousands of messages directly through Outlook.

Does the Content of Your Email Matter?

Of course, what you actually write in your emails can also influence whether they’re identified as spam, although I think there’s a tendency to exaggerate the importance of individual words and phrases.

You might have heard that using words such as ‘free’, ‘discount’ or ‘special offer’ will automatically result in your email being sent to the spam folder, but modern spam filters are considerably more sophisticated than that. They generally examine the overall characteristics of a message rather than simply looking for a handful of forbidden words.

However, I’d still avoid misleading subject lines, excessive capitalisation and emails consisting almost entirely of promotional images. It’s also worth checking that any links point to legitimate websites and that your emails contain clear information identifying your business.

For marketing emails, providing a straightforward unsubscribe option is particularly important. If somebody no longer wants to hear from you, it’s considerably better for them to unsubscribe than to repeatedly mark your messages as spam.

What Should You Do If Your Emails Keep Going into Spam?

Personally, I’d start by establishing whether the problem affects all your emails or only particular types of messages. If ordinary Outlook emails are being delivered successfully but automated website notifications aren’t, that suggests a rather different problem from every message sent by your company ending up in spam.

Next, I’d check your SPF, DKIM and DMARC configuration, examine the headers of an affected email to see whether authentication checks are passing, and investigate whether your sending IP address has developed a poor reputation. If you’re sending marketing campaigns, I’d also review your mailing list and recent engagement figures.

It’s worth remembering that being able to send an email doesn’t necessarily mean the recipient’s email provider is going to trust it. Proper email authentication, a good sending reputation and sensible mailing practices are all important, particularly when businesses depend so heavily on email for everyday communications.

Ultimately, there’s no magic setting that will guarantee your emails always arrive in somebody’s inbox, but there are plenty of things you can do to improve your chances. Given the potential consequences of customers missing important quotations, enquiries or invoices, I’d suggest it’s worth spending a little time making sure everything is configured properly rather than simply asking people to check their spam folders whenever you send them something.

If you run a business, there’s a good chance that you rely on computers and the internet for almost everything you do, whether that’s communicating with customers, processing orders, managing finances or simply storing important documents. However, while most businesses recognise the importance of protecting their physical premises, I’m not convinced that the same level of attention is always given to protecting their computers and online systems. I’ve come across plenty of smaller companies that spend hundreds of pounds on security cameras and alarm systems, but don’t think twice about using the same password for every online account or storing their entire customer database on a laptop that hasn’t been backed up for months.

Unfortunately, cyber attacks aren’t something that only happens to enormous multinational companies. In fact, smaller businesses can be particularly attractive targets because they often lack the resources or technical expertise required to implement more sophisticated security measures. The good news is that improving your cyber security doesn’t necessarily involve spending thousands of pounds on specialist software, and there are several relatively straightforward things that almost any business can do to reduce its risk.

Make Sure Your Software Is Up to Date

Probably one of the simplest ways to improve your security is to make sure your computers, websites and other software are regularly updated. Software developers frequently release updates to fix security vulnerabilities, and once those vulnerabilities become publicly known, criminals can potentially exploit them to gain access to systems that haven’t been patched.

This is particularly important for websites running content management systems such as WordPress, where outdated plugins and themes can create opportunities for attackers. However, the same principle applies to Windows, Microsoft Office, web browsers and almost any other software your business uses. I’d recommend enabling automatic updates wherever practical, although it’s worth having a backup and testing particularly significant updates before applying them to business-critical systems.

It’s also important to stop using software that no longer receives security updates. For example, Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 in January 2020, meaning businesses still relying on it could be exposing themselves to vulnerabilities that are no longer being fixed through normal updates.

Stop Using the Same Password Everywhere

Despite years of warnings about password security, I’m still surprised by how frequently people reuse the same passwords across numerous websites and services. I can understand why they do it, particularly when almost every application requires an account, but it creates an obvious problem if one of those services suffers a data breach.

Imagine somebody obtains your email address and password from a compromised website. If you’ve used exactly the same details for your Microsoft 365 account, website administration area and online banking, you’ve potentially given them access to several completely unrelated systems.

Fortunately, password managers such as Bitwarden, LastPass and 1Password make it relatively straightforward to generate and store unique passwords without having to remember them all. I’d also strongly recommend enabling two-factor authentication wherever it’s available, particularly for email accounts, financial services and website administration systems. Requiring somebody to provide an additional verification code or approve a login through their phone makes it considerably more difficult for criminals to access an account using a stolen password alone.

Back Up Your Data Properly

One of the biggest threats to businesses in recent years has been ransomware, where malicious software encrypts files and demands payment in exchange for restoring access to them. These attacks can be devastating, particularly if important customer records, financial information or business documents suddenly become inaccessible.

Regular backups are one of the most effective ways to reduce the potential damage, although it’s important to understand that simply copying everything to an external hard drive occasionally isn’t necessarily sufficient.

Ideally, you should maintain automated backups that are stored separately from your main systems, including at least one copy that can’t be easily modified or deleted if your network is compromised. You should also periodically test whether those backups can actually be restored, because discovering that your backup system hasn’t been working properly for six months isn’t particularly useful after you’ve already lost everything.

Cloud services such as Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive can help protect important files, but synchronisation isn’t necessarily the same thing as having a proper backup. If somebody accidentally deletes or encrypts files, those changes can sometimes be synchronised too.

Be Careful with Emails

Email remains one of the most common ways criminals attempt to compromise business systems, particularly through phishing messages designed to trick people into revealing passwords, downloading malicious attachments or transferring money to fraudulent accounts.

These messages are becoming increasingly convincing, and they don’t always contain the obvious spelling mistakes and suspicious formatting that people traditionally associate with scams. Some are specifically targeted at individual employees, using information about the business to make the message appear legitimate.

For example, somebody working in your accounts department might receive an email that appears to come from a regular supplier, explaining that their bank details have changed and requesting that future payments be sent to a different account. Rather than simply accepting the instructions, I’d recommend verifying changes like this through an established telephone number or another trusted communication channel.

Employee awareness is particularly important here, because even the most sophisticated security software can’t guarantee that somebody won’t be persuaded to hand over sensitive information.

Don’t Give Everybody Administrator Access

Another relatively straightforward improvement is making sure employees only have access to the systems and information they actually need.

For example, somebody responsible for updating blog posts probably doesn’t need administrator access to your entire WordPress website, while an employee working in customer service might not need access to your company’s financial records.

This principle is commonly referred to as ‘least privilege’, and it helps limit the potential damage if an individual account is compromised. It’s also worth regularly reviewing user accounts, particularly when employees leave the business or change roles.

I’ve encountered websites with administrator accounts belonging to people who left the company several years earlier, which is an unnecessary security risk that’s usually straightforward to resolve.

Consider Cyber Essentials

For UK businesses, I’d also recommend looking at Cyber Essentials, a government-backed certification scheme designed to help organisations protect themselves against common cyber threats.

The scheme concentrates on five fundamental areas: firewalls, secure configuration, access control, malware protection and security updates. These aren’t particularly revolutionary concepts, but implementing them properly can significantly reduce the likelihood of falling victim to relatively straightforward attacks.

Certification can also be useful commercially, particularly when dealing with larger organisations or public sector contracts where demonstrating appropriate security measures might be a requirement.

Even if you don’t intend to obtain certification, the National Cyber Security Centre provides a free small business guide containing practical advice that’s worth reading.

Have a Plan for When Something Goes Wrong

Finally, it’s worth considering what would actually happen if your business suffered a serious cyber attack. Would employees know who to contact? Could you restore your systems from backups? Would you be able to continue operating while your computers or website were unavailable?

There’s also the question of data protection. Under UK GDPR, certain personal data breaches need to be reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours of becoming aware of them, where feasible, so it’s important to understand your responsibilities before something happens.

Personally, I don’t think smaller businesses need to become experts in cyber security, but they should at least understand the risks and take reasonable precautions to protect themselves.

Most of the measures I’ve discussed don’t require particularly sophisticated technology or enormous budgets, but they can make a substantial difference to how vulnerable your business is.

Ultimately, I’d suggest treating cyber security in much the same way as protecting your physical premises: you probably can’t eliminate every possible risk, but that’s hardly a reason to leave the front door unlocked.

Launching a new website is something that most businesses will only do once every few years, and while it’s always exciting to see a new design finally go live, there’s considerably more involved than simply uploading a few files and pointing your domain name at a different server. Having been involved in more website launches than I can remember over the years, I’ve seen plenty of occasions where something that should have been relatively straightforward has turned into a rather stressful experience, usually because somebody has overlooked an important detail during the preparation.

Fortunately, most of the problems associated with launching a website are entirely avoidable, provided you spend a little time planning the process properly. Whether you’re launching your first website or replacing an existing one, there are several things I’d recommend checking before making it available to the public, particularly if your business relies on its website for enquiries or sales.

Make Sure Everything Actually Works

This might sound rather obvious, but you’d be surprised how frequently websites are launched without being properly tested. Just because the homepage looks fantastic on your computer doesn’t necessarily mean everything else is working as expected, particularly when visitors start using different browsers, devices and screen sizes.

I’d recommend testing all the important pages on both desktop and mobile devices, paying particular attention to navigation menus, contact forms, buttons and any interactive functionality. If you’re launching an ecommerce website, make sure you’ve tested the entire purchasing process, including adding products to the basket, applying delivery charges, completing payments and receiving confirmation emails. It’s also worth checking what happens when something goes wrong, such as a customer entering incorrect payment information or leaving a required form field empty.

One thing I always recommend is getting somebody who hasn’t been involved in developing the website to test it. When you’ve spent weeks looking at the same pages, it’s surprisingly easy to overlook problems that somebody encountering the website for the first time will spot immediately.

Don’t Forget About SEO

If you’re replacing an existing website, this is probably one of the most important considerations. Your old website might already have established rankings in Google, along with links from other websites pointing to particular pages. If you simply replace everything without considering what happens to those existing URLs, you could potentially lose a substantial amount of organic search traffic.

Ideally, I’d recommend keeping your existing URL structure wherever possible, particularly for pages that already perform well in Google’s search results. Where URLs genuinely need to change, you should implement permanent 301 redirects from the old addresses to their most relevant replacements. For example, if your existing services page is located at /what-we-do/ but the new website uses /services/, anybody visiting the old address should automatically be redirected to the new one.

You should also check that page titles, meta descriptions, headings and other important SEO elements have been transferred correctly. There’s little point spending years optimising a website only to discover that the new version has replaced all your carefully written page titles with something generic.

Check That Google Can Actually Access Your Website

Another surprisingly common problem is launching a website that’s accidentally been configured to prevent search engines from indexing it.

During development, it’s normal to restrict access to a website while it’s being built, particularly if you’re working on a temporary development address. However, those restrictions need to be removed when the website goes live.

For WordPress websites, I’d recommend checking the ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ option under Settings > Reading, along with any indexing restrictions introduced through SEO plugins or the website’s robots.txt file.

You should also make sure your website has been added to Google Search Console, which allows you to monitor indexing problems, submit an XML sitemap and see how your website performs in Google’s search results. If you’re replacing an existing website, it’s particularly important to monitor Search Console during the weeks following launch, as significant changes to your URL structure can sometimes cause temporary fluctuations in rankings.

Make Sure Your Analytics Is Working

There’s little point launching a new website if you can’t measure whether it’s actually performing any better than the old one. Before going live, I’d recommend checking that Google Analytics has been installed correctly and is recording visits as expected.

If you’re replacing an existing website, you should ideally retain your existing Google Analytics property so that you can continue comparing performance against historical data. I’d also recommend checking any goals you’ve previously configured, particularly those measuring contact form submissions, purchases or other important conversions.

It’s surprisingly easy for conversion tracking to stop working during a website redesign, particularly when forms are replaced or thank-you page URLs change. This can cause problems with Google Ads campaigns that rely on conversion data to optimise their performance.

If you’re using Google Tag Manager, it’s also worth reviewing any tags and triggers that might depend on elements of the old website, rather than assuming everything will continue working automatically.

Hosting, Domains and Email

The technical process of launching a website will depend largely on where it’s hosted and whether you’re changing hosting providers. If you’re moving to a new server, you’ll generally need to update your domain’s DNS settings, which can take some time to propagate across the internet.

However, I’d strongly recommend checking your existing DNS records before making any changes, particularly if your business uses email addresses associated with the same domain. I’ve encountered situations where somebody has changed DNS settings to launch a new website and accidentally disrupted the company’s email service in the process.

You should also make sure the website has a valid SSL certificate, loads correctly over HTTPS and redirects visitors to the appropriate version of the domain. It’s worth checking that any backup systems are working properly too, particularly if you’re replacing an existing website that might need restoring if something goes wrong.

What About the Content?

One thing that’s easy to overlook during a redesign is whether the information on the website is actually correct. It’s not unusual for development websites to contain temporary text, outdated contact details or photographs that were only intended to demonstrate how a particular section would look.

Before launching, I’d recommend checking that everything is accurate, particularly telephone numbers, email addresses, opening hours and product prices. For UK businesses, you should also make sure any required company information, privacy notices and cookie consent functionality have been included where appropriate.

If you’ve introduced new content, it’s worth asking somebody to proofread it before launch. While the occasional spelling mistake probably isn’t going to cause a disaster, having incorrect prices or misleading information about your services could create considerably more serious problems.

The Launch Isn’t the End of the Project

Finally, I’d suggest resisting the temptation to consider the project finished as soon as the website goes live. In fact, the first few days after launch are often when previously unnoticed problems begin to emerge, particularly once real visitors start interacting with the site.

I’d recommend keeping an eye on Google Analytics, Search Console and any error reports generated by the website, while also checking that enquiries and orders are coming through correctly. If you’ve changed your URL structure, monitor your redirects and make sure visitors aren’t encountering unnecessary 404 errors.

Personally, I think the most successful website launches are usually the ones where nothing particularly exciting happens, because everything has already been checked and tested before anybody notices the change.

Launching a website doesn’t need to be complicated, but there are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong if you rush the process. My advice would be to prepare properly, test everything you can and make sure you’ve got a way of restoring the old website if something unexpected happens.

After all, there’s little point spending thousands of pounds on a fantastic new website if half your customers can’t actually use it.

If you’ve ever looked for a local tradesperson, compared hotels or considered buying something from an unfamiliar website, there’s a good chance you’ve spent some time reading customer reviews before making your decision. In fact, online reviews have become such an important part of how people choose which businesses to use that it’s increasingly difficult to imagine making certain purchases without checking what previous customers have said about them. However, while most businesses recognise the value of having positive reviews, there’s still a surprising amount of uncertainty about whether they should actively encourage customers to leave them.

I’ve come across quite a few businesses that are reluctant to ask customers for reviews, either because they think it might seem a little desperate or because they’re concerned about encouraging somebody to leave negative feedback. Others take the opposite approach, contacting practically everybody they’ve ever dealt with and repeatedly asking them to leave five-star ratings. Personally, I think there’s a sensible middle ground between these two approaches, although there are some important things to consider before you start asking customers to review your business.

Why Are Customer Reviews So Important?

One of the biggest problems facing any business is establishing trust, particularly when somebody hasn’t dealt with you before. You can spend thousands of pounds creating a professional website, writing convincing sales copy and telling potential customers how fantastic your products or services are, but ultimately that’s just your business talking about itself. A positive review from an independent customer can be considerably more persuasive, particularly when it’s accompanied by a detailed explanation of their experience.

Reviews can also be useful from an SEO perspective, especially for businesses that rely on attracting customers through local searches. Google My Business listings display customer ratings and reviews alongside other information about local companies, allowing potential customers to compare businesses without necessarily visiting their websites. Google has also confirmed that positive reviews and ratings can help improve local search rankings, although they’re obviously only one of several factors involved.

However, I think it’s important to distinguish between collecting reviews to improve your online visibility and collecting them because they’re genuinely useful to potential customers. If you’re concentrating entirely on getting your average rating as close to five stars as possible, there’s a danger that you’ll overlook the information that makes reviews valuable in the first place.

Should You Actually Ask Customers for Reviews?

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with asking customers to leave an honest review, provided you’re not putting them under pressure or attempting to influence what they say. Most people probably won’t think about reviewing a business unless they’ve had either an exceptionally good or particularly bad experience, which means companies that don’t actively request feedback could end up with a rather unrepresentative collection of reviews.

Imagine a local electrician who completes 200 jobs a year, with 195 satisfied customers and five who encounter some sort of problem. If those five dissatisfied customers are considerably more motivated to leave reviews than everybody else, the business could end up looking far worse than its actual customer satisfaction levels would suggest.

Simply sending customers a polite email after completing a job, thanking them for their business and inviting them to leave a review could help create a more representative picture. I’d recommend making the process as straightforward as possible by providing a direct link to the relevant review platform, rather than expecting customers to search for your business themselves.

However, I wouldn’t repeatedly chase people who haven’t responded. There’s a reasonable chance that somebody who was perfectly happy with your service might become considerably less enthusiastic after receiving their fifth request for a review.

Be Careful About Offering Incentives

One thing I’d strongly advise against is offering customers rewards in exchange for positive reviews. You might be tempted to offer a discount on their next purchase or enter them into a prize draw if they leave a five-star rating, but this creates some fairly obvious problems with the credibility of the resulting feedback.

Google’s policies prohibit businesses from offering incentives in exchange for reviews, while UK consumer protection rules also place restrictions on misleading endorsements and reviews. The Competition and Markets Authority has been investigating fake and misleading online reviews for several years, and in January announced that Facebook and eBay had agreed to take action against people using their platforms to buy and sell fraudulent reviews.

There’s also the practice of selectively asking only your happiest customers to leave public reviews, while directing everybody else towards a private feedback form. Although I can understand why businesses might find this attractive, it creates a misleading impression of customer satisfaction and is something I’d recommend avoiding.

If you’re going to ask for reviews, I’d suggest asking customers for their genuine opinions rather than attempting to manufacture an artificially positive reputation.

What About Negative Reviews?

This is probably what concerns businesses most, particularly when they’ve spent years establishing a good reputation. Nobody particularly enjoys receiving criticism, especially when it’s published online for everybody to see, but I think negative reviews can sometimes be surprisingly useful.

Firstly, they provide an opportunity to identify problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. If several customers complain about slow delivery, confusing instructions or difficulty contacting your business, that’s probably something worth investigating rather than simply dismissing their feedback.

Secondly, the way you respond to criticism can influence how potential customers perceive your business. A polite, professional response acknowledging a problem and explaining how you’re going to resolve it can be considerably more reassuring than an angry reply accusing the customer of being unreasonable.

I’d also argue that a business with hundreds of exclusively five-star reviews can sometimes look less convincing than one with a slightly lower rating and a mixture of genuine customer experiences. Very few businesses provide absolutely perfect service on every occasion, and most people understand that things occasionally go wrong.

Which Review Platforms Should You Use?

For local businesses, I’d probably concentrate on Google My Business initially, particularly if customers are likely to discover you through Google Search or Maps. However, other platforms such as Trustpilot, Reviews.io, Facebook and industry-specific review websites might be worth considering, depending on the type of business you’re running.

For ecommerce retailers, product reviews can be particularly valuable because they provide information about individual products rather than simply the business selling them. Platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce offer various ways of collecting and displaying this feedback, although I’d recommend making sure reviews are genuine and that negative comments aren’t simply being hidden.

Personally, I’d avoid trying to establish a presence on every review platform simultaneously. You’re probably better off concentrating on one or two relevant services and collecting a reasonable number of genuine reviews rather than spreading your efforts across half a dozen different websites.

Should You Make Reviews Part of Your Marketing Strategy?

I think so, although I’d be careful about turning the whole process into an exercise in generating as many five-star ratings as possible. If you’re providing good products or services, there’s nothing wrong with encouraging customers to share their experiences, and a polite request at an appropriate point in the customer relationship can be perfectly reasonable.

However, reviews should ultimately reflect what customers genuinely think about your business, rather than what you’d like potential customers to believe. If you’re receiving consistently poor feedback, the answer probably isn’t to find more creative ways of collecting positive reviews, but to address whatever is causing the dissatisfaction.

My advice would be to make it easy for customers to leave honest feedback, respond appropriately when they do and avoid attempting to manipulate the results.

After all, the best way to build a reputation for providing excellent customer service is probably to provide excellent customer service in the first place.

If you’re running a business, there’s a good chance that you’ve considered using a marketing agency at some point. Whether you’re looking to improve your website’s search engine rankings, generate more enquiries through Google Ads or simply increase awareness of your brand, there are hundreds of agencies across the UK offering to help. However, with some charging thousands of pounds a month for their services, it’s understandable that smaller businesses might question whether employing an agency is really worthwhile, particularly when many of the same activities could potentially be carried out internally.

Having spent many years working in digital marketing, including time working within agencies and directly with businesses, I’ve seen the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. While a good agency can make an enormous difference to a company’s marketing performance, I’ve also encountered businesses spending substantial amounts of money on services that don’t appear to be achieving very much. Personally, I don’t think every business necessarily needs a marketing agency, and there are several things I’d consider before deciding whether to outsource your marketing or manage it yourself.

What Does a Marketing Agency Actually Do?

This might sound like a strange question, but I think it’s worth considering because the term ‘marketing agency’ can cover an enormous range of different services. Some agencies specialise in particular disciplines, such as SEO, PPC or social media advertising, while others offer everything from website development and graphic design to public relations and traditional advertising.

One of the main advantages of working with an agency is that you can potentially gain access to several specialists without having to employ them individually. For example, a relatively small agency might have somebody responsible for SEO, another person managing Google Ads campaigns and a developer who can make technical changes to your website. Employing three people with those skills internally would obviously be considerably more expensive than paying an agency for a few hours of their time each month.

However, it’s important to understand exactly what you’re paying for. Just because an agency advertises a particular service doesn’t necessarily mean it has somebody with substantial expertise in that area, and I’ve come across plenty of agencies that appear to offer almost everything without necessarily specialising in anything.

Could You Do It Yourself?

Depending on the size of your business and what you’re trying to achieve, there’s a reasonable argument that you might be better off handling at least some of your marketing internally. If you’re running a relatively small company, for example, you might be perfectly capable of maintaining your website, publishing occasional blog posts and updating your social media accounts without needing to pay somebody else to do it.

There are also plenty of free resources available to help you learn more about digital marketing, including Google’s own training materials and numerous online guides covering SEO, advertising and analytics. However, I’d be cautious about assuming that being able to use a particular marketing platform necessarily means you’re using it effectively.

Google Ads is a good example of this. Almost anybody can create an account, choose some keywords and start spending money, but that doesn’t mean their campaigns will actually generate profitable business. Understanding keyword matching, conversion tracking, bidding strategies and campaign optimisation takes experience, and mistakes can become expensive surprisingly quickly.

There’s also the question of how much your own time is worth. If you’re spending ten hours a week trying to understand SEO when you could be concentrating on running your business, employing somebody who already knows what they’re doing might actually work out considerably cheaper.

What About Employing Somebody In-House?

For larger businesses, employing a dedicated marketing person or team can offer some significant advantages over using an external agency. An employee working within your business will generally have a much better understanding of your products, customers and day-to-day operations, particularly once they’ve been with the company for a while.

They’ll also be available to respond to things as they happen, rather than having to arrange meetings or wait for an agency to schedule work around its other clients. If you’re regularly launching products, updating your website or running complicated marketing campaigns, having somebody available internally can make a considerable difference.

However, there’s a problem with expecting one person to be an expert in every aspect of marketing. Somebody who’s excellent at writing content and managing social media campaigns might know relatively little about technical SEO or website development, while an experienced Google Ads specialist might not be particularly good at graphic design.

I’ve seen businesses advertise for marketing employees with job descriptions that effectively combine the responsibilities of an entire agency, often without offering a salary that would realistically attract somebody with all those skills.

How Much Should You Be Paying?

Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward answer to this because agency fees vary enormously depending on the services being provided, the complexity of the work and the experience of the people involved. Some agencies offer relatively inexpensive monthly packages, while others charge considerably more for bespoke campaigns or specialist consultancy.

Personally, I’d be cautious about choosing an agency purely because it’s the cheapest option, particularly for services such as SEO where the quality of the work can have a significant impact on your website’s performance. However, I’d be equally cautious about assuming that an agency charging £2,000 a month must necessarily be better than one charging £500.

The important thing is understanding what work is actually being carried out and whether it’s producing worthwhile results. If you’re paying £1,000 a month for SEO, for example, I’d expect to know what activities are being undertaken, why they’re necessary and how their effectiveness is being measured.

That doesn’t mean every activity needs to generate an immediate financial return, particularly when you’re investing in longer-term improvements, but there should at least be a clear explanation of what you’re paying for.

Make Sure You Retain Control

One issue I’ve encountered over the years is businesses allowing agencies to take complete control of their marketing accounts without retaining adequate access themselves. This can become particularly problematic if the relationship eventually breaks down and the business discovers that it doesn’t have the login details for its own website, Google Analytics account or advertising campaigns.

I’d strongly recommend ensuring that important accounts are registered under your business’s control, with appropriate access provided to whichever agency you’re working with. Google Ads, for example, allows agencies to manage clients’ campaigns through manager accounts without requiring businesses to surrender access to their own accounts.

It’s also worth checking the terms of any agreement before signing, particularly regarding notice periods, ownership of creative work and what happens when the contract ends. A good agency shouldn’t need to make it unnecessarily difficult for you to leave.

How Do You Know Whether an Agency Is Any Good?

Probably the best starting point is looking at the results an agency has achieved for businesses similar to yours. Testimonials and case studies can be useful, although I’d be more interested in understanding the actual commercial outcomes than simply seeing impressive-looking graphs showing increases in website traffic.

If an agency claims to have doubled a client’s organic traffic, for example, that’s obviously encouraging, but did those additional visitors generate any enquiries or sales? Similarly, an agency managing Google Ads campaigns should ideally be concentrating on the cost of acquiring customers rather than simply increasing clicks or impressions.

I’d also recommend finding out who’ll actually be working on your account. The person delivering the sales presentation might have twenty years of experience, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be the person managing your campaigns.

So Do You Really Need an Agency?

Personally, I think the answer depends largely on the resources and expertise you already have available. For a small business with relatively straightforward marketing requirements, employing an agency might be unnecessary, particularly if you’re comfortable managing your own website and advertising.

However, if your business relies heavily on digital marketing, or you need specialist skills that aren’t available internally, a good agency can be extremely valuable. There’s also nothing wrong with combining the two approaches, employing somebody internally to manage your overall marketing while outsourcing specialist activities such as SEO or PPC.

Ultimately, I’d suggest deciding what you actually want your marketing to achieve before worrying about whether you need an agency to do it. If you can achieve those objectives effectively using your existing resources, there’s little reason to pay somebody else.

If you can’t, an agency might be exactly what you need, but I’d concentrate on finding one that understands your business and can demonstrate worthwhile results rather than simply choosing whoever gives you the most convincing sales pitch.

If you’re spending money on digital marketing, you’ll presumably want to know whether it’s actually generating any business. Google Analytics can provide an enormous amount of information about how people find your website, but one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that businesses often struggle to identify which of their individual marketing campaigns are producing results. They might know that 500 people visited their website from Facebook last month, for example, but have no idea whether those visitors came from a paid advertisement, an ordinary Facebook post or a link somebody shared with their friends. Fortunately, there’s a relatively straightforward way of solving this problem, using something called UTM tracking.

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, a name that originates from Urchin, the web analytics company Google acquired back in 2005 and subsequently developed into Google Analytics. Despite the rather technical-sounding name, UTM tracking is actually extremely simple, and it’s something I’d recommend using whenever you’re running marketing campaigns that direct people to your website.

What Exactly Are UTM Parameters?

Essentially, UTM parameters are small pieces of information added to the end of a website address, allowing Google Analytics to identify where a particular visitor has come from. For example, let’s say you’re running an email marketing campaign promoting a summer sale, and you want to know how many visitors arrive through the links in your newsletter. Rather than simply linking to your homepage, you could use an address like this:

https://www.example.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=summer_sale

Although the address looks considerably longer, it still takes visitors to exactly the same page. The difference is that Google Analytics can now identify the source of the traffic as your newsletter, the marketing medium as email and the campaign as your summer sale. This information can then be used to analyse how visitors from that particular campaign behave, including whether they make a purchase or submit an enquiry.

There are five main UTM parameters available, although you generally only need to use three of them. The utm_source parameter identifies where the visitor came from, such as Facebook, Google or a particular newsletter, while utm_medium describes the type of marketing activity, such as email, CPC advertising or social media. The utm_campaign parameter identifies the specific campaign, allowing you to group together traffic generated through several different channels. Two additional parameters, utm_term and utm_content, can be used to identify paid search keywords or distinguish between different advertisements and links.

Why Is This Better Than Normal Analytics Tracking?

You might be wondering why any of this is necessary when Google Analytics already tells you where your visitors come from. After all, if somebody clicks a link on Facebook, shouldn’t Google Analytics automatically recognise that the visitor arrived from Facebook?

In many circumstances it will, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you which marketing activity generated the visit. If you’re running several Facebook campaigns simultaneously, you’ll probably want to distinguish between them rather than simply looking at the total number of visitors coming from the platform.

Email marketing presents another problem, because links opened through certain email applications don’t always provide referral information. Without UTM parameters, those visits can end up being classified as Direct traffic, making it difficult to establish how effective your newsletters have been.

By adding UTM parameters to your campaign links, you’re explicitly telling Google Analytics how the traffic should be categorised, rather than relying entirely on whatever referral information happens to be available.

How Do You Create UTM Links?

Fortunately, you don’t need to understand programming or manually construct complicated website addresses. Google provides a free Campaign URL Builder that allows you to enter your website address and the relevant campaign information, before automatically generating a properly formatted URL.

For example, imagine you’re running a Facebook advertising campaign promoting a new range of office furniture. You might enter facebook as the source, cpc as the medium and office_furniture as the campaign name. If you were testing two different advertisements, you could also use the content parameter to distinguish between them, allowing you to compare their performance in Google Analytics.

One thing I’d strongly recommend is establishing a consistent naming convention before you start creating links. Google Analytics treats Facebook and facebook as different values, so if different employees use different naming conventions, you could end up with several separate entries for what should actually be the same traffic source.

It’s also worth being careful with the medium parameter, as Google Analytics uses this information to categorise traffic into its default channel groupings. Using an unusual value might result in traffic being classified under Other rather than the channel you were expecting.

Where Can You See the Results?

Once somebody clicks one of your tagged links, the campaign information becomes available within Google Analytics. Using Universal Analytics, you can find your campaign reports under Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns, where you’ll be able to compare the traffic generated by different marketing activities.

You can also examine the source and medium associated with those visits, along with various other metrics such as bounce rate, average session duration and the number of pages viewed.

However, I’d argue that the most important information is whether those visitors actually complete the objectives you’ve established for your website. If you’re running an ecommerce business, you’ll presumably be interested in purchases and revenue, while a service-based business might concentrate on contact form submissions or telephone enquiries.

By configuring Goals or Ecommerce tracking within Google Analytics, you can begin comparing campaigns based on the results they generate rather than simply how many visitors they attract.

Don’t Forget About Google Ads

One important consideration is that you don’t necessarily need to manually add UTM parameters to your Google Ads campaigns. Google Ads has an auto-tagging feature that can automatically append a Google Click Identifier, or GCLID, to the URLs used by your advertisements.

When Google Ads and Google Analytics are correctly linked, this allows more detailed information about your advertising campaigns to be shared between the two platforms, including campaign performance and advertising costs.

Personally, I’d generally recommend using auto-tagging for Google Ads rather than manually adding UTM parameters, although there are circumstances where manual tagging might still be appropriate. For other platforms, such as Facebook advertising and email marketing, UTM parameters are an extremely useful way of maintaining consistent campaign reporting.

Are There Any Disadvantages?

There aren’t many, although it’s possible to make a mess of your analytics data if you’re not careful. Aside from inconsistent naming conventions, one mistake I’d particularly recommend avoiding is adding UTM parameters to links between pages on your own website.

UTM parameters are designed to identify external marketing campaigns, and using them for internal navigation can overwrite the campaign attribution associated with an existing visit. This could result in Google Analytics attributing conversions to your own website links rather than the marketing activity that originally attracted the visitor.

It’s also important to remember that UTM tracking doesn’t automatically tell you whether a campaign is profitable. You’ll still need to understand how much you’ve spent, what conversions you’ve generated and how valuable those conversions are to your business.

Personally, I think UTM tracking is one of the simplest and most useful things you can implement to improve your marketing reporting, particularly if you’re running campaigns across several different platforms. It costs nothing to use, requires very little technical knowledge and can help answer questions that would otherwise be surprisingly difficult to investigate.

Ultimately, there’s little point spending hundreds or thousands of pounds promoting your business if you can’t establish which activities are producing worthwhile results, and adding a few parameters to your website links is a relatively small amount of effort for the additional information it can provide.

If you’re running a small business, there’s a good chance you’ve wondered whether you should be doing more to promote it online. With so many different marketing opportunities available, from Google AdWords and SEO to Facebook advertising and email marketing, it can be difficult to know where to concentrate your efforts, particularly when you don’t have thousands of pounds available to spend every month. I’ve spoken to plenty of business owners who recognise that digital marketing could help them attract more customers, but aren’t entirely sure where to begin or whether they’re going to see a worthwhile return on their investment.

Having worked with businesses of all sizes over the years, I think one of the biggest mistakes smaller companies make is assuming that they need to be doing a little bit of everything. They’ll set up accounts on half a dozen social media platforms, occasionally publish a blog post, experiment with Google AdWords and perhaps send the odd email newsletter, without really understanding which activities are generating results. Personally, I’d suggest concentrating on a smaller number of marketing channels that are genuinely relevant to your business, rather than spreading your time and money across everything that’s available.

Start by Understanding Your Customers

Before spending any money on marketing, I’d recommend thinking carefully about who your customers actually are and how they’re likely to find your business. This might sound obvious, but the approach you take to marketing a local plumbing company should be considerably different from the one used by an online retailer selling specialist computer equipment.

For example, somebody looking for an emergency plumber is probably going to search Google for a local business that can help them immediately. They’re unlikely to spend several weeks following plumbing companies on Facebook before eventually deciding which one to use. Conversely, somebody selling handmade jewellery might find that Facebook or Instagram provides an excellent opportunity to reach people who weren’t necessarily looking to buy anything until they saw a particular product.

The important thing is understanding how people make purchasing decisions, rather than simply choosing marketing channels because they’re popular. I’d also recommend considering the value of each customer, particularly if you’re working with a limited budget. A company selling products worth £10 might struggle to justify spending £20 acquiring a new customer, whereas a business offering services worth several thousand pounds could potentially generate an excellent return from the same advertising costs.

Make Sure Your Website Is Doing Its Job

One thing I’d strongly recommend is making sure your website is actually capable of converting visitors into customers before spending money attracting more traffic. I’ve encountered plenty of businesses that are desperate to improve their Google rankings or increase their advertising budgets, despite having websites that make it unnecessarily difficult for potential customers to get in touch.

Your website doesn’t necessarily need to be particularly complicated or expensive, but it should clearly explain what your business does, provide useful information about your products or services and make it straightforward for visitors to take the next step. It should also work properly on mobile devices, particularly now that so many people use their phones to browse the internet.

For smaller local businesses, I’d also recommend setting up a free Google My Business listing, which allows your company to appear in Google Search and Maps alongside information such as your address, telephone number, opening hours and customer reviews. This can be an extremely effective way of attracting local customers without spending anything on advertising.

Is SEO Worth Investing In?

Search engine optimisation is something I’d generally recommend considering, particularly if your customers are likely to search Google for the products or services you offer. Unlike paid advertising, where you usually pay every time somebody clicks your advertisement, organic search traffic doesn’t incur a direct cost for each visitor.

However, SEO isn’t necessarily free, and it can take considerable time to achieve worthwhile results. If you’re operating in a competitive market, you might find yourself competing against businesses that have spent years developing their websites and building their online reputations.

For smaller businesses, I’d suggest concentrating on relatively straightforward improvements initially, such as ensuring your pages have appropriate titles, contain useful information and target the searches most relevant to your business. If you’re providing services locally, creating genuinely useful content about those services and the areas you cover can also help, although I’d avoid producing dozens of virtually identical pages simply to target different towns.

Should You Use Google AdWords?

Google AdWords can be particularly effective for small businesses because it allows you to advertise to people who are already searching for something relevant to your products or services. Rather than attempting to persuade somebody that they need a particular service, you’re placing your business in front of them at the point they’re actively looking for it.

However, I’d be careful about setting up campaigns without understanding how the platform works, particularly when it comes to keyword matching and geographical targeting. It’s surprisingly easy to waste money attracting visitors who aren’t particularly interested in what you’re offering, and even a relatively modest advertising budget can disappear quickly if your campaigns aren’t configured properly.

I’d recommend starting with a small number of highly relevant keywords, monitoring the searches that trigger your advertisements and making sure you’re tracking enquiries or sales rather than simply counting clicks. There’s little point spending £500 a month attracting visitors if you have no idea whether any of them are becoming customers.

What About Social Media?

Social media is another area where I think smaller businesses sometimes spend considerably more time than necessary. While Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn can all provide useful marketing opportunities, that doesn’t mean every business needs to maintain an active presence on all four.

Personally, I’d concentrate on whichever platforms your customers are most likely to use, and consider what sort of content they’re actually interested in seeing. A restaurant might benefit from regularly posting photographs of its food and promoting special offers on Facebook, whereas a business selling industrial machinery might find LinkedIn more appropriate.

It’s also worth remembering that building up thousands of followers doesn’t necessarily mean those people will see everything you publish. Facebook has been reducing the organic reach of business pages for several years, meaning that even companies with substantial followings can struggle to reach their audiences without paying to promote their posts.

Don’t Forget Your Existing Customers

One marketing opportunity that I think businesses frequently overlook is encouraging existing customers to purchase again. Attracting new customers can be expensive, particularly if you’re relying on paid advertising, whereas somebody who’s already bought something from you might require considerably less persuasion to return.

Email marketing can be particularly effective here, especially for businesses selling products that customers purchase regularly. Services such as Mailchimp make it relatively straightforward to send newsletters, announce new products and promote special offers, although you’ll obviously need to comply with the relevant data protection and electronic marketing regulations.

I’d also recommend encouraging satisfied customers to recommend your business to other people. Word of mouth remains incredibly valuable, and providing excellent service can sometimes generate more business than an expensive advertising campaign.

Measure What Actually Works

Ultimately, I think the most important thing is making sure you understand which marketing activities are generating worthwhile results. Google Analytics can help you identify where your website visitors are coming from, while properly configured goals can show which channels are producing enquiries or sales.

However, I’d be cautious about concentrating too heavily on metrics such as website traffic, Facebook followers or advertising clicks. These figures might look impressive in a report, but they don’t necessarily mean your business is making any more money.

My advice would be to start with a couple of marketing activities that seem particularly appropriate for your business, measure their performance and gradually invest more time or money in whichever ones prove successful.

There’s no reason why a small business can’t compete effectively online with considerably larger competitors, particularly when it’s targeting a specific market or geographical area. However, successful marketing generally involves understanding your customers and making sensible decisions about where to spend your resources, rather than simply throwing money at every advertising platform available.

If you’ve only got £300 a month to spend on marketing, I’d much rather see you concentrate that money on something that generates profitable business than spread it across six different activities simply because somebody told you that you need a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

If you’ve been involved in SEO for any length of time, you’ll probably have noticed that there’s a seemingly endless stream of news articles warning about the latest Google algorithm update. Every few months, we’re told that Google has made some enormous change to the way it ranks websites, potentially causing businesses to lose their search engine rankings overnight. This is usually accompanied by plenty of speculation about which types of websites have been affected, what Google might be trying to achieve and, inevitably, what businesses need to do to recover from the latest disaster.

Having worked in SEO for well over a decade, I’ve seen quite a few of these updates come and go, and while some have certainly had a significant impact on particular websites, I’m not convinced that the constant panic surrounding them is particularly justified. In fact, I’d argue that if you’re following generally accepted SEO best practices and concentrating on building a decent website, there’s a good chance you can simply ride out most of these changes without doing anything particularly dramatic.

Google Updates Aren’t Necessarily Bad News

One of the things I think people frequently overlook is that Google’s search results are essentially a competition between websites. If your website ranks third for a particular keyword and an algorithm update causes it to drop to fifth, that means two other websites have moved above you. From their perspective, the update has been a success, even though you might be rather less enthusiastic about it.

In this respect, Google’s ranking updates are something of a zero-sum game. There are only ten conventional organic positions on the first page, and if one website moves up, another generally has to move down. The overall number of positions available hasn’t suddenly changed simply because Google has adjusted the way it determines which websites deserve them.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the amount of traffic websites receive is necessarily fixed, as changes to search behaviour and the appearance of Google’s results can affect how many people click through to individual websites. However, the important point is that a ranking decrease for one business doesn’t necessarily mean Google has done something terrible to the internet. It might simply mean that another website is now being considered a better result.

Why Does Google Keep Changing Its Algorithm?

Google’s main objective is to provide people with relevant search results, because if its search engine consistently fails to deliver useful information, people might eventually start using something else. To achieve this, Google continually adjusts the algorithms responsible for determining which pages should appear for particular searches.

Some changes are relatively minor, while others are considerably more significant. Google’s Panda update, first introduced in 2011, attempted to reduce the visibility of low-quality content, while Penguin, introduced in 2012, targeted websites attempting to manipulate rankings through unnatural links.

These updates caused considerable disruption for some businesses, particularly those that had been relying on questionable SEO techniques. However, it’s worth remembering that many websites experienced little or no negative impact, while others actually benefited from competitors being pushed further down the results.

Google has also made numerous improvements to how it interprets search queries, including the introduction of Hummingbird in 2013 and RankBrain in 2015. These changes have generally been intended to improve the relevance of search results rather than penalise website owners for doing something wrong.

Don’t Confuse Ranking Changes with Penalties

This is another area where I think there’s a considerable amount of misunderstanding. Whenever somebody notices that their website has dropped a few positions in Google, they’ll often assume they’ve been penalised, particularly if there’s been discussion of an algorithm update around the same time.

However, there’s an important distinction between Google taking action against a website for violating its guidelines and simply changing the way it evaluates different pages. If you’ve been purchasing hundreds of artificial backlinks or creating thousands of low-quality pages purely to manipulate search rankings, then you’ve probably got a legitimate reason to be concerned about Google’s spam detection systems.

On the other hand, if you’ve got a reasonably well-maintained website containing useful content, there’s no particular reason to assume that a drop in rankings means you’ve done something wrong.

Search engine rankings are constantly changing anyway, regardless of whether Google has announced a major update. Competitors improve their websites, new content gets published and search engines continually reassess which results are most relevant. Some fluctuation is therefore perfectly normal, and I’d be cautious about treating every movement as evidence of a problem.

The SEO Industry Doesn’t Help

I think it’s also worth acknowledging that the SEO industry has a tendency to exaggerate the significance of algorithm updates, particularly when there’s an opportunity to generate traffic, attract new clients or sell services to worried website owners.

Whenever Google announces a change, you’ll inevitably find articles claiming to have identified exactly which ranking factors have become more important, often based on analysing a relatively small number of websites that have experienced changes in their rankings.

While this research can sometimes be useful, it’s worth remembering that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. Just because several websites that lost rankings happen to contain a particular type of content doesn’t automatically mean Google has introduced a new penalty targeting that content.

I’ve also seen businesses make substantial changes to perfectly good websites because somebody has convinced them that the latest Google update requires an entirely different approach to SEO. In some circumstances, those changes could potentially do more harm than the original update.

What Should You Actually Be Doing?

Personally, I think the most sensible approach is to concentrate on the fundamental principles of good SEO rather than attempting to anticipate every adjustment Google makes to its algorithms.

That means making sure your website is technically sound, loads reasonably quickly, works properly on mobile devices and contains useful, relevant information about the products or services you’re offering. It also means avoiding manipulative techniques such as buying artificial backlinks, stuffing pages with keywords or creating large quantities of content purely to attract search engine traffic.

None of these recommendations are particularly revolutionary, but that’s rather the point. Google has been encouraging website owners to concentrate on providing useful content and a good user experience for years, and I don’t see much reason to believe those principles are suddenly going to become irrelevant.

Of course, if your website experiences a substantial and sustained decline in organic traffic, it’s worth investigating. Google Search Console can help identify which pages and search queries have been affected, while your analytics data can establish whether the changes are actually having a meaningful impact on your business.

However, I’d recommend gathering some evidence before making major changes, particularly if the fluctuations have only been apparent for a few days.

Just Ride Out the Waves

Ultimately, I think businesses need to accept that SEO isn’t something where you can achieve a particular ranking and expect to retain it indefinitely. Google’s algorithms will continue changing, competitors will continue improving their websites and search engine rankings will inevitably fluctuate as a result.

However, if you’re consistently producing useful content, maintaining your website properly and following sensible SEO practices, there’s a reasonable chance that the improvements and declines caused by individual updates will balance out to some extent over time.

That’s not a guarantee, of course, and even well-optimised websites can lose rankings when competitors improve or Google’s assessment of relevance changes. Nevertheless, I’d be much more concerned about the long-term direction of a website’s organic traffic than whether a handful of keywords have moved up or down following the latest update.

My advice would be to treat Google algorithm updates in much the same way as fluctuations in the stock market: keep an eye on what’s happening, investigate anything genuinely concerning, but don’t assume that every downward movement requires an immediate response.

If your SEO strategy is fundamentally sound, there’s a good chance that the best thing you can do when Google announces another update is simply carry on doing what you were doing before.

If you’re thinking about setting up an ecommerce website, there’s a good chance you’ll have come across both WooCommerce and Shopify, two of the most popular platforms available for selling products online. Both allow businesses to create online shops, manage products, process payments and fulfil orders, but they take rather different approaches to how websites are built and maintained. Having worked with various ecommerce systems over the years, I think both have their advantages, although choosing the wrong one for your particular business could result in a considerable amount of unnecessary expense and frustration.

One of the main differences is that WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress, whereas Shopify is a hosted ecommerce service that charges a monthly subscription. At first glance, that might make WooCommerce seem like the obvious choice, particularly if you’re working with a limited budget. However, there’s considerably more to running an ecommerce website than simply installing some software, and the cheapest option isn’t necessarily the one that will cost you the least over the longer term.

What’s the Difference Between WooCommerce and Shopify?

WooCommerce was originally launched in 2011 and has become one of the most widely used ecommerce solutions available. Because it runs on WordPress, you have considerable flexibility over how your website is designed and which features you choose to include. You can install it on an existing WordPress website, add your products and configure payment and delivery options without paying anything for the WooCommerce plugin itself.

Shopify takes a rather different approach. Instead of installing software on your own hosting account, you pay Shopify a monthly subscription to provide the ecommerce platform and much of the technical infrastructure required to run it. This means you don’t have to worry about configuring a web server, maintaining the underlying software or arranging separate hosting.

Personally, I think this is one of Shopify’s biggest advantages, particularly for smaller businesses that don’t have access to somebody with web development experience. There’s something quite appealing about being able to concentrate on selling products rather than worrying about whether your website is going to stop working after a software update.

Is WooCommerce Really Free?

One of the main selling points of WooCommerce is that it’s free to download and use, but I’d be cautious about interpreting that as meaning it’s free to operate an online shop.

You’ll still need somewhere to host your website, along with a domain name and potentially a suitable WordPress theme. Depending on your requirements, you might also need to purchase additional plugins for things like subscriptions, advanced delivery options or integrations with other business software.

These costs can start adding up, particularly if you’re running a more complicated ecommerce website. There’s also the time involved in maintaining everything, keeping WordPress and its plugins updated, and resolving any technical problems that occur.

Shopify’s Basic plan currently starts at $29 per month when paid monthly, with more expensive plans offering additional features and lower payment processing rates. Although Shopify Payments is available to UK merchants, businesses using alternative payment gateways can also incur additional transaction fees.

For a relatively small online shop, Shopify’s monthly subscription might actually work out cheaper than paying somebody to maintain a WooCommerce installation, particularly if you’re not particularly technically minded.

Which Is Easier to Use?

I think Shopify probably has the advantage here, particularly when it comes to getting a new shop up and running. Its administration interface is designed specifically for ecommerce, and most of the essential functionality is available without needing to install numerous additional applications.

Adding products, managing orders and configuring delivery options are all relatively straightforward, although things can become more complicated when you want to introduce functionality that isn’t supported by default.

WooCommerce is also reasonably easy to use, particularly if you’re already familiar with WordPress, but there’s generally more configuration involved. You’ll need to choose suitable hosting, install WordPress and WooCommerce, configure your payment gateway and make sure everything works together properly.

However, WooCommerce offers considerably more flexibility when it comes to modifying how your website operates. If you want to create a particularly unusual product page, introduce bespoke functionality or integrate your shop with another system, having access to the underlying PHP code can be extremely useful.

Of course, that flexibility is only really an advantage if you’ve got somebody capable of making those changes.

What About SEO?

From an SEO perspective, both platforms are perfectly capable of achieving excellent search engine rankings, although there are some differences worth considering.

Because WooCommerce runs on WordPress, you have access to a wide range of SEO plugins, including Yoast SEO, along with considerable control over your website’s content and URL structure. This makes it relatively straightforward to optimise product pages, category pages and supporting content, particularly if you’re comfortable making technical changes.

Shopify also provides much of the functionality required for SEO, including editable page titles, meta descriptions and redirects. However, there are some restrictions, particularly around its URL structure. Product pages, for example, use URLs containing /products/, while category-style collections use /collections/, and you can’t simply remove these elements through the administration interface.

Personally, I don’t think this is necessarily a reason to avoid Shopify, as having a particular word in your URL structure isn’t going to prevent a website from ranking well. However, I do prefer having the flexibility to configure things exactly how I want them, particularly when working on larger or more complicated websites.

It’s also worth remembering that neither platform will automatically deliver good SEO results simply because you’ve installed it. You’ll still need to carry out keyword research, optimise your content and make sure your website provides a good experience for visitors.

What Happens When Something Goes Wrong?

This is another area where I think Shopify has a significant advantage, particularly for businesses without technical support.

With WooCommerce, you’re responsible for maintaining the website, including WordPress updates, plugin compatibility and backups. If an update causes your checkout to stop working, you’ll generally need to investigate the problem yourself or pay a developer to resolve it.

Shopify handles much of this infrastructure on your behalf, including hosting, server maintenance and the core ecommerce software. This doesn’t mean Shopify websites never experience technical problems, but it does remove quite a few of the responsibilities associated with running a self-hosted website.

However, there’s a disadvantage to relying on a hosted platform, because you’re also dependent on Shopify’s systems and the functionality it chooses to provide. With WooCommerce, you have considerably more freedom to modify your website or move it to another hosting provider if you’re unhappy with the service.

Which Should You Choose?

Personally, I think the decision largely comes down to how much flexibility you need and how comfortable you are with managing the technical side of an ecommerce website.

If you’re setting up a relatively straightforward online shop selling physical products, and you don’t have access to a web developer, I’d probably recommend Shopify. It’s relatively easy to use, much of the technical infrastructure is managed for you, and you can concentrate on running your business rather than maintaining your website.

However, if you’re already using WordPress, require particularly complicated functionality or want complete control over how your website operates, WooCommerce could be a better option. It’s an extremely capable ecommerce platform, and with the right development expertise, you can build something that’s tailored very closely to your requirements.

Ultimately, I don’t think either platform is inherently better than the other. Both are capable of running successful ecommerce websites, and the quality of your products, customer service and marketing will probably have a considerably greater impact on your business than which platform you choose.

My advice would be to consider what your business actually needs, including the ongoing costs of maintaining the website, rather than simply comparing the initial prices. If you don’t need the additional flexibility WooCommerce provides, there’s little point making things more complicated than necessary. Equally, if Shopify can’t accommodate the way your business operates without expensive workarounds, its apparent simplicity might not be much of an advantage.

One of the things I frequently hear when discussing digital marketing with businesses launching a new website is that they’re planning to use Google AdWords to generate traffic initially, before gradually switching over to SEO once the website has become established. On the face of it, this sounds like a perfectly reasonable strategy: paid advertising can start generating visitors almost immediately, whereas achieving good organic search engine rankings can take considerably longer. However, there’s a fairly fundamental problem with this approach, and that’s the assumption that you’ll eventually reach a point where your SEO is performing so well that you no longer need to advertise.

Having worked with both SEO and PPC campaigns for many years, I’m not convinced that this is a particularly realistic objective for most businesses. In fact, I’d argue that if your Google AdWords campaigns are generating a decent return on investment, there’s probably very little reason to switch them off in the first place.

Why Do Businesses See PPC as a Temporary Solution?

I think much of this comes down to the perception that SEO generates free traffic, whereas PPC involves paying for every visitor. If you’re spending £1,000 a month on Google AdWords, it’s tempting to imagine how much money you could save if you were receiving exactly the same visitors through Google’s organic search results instead.

Unfortunately, this overlooks two important considerations. Firstly, SEO isn’t free, particularly when you’re operating in a competitive market. Whether you’re paying an agency, employing somebody internally or spending your own time improving your website, there’s still a cost involved in achieving and maintaining those rankings. Secondly, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever generate the same volume of relevant traffic organically, regardless of how much effort you put into your SEO.

For example, imagine you’re launching a new ecommerce website selling office furniture. You might be able to generate sales immediately through Google AdWords by targeting searches for particular products, but achieving first-page organic rankings for competitive phrases such as ‘office chairs’ could take years, assuming you manage to achieve them at all.

SEO Is Harder Than Many People Think

One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that once your website has been properly optimised, it’s simply a matter of waiting for Google to recognise how good it is and start sending you visitors.

Unfortunately, that’s not really how it works. Google has to decide which websites deserve to appear prominently for millions of different searches, and for commercially valuable keywords, there’s often an enormous amount of competition. You might have a technically excellent website containing useful content, but if you’re competing against established retailers with thousands of products, substantial marketing budgets and years of accumulated backlinks, you’re unlikely to overtake them simply by writing a few blog posts.

There’s also the fact that your competitors aren’t standing still. While you’re trying to improve your rankings, they’re potentially investing in their own SEO, creating new content and improving their websites. Reaching the first page of Google isn’t necessarily the end of the process either, because maintaining those positions can require continued effort.

This doesn’t mean SEO isn’t worthwhile, but I think businesses need to be realistic about how long it can take and how much work is involved.

Why Would You Turn Off Profitable Advertising?

This is probably the most important point, and one that I think gets overlooked surprisingly often.

Let’s say you’re spending £1,000 a month on Google AdWords and generating £5,000 in sales as a result. Assuming your products have sufficient profit margins to cover the advertising costs and leave you with a worthwhile return, why would you want to stop?

The fact that you’re paying Google for those visitors doesn’t necessarily make them less valuable than visitors arriving through organic search results. If you’re generating £2 in profit for every £1 spent on advertising, switching off your campaigns would simply mean giving up an activity that’s making you money.

Of course, it’s important to measure profitability properly. Generating £5,000 in revenue from £1,000 in advertising isn’t particularly impressive if the products you’re selling only have a 10% profit margin. However, provided you’re accounting for your costs and generating a genuine return, I’d generally be looking for opportunities to increase advertising expenditure rather than eliminate it.

This is why I think businesses should stop treating PPC as a temporary expense that needs to disappear once SEO starts working. In many circumstances, it’s a profitable marketing channel in its own right.

Can’t Organic Traffic Replace Paid Traffic?

There are certainly situations where organic search traffic can reduce your reliance on paid advertising, particularly if you achieve strong rankings for the keywords you’ve previously been targeting through AdWords.

However, it’s worth remembering that appearing in both the paid and organic search results can provide additional visibility. Just because your website ranks third organically doesn’t mean everybody who might have clicked your advertisement will automatically find and click your organic listing instead.

Google has previously published research suggesting that paid search advertisements can generate additional clicks even when the advertiser already has an organic listing. While I’d treat Google’s own research with some caution, given that it obviously has a commercial interest in encouraging businesses to advertise, the principle makes sense.

It’s also important to consider which searches generate your most profitable customers. You might eventually rank well organically for some of your target keywords, while others remain difficult to reach without paid advertising. In those circumstances, there’s no particular reason why you can’t continue advertising for the searches where PPC delivers worthwhile results.

PPC Can Actually Help Your SEO Strategy

Another advantage of running Google AdWords campaigns alongside SEO is that paid advertising can provide useful information about which keywords and landing pages generate the most valuable traffic.

For example, you might discover that a particular search phrase generates plenty of visitors but very few enquiries, while another produces fewer clicks but a much higher conversion rate. This information can help you decide which keywords are worth concentrating on when developing your SEO strategy.

AdWords can also help you test different messages and landing pages without waiting months to see whether changes to your organic rankings have made a difference. Although paying for advertising doesn’t directly improve your organic search rankings, the information you collect can certainly help you make better decisions about your website.

Personally, I think SEO and PPC work particularly well when they’re managed together, rather than being treated as two completely separate activities competing for the same marketing budget.

When Should You Reduce Your PPC Spending?

That’s not to say you should continue spending money on advertising indefinitely without reviewing whether it’s worthwhile. If a campaign is consistently generating poor-quality enquiries or unprofitable sales, there’s obviously a good reason to reconsider it.

Similarly, if you’ve achieved strong organic rankings and find that reducing your advertising spend has little or no effect on overall sales, you might reasonably conclude that some of your paid traffic is unnecessary.

However, I’d recommend testing this rather than simply assuming that organic search will replace your paid visitors. Look at the overall number of enquiries or sales your website generates, rather than concentrating exclusively on how many conversions AdWords claims to have produced.

Ultimately, I think businesses would be better off viewing SEO and PPC as complementary marketing activities rather than assuming one will eventually replace the other.

SEO can provide an excellent long-term source of traffic, but achieving strong rankings is considerably more difficult than many people realise, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever reach a point where you can rely on it exclusively.

If your AdWords campaigns are generating profitable business, my advice would be to keep running them while continuing to invest in SEO. The objective should be generating as much profitable business as possible, rather than eliminating advertising expenditure simply because you’re now receiving visitors from Google for free.