Category: Other News

Given that I’ve spent most of my career working in web development and digital marketing, you might expect me to argue that every business should have its own website. After all, it’s something I’ve been helping businesses with for the best part of two decades, and there’s certainly no shortage of people within the industry who’ll tell you that having a professional website is absolutely essential if you want your business to succeed. However, I’m not entirely convinced that’s true, particularly for smaller businesses that might already be attracting more than enough customers without one.

The internet has changed considerably over the last twenty years, and while having your own website was once almost a prerequisite for establishing an online presence, there are now plenty of other ways for businesses to reach potential customers. In fact, depending on what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to, there’s a reasonable argument that investing thousands of pounds in a website might not be the best use of your money.

How Do Your Customers Find You?

I think the most important consideration is understanding how your customers actually find your business. Let’s say you’re a self-employed plumber who gets almost all your work through recommendations from existing customers. You’ve already got a reasonably full diary, and you’re not particularly interested in expanding or employing anybody else. Would spending £2,000 on a website really achieve anything worthwhile?

You could argue that a website would help establish credibility, allow potential customers to find your contact details and perhaps generate additional enquiries through Google. All of those things are perfectly valid, but if you’re already receiving more enquiries than you can handle, what’s the point? You might actually be better off spending that money on equipment or something else that makes running your business easier.

Compare that with a company selling specialist industrial machinery across the UK. Potential customers might spend weeks researching suppliers before making a purchase, and having a professional website containing detailed product information, technical specifications and case studies could make an enormous difference. In that situation, I’d argue that not having a website would put the business at a considerable disadvantage.

What About Google Business Profile?

One of the reasons I don’t think every small business necessarily needs a website is that Google provides a free service called Google Business Profile, which allows eligible businesses to appear in Google Search and Maps without having to maintain their own website.

For local businesses, this can be particularly valuable. If somebody searches for a hairdresser, electrician or restaurant in their area, Google will often display a selection of nearby businesses alongside their contact details, opening hours, photographs and customer reviews. Potential customers can then call the business or get directions without ever visiting its website.

Of course, having a website can provide additional information and potentially help your overall online visibility, but it isn’t necessarily essential for appearing in local search results. A well-maintained Google Business Profile, particularly one with plenty of positive customer reviews, can be extremely effective in its own right.

There are limitations, though. Not every type of business is eligible for a profile, and you’re ultimately relying on Google to decide how and where your information appears. Nevertheless, for a small local business with limited resources, I’d probably recommend making the most of Google Business Profile before spending a fortune on a new website.

Could Social Media Be Enough?

Social media provides another alternative, particularly for businesses that rely heavily on visual content or personal relationships with their customers. I’ve come across plenty of small businesses that operate almost entirely through Facebook or Instagram, using their profiles to display products, communicate with customers and take bookings.

For example, somebody making personalised cakes might find that regularly posting photographs on Facebook generates more enquiries than a conventional website ever would. Their customers can see examples of previous work, read recommendations and contact them directly through Messenger, all without the business owner needing to learn how to manage WordPress.

However, there’s a fairly significant disadvantage to relying entirely on social media, and that’s the fact that you don’t actually control the platform. Facebook could change its algorithms tomorrow, significantly reducing the number of people who see your posts, or your account could be suspended for reasons that might be difficult to resolve. If your entire business relies on that one platform, you could suddenly find yourself in a rather difficult position.

With your own website, you have considerably more control over your content, branding and the way customers interact with your business, although you’re obviously still dependent on your hosting provider and other services.

What About Selling Products Online?

Ecommerce is another area where I think the answer depends on the circumstances. If you’re selling a relatively small number of products, particularly as a side business, using an established marketplace such as eBay, Amazon or Etsy might make considerably more sense than building your own online shop.

These platforms already have enormous audiences of potential customers, along with established payment systems and much of the infrastructure required to sell products online. You can start selling relatively quickly without worrying about website hosting, security updates or payment gateway integrations.

Of course, you’ll generally pay commission on your sales, and you won’t have the same level of control over your customers or branding. However, it’s worth remembering that operating your own ecommerce website isn’t free either, particularly when you account for development, maintenance and the cost of attracting visitors.

For a business selling hundreds of products and attempting to establish a recognisable brand, I’d probably recommend investing in its own website. For somebody selling a handful of handmade items every month, I’m not sure I’d bother.

Don’t Build a Website Just Because You Think You Should

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that some businesses seem to feel obligated to have a website, even when they haven’t really considered what they want it to achieve. They’ll spend hundreds or thousands of pounds having something built, populate it with a few generic pages and then leave it untouched for years, occasionally wondering why it doesn’t generate any enquiries.

In those circumstances, I’d question whether the money might have been better spent elsewhere. A website isn’t automatically going to attract customers simply because it exists, and getting meaningful traffic through SEO or paid advertising can require considerably more work than creating the website in the first place.

Personally, I think most established businesses would benefit from having their own website, even if it’s something relatively straightforward that provides information about their services and contact details. However, there’s a difference between something being beneficial and something being essential.

If you’re starting a business, I’d suggest concentrating on understanding your customers and establishing how you’re going to reach them before investing heavily in a website. You might discover that Google Business Profile, social media or an established marketplace is perfectly adequate for your immediate requirements.

You can always build a website later, once you’ve established that there’s a genuine need for one.

Ultimately, the question shouldn’t be whether every business needs a website, but whether having one will help your particular business achieve something worthwhile.

If the answer is no, I wouldn’t spend the money simply because somebody who builds websites tells you that you should.

If you’ve ever spoken to somebody trying to sell you a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, you’ll probably have been told that it’s an essential piece of software for almost any business. After all, keeping track of your customers, managing sales opportunities and making sure you don’t forget to follow up on enquiries are all fairly important things to get right. However, while I certainly wouldn’t argue against the benefits of having a decent CRM system, I’m not convinced that every business actually needs one, particularly when there are much simpler ways of achieving the same thing.

I’ve worked with various CRM systems over the years, ranging from relatively straightforward contact databases to enormous platforms capable of managing almost every aspect of a company’s sales and marketing operations. Some have been genuinely useful, while others have seemed to create considerably more work than they actually save. As with most business software, I think the important thing is understanding what problem you’re trying to solve before spending money on something that promises to transform the way you work.

What Exactly Is a CRM?

A CRM system is essentially a central database containing information about your customers and potential customers, along with details of the interactions you’ve had with them. Depending on the software you’re using, this might include contact information, previous purchases, email correspondence, telephone calls, sales enquiries and various other activities associated with each customer.

More sophisticated systems, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and HubSpot, can also manage sales pipelines, automate marketing campaigns, generate reports and integrate with other business software. For example, you might use a CRM to record an enquiry submitted through your website, automatically assign it to a salesperson and send them a reminder if they haven’t followed it up within a particular period.

This can be extremely useful, particularly when several people are responsible for dealing with the same customers. However, if you’re a self-employed tradesperson with 30 regular customers whose details are already stored in your phone, I’m not entirely convinced that implementing Salesforce would be a particularly sensible investment.

What’s Wrong with Using a Spreadsheet?

One of the arguments I frequently hear in favour of CRM systems is that businesses shouldn’t be managing their customers through spreadsheets. While I can understand the reasoning behind this, I think it’s a little simplistic to suggest that using Excel is automatically a bad thing.

If you’re running a relatively small business, a spreadsheet containing customer names, contact details, enquiry dates and follow-up information might be perfectly adequate. You can filter records, sort information and even produce reasonably sophisticated reports without paying for a dedicated CRM system. More importantly, most people already know how to use Excel, meaning there’s relatively little time or money required to get started.

Of course, spreadsheets have limitations. If several employees are constantly updating the same file, it can become difficult to keep information consistent, particularly if people start saving their own copies. There’s also the problem of remembering to update records manually, which can result in important information being missed.

However, I’d argue that these are reasons to consider moving to a CRM when your business has outgrown its existing processes, rather than reasons why every business should immediately abandon spreadsheets.

When Does a CRM Become Worthwhile?

Personally, I think one of the clearest indications that a business needs a CRM is when customer information starts becoming difficult to manage. If you’ve got several salespeople dealing with hundreds of enquiries every month, for example, it’s probably not particularly practical to rely on individual email inboxes and spreadsheets.

Imagine somebody submits an enquiry through your website, which gets forwarded to a salesperson who happens to be on holiday. Without a central system recording that enquiry and assigning responsibility for following it up, there’s a reasonable chance it could be overlooked entirely. Similarly, if a customer telephones to discuss a previous conversation with somebody who’s no longer available, having a record of that interaction can make a considerable difference to the quality of service you provide.

A CRM can also help businesses understand how effectively they’re converting enquiries into customers. You might discover that one salesperson converts 30% of their enquiries while another converts just 10%, or that leads generated through Google Ads are considerably more likely to result in sales than those coming from Facebook. This sort of information can be extremely valuable when deciding where to concentrate your marketing efforts.

Integrating Your Website and Marketing

From a digital marketing perspective, one of the biggest advantages of using a CRM is the ability to connect your website enquiries with what actually happens afterwards.

Google Analytics can tell you how many people submit an enquiry form, and Google Ads can identify which advertising campaigns generated those enquiries, but neither necessarily tells you whether those people eventually became paying customers. If your CRM records the original source of each enquiry and tracks its progress through the sales process, you can potentially establish which marketing activities are generating the most valuable business.

Some CRM systems can also send information about completed sales or qualified enquiries back into advertising platforms, allowing you to optimise campaigns based on outcomes rather than simply counting form submissions. However, this generally requires some additional configuration, and the quality of the results depends heavily on how accurately your customer information is recorded.

There’s also the opportunity to automate communications, such as sending follow-up emails, reminding staff about outstanding enquiries or identifying existing customers who might be interested in purchasing something else. These features can be extremely useful, although I’d be careful about implementing automation simply because the software makes it possible.

Don’t Underestimate the Cost

One thing I think businesses sometimes overlook is that the cost of a CRM extends considerably beyond the monthly subscription fee. While services such as HubSpot offer free or relatively inexpensive entry-level options, more sophisticated systems can become expensive once you start adding users, automation features and additional functionality.

You’ll also need to consider the time involved in configuring the system, importing existing customer information and training employees to use it properly. Depending on the complexity of your requirements, implementing a CRM can become a substantial project in its own right.

There’s also the issue of data protection. If you’re storing customers’ personal information, you’ll need to ensure that you’re complying with the UK’s GDPR requirements, including having an appropriate lawful basis for processing that information and making sure it’s stored securely. Using a CRM doesn’t automatically make your business compliant, particularly if you’re also planning to use the information for email marketing. The Information Commissioner’s Office provides useful guidance on these responsibilities.

Will Your Employees Actually Use It?

Perhaps the biggest problem I’ve encountered with CRM systems isn’t the technology itself, but getting people to use it consistently. It’s all very well spending thousands of pounds implementing a sophisticated system, but if your salespeople continue storing customer information in their own spreadsheets or forgetting to update records, you’re not going to achieve very much.

In fact, a poorly maintained CRM can sometimes be worse than having no system at all, because managers start making decisions based on information that they assume is accurate. If half your sales opportunities haven’t been updated for six months, any reports generated from that data are going to be fairly questionable.

Personally, I’d recommend starting with a relatively simple set of requirements and making sure everybody understands why the information needs to be recorded. You can always introduce more sophisticated functionality later, once the basic processes are working properly.

So Do You Actually Need One?

Ultimately, I think most growing businesses will reach a point where a CRM becomes a worthwhile investment, particularly if they rely heavily on generating and converting sales enquiries. Having a central record of customer interactions, properly managing sales opportunities and understanding which marketing activities generate revenue can provide enormous benefits.

However, that doesn’t mean every business needs to rush out and purchase one. If you’re managing a relatively small number of customers and your existing processes are working perfectly well, there might be very little to gain from introducing additional software.

I’d suggest looking at how your business currently manages customer information and identifying any genuine problems before deciding whether a CRM is the answer.

If you’re regularly losing enquiries, forgetting to follow up with potential customers or struggling to understand where your sales are coming from, a CRM could be exactly what you need.

If everything is running smoothly with a spreadsheet, though, I’d probably leave it alone.

There’s no point making something more complicated simply because you can.

If you’ve been following developments in digital marketing over the last couple of years, you’ll probably have heard that Google is planning to remove support for third-party cookies from its Chrome browser. Depending on who you listen to, this is either going to revolutionise online advertising or bring about the end of digital marketing as we know it. Personally, I think both predictions are rather exaggerated, although there’s no doubt that the changes could have some fairly significant implications for businesses that rely heavily on tracking website visitors.

Google originally announced its intention to phase out third-party cookies back in January 2020, with the changes initially expected to take place within two years. However, the deadline has subsequently been pushed back several times, with Google announcing in July that it now intends to begin removing support during the second half of 2024. This gives advertisers a little more time to prepare, although it’s worth remembering that other browsers have already introduced similar restrictions.

What Exactly Are Cookies?

Before looking at what’s changing, it’s probably worth explaining what cookies actually do, because there’s a considerable amount of confusion surrounding the subject. Essentially, a cookie is a small piece of information that a website can store in your browser, allowing it to remember certain details when you return or move between pages.

For example, when you log into a website, cookies can help keep you logged in as you navigate between different sections. Ecommerce websites also frequently use them to remember which products you’ve added to your shopping basket, while analytics platforms use cookies to help distinguish between different visitors and sessions.

However, there’s an important distinction between first-party and third-party cookies. First-party cookies are associated with the website you’re visiting, whereas third-party cookies are associated with a different domain, often belonging to an advertising or tracking service.

It’s these third-party cookies that are causing most of the controversy, because they can allow advertising companies to recognise users as they move between completely unrelated websites.

Why Are Third-Party Cookies Being Removed?

Imagine that you visit a website selling televisions, spend a few minutes looking at a particular model and then leave without purchasing anything. Later that day, you visit a news website and suddenly find yourself looking at advertisements for exactly the same television.

This is an example of remarketing, and third-party cookies have traditionally played an important role in making it possible. Advertising networks can use information collected across participating websites to identify people who have previously expressed an interest in particular products and show them relevant advertisements elsewhere.

From an advertiser’s perspective, this can be extremely useful. Rather than showing advertisements to people who might have absolutely no interest in what you’re selling, you can concentrate on those who have already demonstrated some intention to purchase.

However, from a privacy perspective, there’s an obvious problem with companies being able to monitor somebody’s activity across large parts of the internet, particularly when that person might not fully understand what information is being collected.

Apple’s Safari browser has already been blocking third-party cookies by default since 2020, while Firefox introduced default protection against known third-party tracking cookies in 2019. Google Chrome is therefore something of a latecomer to the party, although its enormous market share means the changes will potentially have a much greater impact.

Will Google Analytics Stop Working?

This is probably one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the proposed changes. Removing support for third-party cookies doesn’t mean that websites will suddenly be unable to use cookies at all, and it certainly doesn’t mean that Google Analytics will stop collecting information.

Google Analytics primarily uses first-party cookies to help identify visitors and measure their interactions with a website. These aren’t the cookies Google is proposing to remove from Chrome, although they can still be affected by browser privacy restrictions and users’ consent preferences.

The more significant implications are likely to involve advertising attribution and remarketing, particularly where advertisers rely on identifying the same person across multiple websites.

For example, if somebody sees an advertisement on one website before purchasing something on another, it may become more difficult to establish whether the original advertisement contributed to that sale.

This could make it considerably harder for advertisers to accurately measure the performance of certain campaigns, particularly those involving display advertising.

What Is Google Planning to Replace Them With?

Google has been developing something called the Privacy Sandbox, which aims to introduce alternative technologies that allow advertisers to reach relevant audiences without relying on traditional third-party tracking cookies.

One of the original proposals was called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, which would have grouped users together based on their browsing behaviour. However, following criticism and concerns about privacy, Google abandoned that approach earlier this year and introduced a replacement called the Topics API.

The idea behind Topics is that Chrome could identify broad categories of interest based on the websites somebody visits, such as fitness, travel or technology, and share limited information about those interests with participating advertisers.

Rather than allowing an advertising company to build a detailed record of somebody’s browsing activity across numerous websites, the system is intended to provide more general information that can be used to display relevant advertisements.

Google is also developing other technologies to support remarketing and conversion measurement, although these are still being tested, and it remains to be seen how effective they’ll be compared with existing methods.

What Should Businesses Be Doing?

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend panicking or making drastic changes to your advertising strategy just yet. Google has already delayed the removal of third-party cookies several times, and there’s still considerable uncertainty about exactly how the replacement technologies will work in practice.

However, I do think businesses should start paying more attention to the information they collect directly from their own customers. First-party data, such as customer purchase histories, enquiry records and email marketing preferences, is likely to become increasingly valuable as traditional tracking methods become less effective.

It’s also worth making sure your Google Analytics implementation is up to date, particularly with the transition to Google Analytics 4 already underway. Google’s existing Universal Analytics platform is due to stop processing new data for standard properties in July 2023, so businesses that haven’t started preparing for the change should probably make that a priority.

Of course, collecting first-party information doesn’t mean you can simply ignore GDPR or the UK’s cookie consent requirements. You’ll still need to ensure that information is collected and used appropriately, regardless of which technology you’re using.

Is This Really the End of Cookies?

Ultimately, I think the phrase ‘the death of cookies’ is rather misleading. First-party cookies will continue to play an important role in how websites operate, and businesses will still be able to measure many of the activities taking place on their own websites.

What is changing is the ability of advertising companies to follow individual users across numerous unrelated websites, which has been a fundamental part of online advertising for many years.

Whether Google’s proposed alternatives will provide the same level of effectiveness remains to be seen, but I suspect the advertising industry will adapt, just as it has adapted to previous technological changes.

Personally, I think anything that gives people greater control over their personal information is generally a positive development, although there’s clearly a balance to be struck between protecting privacy and allowing businesses to advertise effectively.

In the meantime, I’d suggest concentrating on collecting useful information from your own customers, measuring your advertising performance as accurately as possible and keeping an eye on Google’s announcements.

After all, given how many times the deadline has already moved, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if we’re still talking about the impending death of third-party cookies this time next year.

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is how much digital marketers love coming up with terminology for things that are actually relatively straightforward. Whether it’s customer journeys, conversion funnels or various other marketing expressions, there’s a tendency to make relatively simple concepts sound considerably more complicated than they really are. One example that I come across particularly frequently is the term ‘landing page’, which seems to have taken on a life of its own, with some businesses apparently convinced that they need to create an entirely separate set of pages specifically for their marketing campaigns.

I’ve had conversations with clients who have perfectly good websites, containing detailed information about their products and services, but still believe they need to commission additional landing pages before they can start advertising on Google or Facebook. In some cases, they’ve been advised to create dozens of these pages, often containing almost exactly the same information that’s already available elsewhere on their website. Personally, I think this is frequently an unnecessary complication, and it generally comes down to a misunderstanding of what a landing page actually is.

What Exactly Is a Landing Page?

The simplest definition of a landing page is the page somebody arrives on after clicking a link. That link might appear in a Google advertisement, an email newsletter, a social media post or even Google’s organic search results. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the page looks like, how it was created or where it sits within your website. If somebody clicks a link and arrives on that page, it’s functioning as a landing page.

However, somewhere along the way, the marketing industry seems to have adopted a rather more specific interpretation of the term. Landing pages are often described as standalone pages, usually with minimal navigation, a prominent call to action and content designed to encourage visitors to complete one particular objective. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach, and in certain circumstances it can be extremely effective, but it isn’t the only way a landing page can work.

For example, imagine somebody searches Google for ‘accountants in Worcester’ and clicks an advertisement for a local accountancy firm. If that advertisement takes them to the firm’s existing accountancy services page, which contains relevant information and a straightforward way to make an enquiry, then that page is serving perfectly well as a landing page. There’s no particular reason why the business needs to create another page containing essentially the same information simply because somebody has decided that advertising campaigns need dedicated landing pages.

Shouldn’t Your Existing Pages Already Be Optimised?

This is probably my biggest argument against creating unnecessary landing pages. If your website has been designed and optimised properly in the first place, most of its important pages should already be capable of converting visitors into customers.

Think about what a good SEO strategy involves. You identify the products and services people are searching for, create relevant pages explaining those products or services, ensure the content answers potential customers’ questions and provide clear opportunities for visitors to get in touch or make a purchase. Ideally, those pages should also load quickly, work properly on mobile devices and be easy to navigate.

Now compare that with the advice typically given about creating effective landing pages. They should contain relevant content, match the visitor’s expectations, load quickly and make it straightforward to complete a particular action.

There’s an enormous amount of overlap, isn’t there?

If you’ve already spent time creating a properly optimised page targeting a particular service, I’d suggest that your first consideration should be whether you can use that page for your advertising campaign. If it contains everything the visitor needs, why create another one?

The Problem with Having Too Many Landing Pages

One of the biggest disadvantages of creating separate landing pages for every marketing activity is that you can quickly end up with numerous versions of essentially the same content.

Let’s say you’re running an ecommerce website selling office furniture. You’ve already got a category page dedicated to office chairs, containing product information, prices and links to individual products. However, somebody decides that your Google Ads campaign needs a dedicated office chairs landing page, so you create another page containing much of the same information.

A few months later, you launch a Facebook campaign and decide that needs another landing page. You might then create additional versions for an email campaign, a seasonal promotion and various other marketing activities.

Before long, you’ve got half a dozen pages covering the same subject, all of which need maintaining whenever your products, prices or services change. There’s also the potential for confusing customers who encounter different versions of what appears to be the same page.

From an SEO perspective, creating multiple similar pages can also introduce unnecessary complications. Google doesn’t automatically penalise websites for having duplicate content, but it may struggle to determine which version should appear in search results, and your internal links and external backlinks could end up pointing to several different URLs rather than one established page.

In more extreme cases, creating large numbers of very similar pages purely to target slight variations of search queries can also raise concerns about doorway pages, something Google has been warning against for years.

When Does a Dedicated Landing Page Make Sense?

Of course, I’m not suggesting that dedicated landing pages are always unnecessary. There are plenty of circumstances where creating a separate page is entirely justified, particularly when you’re running a campaign with a specific offer or objective that isn’t adequately covered by your existing website.

For example, imagine you’re promoting a limited-time discount, launching a new product or encouraging people to register for an event. In those situations, a dedicated page containing information about the promotion, along with a prominent call to action, might be considerably more effective than directing visitors to a general product or service page.

Similarly, there can be advantages to creating specially designed pages for certain paid advertising campaigns, particularly if you want to test different messages, layouts or forms without making permanent changes to your main website.

However, I’d argue that these decisions should be driven by an actual requirement, rather than an assumption that every campaign automatically needs its own landing page.

What Does Google Actually Want?

Interestingly, Google’s own guidance on landing page experience doesn’t suggest that advertisers need to create separate pages for every campaign. Instead, Google places emphasis on the relevance and usefulness of the destination page, along with factors such as navigation, transparency and how closely the content matches what somebody expected when they clicked the advertisement.

You can read more about this in Google’s explanation of landing pages.

If somebody searches for a particular service, clicks your advertisement and arrives on a page that clearly explains that service and makes it easy to enquire, you’ve probably satisfied most of the important requirements. Whether that page was specifically created for the campaign or has been part of your website for five years is largely irrelevant.

Keep Things Simple

Personally, I think businesses would be better off concentrating on improving their existing websites rather than continually creating new pages for every marketing campaign. If an important product or service page isn’t capable of converting visitors, perhaps the solution is to improve that page rather than build another version of it.

That way, improvements benefit visitors arriving through SEO, paid advertising, social media and any other marketing channels you’re using, rather than being restricted to one particular campaign.

By all means, create dedicated landing pages when there’s a genuine reason to do so, but don’t assume they’re an essential requirement for every advertising campaign.

Ultimately, a landing page isn’t some special type of webpage that needs to be created by a marketing specialist. It’s simply the page somebody lands on, and if your website is doing its job properly, there’s a good chance you’ve already got plenty of them.

If you’re planning to build a new website, one of the first decisions you’ll need to make is which Content Management System (CMS) to use. There are dozens of different platforms available, all promising to make it easier to create, manage and update your website, and choosing between them can be surprisingly difficult, particularly if you’re not particularly technically minded. Having worked with a wide variety of content management systems over the years, I’ve developed some fairly strong opinions about which ones are worth considering, although I don’t necessarily think there’s a single platform that’s suitable for every business.

In fact, one of the mistakes I frequently see is businesses choosing a CMS based on what their web developer happens to prefer, rather than what actually makes sense for the website they’re trying to build. While developers will naturally have their favourite technologies, there’s little point spending thousands of pounds developing a relatively straightforward website using a complicated system when something considerably simpler would do the job perfectly well.

WordPress – Still My First Choice

For most business websites, I’d probably recommend WordPress, which has become by far the most popular content management system in the world. According to W3Techs, WordPress accounts for approximately 65% of websites using an identifiable CMS, which is an extraordinary achievement when you consider how many alternatives are available.

Originally developed as a blogging platform, WordPress has evolved into a remarkably flexible system capable of running everything from simple personal blogs to large corporate websites and ecommerce stores. One of its biggest advantages is the enormous number of themes and plugins available, allowing you to add functionality without necessarily having to develop everything from scratch.

Personally, I particularly like the flexibility WordPress offers when building bespoke websites. With the right theme and a few carefully selected plugins, you can create something that’s relatively straightforward for clients to manage without restricting what developers can achieve. Its integration with tools such as Advanced Custom Fields also makes it possible to build more complicated page layouts while keeping the administration interface reasonably simple.

WordPress 5.9, released in January, has also introduced more extensive full site editing functionality, allowing users of compatible block themes to customise areas of their websites that would previously have required changes to the theme itself.

However, WordPress isn’t perfect. Its popularity makes it a frequent target for automated attacks, and poorly maintained installations can become vulnerable, particularly when websites contain outdated plugins. It’s also surprisingly easy to turn a perfectly good WordPress website into a slow, unreliable mess by installing dozens of unnecessary extensions.

Nevertheless, for most conventional business websites, I think it remains difficult to beat.

Shopify – Probably the Best Option for Ecommerce

If you’re primarily interested in selling products online, however, I’d be inclined to consider Shopify before automatically choosing WordPress.

Shopify is a hosted ecommerce platform, meaning much of the technical infrastructure is managed for you. Rather than worrying about configuring servers, maintaining payment integrations and installing security updates, you can concentrate on managing your products and fulfilling orders.

Its administration interface is relatively straightforward, and the platform includes many of the features required to run an online shop, including inventory management, payment processing and integrations with delivery and marketing services.

The downside is that you’re paying an ongoing subscription, potentially alongside additional charges for applications and payment processing. You’re also more restricted in what you can change compared with a fully self-hosted system, particularly if you require unusual functionality.

Of course, WordPress has WooCommerce, which is an excellent ecommerce solution in its own right. However, if I were setting up a relatively straightforward online shop without any particularly complicated requirements, I’d probably choose Shopify simply because there’s less technical maintenance involved.

What About Wix and Squarespace?

Wix and Squarespace are two other platforms worth considering, particularly for smaller businesses that want to manage their websites without employing a developer.

Both offer hosted website builders, with templates and visual editing tools that allow users to create websites without needing to understand HTML, CSS or PHP. For somebody running a small business who simply needs a handful of pages explaining their services, this can be an attractive proposition.

However, I’ve never been particularly enthusiastic about using these platforms for more complicated websites. Although they’ve improved considerably over the years, I still find them restrictive compared with WordPress, particularly when it comes to implementing bespoke functionality or making more technical changes.

There’s also the issue of portability. With WordPress, you can generally move your website between hosting providers relatively easily. With a hosted website builder, moving to another platform can involve rebuilding substantial parts of your website.

That doesn’t necessarily make Wix or Squarespace bad choices, but it’s something I’d consider before committing to either platform.

Are Joomla and Drupal Still Worth Considering?

Joomla and Drupal have both been around for many years, and there was a time when they were commonly considered alongside WordPress for business websites.

Drupal, in particular, remains a powerful platform for complex websites with sophisticated content structures, user permissions and integration requirements. However, it generally requires more technical expertise to develop and maintain, which can make it unnecessarily complicated for smaller businesses.

Joomla occupies something of a middle ground, offering considerable flexibility without necessarily requiring the same level of development knowledge as Drupal. However, its popularity has declined significantly compared with WordPress, and I struggle to think of many situations where I’d actively recommend Joomla for a completely new project.

That’s not to say existing Joomla or Drupal websites should immediately be rebuilt, particularly if they’re working perfectly well. However, when starting from scratch, I’d want a fairly compelling reason to choose either over the alternatives.

Does Your CMS Affect SEO?

This is something I’m frequently asked, and the short answer is that Google doesn’t particularly care which content management system you’re using.

You can achieve excellent search engine rankings with WordPress, Shopify, Drupal or almost any other reasonably competent platform. What matters is whether your website can be properly optimised, loads quickly and provides useful content that search engines can access.

However, some content management systems make the technical aspects of SEO considerably easier than others. I’d recommend checking whether you can edit page titles, meta descriptions, URLs, redirects and other important elements without needing a developer every time you want to make a change.

WordPress is particularly flexible in this respect, especially when combined with plugins such as Yoast SEO. Shopify also provides most of the essential functionality, although certain aspects of its URL structure are less flexible.

So Which Would I Choose?

Personally, I think the decision is relatively straightforward for most businesses. If you’re building a conventional business website, WordPress would almost certainly be my first choice. If you’re setting up an ecommerce store, I’d seriously consider Shopify, while Wix or Squarespace might be perfectly adequate for smaller websites where ease of use is more important than flexibility.

For larger organisations with particularly complicated requirements, Drupal or a bespoke solution might be worth investigating, but I’d be cautious about introducing unnecessary complexity simply because a developer prefers working with a particular technology.

Ultimately, the most important thing isn’t which CMS has the longest list of features, or even which one is technically the most sophisticated. It’s whether the system allows you to manage your website effectively without spending a fortune on development and maintenance.

After all, your customers probably couldn’t care less whether your website is running WordPress, Shopify or something else entirely – they just want it to work.

One of the questions I’ve been asked countless times over the years is how many words a webpage should contain to achieve good rankings in Google. Depending on which SEO expert you speak to, the answer might be 300, 500, 1,000 or even 2,000 words, with some suggesting that longer articles will almost automatically outperform shorter ones. In fact, there are plenty of SEO tools that will analyse the pages currently ranking for a particular keyword and recommend a target word count based on the average length of your competitors’ content. However, there’s a fairly fundamental problem with this approach, and that’s the fact that Google has repeatedly stated that word count isn’t a ranking factor.

Having worked in SEO for the best part of two decades, I’ve seen quite a few supposed rules about content length come and go. At one point, it seemed that every webpage needed at least 300 words to be considered properly optimised, while more recently there’s been an increasing emphasis on producing enormous articles covering every conceivable aspect of a subject. Personally, I think both approaches rather miss the point, because the amount of content a webpage needs should depend entirely on what that page is trying to achieve.

What Does Google Actually Say?

Google has been remarkably consistent about this over the years. In February 2021, Google’s John Mueller explained that the number of words on a page isn’t a quality factor or a ranking factor, and that simply adding more text doesn’t automatically make a page better. This isn’t particularly surprising when you think about it, because there would be very little benefit to Google’s users if the search engine simply rewarded whichever website could produce the longest article.

Imagine searching Google for the opening hours of your local supermarket. You probably want a straightforward answer telling you when the shop opens and closes, rather than a 2,000-word article explaining the history of supermarkets, the development of retail opening hours and why people occasionally need to buy milk on a Sunday.

Conversely, if you’re researching something complicated, such as how to install solar panels or set up an ecommerce website, you’ll probably appreciate a much more detailed explanation. The information required to answer those questions adequately simply won’t fit into a couple of hundred words.

The important thing is providing enough information to satisfy what somebody is actually looking for, rather than attempting to reach an arbitrary number of words.

Why Do SEO Experts Recommend Longer Content?

One of the main reasons is that several studies have identified a correlation between longer content and higher search engine rankings. For example, a Backlinko study published in 2020, which examined 11.8 million Google search results, found that the average first-page result contained approximately 1,447 words.

At first glance, that might suggest aiming for around 1,500 words is a sensible SEO strategy. However, the same research found no direct relationship between word count and ranking position among pages appearing in the top ten results.

This is a fairly important distinction, because correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. Longer articles might perform well because they provide more comprehensive information, attract more backlinks or cover subjects in greater depth. That doesn’t mean their length is the reason Google ranks them highly.

There’s also the possibility that websites producing longer articles tend to invest more effort in content creation and SEO generally, meaning their rankings could be influenced by numerous other factors.

Simply looking at successful websites, counting their words and assuming that copying their article lengths will produce similar results seems like a rather questionable approach to me.

What About Thin Content?

This is where things can become slightly confusing, because Google has also spent years warning website owners about the problems associated with thin content.

The term generally refers to pages offering little or no meaningful value to visitors, particularly when they’re created primarily to manipulate search rankings. For example, a website might generate hundreds of virtually identical pages targeting different towns, with little more than the location name changed on each page.

However, thin content doesn’t necessarily mean short content. A webpage containing just 150 words could be extremely useful if those words answer the visitor’s question accurately and completely, while a 3,000-word article could provide virtually no value if it’s full of irrelevant information and repetition.

Similarly, a product page containing a photograph, price, specifications and a short description might provide everything a potential customer needs to make a purchase. Adding another 1,000 words simply to satisfy an SEO recommendation could actually make the page less useful, particularly if visitors have to scroll through paragraphs of unnecessary text to find the information they’re looking for.

Should You Look at Your Competitors?

Although I don’t think there’s much value in blindly copying your competitors’ word counts, I do think examining the pages already ranking for your target keywords can be useful.

If the top-ranking results are all detailed articles explaining a subject in considerable depth, that might suggest people searching for that particular phrase are looking for comprehensive information. Conversely, if Google primarily displays product pages, short explanations or comparison tables, writing an enormous article might not be the most appropriate approach.

However, I’d be more interested in understanding what information those pages provide than how many words they contain. Are there important questions they’re answering? Do they include useful examples, technical details or illustrations? Is there anything they’ve overlooked that you could explain more effectively?

These are the sorts of considerations that can help improve your content, rather than simply deciding that your article needs another 500 words because your competitor has written more than you.

Don’t Write for the Sake of Writing

Another problem with setting arbitrary word counts is that it encourages people to add unnecessary content, something I think is particularly common with SEO-focused blog posts.

We’ve probably all encountered articles where the answer to a relatively straightforward question is buried halfway down the page, preceded by several paragraphs explaining things that nobody actually asked about. While I can understand the temptation to produce longer content in the hope of improving search rankings, I’m not convinced that frustrating your visitors is a particularly sensible strategy.

Personally, I’d much rather read a 500-word article that explains something clearly than spend ten minutes working through 2,000 words of largely irrelevant information to reach exactly the same conclusion.

Ultimately, I’d suggest writing enough content to explain your subject properly, making sure it answers the questions your audience is likely to have, and then stopping when there’s nothing useful left to say.

If that takes 300 words, fine. If it takes 3,000, that’s fine too – just don’t add another 500 because somebody told you Google likes long articles.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, you’ve probably heard the term ‘metaverse’ being mentioned rather a lot recently. In October last year, Facebook announced that it was changing its parent company’s name to Meta, with Mark Zuckerberg explaining that the business would increasingly concentrate on developing the metaverse, which he believes represents the next major evolution of the internet. Since then, it seems that almost every technology company has started talking about virtual worlds, digital avatars and the enormous commercial opportunities that supposedly await us.

However, despite all the excitement, I’m not entirely convinced that most people actually understand what the metaverse is supposed to be, or why we should be particularly interested in it. Having spent a reasonable amount of time using virtual reality over the years, I can certainly see the potential for some interesting applications, but I’m struggling to understand why so many people seem convinced that we’re all going to be spending large portions of our lives wandering around virtual environments in the near future.

What Exactly Is the Metaverse?

This is probably the first problem, because there doesn’t seem to be a universally agreed definition of what the metaverse actually is. Broadly speaking, it’s the idea of a persistent virtual environment in which people can interact with one another, participate in activities, purchase digital products and potentially carry out many of the things they currently do through conventional websites and applications.

Rather than simply looking at a website on your computer screen, you might put on a virtual reality headset and find yourself standing inside a virtual shopping centre, where you can examine products, speak to other customers and make purchases. Alternatively, you could attend a concert, meet friends or sit in a virtual office alongside colleagues who are actually working from home.

The idea itself isn’t particularly new. The term ‘metaverse’ originated in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, while virtual environments such as Second Life have been allowing people to interact through digital avatars for almost twenty years. Anyone who’s played an online game like World of Warcraft will also be familiar with the concept of sharing a persistent virtual environment with thousands of other people.

What’s different now is the amount of money being invested in the technology, particularly by companies such as Meta and Microsoft, which clearly believe that virtual environments could eventually become a major part of how we use the internet.

Why Has Facebook Changed Its Name?

In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s parent company would become Meta, reflecting his ambition to transform the business from a social media company into what he describes as a ‘metaverse-first’ organisation. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will continue operating under their existing names, but the company’s long-term strategy will increasingly involve developing virtual and augmented reality technologies.

Meta already owns Oculus, which it acquired in 2014, and its Quest 2 headset has become one of the most accessible ways for consumers to experience virtual reality. The company has also been developing Horizon Worlds, a social virtual reality platform that allows people to meet, explore environments and create their own experiences. Horizon Worlds was opened to adult users in the US and Canada last month, although it isn’t currently available to the general public here in the UK.

It’s certainly an ambitious strategy, particularly when you consider that Meta is effectively betting enormous amounts of money on a technology that most people have never experienced. There’s also the question of whether the rebrand is partly intended to shift attention away from the controversies surrounding Facebook’s existing social media business, although Zuckerberg insists that the decision reflects the company’s longer-term ambitions.

Haven’t We Seen This Before?

Personally, I think one of the most interesting things about the metaverse is how familiar much of it sounds. Virtual reality has been around in various forms for decades, and although the technology has improved enormously, the fundamental concept of entering a computer-generated environment hasn’t really changed.

Second Life attracted considerable attention during the mid-2000s, with businesses opening virtual shops and organisations experimenting with online meetings and events. At the time, there were plenty of predictions that virtual worlds would become an important part of everyday life, but things didn’t quite turn out that way.

There are obviously differences between Second Life and what Meta is proposing, particularly when it comes to virtual reality hardware and the ability to create more immersive experiences. However, I’m not convinced that putting on a headset to visit a virtual shop is necessarily more convenient than simply opening a website and buying something.

That’s not to say there aren’t circumstances where virtual reality can be genuinely useful, particularly for gaming, training and certain types of remote collaboration. I just question whether those applications necessarily translate into a completely new way of using the internet.

What About Other Technology Companies?

Meta certainly isn’t the only company interested in the metaverse. Microsoft announced its Mesh for Teams initiative in November, which aims to introduce virtual avatars and immersive meeting environments into its existing collaboration software. Rather than simply participating in a conventional video meeting, employees could potentially interact with colleagues inside a shared virtual workspace.

This seems like a more practical application to me, particularly following the enormous increase in remote working during the coronavirus pandemic. However, I do wonder whether most employees would actually prefer to attend meetings as animated avatars rather than simply switching on their webcams.

Meanwhile, gaming platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite have already demonstrated that millions of people are perfectly happy spending time in shared virtual environments, although whether these should really be described as metaverses is debatable.

What Does This Mean for Businesses?

From a digital marketing perspective, the potential implications are certainly interesting. If large numbers of people eventually start spending time in virtual environments, businesses will presumably want to advertise to them, sell products and establish some form of presence within those environments.

You could imagine virtual showrooms, interactive product demonstrations and advertising opportunities that go considerably beyond conventional display advertisements. However, there’s also a danger that businesses will start investing money in metaverse projects simply because they’re worried about missing out on the next big thing.

Personally, I’d be cautious about committing significant resources to something that hasn’t yet demonstrated a clear commercial benefit. There are plenty of businesses that would be better off improving their existing websites, ecommerce platforms and digital marketing campaigns before worrying about whether they need a virtual office.

Is the Metaverse Really the Future?

I certainly wouldn’t dismiss the metaverse entirely, particularly given the investment being made by some of the world’s largest technology companies. Virtual reality hardware is becoming more affordable, the experiences are becoming increasingly convincing and there are undoubtedly applications that could become genuinely useful.

However, I think there’s a considerable difference between creating impressive virtual environments and persuading ordinary people that they actually need to use them. Most people are perfectly happy browsing websites, using mobile applications and communicating through existing social media platforms, so the metaverse will need to offer something substantially better if it’s going to replace any of those activities.

My suspicion is that we’ll see virtual reality become increasingly popular for certain activities, particularly gaming and entertainment, while most of the internet continues operating in much the same way it does today.

Perhaps I’ll be proved wrong, and in ten years we’ll all be attending meetings, shopping and socialising through virtual reality headsets. However, until somebody explains why visiting a virtual supermarket is preferable to ordering my shopping through a conventional website, I’ll remain a little sceptical.

It’s now been three years since WordPress introduced Gutenberg, its controversial block-based editor that replaced the traditional editing interface we’d all become accustomed to. When it was first announced, the reaction from the WordPress community was decidedly mixed, with some welcoming the prospect of a more modern way to build webpages and others questioning why something that had worked perfectly well for years needed replacing in the first place. Having spent a considerable amount of time developing WordPress websites, I can understand both sides of the argument, although I’m still not entirely convinced that Gutenberg is the best solution for every type of website.

The idea behind Gutenberg is relatively straightforward: rather than editing a page using a single text editor, you build it using individual blocks representing paragraphs, headings, images, columns and other elements. These blocks can be rearranged, customised and combined to create layouts that would previously have required a developer or a separate page builder plugin. In theory, this should make WordPress considerably more accessible to people without technical knowledge, but does it actually make managing a website any easier?

What’s Wrong with the Classic Editor?

Before Gutenberg arrived with WordPress 5.0 in December 2018, editing a page was generally a relatively straightforward process. You opened the page, entered your content into an editor that looked rather like Microsoft Word, and clicked Update when you’d finished. It wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but it did exactly what most people needed it to do.

Of course, there were limitations, particularly when it came to creating more complicated layouts. Adding columns, buttons or other design elements often involved shortcodes, custom HTML or additional plugins, none of which were particularly intuitive for somebody who simply wanted to update their website.

Gutenberg attempts to solve these problems by making individual elements easier to manage. If you want to add an image alongside some text, for example, you can use a Media & Text block rather than worrying about HTML or CSS. Similarly, creating columns, adding buttons or embedding videos is considerably more straightforward than it was with the Classic Editor.

However, I do wonder whether WordPress has made the relatively simple task of editing text unnecessarily complicated in the process. Sometimes, all I want to do is change a couple of paragraphs without having to worry about which block I’m selecting or why the editor has decided to display another toolbar.

Is Gutenberg Actually Easier to Use?

I think this depends largely on what you’re trying to achieve and how comfortable you are with WordPress. For somebody creating their first website, Gutenberg can be quite appealing because it allows them to experiment with layouts without understanding how the underlying code works. The ability to drag elements around and see approximately how they’ll appear on the finished page is certainly useful, particularly when compared with the old editor.

However, I’ve also found that Gutenberg can become frustrating when working with more complicated layouts. Selecting the correct block isn’t always as straightforward as it should be, particularly when blocks are nested inside columns or groups, and making relatively minor adjustments can sometimes involve navigating through several different settings panels.

There’s also the issue of consistency. Just because Gutenberg allows somebody to change colours, font sizes and layouts doesn’t necessarily mean they should be doing so. If you’re managing a corporate website with established branding and carefully designed page templates, giving every content editor the ability to experiment with the appearance of individual pages could quickly result in a rather inconsistent website.

Fortunately, developers can restrict which blocks and editing options are available, but that introduces another layer of configuration that needs to be considered when building the website.

What About Advanced Custom Fields?

Personally, one of my preferred approaches to developing WordPress websites has always been using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which allows developers to create specific fields for different types of content. Rather than asking a client to build an entire page layout themselves, you can provide clearly labelled fields for headings, descriptions, images and other information, while the website’s theme controls how everything is displayed.

I particularly like this approach because it separates content from presentation. If a client wants to update a heading or replace an image, they can do so without accidentally changing the layout or breaking something that took several hours to develop.

Of course, Gutenberg and ACF aren’t mutually exclusive. ACF Pro supports the creation of custom Gutenberg blocks, allowing developers to combine structured fields with the flexibility of the block editor. This is potentially a useful compromise, particularly when clients need to create pages containing different combinations of predefined content sections.

However, for websites with relatively fixed layouts, I’m not convinced that introducing Gutenberg necessarily offers an advantage over a straightforward collection of custom fields. Sometimes, providing people with fewer options actually makes a website easier to manage.

What About Page Builders?

Another consideration is how Gutenberg compares with established page builders such as Elementor, Divi and Beaver Builder, which have been providing visual editing functionality for WordPress for years.

These tools generally offer considerably more control over layouts and styling than Gutenberg, although that flexibility can come at the expense of additional complexity and potentially unnecessary code. I’ve encountered websites built using page builders that contain enormous amounts of HTML and CSS for layouts that could have been achieved much more efficiently with a properly developed theme.

One of Gutenberg’s advantages is that it’s part of WordPress itself, meaning there’s less reliance on third-party software and potentially fewer compatibility issues to worry about. However, it still doesn’t offer the same level of design flexibility as some dedicated page builders, which might disappoint people expecting a complete drag-and-drop website development system.

WordPress is clearly working towards addressing this, particularly with its ongoing Full Site Editing project, which aims to allow users to edit more of their websites through the block interface.

What’s Coming Next?

WordPress 5.8, released in July, introduced several improvements to Gutenberg, including the ability to use blocks in widget areas and additional support for editing page templates. These changes represent another step towards allowing users to manage more of their websites without modifying theme files.

The next major release, WordPress 5.9, is currently scheduled for January 2022 and is expected to introduce further Full Site Editing functionality, including new ways to manage templates, navigation and global styles through block-based themes.

This could be a significant development, although I’m interested to see how practical it will be for businesses with bespoke websites that require more control over their layouts and functionality. There’s clearly a difference between allowing somebody to customise a personal blog and giving several employees access to modify the structure of a large corporate website.

Should You Be Using Gutenberg?

Despite my reservations, I think Gutenberg has improved considerably since its original release, and there are certainly circumstances where I’d recommend using it. For blogs and websites where content editors regularly need to create different page layouts, the block-based approach can be very useful, particularly when developers have configured the available blocks properly.

However, I wouldn’t suggest that every existing WordPress website needs to abandon the Classic Editor immediately. In fact, WordPress has recently confirmed that the Classic Editor plugin will continue receiving support through 2022, which suggests there’s still a substantial demand for the older approach.

Personally, I think the best solution is to choose whichever editing experience makes managing a particular website as straightforward as possible. If Gutenberg provides useful flexibility without introducing unnecessary complexity, then it’s a perfectly reasonable option. If a website is easier to maintain using ACF and the Classic Editor, I don’t see any particular reason to change it simply because WordPress is moving in a different direction.

Ultimately, the people editing a website generally aren’t interested in which technology is being used behind the scenes. They just want to update their content without accidentally breaking anything, and I’d argue that making that process as simple as possible should be the priority.

Gutenberg is undoubtedly becoming a more capable editor, but more functionality doesn’t automatically make something better: sometimes, the simplest solution is still the most effective.

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.