Shopify

Shopify is a very rapidly growing Ecommerce script, and like so many of these out there it does have SEO issues and in response to that a whole community of SEO outfits have sprung up helping Shopify stores to make the most out of what they have.

I joined the Shopify Community for the first time this week so I can drop in my two pennies worth of advice also.  Not sure if I can pick up customers or work from this type of approach but it is a way for me to learn more about the SEO Shopify niche area.

Seed and Spark is a kind of Seed investment site a little bit like kickstarter and many of those other similar ones.  I've been busy supporting a good number of projects and actually funded a few directly also, it really will be interesting to see how these turn out.  Adrian on Seed and Spark is my profile and this site is focussed mostly onto the media and film creation niche, so a very highly creative area.

I plan to keep working on this profiles until they get some traction which hopefully won't be too long given how strong these sites appear to be.

Some great new places featuring our work

I've been busy this last week, posting and frequenting new sites, many of which I have been a member of for many years but some new ones also.  This post is partly to help me keep track of where I have been and what I have been doing, so I can at least follow and find my way back if I loose track, which I often do these days.

First off SEMRUSH - I used this service a lot back in my days at the domain registrar, I didn't really get a chance to comment on many of the great articles, but I've used my time this week to do just that, so here I am Adrian Lawrence on SEMRush.

BT  Business forum - this is a strangely low profile forum for what is a jumbo company and their huge UK base of customers.  But all the same I have been a BT customer on and off for 30 years so its great to have a connection with them at last.

Product Hunt is a place I have had an account for a few years, but almost forgot about it, anyway this time I've spent extra time and effort making a better profile with more detail and links through to our site.  Check out Adrian Lawrence on Producthunt.

There are a few others but this is the progress so far this week.  I'll make some more posts as I go along as I find it a good way to collect a list and track what I have done and what I have not.

Then last and by no means least, or maybe leaving the best to last, our Android App is now live on the Play Store - Wayyyyyy to gooo!

Will Amazon take over the world (of shopping) ?

It is tempting to believe that all shops are doomed and Amazon and their kind will replace all of them, I think the world will be a much different place in the not too distant future but there will come a time when online matures and grows only by the rate of inflation.

Looking at the issues.  In the UK where I live we have a number of challenges.

• Traditional high streets can be dirty and run down
• Parking and congestion to get to shops is a real problem
• Service is not always great
• Too often sales staff just use the internet to check for stock and pricing.
• Environmental impact of journeys and the running of large stores.

Given that Amazon prime offers same day delivery often at a total price less than the shops, particularly if use your own transport to get there.

So what I forecast will happen.

1. The traditional high street will be replaced with socialising venues, cafe's, restaurants bars etc.
2. Online will grow to be the biggest % of shopping
3. Smart AI will help to auto select products and order things that really fit, e.g if your home computer knows your current weight and dimensions it can order precisely the right thing for you.
4. Style AI will help you make the best fashion selections.
5. Shopping will be a niche either for advisory services or for higher end fashion e.g Armani

This means the current decline in high street shopping will continue.

Amazon is not only a shop it also offers to host websites on Amazon  and maybe like Google it will soon enter other market niches such as insurance, financial services, travel and who knows what else.

UK retailers needs to really take the opportunity of investing in the online space before they fall too far behind the likes of Google and Amazon.

Proposal for FD and IT Director work

Proposal  

Here is a proposal I created this week - client seemed to like it. 

Thanks for taking the time to meet again this week.  As discussed I’ve done some preliminary research into your website and reached the following initial conclusions.

Overview.

Your website is already a successful online store and you are generating around £20K per month in online revenue from it.  Google however has a particular approach that it uses for all larger sites which is designed to reward sites that have good reputations, and to act as a barrier to new entrants, preventing new sites appearing with large numbers of pages and grabbing traffic, their approach  also “encourages” sites (conveniently) to spend directly with Google’s Adwords advertising program.

You are already familiar with the concept of Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) but an area I recommend you read up on is known as the “Google Crawl Budget” this basically means that Google limits the amount of pages it crawls and therefore indexes based on the number of unique sites of quality that link to your site.

All website are given a basic crawl budget and for 99% of sites that is more than enough, and therefore needs no further consideration.  It works by sites being allowed both a certain % , and an absolute number of pages that Google includes in their index at any one time.  These change on a dynamic basis as your sites backlink profile evolves.

As an example a medium sized site with strong DA and 1,000’s of backlinks can expect a very high % of their site to be indexed, but very large sites even with very high DA’s need huge numbers of referring urls to support their size and scale.  Likewise large sites with low DA and low numbers of backlinks can expect only very low %’s of their sites to be indexed for example my reportingaccounts.com website and to a lesser degree hiddenfashion.com

Google is however reasonable in that it chooses what it considers to be your best pages for inclusion in their crawl budget, which pages are indexed are determined as follows:-

• Proximity to home page
• Backlinks to each page
• Metrics of each page – Time on Page, CTR, and Bounce Rate.

A proportion of your pages will drop and be replaced by others continually as Google dynamically evaluates and re-evaluating pages in real time.

What this means for your website

Based on the glance of your Google Search Console, which I had whilst in your office it appears that around 2,100 of your pages are in the Google Index out of around 88,000 pages, which Google is aware of from either  your site maps or its general crawling activity.

So around 2.4% of your site is currently indexed.

Most businesses and websites make 80% of their revenue from around 20% of their products, so that suggests that another 17% of your site could perform if your crawl budget was higher.  Or put another way your traffic could be expected to increase by around a factor of 8x if your crawl budget was increased enough to allow another 17% of your site to perform. 

That ought to represent a very significant increase in income, in theory at least, the actual outcome of course depends on the potential of pages not currently indexed and their associated products to sell compared to the ones that already perform.

Here is an example mini site on Google.

How to improve.

Your cautious approach to SEO has paid dividends as you already have a successful business, but here are some observations I can share with you :-

Ø               Successful competitor ecommerce stores spend around £15K monthly on link building.

Ø               There is an adage in SEO that “a rising tide lifts all ships” which means increasing the quality and number of backlinks leads to more pages performing which then in turn means more sales, more traffic and greater success.

Ø               You should be aiming to spend around 20% of current turnover on backlink building and scaling that up until you are approaching the £15K or so spend level I suggest above.

Ø               It is very important to only use proven SEO providers who are very experienced with white hat techniques, and have good track records.  I recommend dealing only with providers who are well known within the MOZ community, these will be expensive, but quality is what is needed and Google is getting ever stricter with this aspect.

Ø               Your key weakness is a “Sheer lack of good links”

The main reason their marketing activity and level of spend is so high, is that SEO is now a tough area and only high quality and therefore expensive marketers can be relied on to deliver, plus getting into high quality publications usually takes a spend of some form or another, either on direct approaches or using some sort of intermediate approach, an example being my building of an IOS app to achieve a Dofollow backlink from itunes.

At one time I owned and ran a Search Marketing business, but we rarely worked for external customers and only worked on our own in house projects, with this approach still in mind I don’t offer services to third parties, I am prepared however to use my knowledge and experience to add value for companies I am working with as their Director of Finance or Director of Finance & IT

What am I looking for?

I am building a portfolio of companies which employ me part time, I already work around three days per week and are looking for around two more days per week to complete my diary.

My skills in SEO are as strong as my financial ones, and therefore my ideal role is that of a Director of Finance and IT or Director of Finance and Digital Marketing.

We talked about how that could work for your website

As an example I can help you as a part time FD – producing good management information and helping to source debt and equity finance whilst forecasting ahead both for profit and cash flow purposes.   My experience and reputation can help with the credibility needed during finance raising.

As a part time IT Director I can help with the direction and strategy of your online campaigns and to monitor and review the activities of any external provides we may use.

In the very short term I can help you gain high quality links, though in something like the way a newly qualified accountant is likely to be faster and better value than myself at accounts preparation, a professional link builder is likely to be more cost effective at building links, though as you know it is very hard to sort out quality providers from low quality ones.

I don’t mind turning my hand to manual link building if that offers value and an opportunity for me to prove myself to you in the short term,

You asked for suggestions so here is an example list of the sorts of sites, that I consider to be appropriate to target for link acquisition, these are “low hanging fruit” and ones which will help to begin to move the dial on your SEO.

My personal experience is that no follow links appear to help with the count of referring urls and therefore crawl budgets, but not with rankings so I recommend a mix of both dofollow and nofollow links for your situation given the crawl budget issues you appear to have.

An example selection of sites to target and to build links from:-

                    Wikipedia.org                             becomegorgeous.com

                    Medium.com                               List.ly

                    Bloglovin.com                            itunes.com

                    Flickr.com                                  youtube.com

                    Thriveglobal.com                       reddit.com

                    Mcafeesecure.com                      huffingtonpost.com

                    Strikingly.com                            moz.com

These are all strong sites with good DA, though Huff post is now very problematic to get into.

These needs to be complemented by niche on topic sites that are closely related to Fashion and ideally younger female fashion blogs and women’s interest type of sites. I would need to research a suitable list but the sites that comprise asos.com backlink profile are along the correct lines.

In this way you can increase your total of referring domains and contribute to an increased DA score.

I estimate that you need to add around 80 links of the quality of the above on a monthly basis to notice any change in indexing, but by building that sort of volume of links you should notice results in around a three month timescale, maybe sooner and in so doing begin the process of pushing forwards and upwards with your traffic and rankings.

Let me know what your thoughts are and how and when we can move forward.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Adrian

Sirius Minerals

Sirius minerals is an interesting business but somewhat like thomas cook is close to insolvency.

Their Stock Market code is SXX and Sirius Minerals Plc is fully listed and even with their bombed out share price is still valued at over £200m.

Basically they are building a large mine in the North east of england to exploit Polyhydride a type of fertiliser it is however heavily dependent on raising debt to build the mine as so far it has no sales at all.

This has left it very exposed to the bond market, their main fundraising round has collapsed leaving the group in a position whereby it is close to insolvency with between 3 and 6 months of cash only left.

The problem from current shareholders points of view is that probably financing will be arranged by one means or another, with for example the Qataris coming in, but that will likely dilute very significantly the existing shareholds.

Long term however it is a very interesting position and if funding can be secured there may be an opportunity to get in when the bottom is really reached.

Our brasskangaroo professional publishing site

Earlier this year we launched brasskangaroo which is a fun and friendly professional publishing site, our aim is to attract high quality authors who are prepared to write top stuff.

So far progress has been made, but it has been mixed, we are now getting 5 or 6 submissions per day, but only one or two per week really make the grade of what we are looking for.

I guess the issue is that you need to be successful and full of high quality content to attract more high quality authors.  That is of course not so easy when you are starting out, but we are working on it,  building links so our DA grows and promoting the site in professional places so we get more attention from authors.

Of course as content expands so does traffic so it is balance, we don't want any Panda or other quality issues with this site.

The type of calibre we want is like Lucy Earl, but other than sharing her videos we are not getting close!

Her videos are really good actually and well done to her for building more than a million worldwide subscribers to her youtube channel - that is impressive and takes some doing I can tell you.

and even more from credit safe

A really impressive looking chart, not so useful for me, but could be great for knowledge based selling is shown here

Actually impressed with that - not seen that before on any rival service.  There is then a further level of drill down available which is something indeed

Actually really a good range of data.

More detail from Credit Safe

Digging further into their tabs

The Directors tab layout is good with a lot of useful detail and the ability to see a directors other interests.

The financials are detailed

And a cumulative invoice trend is interesting

More from Credit safe

For some reason Blogger only allows 3 pics to be inserted then they start being added to the top of the page.

There is a useful commentary covering key points of interest

Lastly there is a section showing the number of requests for that report - which gives an idea for the level of interest or any unusual spikes could be a sign of issues also.

Credit Safe a competitor to Reporting Accounts

Credit Safe is a key competitor to Reporting Accounts.

There initial search screen looks like this:-

Clicking into a listing shows more details

The page extends down and contains more information

There is a really useful panel containing invoicing values and age profiles, presumably acquired from

the Payment Data is real life payment experiences gathered from selected third party partners big and small who send us trade payment information on their complete sales ledger.

The Age of Debt Graph highlights the current Age of Debt of a given company. The graph is separated into 5 categories. Generally, Within Terms and 0-30 days are a reasonable time for a company to pay their invoices and showcases good invoice payment whereas anything beyond that is indicative of poor invoice payment.

Bermuda for my holidays 2020

I am finally planning a return trip, I lived and worked in Bermuda for 5 great years but had to return home when my employment visa ended.

If my Article Alley site had kept performing I probably could have set that up in Bermy and lived on that, but Bermuda is really very expensive, like crazy expensive, so even though I earned really good, top money working in Accountancy there, it could not support me for very long without work.

Here is a lovely pic of Hamilton viewed from across the harbour - you can see Front Street lit up nicely in the evening.

I really miss that view, it really made my day to sit there are look out, Bermuda is such a beautiful country to live in, I would choose to spend every day there if I could.

Horseshoes bay is perhaps the best known beach outside of Bermuda, it has a great atmosphere and is really good on Xmas day if there is a party and good weather.

This pic should give you the idea it was taken 25th December 2001.

The crystal caves and the Bermuda perfumery are real tourist attractions but nevertheless well worth a visit.

Anyway back to the title of the post, I am planning in taking my wife and two daughters to Bermy they don't remember it as they were only babies/toddlers when we were there, I am secretly hoping I'll be stopped in the street and offered another role there, but its not going to happen!

Accounting fun: Bizarre excuses for late filing of company account...

Accounting fun: Bizarre excuses for late filing of company account...: Each year Companies House receives unusual excuses from directors who fail to file their company accounts on time. They report that some ...

Reporting Accounts

My current focus is on a massive site that I am building up at present, its called Reporting Accounts, and what it offers is free UK Company information covering every company listed at Companies House!

Yep its a pretty ambitious project, and while I made rapid progress its gone through a phase of slower development, however now I have a short break between assignments I can develop it again.  My coders has a new brief to add a great range of features, for example a block of graphs

The idea being to display the key metrics that are likely to be interesting to the user, Cash at bank over time, Net Assets over time, employee numbers, the current ratio which is an accountants way of measuring how short term assets match to short term liabilities, plus many more in the future.

The site has many great features but its the listing pages that are the main feature.  Examples of a few are shown here

Hidden Fashion - a popular young ladies fashion site.

CommonTime - an pager app for the NHS with great potential

The list is a very long one as you imagine with more than 4.5million pages and as around 20,000 companies are registered each month in the UK the list is a growing and very dynamic one at the same time.

Welcome

I've been blogging in one form or another for around 20 years, so I can truthly claim that I was one of the first bloggers around.

Even before the internet was properly around, i used a home BBC computer to create content that I shared in journal form on bulleting and discussion boards, actually dialling in using a modem.

I can't believe that was 40 years ago now, but time as they say flies and it certainly has done for me.

I trained as an Accountant and working my way up to be a Finance Director, after a good 6 year long stint I set up my own business and focussed on the development of websites and publishing ones in particular.

My most success came from a site called Article Alley This grew and grew but eventually got smashed when Google brought out its now infamous Panda update.

My team at that time as around 16 strong and they all lost their jobs, which was a great blow for the team and all concerned.

But these days I still work in technology helping companies with their business models and from time to time their internet marketing also.