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It doesn’t take an E-commerce digital agency to tell you that E-commerce has more than come of age. It is hard to remember that when London won the Olympics bid against Paris on July 6, 2005, hardly anyone shopped on-line. Today, hardly anyone hasn’t shopped on-line at some point and the business of E-commerce development is the fast growing business in the world. The only way to ensure that your organization maximizes its on-line potential, especially in this Olympics year of 2012, is to find a winning digital agency in London and go for gold.

The famous playwright, Oscar Wilde once said that there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that’s not being talked about. The whole point of marketing on-line is to get your organization and your products or services talked about on Twitter, Face book, You Tube and a plethora of existing and soon-to-exist platforms that your digital design and marketing agency will guide you towards. Internet chatter is what everyone craves whether it is a massive star such as Madonna selling her debut feature as writer and director, or Lady Gaga releasing her next album.

Creating a buzz on-line is what internet marketing is partly about but for more “everyday” items it is also about utilizing search engine optimization to maximum effect so that Google and the other search engines have no choice but to place your organization high up the free search rankings. Getting on page one of a Google search is what every organization craves and it is possible with a skilfully contrived on-line marketing campaign that includes writing blogs and off site search engine optimized articles, affiliate marketing, link building, advertising and pay per click, email and viral marketing, and developing a following on social media platforms.

To achieve optimum on-line results, it is key to select a digital agency London that has comprehensive internet marketing skills, complemented with design flair so that when visitors are driven to your website, your new found customers buy your goods. An E-commerce digital agency worth its pixels will develop a comprehensive on-line marketing strategy that really will pay for itself many times over. One thing that is apparent with regard to the internet is that simply having a good website is not enough; simply having good products or services is not enough; but if you have the aforementioned and a top digital design and marketing agency in your team, you do have enough to turn the world of the internet into your oyster.

In these dark days of London’s winter, there are green shoots appearing in the UK economy which will blossom and grow throughout the year. To ensure that your organization fills its coffers with Olympic loot and develops a momentum into 2013 and beyond, now is the time to work with a design and marketing E-commerce agency to plan and implement your finest internet marketing strategy to date.

SEO trends

Businesses that follow trends are not usually market leaders. A top digital agency in London will not necessarily follow SEO trends but will most certainly be aware of them. E-commerce is a complex business and driving traffic to websites is a never ending task. The sole purpose of Google and the minor search engines is to provide the most accurate search results for searchers whilst also making the most money from sponsored links through Pay Per Click.

The latest trend that every digital agency London will be aware of is that of content; content within websites has to be refreshed on an agonisingly frequent basis. The fresher the copy, the greater the Google interest; one of the ways to keep on-site copy fresh is to blog everyday utilising key words that are popularly search and also long tail key words that are searched only occasionally. The most popular key words will not bring in custom, owing to the intense competition, but in conjunction with long tail key words they will add weight to your website’s ranking.

The truth is, Google likes to keep eCommerce development in London and elsewhere in the world on its toes by continually changing the rules; rules that are never written down. After all, there is nothing stopping a website from key word stuffing apart from the fact that it will have a negative effect within the search rankings. Google likes to refresh the order of searches on a regular basis and so rankings can easily change from one month to the next. The notion is that new pages inserted within websites can be picked up by Google and alter the search ranking more effectively today than the Google of old.

SERP

A Search Engine’s Results Page offers a route to checking the validity or frequency within your website and competitors’ websites of certain key words. The results include a listing of the web pages that have been located by the search engine containing the relevant key words or key phrases, providing an insight to design and marketing agencies as to the effectiveness of certain key words.

Your ecommerce digital agency will know that primary search engines examine the content of web pages first and then take a look at meta tags. It should be noted that search engines cache web pages when they are required for frequent searches and often only display the cached pages rather than refreshed / live pages. The idea is that by caching pages, the search results will be quicker, although the information contained within the pages can be out of date by hours, days or even weeks. Often, new websites simply do not feature even when a URL is included in the search box.

Is the tail wagging the words?

Many people in business looking at 2012 as the year to turn their flagging fortunes around, will not necessarily have heard the expression “long tail keywords”. You could be forgiven for imagining that the term refers to the length of the key phrases; in other words, utilising key words in longer phrases in the hope that the search engines will boost the positioning of the website because more searched key words exist in a particular phrase. In truth, long tail key words refer to the graph used to examine the key words that are searched for a particular topic. The most popular key words that a digital agency of London may analyse will be at the apex of a graph, if it were drawn, with the words securing the fewest searches at the tail ends of the graph. That is where the expression comes from: long tail key words are simply words that are Googled less frequently.

The next question that a business may ask of its ecommerce agency in London is “what is the point of using long tail key words if they are rarely searched?” One answer as to why long tail key words can be effective is that they do attract some custom, whereas, the most popular of the search words and terms are so competitive that the average website is too far down the search pages to be seen. If somebody is looking for a copywriter in London, the competition for “copywriter in London” is so intense that most copywriters living in London would not be found as hundreds would be above them in Google’s search rankings. However, if somebody searched for a “copywriter in Clonmore”, any copywriters in Clonmore Street, London, would only have to compete with the very few copywriters that come up in the search rankings that are located in Clonmore, County Tipperary in the Republic of Ireland. Of course very few people looking for a copywriter in London would include the search term “Clonmore”, but if they did, then the sole copywriter that lives in that street would receive a visit. In other words, one visit every now and then is better than no visits owing to the fact that “copywriter London” is too competitive.

An ecommerce agency in London when advising a client about key words and key phrases has to balance budget against the value of long tail key words. For example, a small business with limited funds may not be able to handle a great rush of enquiries and so a few customers brought in free via Google’s searches is all that is required. However, a larger organisation that wants lots of traffic and has deeper pockets may decide that it wants to utilise the keywords that are searched most often and by a mix of effective distribution of offsite search engine optimised articles, advertising on third party websites, and Pay Per Click in Google’s sponsored links, the organisation receives hundreds, if not thousands, of enquiries.

Perhaps long tail key words as described by the average London digital agency is a bit of a misnomer and that the term “niche key words” more accurately describes their value. Of course, it should always be remembered that there is never a magic bullet with regard to the internet; driving traffic always requires a multi-pronged approach.

The sharpest minds in the world

At the time of writing, the UK is struggling to punch its way out of its severe recession and not destroy the career opportunities of a million or more young people that cannot find work. In the last ten years, before the average London digital agency was a pixel in the eye of its beholder, the European union opened its doors to eastern European countries and millions came to the UK; clever, hard working multilingual people started to compete head on with British workers.

In the early years of the last decade, it was often commented that British people were either too lazy or too uneducated to work in jobs now undertaken by people from Poland and other countries such as the Czech Republic. However, in the last five years, as the economy in the UK has slowed and unemployment has risen, the advent of broadband spreading like a web across the world has opened UK businesses to online competition that would have been impossible at the turn of the century. Today, to fight the growing threat of companies based outside of the UK but operating within the UK taking custom and profits from British organisations, the drive has been to meet the challenge head on by employing the sharpest minds in ecommerce development and digital design.

Today, a top ecommerce agency in London will hire superb business brains living in the capital and complement their skills with the finest internet marketing brains located abroad. In order for British companies to challenge the global competition that the internet has brought to this country, British companies are employing digital marketing agencies that understand how global organisations function on the web and are experts in the process of internet marketing.

Communication is simple thanks to the digital revolution but the new world order is creating problems for business people who have yet to come to terms with how the world has changed. Following World War II, the way business was done in the UK remained mostly unchanged until 2005. In the last five or six years, universal broadband has delivered services into people’s homes that were unimaginable at the turn of the 21^st century.

Unfortunately, our exciting digital revolution has coincided with the global financial meltdown and the pace of change has left many businesses still trying to climb on board the internet train.

Recently, the shopping guru, Mary Portas, delivered her assessment of town shopping centres that are dying through loss of business to out of town shopping and entertainment malls and to online sales driven by organisations such as Amazon and iTunes. Mary Portas produced some good ideas for reviving town centres that are considered innovative as she is not trying to turn the clocks back. Her solution is not to challenge the internet but for town centres to offer people services and entertainment that cannot easily be replicated online.

Where to go in 2012

The internet is here to stay and expand; the answer for British businesses trying to keep abreast of Search Engine Optimisation, email marketing, Pay Per Click, Social networks and a plethora of other internet activity is to hire the very best London digital agency and turn competition from abroad into an opportunity that can see a UK business expand at rates undreamed of in the 1960s.