We’re Moving!

From the 1st of October, we will be operating from our new office, and we’ll also have a new telephone number and business address. While this was a tough decision to make, we felt that, as a team, it was probably the right one as a new workplace was sought after for our new start.

We currently do not know what our new phone number will be, but as soon as we do we’ll let you all know through an e-mail as well as this news article being updated. Our new address will be:
The Gateway,
11 Monkmoor Road,
Shrewsbury,
Shropshire,
SY2 5AG

If possible, please direct all new mail towards this new address. We’ll still be reachable through our standard e-mails.

We thank you for your patience in this matter and we hope to be hitting the ground running as soon as we’ve moved!

The BeVivid Team.

Search Engine Optimization – A Success Story in 2012

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is probably the most important part of running and managing a website. Part of running a business is minimizing costs, but the sad truth was that, before SEO came to the limelight, in order for a webpage to be at the top of Google’s search results for competitive keywords businesses would have to spend ludicrous amounts of money on “Pay-per-Click” campaigns.

SEO comes down to many factors. To name a few, you have: design, programming, off-site articles, relevance, inbound links, page rank, social networking links and user generated content. There are many, many more ways of optimizing your respective web pages but a lot of them can’t be done by external SEO companies without access to your programming source code; and therefore your data.

There are 2 types of SEO marketing: the type that’s done through the original web design and that done through external SEO marketeers. Typically, the SEO done through the web design has more potential as it covers more of the bases, but if you’re willing to allow external SEO marketeers access to your data they can do just as good a job. These 2 types of SEO marketing rarely cross paths because you can achieve effective results doing both independently. To clarify this, web developers can do their SEO; and if it is successful the website owner doesn’t need to look for an SEO specialist. However, if a web developer hasn’t done a good job SEO-wise, then the SEO marketeer can do SEO marketing their way. Both achieve results, yet in both scenarios only one type of SEO is used.

The sad truth is that there are no magic answers for SEO. Anyone who promises the earth is unrealistic and by tomorrow their technique will be out of date or blacklisted. Many clients want the magic answer – but it just doesn’t exist.

The BeVivid team has designed, programmed and SEO’d over 150 websites using as many SEO techniques as the client’s budget allows. This means we get a good indication of what SEO techniques work and what do not. Does what we do work? The pie-chat below shows that it does. Of 140 listings for Contact Forklift Attachments, 31 have been pushed to rank 1.  All 140 are in the top 20, and while some have moved down or dropped a page, two thirds of all the listings have either stayed in place or risen.

Using Facebook to Expand your Business

Facebook is a Social Networking site which was founded in 2004. As of June 2012, it has over 950 million active users.

Previously, before Twitter emerged, there wasn’t much interest for businesses in having their own Facebook pages, the main reason being the way that relationships worked. Having to have both parties agree to be ‘friends’ with one another to see status updates and so forth made the marketing more difficult and more of a hassle than it was worth.

However, since the rise of Twitter, Facebook changed the way their business and ‘personality’ pages worked, meaning that people could simply ‘Like’ your page and they’d receive all your posts should they so wish. It worked much like ‘following’ someone on Twitter did, only there was no need for the business or personality to do anything in return. This basically led to a one-way system by which businesses could slowly promote themselves on Facebook, gain more likes and get more free advertising, as users have the option to ‘Share’ your post with their friends as well.

With these changes, Facebook changed itself and became very much like Twitter – a business opportunity that’s difficult to look past. Users who see your posts have the opportunity to ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ each individual one, either way the post gets posted on the news feed of their respective friends, who then in turn have the chance to ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ it, into a positive feedback loop. Ultimately, Facebook has become a great way to advertise almost anything related to your business, be it promotions or just small updates.

As both Facebook and Twitter have different user-bases, it isn’t a case of having one or the other. They are both free to use, self-managed and easy to use, and can massively expand your business profile.

At BeVivid, we can design and help you set up your own Facebook Page. We can also set up a Facebook (and/or Twitter) feed on your website so that all visitors to your website can see any updates that you decide to post without having to visit your Facebook page. We can also add a link on your website so that they can ‘Like’ you with minimal effort so they can see your updates on their Facebook news feed.

If you want a good example of one of our client’s Facebook pages, you can visit Arboreta’s Facebook page here.

Using Twitter to Expand Your Business

Twitter is social networking tool. In 140 characters you can post little snippets about your life, what you are doing, where you are or even what you had for breakfast.

When Twitter first emerged, it wasn’t widely used (mainly due to the presence of Facebook in the social networking category). Today, it is used by over 500 million people and has grown into a huge marketing tool for businesses to take advantage of.

The relationship model that Twitter provides is what makes it such an exceptional tool. As people don’t have to follow you, its up to you to create a relationship with other tweeters, but while this sounds bad at first, building relationships with others is one of the best ways to increase the amount of traffic your site gets as well as giving you a solid base to promote new products and gain information about the market and so forth.

Another reason why Twitter has grown important for businesses is the impact it has on the younger generations. Nowadays big issues go ‘viral’ within days (if not sooner) due to how the younger generation operates on the internet and, more often than not, Twitter is involved. There are now even trending hash tags (for example, #awesome) that are used and can be exploited to bring more attention to your tweets.

Through good use, Twitter becomes a free-to-use advertising tool which can really help your site grow, perhaps even exponentially. As well as this, we can attach a Twitter (and/or Facebook) feed to your site, so people who are regular visitors don’t have to always to go Twitter so see your tweets!

For an example of a Twitter page that we’ve set up, you can visit Contact’s page here.

As well as this, you can read about how Facebook can help you expand your business by clicking here.

Active Garden’s website designed by Bevivid has won the Silver award in the mumpreneur UK awards.

Active Garden’s website designed by Bevivid has won the Silver award in the mumpreneur UK awards. 

They said:

“We are very proud of our site, so please tell your friends and family so we can have even more people enjoying our great products.

Thanks mumpreneuruk.com!”