Unleaded Digital | The latest and greatest from the digital world.

29
Mar
2022

Benefits of an Online Booking System

Maybe you’ve got a budding start up business or maybe you’re a fan of the good old fashioned pen and paper. Whatever it may be, the next step to maximising your sales and getting your business booming could be moving to a more digital system.

I know what you’re thinking – ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. But I have a better saying: ‘if it ain’t broke, it might still be holding you back’.

As much as you may not want to tear yourself away from your paper diary, it’s important to hear out the many benefits for you and your business!

Did you know that in 2018, 82% of all travel bookings around the world took place without human interaction? If that hasn’t piqued your interest – I don’t know what will!

Internal Or External?

If you already have a website, you may want to first decide whether you want your online booking system to be within your website, or totally separate from it.

There are pros and cons to both.

Keeping everything on your website means that you have full control of exactly how your booking system works. However, there’s a reason that many businesses will choose to have an external booking system.

The main reason being that to be frank, if you don’t have the budget for bespoke web or app development – you may as well sign up to a tried and tested system. Even with an external booking system, you will still be able to link to this from your website via buttons, and quite often booking systems will even have widgets for you to integrate this with your own website, seamlessly.

Sound Inc link to their studio booking system through various call to action buttons on the website. And with the external booking system styled to match their branding – it’s almost nor noticeable that you’ve moved away to another platform.

If you don’t already have a website – don’t sweat! Many booking systems now allow you to create ‘mini-sites’ in order to get your presence up online.

So, now you’ve thought about which direction you want to go, let’s get straight down to the benefits!

1. They Cut Down On Admin Time

Let me ask you this, when you dreamt of owning your own business, did you also dream of the amount of admin time it would take? Didn’t think so.

It’s hard to build your empire whilst you’re constantly stuck on the phone dealing with bookings and reservations.

Moving to an online booking system means that you free up your time to do more of the things that you love. And the more time you spend doing the things that you love – the more energy and passion you’ll be able to put into your business!

2. Your Customers Can Book Whenever, Wherever

Shakira said it best: Whenever, wherever!

Not everyone has the luxury of being able to choose what hours they work. And not everybody has the luxury of being able to pop away from their job for a quick 10 minute call in order to book your service.

This is when an online booking system really shines.

With an online booking system, your business is open 24 hours, 7 days a week for your customers. They are able to book an appointment at a time that is most convenient to them, and that can truly make the difference between gaining a loyal customer and them going elsewhere (especially when according to this report, 94% of respondents would be more likely to choose a new service provider if that provider offered online booking options.).

3. You Can Take Payment Quicker

An online booking system is an easy way to take payment in advance.

With an online system, there’s no room for people to argue, and they’ll know that if they don’t pay, they’ll not get booked in – simple as!

Manual booking systems don’t always go that way (put your hands up if you’ve been personally victimised by a ‘I’ll pay once I get home’ message where they never end up paying).

4. It’s Easy To Manage Your Calendar and Bookings

Gone are the days of panicking that it’s all over when you’ve misplaced your diary. With your information stored online, you can access this no matter where you are.

No more is the need for a bulky, heavy diary. Just check your appointments from the palm of your hands on your phone or tablet. No tip-ex needed!

5. Protect From No Shows

There is nothing more aggravating than a no show. But did you know you can protect yourself from this by simply moving to an online booking system?

With most systems, you’re able to take a deposit or even just card details just in case. No shows are no longer a problem if you’re able to charge a card on file!

Some systems even include email/text reminders – so there’s absolutely no reason for your customer to forget.

In Conclusion

With the direction that the world is moving, it’s hard to deny the benefits of moving digital. People expect instant gratification – and that’s no different when it comes to booking services!

At the end of the day – why wouldn’t you want your business to work as hard as you?

05
Feb
2019

The benefits of using an expense management software

categories: Uncategorised

Processing expenses is a time-consuming task and it is simply a shame to have to do it on paper and manually today, when everything has gone digital. Submitting claims and monitoring expenses has become digitalised and paper free, which has made our lives easier.

We have recently started using webexpenses and it has helped us overcome the challenges we’d been facing with expense reporting, visibility, a slow approval process & submission of expense claims and many other challenges we’d been facing before we started using this software.

The Benefits

The main benefits this expense management software has brought to our business are the following:

Saves Time – The expense reporting time has been reduced by over 80%. I use the software as a phone app. I take photos of receipts upload them into the cloud and that’s it.
Saves Money – Given that it is paperless and digitized, no manual data entry is involved, which reduces human labour costs.
Improved Visibility – It provides accurate visibility into expenses and this helps us avoid frauds and duplications.
Reduced Errors – Improving efficiency and reducing the paper work (and manual work) has led straight to the reduction and elimination of errors.
Tax Compliant – VAT guidelines are applied automatically when processing claims and without the need to rely on local knowledge when travelling.
Business Insights – It provides real-time insights into business expenditures. Our finance team can easily analyse how much money was spent on flights, hotels, entertainment and so on.

A great additional benefit of the webexpenses software is the ability to manage mileage claims more accurately because it has a mobile tracking feature. If you want to know more, check out this video.

Generally, the software is easy to navigate and simple & intuitive to use. We were able to start using the tool without any training and the fact that we could rely on our service provider, Bowe Digital for any questions, made everything so much easier for all of us.

If you are based in the North East and are tired of having to deal with piles of receipts, paper and manual work, the company that can help you transform this time-consuming, manual process into an efficient one is Bowe Digital, a great IT partner for your business and the only webexpenses Partner in the North East.

22
Nov
2018

5 Useful DIY SEO tips that will help you save money

categories: Uncategorised

Search engine optimization or SEO is crucial for establishing an online presence for your business. Hiring an SEO agency is always the best option, however, there are a few useful tricks that can help you in your SEO efforts if you are still not financially ready to outsource SEO.

Whenever potential clients approach me asking for help, I am happy to share some advice that can help them with an initial SEO optimisation. This was the case with J3 Building Solutions, commercial construction specialists based in Newcastle who operate both regionally and nationally within the UK.

Competitor research

Knowing your competition and learning from them is the first thing to cover and it will, by all means, help you with the next steps. Researching your competitors can help you learn about the keywords used and you can get so many ideas on the website content, layout or potential pages you might to add to your website. Competitor research should inspire you, and I strongly advise against copying from your competitors as this will negatively affect your SEO and you might even get punished by Google.

Keyword research and planning

Keyword research helps you understand what your potential customers want through identifying most often used searched terms on search engines. There are so many tools that can help you with this and Google Keyword Planner is probably the most popular one.

Website optmisation

Finding out your website’s areas of improvement is pretty simple and again, there is a number of tools that can help with that. SEO SiteCheckup is one of them and it simply lists all SEO-relevant sections on your website, marking the ones you need to improve, add or modify in order make your website SEO compliant. If you are not a technical person, you probably won’t be able to make some advanced changes to the code, but at least you will be able to undetrstand and make some basic SEO changes.

Social media

Having social media profiles is a must nowadays, not only from an SEO perspective! Social media helps you connect with your existing customers and reach the new ones as well. It helps you build social proof for your company and publishing posts and linking them to your website can indeed help you drive more traffic to your website and boost your SEO rankings.

Regular content updates

Regular content updates are important; if you update the content regularly, you keep your website fresh, provide up to date information to the visitors and it is also a good sign for search engines and their bots that keep crawling websites – this shows them that your website is ‘active’ which they tend to rank better than dated websites which are not updated regularly.

Find this interesting? (I hope so). What are your thoughts on this subject, do you think there are more activities that businesses can do without any help from an SEO agency? Excited to hear your thoughts!

29
Oct
2018

Why are backlinks important? From link building to more conversions

categories: Uncategorised

First off, let’s start with an explanation of the meaning of backlinks. Backlinks are incoming links to a website page. The website containing the backlinks is called the referrer while the website that the backlinks direct to is called the referent. A website or a blog page containing a link taking to another website’s page is an example of a backlink. Quality backlinks are important for a website’s organic ranking; however, they can also help with a number of other aspects, including new business development and sales.

These are the 3 main reasons why backlinks are important and an explanation of why and how backlinks help your business.

Search engine rankings

Search engines regularly crawl all websites and their pages. Take Google for example – it crawls a website and when it finds links taking to other websites, it considers these links as ‘votes’ for the referent websites. High quality and relevant links from one website to another are one of the most important factors in the referent website’s rankings and the more relevant backlinks a website has, the better its rankings are!

Website traffic

Given that these are incoming links from one website to another, naturally, they drive traffic from one website to another. I am sure we have all seen an example of backlinks when surfing the internet. Have you ever read a blog post about diet, health or fashion trends and then found a link to an ecommerce website offering similar products? This is a great example of backlinks and when building backlinks on relevant websites, your website will get relevant visits, which is what every website owner wants. But this is not the only way backlinks drive more traffic to your website. As I already mentioned, high quality (and relevant!) backlinks improve the website’s organic rankings meaning that websites with a lot of relevant backlinks will be ranked better and a lot of visits coming from Google will be guaranteed.

More conversions

Previous two points should cover everything you need to know about getting better organic rankings and driving more traffic to your website. But what happens then? If your website is dated and if the content does not speak to your target audience, all your efforts are in vain. So if you decide to invest your time and efforts in link building, make sure you invest some time in making your website look good and don’t forget – content is king. Try to look at it this way – with link building or backlinks, you make sure you are found by your potential customers. However, your efforts should not stop there because your ultimate goal is not the increased traffic, but more conversions and you can get there by having a great website and content.

Summary

I always try to make clear to my clients – on-site SEO, off-site SEO, user experience, website design, content and many other elements are all interconnected as they all have the same goal – more conversions. We have recently started working on link building for 2 of my clients from completely different industries – Abbey Masterbatch Ltd, a major masterbatch manufacturer & supplier and ACS Installations, a company providing water-cooled air conditioning and the leading specialists in air conditioning installations, repairs and maintenance. The results are outstanding – if you don’t believe me, ask them 🙂 .

29
Aug
2018

4 awesome ways a professional website will grow your business

categories: Uncategorised, web design

Whatever industry you come from, whether you are a photographer, commercial builder or insolvency practitioner, hopefully, your business will reach a point when you will need a website to help it grow further. If you are anywhere near that point and are wondering if and why you need a website, these are some of the reasons to consider.

Improves your visibility and credibility

If you do not have a website and your potential customers cannot find you online, it is almost as if your business does not exist. Yes, you might have social media accounts to help potential customers learn more about you and follow you, but will they trust you if you do not have a website that will represent your business too. Connect Insolvency – liquidators and insolvency practitioners based in Newcastle is a company that decided to build a website after a few years in business without a website and according to them – this was one of the best decisions they’ve ever made!

Helps customers find and contact you

Whether your customers hear about you from a friend or come across your company profile on social media, they will want to check your website. So, let them find you if they want to! A website will also help you get noticed if potential customers are searching for the services that you offer on search engines. If they visit your website and like what they see, they will want to contact you, so include directions, working hours and various contact information to make it easier for your customers to contact you.

Takes workload off your customer service team

Your website content should be informative and provide the answers to your customers’ questions. Your services should be described well, and your customers should be clear on what they are getting if they start using your services. But you can not cover all the questions on the ‘About us’ or ‘Services’ page (and you shouldn’t!). Adding and FAQ page to your website will be of great help to your customer service team, so if you notice a number of repeated questions coming from your customers, consider including this page.

Facilitates your brand

Professional websites increase your online visibility and thus increase the recognition of your business brand. When you build your online presence, your brand will become more popular among customers and that’s exactly what you want!

Conclusion

As you can see, there are so many ways a professional website can help your business grow and it is important to understand that you need to invest some time, money and effort into creating your website and online presence and you will soon be able to reap the benefits of the work done!

30
Jul
2018

Chrome’s insecure change

categories: Uncategorised

According to a Google blog post, Chrome started marking all HTTP sites as “not secure”. What does that mean? It means that as of July 2018, all website starting with a “http://” will be marked as “not secure” by Chrome, while the ones starting with an “https://” will be marled as “secure”.

The image above has been taken from the Google blog post and this is how “http://” websites are now treated. There is also a warning for the visitors saying that the connection to the site is not secure and that the visitors should not enter any sensitive information on a given website, such as passwords, credit card details, etc…

So far, Google has been trying to nudge users away from the website starting with an “http://” for years. Initially, such websites’ rankings have dropped on Google causing the website owners who have wanted better rankings for their website to do something about this. This move is a bit more drastic and it seems to be giving results – more and more website owners seem to care and take the necessary steps to avoid being marked as “not secure” by Chrome.

So, what should you do if your website is marked as “not secure”? It is pretty simple – you should have an SSL certificate installed to your website. What is an SSL? Well, SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer which ensures that all data transmitted between the web server and browser is encrypted, thus making it safe and secure. If you’d like to read more about SSL, please check this blog post.

Installing an SSL certificate on your website will help you avoid having your website marked as “not secure” by Chrome but there are some additional benefits as well and I’ll summarize these:

An SSL gives your search engine ranking a boost, which should help you increase the number of visits
It helps you look trustworthy to visitors and secures sensitive data which is very important due to GDPR,

Metropolitan House is a company offering flexible serviced and cost-effective office accommodation in Gateshead & Newcastle. They are an example of a company that reacted to Chrome update and decided to make their website secure by installing an SSL certificate.

11
Jun
2018

Features Your Contact Page Should Have

categories: Uncategorised, web design

Contact us page is an important element of your website and here is a list of features that you need to make sure are included on your contact page.

Description

A short description of your business is a great intro for your visitors. So, a simple description of your services is something you might want to have on your contact us page.

Email Address

A hyperlinked email address will help your visitors contact you in an easy way – by clicking the link. Some of them might want to copy and paste it from your contact page but it is highly recommended to use hyperlinks for a better user experience.

Phone number

Some visitors will want to make a quick call and find out more about your services rather than sending you an email or contacting you via the contact form. To make sure you all sorts of visitors find your website easy to navigate and use, make it possible for them to contact you in different ways.

Physical Address

This is optional, but it is recommended. Not only for the visitors but for search engine rankings as well. It increases your business’s trustworthiness and helps your local SEO efforts.

Contact form

Contact form saves your visitors’ and thus contributes to your website’s user experience. They are good for both SEO and user experience and additionally, they make your website more professional. I came across an interesting post that perfectly describes why your Contact us page should have a contact form.

Examples

Abbey Masterbatch Ltd is a major manufacturer and supplier of a range of Thermoplastic Masterbatch, Liquid Colour Concentrates and Dispersions. They offer a range of specially designed black masterbatch grades, white masterbatch grades and pigment dispersions. Their Contact us page is a good example of what this page should look like:

J3 Building Solutions is a leading commercial, industrial & residential building and construction company. Established in 1986, J3 Building Solutions is highly experienced in the General Building Industry, with an excellent reputation based on quality and service. This Newcastle based construction company has a contact us page with all the necessary features:

Screen Shot 2018-06-12 at 13.43.34

01
May
2018

The benefits of having an FAQ page on your website

categories: Uncategorised, web design

FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions and the purpose of this page is of course to make your visitors’ lives easier. This is the page where you address most common questions your customers have. Admittedly, not every website qualifies for an FAQ page, but the good news is – it is very easy to figure out if your website needs it or not.

If you face a situation that the same questions (potentially in different forms) are coming from a number of customers and if these questions can be answered in a straightforward manner – with a simple answer or set of instructions, it is the right time to start thinking about adding an FAQ page to your website.

An FAQ page helps your customer support team

Before you decide to hire a customer support person or expand the existing customer support team, you might want to check how much time is spent on the same or similar questions coming from different customers. Though there is something great about interacting with customers and helping them with their questions via phone or email, it does take time and therefore, it takes money. So, try to look at it as an investment and a way to help your customers with their questions – remember, there are and always will be some shy ones among your visitors who would rather find the answers on your website than getting in touch with your team immediately.

An FAQ page improves visitors’ experience

Given that it helps your visitors with their questions and requests, it makes their lives easier. Remember how many times you have searched the internet for some information and instead of reading carefully, you’ve gone through the content scanning. A website that enables the visitors to gather the most important information without too much effort and with quick scanning does a great job by providing a fantastic user experience.

An FAQ page helps with SEO

Finally, your website needs to be loved by search engines too. And search engines love FAQ pages. By adding an FAQ page to your website and distribute the relevant keywords across this page, you get better rankings and thus boost your organic website traffic.

A great example of a website with a well-structured FAQ page is the website of a photo booth hire and wedding entertainment company based in Newcastle, AG Events. It lists relevant questions and provides straightforward answers, easy to understand and navigate.

29
Mar
2018

Should I add an SSL Certificate to my Site?

categories: web design

Right, so I’ve been hearing SSL this and SSL that for ages… But what is it? And more importantly, do I need one for my website? Let’s tackle the big SSL question in this post!

What is an SSL Certificate?

It stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it basically creates a secure connection that data can be sent over. It uses a cryptographic operating system to encrypt twice, once at each end of the communication. Sounds complicated right? Well, it’s not. It just makes everything safer for everyone sending and receiving data online.

Why does my site require one?

First up, it’s essential if you are accepting card payments on your site. In fact, it’s a basic requirement of PCI compliance standards. An SSL certificate is highlighted to customers via a padlock or https at the beginning of the website URL. Customers are becoming so accustomed to seeing these on large site that you are in danger of standing out without one installed. In the most basic of terms, an SSL certificate provides an amount of trust between your site and it’s users.

For example, this aircraft engine overhaul/exchange company based in the UK has an SSL certificate. You can detect this because the URL starting with https.

Summary

It is essential that all websites install SSL certificates to protect their data and website, the data and identities of their customers and gain the trust of customers inputting data and completing transactions.

14
Mar
2018

Why You Should Add Case Studies To Your Website

categories: web design

Because you are trying to generate more leads and close more sales! Convinced yet? In this post, we discuss the advantages of adding case studies to your website and how they could help you create more leads and close more sales.

Let’s take an everyday example:

You want to go out for dinner… You maybe Google the best restaurants in your area? After a few more refined Google searches you have it down to a possible 3 or 4… What now? Now you’re looking for some kind of peer-based feedback. Reviews, recommendations and advice would be great, right? So you head over to Trip Advisor, Facebook or Google to read them. You may are probably more likely to choose the restaurant with favourable reviews and or reviews that highlight your own requirements.

Case studies are doing the same job on your website. They are highlighting to potential clients fantastic work you have done in the past for possibly similar projects to their own. Adding pictures and testimonials to the case studies will also increase the validity of each study increasing your competitive advantage.

A great example of case studies on a website can be found on this building surveyors site, they feature them in the top menu and feature over 20 examples of their work. Each individual case study features a photograph and links to its own page with further information on the project.

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