Trading Online Voucher – don’t forget website content!
A Trading Online Voucher can transform your business. Available from your own Local Enterprise Office (LEO), it is a grant of €2,500 to enable you to trade online. At the moment, you will have to co-fund the grant to the tune of 50%. Until end-September, the co-funding was 10%, so do check the amount with your LEO before applying.
What’s involved?
To get started, decide how you want to trade online. Do you need a booking form to book appointments? Are you selling products online – so you need a sales platform, a shopping cart, and a checkout area. Do you want to accept payments online?
The Trading Online Voucher can help towards the cost of setting these up on your website. You will need three quotations in most cases. Fill out the application, explaining the difference these facilities will make to your business.
If successful, sign your letter of offer from the LEO within two weeks. Then, you have four months to complete the work. You must pay for the work yourself, keep a receipt of your invoice and proof of payment. Then, submit your drawdown claim to the LEO and receive back the value of your voucher.
Why bother?
In 2020, €21.4 billion is expected to be spent on online sales. A staggering 70% will be spent on overseas markets*. You will have seen this in your own home, no doubt, during the Covid-19 lockdown. Online shopping was all that was left for us to do. And, with only one in three Irish businesses able to trade online, we shopped abroad.
The Trading Online Voucher aims to change all of that. According to the LEO, amongst 800 businesses surveyed that had received a Trading Online Voucher, 84% saw an increase in customer inquiries. Sales increased on average by 21%*. Who wouldn’t want a slice of that pie?
Google does not see pictures – it only sees words
Trading Online Voucher Seminar delivered by Noel Davidson,
The Entrepreneurs Academy
Importance of content
According to Noel Davidson of The Entrepreneurs Academy*, Google does not see pictures. It only sees words. This is why the words – your website content – is so important. Your words need to reflect what you do. They need to be the words and key phrases that your potential customer will use to find you. This is the key behind Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Not only that, but Google loves new website content. It checks your website regularly to see if it has changed. How does your website change? When you put new content on it. How do you put new content on your website? By writing blog posts and news stories relevant to your audience.
Blog posts and news
Blog posts and news items allow you to show your expertise in your area. And to help your customers find answers to questions. For instance, an accountant might write blog posts on preliminary tax to help her self-employed clients assess their tax liability. A psychotherapist might blog about managing stress during the pandemic. A copywriter might blog about why you should care about your website content.
News items on your website might include changes to VAT on your products brought in by the budget. A website designer might include news relating to the WordPress platform that many websites are created on. A printer might upload a news item about a new deal on Covid-19 signage required for retail outlets.
As you can see, blog posts and news items are designed to help your customer. They also boost your reputation as the go-to person in your field. And they help you meet Google’s requirement for regular content, updated content, and trustworthy content. Include links to other pages or posts on your own website and to credible sources of information outside your business.
Website copywriting
You may feel you can write all this content yourself. Lucky you if you have the time to do the research, write the website content, and edit it. Then you have to make sure you have enough SEO words and phrases that match your sector. Then you have to check that it reads smoothly, has a catchy headline, that the sentences are not too long. And, yet, the website content has to be long enough for Google to rate it as trustworthy and that it has an information value.
A good website copywriter will do all of that for you. Words are our thing. It is where our expertise lies. Crafting clear website content is a skill. Making sure it is interesting is a skill. Coming up with ideas for regular blog posts is a skill. Writing content that is relevant to your market is a skill.
That is why you should tell your website designer that you want good SEO-relevant writing in your website content. When you are applying for your Trading Online Voucher, make sure you include website content in your application.
Contact us
Contact us today if you want to review the content on your website. As a website content writer, Deirdre can assess if your website is on the mark when it comes to answering the browser’s questions. If you want to increase the Google ranking of your website with SEO-relevant interesting content, get in touch!
- *LEO Trading Online Voucher seminar, 6 October 2020