Most Website Design and Development companies come from a back ground of web development, not business. As a result, when they approach a project, they approach the project from a development standpoint. They assume that the website requirements are in place and not to be questioned. The problem with is approach is that in order to do great development, you need to understand the business or application that is being built.

At Kirk we approach each customer as a business case study. We ask fundamental business questions that are crucial to the success of the website or application. Some of the questions that we drill into with clients are:

• What is their business?
• How is this website or application going to make money or help the company make money?
• How do clients or customers interact with the system to make a purchase or transaction?
• How are they accessing the site or system? Is it on a mobile device? A tablet? A computer?

By asking and drilling into these business questions, we often uncover flaws in the business model. By pushing our clients to ask these basic questions, we often help them rethink their entire business and process flow. This not only saves the client from a disappointing ending after a project is completed, but it helps ensure that the product or service is a success in the long run.

In selecting a website design and development company, you should not just look and see if they have good developers but ask, do they really understand my business. This understanding is crucial to the success of your website, product or service.

But hire a typical website design and development company or a web design agency and you could be cutting yourself off from a lot of what the web can do for your business.

First, about 40 percent of web users are viewing the web on mobile devices. That means to reach those potential customers, you need a website that is enabled for mobile devices. A dedicate mobile site is even better if you own a restaurant or retail store. While there are website design and development companies that can do this, check first before you hire one.

Second, companies with a sales force or a dozen or more employees are increasingly doing more and more in the cloud and online. To do this right, you must integrate the web, smart phones and mobile devices to integrate with each other; from databases, to sales apps, to storage and everything in between. That means you’ll need application developers to get all the devices talking to each other. That’s something you’re unlikely to find at a web design agency.

Third, most website design and development companies claim to have search engine optimization capabilities. The truth is, they rarely have the capabilities. As Google has become more sophisticated, search engine optimization has become much more sophisticated. Off page linking must be done very carefully to get the benefits for SEO. Do it wrong and you can end up being punished by Google in the rankings or even delisted all together. The truth, is most website design and development companies will make sure the backend of your site is optimized, they guess at some keyword phrases to use in your content and they’ll create a blog to salt with keywords. If they don’t have the people to create relevant content that’s linked off page, getting your site onto the first couple pages of Google with keyword phrases that will move your business will be a very long and very slow process.

Take for example, the company who hired an SEO company that promised to add 29,000 back links per month to their site in order to boost their position on Google. Of course, Google was on to the tactic in a week and de-ranked the site immediately. Kirk was called in to find the thousands of unnatural links, request that they be removed and then contact Google to have the penalty removed.

Then there are the thousands of SEO company con artists who promise to write articles, blogs and off-page press releases for five to ten dollars each and guarantee results “or your money back.”  The problem is that getting your money back for the shoddy NH SEO is the least of your worries compared to the senseless blather these companies post to suspicious and irrelevant websites which tell Google and other search engines that you’re trying to pull a fast one.

So how do you tell a good SEO company from a bad SEO company? First, do some homework. If their website has no address and no listed management people, stay away! If they make wild claims for lost costs that sound to good to be true, stay away! If you get correspondence from an SEO company that is in broken English, stay away. Good SEO is all about words. If an SEO company can’t send you a well-worded email, how will they craft a sensible keyword strategy and well-written content?

Internally we still augment our organic search results with paid search but the best, most qualified leads we get are those generated organically. Why? Because people seem to have trust in organic results. Maybe because you earned it. Users are increasingly becoming savvy and know that you don’t just appear at the top of natural search with out your product or service being highly relevant.

Instead of paying all that money to search engines, why not invest in organic search. Not only will your search results yield better conversions but in the process of building your search campaigns you will be writing better content for your users. This content can help turn prospects into customers.

Finally, with a good SEO strategy, social media will improve. Again, building more, longer term customers through shared voice.

“While not everything Google did was beneficial, on balance we did not believe that the evidence supported an FTC challenge to this aspect of Google’s business under American law,” Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC, said.

Google has agreed to make minor changes to search practices related to search advertising. This is just “a slap on the wrist, wrote Clare Cain Mill and Nick Wingfield of the New York Times.

Given that Google’s exec. Chairman, Eric Schmidt is a close advisor to President Obama and the fact that they more than doubled their lobbying efforts to the tune of $13.1 million last year, it’s hardly surprising that the investigation dwindled.

Website design & development companies say, “Tell me something I don’t know.

Of course if, you’re an SEO Company, you and everyone else knows that Google is the giant in the search business. “By allowing Google to continue to present search results that highlight its own services, the F.T.C. decision could enable Google to further strengthen its already dominant position on the Internet,” reported Edward Wyatt of the New York Times.

This has little impact if your an SEO Company or a website design & development firm that builds web optimized sites. At Kirk, we’re one website design & development company that looks at Google as the main player in search. So much so that we optimize for Yahoo, Bing and other search engines, mostly because search engines all look at each other to evaluate search positions. In other words, because Google wants to see them on these search engines, we make sure to  put them there.

International website design & development companies could be affected.

In Europe, Google is fighting similar anti-competition charges. If the charges stick, Any SEO Company doing business overseas may be affected, because the Search playing field might be leveled, making other search engines more relevant.

The huge shift to mobile ecommerce means that websites must be designed for mobile, and  the buying experience must be optimized for mobile. So should your digital marketing efforts. If your website design and development company is lacking in any these critical areas, you’ll lose marketing share to competitors who are up on website design and development trends in smart phones and tablet ecommerce.

It used to be enough for your website design and development company to make your computer-optimized website display on mobile sites. Not anymore. A small screen, screen sliding/wiping features and other differences require that ecommerce sites be optimized for the mobile environment. In reality what you really need are separate computer-friendly, tablet-friendly and smart-phone friendly sites that automatically know which kind of device is being used to access your site. If you have to make a choice due to cost considerations, it’s best to go with a mobile-friendly site, since that’s where most of the customers are. Above all, make the buying experience on these devices stimulating, fun and useful

Of particular challenge is the capability to modify an existing website for a client. Sites are written in different code. Because we have the programming staff to handle it, we are a website design and development agency that is code agnostic.  Agencies can call us to add pages in everything from WordPress and Cold Fusion to good old HTML.

Frankly, we are also a website design agency that is design agnostic—meaning we have plenty of really good designers, but we are equally capable of implementing an agency design.

Finally, we are also an actual website design & development company with an office, capital and full time staff in several countries.  “We’re just tired of being burned by flaky designers or developers who say they can do something, only to find out after many weeks and many dollars that things had come to a screeching halt,” said one account person at an agency that works with us now.

Surprisingly, many of these startups can’t even recite the actual benefits of their product. We think this is likely because they have so much time designing and building; the actual reason behind the product has been buried. As a New Hampshire marketing company it’s often our job to help these companies. We end up interviewing a lot of people in the company; we take a look the actual product. When we come back to them to say what the main benefits of their product is, it often provoke heated discussions within the company about whether goals have shifted, or if there aren’t other things that there product needs to do.

As a New Hampshire marketing company, we often see companies, who finish a product, only to realize before their first trade show or event that they have no marketing materials whatsoever. During these times, we jump in and do everything at hyper warp, just to get them something to put into people’s hands before they hit the road.

Another important aspect of New Hampshire marketing is that the seacoast area is a haven for refugee copywriters, art directors, web designers and other talented marketing and advertising people who left New York and Boston to practice their craft here. That means there is an awful lot of creative and strategic talent in the area when it comes to New Hampshire marketing.

If these costs are way out of line but you still want to invest in a franchise, investing in an SEO franchise or Web franchise may be right for you. Right now, there are thousands of small to medium businesses out there trying to work with small mom and pop web companies that can no longer do the job right simply because they don’t have the resources, skills and technology to do a good job anymore. That has businesses frustrated as they try to build sophisticated e-commerce sites, or search engine optimized sites that also encompass social media. Businesses are also getting burned on search engine optimization from overseas and local companies that are nothing but scam operations at worst, or people that just don’t know what they’re doing at best.

At Kirk Communications, we’ve recognized this desperate need that small to medium size business have to get good, high-quality web services from a nationally ranked web franchise instead of people who work out of their basement office at home.  We have software engineers, development teams, writers and designers. They can build sophisticated new e-commerce sites. Improve existing site (in any software language) and can do the job quickly on time and on budget.

When you own a Kirk Communications web development franchise, you simply take sales leads that we give you, visit these potential clients, take orders and give the job to us to complete.  All you need is a laptop, some basic web knowledge, some sales skills, a car and less than five figures to get started.  A web franchise and SEO Franchise from Kirk Communications is the low cost way to get into a ground floor business that people and small to medium businesses are desperately seeking. For more information, visit: www.kirkcommunications.com.

First, a legit SEO company will have a “presence” both online and off line.  By presence, I mean you will be able to find out a lot about them digitally and also professionally through references, industry talk and similar offline chatter.

With any good SEO company you should be able to see who their management team is. They should be on their website and you should be able to find them on linked in. If you can’t, stay away. A good SEO company should have at least a few years of experience, backed up by a number of current clients that they’ll be happy to have you talk to. Don’t just read testimonials on line. It’s hard to tell if they’re real, or several years old. The landscape of SEO technology changes by the month so you need current references.

Of course, like any business, you’ll need to focus on cost. But demanding a price up front is not the way to go. A good SEO company needs to know about your business, and how you’ll need to optimize for search before they can tell you how much it will cost.  An SEO company that offers you a monthly fee right up front based on so many keywords is almost guaranteed to cause problems since it is not focused on strategy the will be successful for your specific business.