Bars are doing cocktail delivery, gyms are providing live streamed workouts, bands are organising online festivals and salons are selling gift cards and products where possible.

If your business has been forced to close or operate in a limited fashion and you don’t already offer products or services via the web, now is a critical time to get started.

TC Web are well positioned to help out local businesses who are looking to start selling a form of their products or services online. We can offer solutions that will get you up and running as quickly and affordably as possible. As this challenging period continues we will be providing discounted pricing on these sort of projects.

We love seeing how businesses have been innovating during this tough time and we’d be happy to discuss ideas about how your business might be able to adapt.

Don’t hesitate to contact us today or call 0423 065 188

The post Take Your Business Online Quickly and Affordably appeared first on TC Web.

We’ve put a lot of effort in to increasing our Google Ads portfolio as well as, of course, delivering great results for our customers over the past 12 months. It’s fantastic to see Google recognising this hard work by awarding us with this Partner status.

Our Google Partner badge assures our clients that:

• We have a history of increasing the performance of the accounts we manage
• Our customers remain with us for a long period of time
• We manage a substantial amount of ad spend across our customer accounts
• We are up to date with the latest Google Skillshop certification courses

We also now have access to exclusive Google events and promotions. This will help us to stay at the forefront with our Google Ads techniques and hence further lift the performance of our managed ad campaigns.

We’ll be looking to expand our Partner status by adding further specialisations in the near future.

You can view our Google Partners profile here or by clicking the badge below.

If you need help with your Google Ads campaigns, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

The post We are now a Google Partner! appeared first on TC Web.

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Now the time has come for Google to crack down on sites with mixed content as well, considering that aren’t really secure anyway. They’ve announced that from January 2020 Chrome will either attempt to automatically serve HTTP audio and video over HTTPS or otherwise block the content. Then in February 2020 images will get the same treatment.

If not fixed up, this could create some big holes on some websites. Mixed content such as images and videos will simply not load if Chrome is unable to find the HTTPS equivalent. This will result in the site looking broken and untrustworthy. I also bet that there will be further negative SEO impacts for having mixed content.

Look for the warnings seen in the images below to discover if your site has mixed content (the little exclamation mark will be seen to the left of your website URL at the top left of your browser, the other is from the console in F12 developer tools). If your site has them, there’s some work to be done.

Fixing up these issues is fast and straight forward. If you need help, contact TC Web to ensure your site is fully served over HTTPS.

The post Chrome to Start Blocking Mixed Content appeared first on TC Web.

It has been suggested that this wave of suspensions has occurred because of an attempt by Google to start weeding out the millions of fake or invalid profiles that pollute the My Business universe. Those who have been suspended may be collateral in an algorithm run by Google to automatically achieve this.

Having your account suspended can be extremely frustrating and even damaging to your business. The way this has been dealt with by Google – with no explanation as to why accounts have been suspended and then incredibly slow response times to reinstatement submissions – is also far from ideal. We can only hope that they improve these processes in the future.

However, if there’s a positive to come from this, it’s that Google are hopefully taking action against fake profiles. There’s no doubt that a few of you reading this would have illegitimate My Business profiles appearing in the local pack above your own for certain Google searches. If numerous accounts were swept up to be removed in the recent suspension wave then expect to see a spike in users that find your business as you move up to your rightful position. This would only be a net positive for businesses into the future.

The post Many Businesses Reporting My Business Listing Suspensions, But the Net Result Could Be Positive appeared first on TC Web.

We recommend that you head over to your My Business account now and claim your desired short name. As this is a global namespace your name can be taken by other businesses across the world with the same or a similar name. For example, @beaches-thai could be the name of a few restaurants, so if it was your restaurant you’d want to jump in and secure that short name for your business before others do.

Users will also be able to search businesses by short name in Google Maps, allowing them to quickly bring up a profile.

Whilst the full extent of the functionality of these short names isn’t clear at this stage, it’s always a good idea to get on board quickly these things to have yourself ready for the best use of new features.

Clients on managed SEO plans with TC Web need not worry about claiming their short names as we have already sorted it out for you.

The post Google My Business Introduces Short Names appeared first on TC Web.

• Want to increase your stockpile of cryptocurrency.
• Be trying to support and promote adoption of a particular coin.
• Wish to easily accept payments from other countries without worrying about bad conversion rates and fees.
• Simply want to offer a wide as possible variety of payment options to your customers.

You might also be attracted by the advantages of some coins, such as Nano, which allows payments to be made instantly and without any fees. This provides welcome relief from traditional payment methods such as credit card, where funds often take days to arrive in your bank account and incur a fee depending upon your volume and the platform you’re using.

Integrating a cryptocurrency payment gateway into your WooCommerce store or website is actually quite straight forward. All you require is a wallet for each of the coins you wish to accept (or an account associated with a particular plugin). Any web developer should then easily be able to sort you out with one of plugins or services currently available.

When a user chooses to pay with their desired coin, the system will automatically convert the purchase amount from AUD (or your store’s currency) to an equivalent amount in that cryptocurrency. A wallet address will be presented for the user to send the amount to. The payment is verified by an intermediate wallet, thus communicating the received payment to your website and completing the order. Funds are then sent to your own wallet.

If you’re interested in accepting cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, XRP, Ether, Dash and Nano in your WooCommerce store or on your website, get in touch with TC Web. We can guide you through any setup processes in terms of accounts and wallets and integrate a payment gateway for you.

TC Web accepts Nano as payment for our services and can offer discounts on payments made in Nano.

The post Accept Cryptocurrency Payments in WooCommerce or on your Website appeared first on TC Web.

Many businesses struggle to come up with legitimate ways to get these backlinks. It’s hard for say, a local plumber, to produce interesting content or to become influential enough to prompt news outlets or other authoritative websites to link back to their website. After registering for various online directories, they become short on ideas.

It is at this point that dubious SEO providers enter the picture. A quick search presents plenty of cheap link building services. High domain authoritative links are promised and the cost seems too good to be true.

Some people even follow up the typical SEO spam emails that are sent to business email addresses every day and engage them.

What you’ll notice from using these services is that your rankings will probably originally go up. You may even enjoy a month or two of increased traffic to your business’s website. But in most cases your ranking will eventually plummet.

Google will figure out what you’ve done sooner or later – the links that have been built for you are likely spammy or irrelevant. You’ll be hit with a penalty and your website will drop perhaps lower than it ever was before. It can be very hard to recover a website once it has been penalised. You will have to work to remove or disavow the troublesome links and even then many sites still bear the burden of the earlier penalty.

Through legitimate work in promoting your business and website you will find that your ranking should gradually rise. Aside from this, you can engage a reputable SEO service provider. They may be expensive, but they are the safest and most effective way to gain quality backlinks.

The post Why You Should Avoid Fiverr and Other Cheap Options for Link Building appeared first on TC Web.

Quite often this decision lands the business in a tricky situation down the track when they decide to move emails off the web server and over to a dedicated, premium email provider. They might decide this for a number of reasons, including the need for more store space, better spam filtering a more reliable service or more sophisticated mailbox management tools.

Depending upon how long the business has been using the emails, how many mailboxes there are and how reliable the web server is, the migration process to bring across all existing mail to the new system can be a time consuming process. However, the pain must be endured at some point to move to the more future proof solution.

With all this in mind, the best decision new businesses can make is to start using a provider such as Gmail (Google Apps) or Exchange Online (Microsoft Office 365) from the beginning. Don’t take the seemingly cheap option – pay the $5-$7 (AUD) per user per month fee for a mail system that you will use into the foreseeable future. In the long run it will save you time and money.

The post Why You Should Choose a Premium Email Provider appeared first on TC Web.

Over TC Ink Web’s short history, we’ve found that we make a great partner for new, small businesses. We find that we provide a happy midpoint where we cover all the online services you require; from web design, to SEO and digital marketing, without having the big price tag associated with digital design agencies. By focusing on what is most important for your business and eliminating the noise of unnecessary, fancy add-ons, we can keep your costs down and provide you awesome with solutions!

We also care a lot more about you to just churn out a website and be done with it – we want to work closely with you, guiding you through the process of getting setup on the web and ensuring that your brand is represented professionally across all the platforms that are most important to your new small business. We take pleasure in seeing your business flourish because of our work.

Here are just a few key new business tasks that we could carry out for you:

• Set you up with @your-domain e-mail accounts
• Build an awesome, professional website to showcase your business
• Get you setup on key local directories
• Build profiles on relevant social platforms
• Climb you up the rankings on Google for your services/products

So if you are starting up a small business on the Northern Beaches (or anywhere else in Sydney or Australia!), whether it be Collaroy, Manly, Brookvale, Dee Why, Mona Vale etc, we are keen to work with you and help you start your new business in a strong way. Contact us today!

The post We’re Perfect for New Small Businesses appeared first on TC Web.