I hope you all had good Christmas and New Years celebrations.

Now is traditionally the time we reflect on the past year and start to plan ahead for the ensuing year. Whilst I was doing this I came across some interesting data that I thought I would share with you.

We all know that the Christmas period for our industry is as dead as the proverbial dodo. Right? Did you realise though that demand for driving schools actually declines from the end of the Summer period all the way up to Christmas?

Below is a graph from Google Trends showing the search activity for the most popular keyword phrases in our industry. I found this most fascinating and enlightening.

The key point to take from this is that despite how busy we may be in the Summer, we should think twice about declining new business at this time if we wish to keep adequate levels of work throughout the declining second half of the year.

Directory Updates
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You may have noticed that I have introduced a voting system for all the driving schools listed. This does not affect the display order of the listings but serves to add some interactivity with the web sites users.

You may wish to let your pupils know and get them voting for you! Actually, you may want to get over there and vote for yourself as well!

Also, the listings no longer show all the driving schools detail when the pages first load. This has been done to ‘tidy’ up the pages and make it easier for the end user to see what is actually there. They can then expand the listings that attract them.

The directory continues to perform very well for the main industry keywords of driving schools, driving school & driving lessons etc. as a result of the continuing process of optimising the website. Due to this, daily traffic continues to increase and new records are being hit on a weekly basis.

Search Engine Optimisation
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I have had a number of questions from ADI’s as to how they can get their own websites to rank higher in the search engines.

It is very difficult, and time consuming, to deliver this by email. Indeed Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a massive subject and can take years to learn, but probably never master, and is not a one off job – it is a continuing process.

I plan to do some videos covering the basics but which will, nontheless, have significant results for you. I did plan to use my own driving school website which, I reluctantly admit, is old, stale, poorly designed and certainly not SEO’d – hey, I’ve had other things on my plate!:-) I thought that it may be an idea to use one of the driving schools on the directory so, if you would like me to use your own website as an example for the videos, please let me know by returning an email. If your website is used, you will need to be prepared to let me have the following in due course:

FTP Username
FTP Password
FTP URL

If you did not build and upload your website from your PC using MS Frontpage or other web editing software but used a web based Content Management System (CMS), I would need your login details.

This information is required so that I could optimise a webpage and upload it to the internet.

I would also need access to the websites statistics so the ‘before & after’ could be asscessed.

Have a great 2008.