Call us 0800 088 7486
Retail sales are already down 1.6% and high street stores are slashing their prices with the Boxing Day sales starting 21 days early. So, as a company looking to cash in on this seasonal spree, what do you need to be doing *today*?
BBC News had an interesting piece with a shopper this morning, who said she was doing plenty of window shopping and then going home to check out the prices online for the items she wished to buy as Christmas presents.
“The deals are online. You can tell your friends about them, shout about them.”
This highlights in itself a human trait: people love to boast about a bargain, and social networks have made this very simple.
So, firstly, give your web presence a once over and make sure that the items you most want to sell during the coming 3 weeks are easy to find – on your site, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, and on the search engines. You will struggle to change your search engine rankings in this short time period (Note to self: start preparing the website for the Christmas season in July/August) but there are plenty of quick ways to promote your site that will get instant exposure using social media and alternative methods such as optimised photos and video, which are often listed more quickly by the search engines.
Next, check your backend systems. If you promote items, will you be able to ship and deliver in time? Are these items already in stock? A failure to deliver on time, which could be hampered by unforeseen circumstances such as this week’s snow, will have long reaching consequences for your brand and reputation so don’t raise expectations. Be realistic in your promises to customers about delivery time. If the item is likely to be late, issue a beautiful gift card or voucher, along with expected delivery date, so that the recipient can be given that on the day. Don’t lose the sale – it is simple touches like this that will make the purchase decisions easy for the customer.
Next, work on your social media presence. Build up your following by offering your existing friends and followers special deals to ’shout’ about to their friends. And put someone in charge of your Twitter and Facebook accounts for the next week at least to get people engaged and talking to you.
You need to get a dialogue going and not just people with large numbers of followers. You cannot know what people do offline. We all know plenty of people who don’t tweet but who know people who do, and that chance conversation about, “Oh, I saw one of those on twitter today. Company XYZ have an offer on,” could win you that all important sale. And every sale matters, as does the customer service backing it.
So, man your phones and email account with the friendliest, nicest, most patient staff you have. Christmas is a stressful time for everyone, and a cheery voice and a 
in an email will go a long way towards buying you long-term evangelists of your brand and products.
What other ideas are you putting into practice this holiday season to increase the chances of a sale? Share them with our readers, especially easy to implement ones that may make that little bit of difference in these hard times that are upon us.
And we are all consumers, so what would you like companies to be doing? What will make you part with your hard-earned cash?
It’s fascinating that even after all these years involved with search engine and internet marketing, there are still those who believe that being in the top 10 results on a search engine is the only result that matters when promoting a business online. And, more interestingly, that many company executives believe that typing in the company name (or, worse, the URL) into the search engine and ranking number one, proves that the budget spent on internet marketing is justified.
Let us consider the problems with the above misunderstanding, particularly for SMEs.
Firstly, if the only budget you are spending to market your business online is on search engine optimisation, you are missing a huge audience. Whilst many companies may not feel that there is the necessary time and resource to handle multiple social media accounts, this is a) where agencies come in and b) a misunderstanding of how social media operates – you do not need a vast social media presence to benefit.
Obviously, the search engines are a logical and essential place for you to have an online presence. However, it is vital to understand how people use the search engines before making the (wrong) assumption that all searchers looking for your company, products and services will type in your company name. Or your URL. If a potential customer knows your URL, and are a savvy Internet user, they are just as likely to type this directly into the location browser of the browser and bypass the search engines entirely.
What is far more likely is that the person looking for your products does not actually know you exist as a company, is unaware of your URL or company name, and therefore will only find your website if it is optimised for the specific terms being searched upon.
If you sell a product, particularly one that is in a competitive market, there is a strong possibility that your website visitors and sales come from word of mouth recommendations from the potential buyer’s social network, from comparison sites, or from links and reviews on other, well-trafficked websites.
Returning to the search engine optimisation issue, many websites do not actually rank for the terms that the average searcher is likely to use to find your product. Many websites are built by website designers, rather than by designers with search engine optimists’ assistance. Whilst Management may love the look of your website, if it does not work for either the search engines or your potential visitors, it will not work for you either.
Therefore, it is important to check that your site includes the terms most likely to be searched for, that these terms occur in all the places required by the search engines, and that the site is competitively optimised in order to rank above others selling similar products.
If the last is not feasible because you are a small fish in a big pond, then it is even more imperative that you use many of the other tools in the internet marketing toolbox to attract attention. eg social media.
To see how well your website is doing on Google, type your main product into the search box and check your ranking. Check your analytics to see how many visitors you are getting from the terms you had expected to be those bringing in most traffic. Think long and hard about where else you are marketing and whether it is driving the necessary traffic to your website. Perhaps 2012 may be the time for a change of tactics?
With its impending demise being public knowledge for around five months, Yahoo! has finally pulled the plug on its Site Explorer feature.
Launched back in September 2005, Yahoo! Site Explorer allowed SEO professionals and online marketers access to a wealth of hugely useful information.
According to an article published by Search Engine Watch, the tool will now roll in to Bing Webmaster Tools. However unlike Yahoo! Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Tools won’t have a competitor analysis function – meaning data about rival sites will be lost.
Throughout its six-year lifespan, Yahoo! Site Explorer was always free. Writing for SEW, Frank Watson has stated that there aren’t any free alternatives.
He has, however, detailed a number of alternative tools that can be purchased on a small budget.
One of the best examples he provides is SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer.
Open Site Explorer provides all of the information Yahoo!’s Site Explorer did. Whilst membership costs start at $99 a month, Watson points out that a greater amount of link information is provided for that fee – making it a great choice for anyone operating less than five websites.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
OK, we knew it was kicking in, hence this week’s focus on the ‘new’ Google algorithm. Yesterday, Youtube’s new look was the focus because video is part of the all-important algorithm.
Today’s post should have been about QDF (Query Demands Freshness) in regards to news, blog posts, tweets etc, but there has been a new announcement which demands attention.
Before we get to that announcement, perhaps we should talk about the ‘new’ algorithm. There are those for whom, once upon a time, the acquisition of Goto, or Hotbot’s latest colour scheme, made IRC buzz. SEO was about hiding terms such as “Pamela Anderson” in your metas and making the keyword rich text the same colour as the bgcolor. Oh you may scoff now at such immature antics, but some of us remember when it worked. For a while, in about 1994/5. It is not often you see such tactics proposed these days, but there are many tactics from 1-2 years ago that would seem pointless now to the IM cognoscenti.
So, “new” has become a very subjective term in SEO and Internet Marketing – more “How new are you?” There are apps and techniques and on-page or even offline optimisation strategies which for many SMEs are complete wizardry. Let’s face it, there are still business people who don’t know what Twitter is! So, we are using new this week to mean – climb out of your PPC and basic SEO box, look at some of your options, understand what drives your audience to you in 2011, and then do it. If you don’t know what Google+ is, and you don’t have a Facebook profile, or you have never tweeted, blogged, answered a post in a forum, or set up an RSS feed to track your competitors – this is ALL going to be new. It might be an idea to start there first….and then return to find out what else you are missing.
Google + is suddenly appearing in the SERPs. (You need to be careful not to confuse +1 with G+). What we are talking about is that G+ status updates (stream/what’s news/posts etc) and Add to Circles have been spotted out in the wild. At present, it seems to be only on Direct Connect accounts, but that is a fairly typical Google strategy – target early adopters and reward those who at least give the betas a run for their money.
Now the Google devs are actually approachable on G+, the instant and valuable feedback that these beta tests garner for Google are well worth the pain of getting 153 comments to a throwaway comment about a new album a dev is listening to on Google Music. (Did you know that had also launched this week?! We’ll show you the workaround shortly for UK people).
The point is though that Google is playing a fast catch up to other social networks. It may not be a quick game. In fact, it is looking increasingly like a long one i.e not instant gratification, as many have come to expect of the online world. However, Google is joining up its dots and adding new functionality, removing dead wood (including the decent version of Reader, but we won’t go into that), and listening far harder, or so it would seem, to its users than a) has been the norm previously and b) its competitors.
So, today’s task is to look at your G+ page/profile, discover if you have actually spotted the SEO factors that Google is taking into account for its algo, and making sure that your page has half a chance to join the firehose that will be the re-introduction of real time search, but from G+ primarily and not Twitter, as it used to be.
And if you think that ignoring all those people who added you to circles over the last 10 days is still an option, or that applying for Direct Connect might be a waste of time…..think again. Your G+ status update might bring your company page to a first page position that your traditionally SEOd website has little to no chance reaching in a competitive world. *THAT* is the new algorithm!
Many small businesses have taken to using WordPress for their company sites.
Easy to use and maintain, you can also implement your SEO strategy into your WordPress site.
Writing for Search Engine Watch, Kevin Gibbons has created a short list of tips, which display the ways in which you can optimise your WordPress site.
Here are just a few of the best in summarised form:
- SEO Plugins - Plugins are extremely useful and can make the overall management of your site a whole lot easier. Gibbons recommends a number of useful plugins, including All in One SEO; SEO Smart Links and Urban Giraffe Redirection.
- Create content with good SEO values – The main body of text on a page should contain your best keywords and phrases, as this will help your pages to rank much higher. However this shouldn’t have a detrimental effect on the quality of your content – remember Google’s Panda algorithm can be extremely harsh, so ensure that the quality is there.
- Keep your site up-to-date – Gibbons states that hacking on WordPress is commonplace, therefore he suggests that site owners keep regular tabs on the malware reports in Google Webmaster Tools – in order to ensure all is safe.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Following Google’s recent algorithm update, which sees an increased focus put on delivering fresh content, many have been left pondering how they can take advantage of it.
Writing for Search Engine Watch, Ray Comstock has produced a list, detailing a number of ways in which those businesses that produce time-sensitive content can take advantage of this latest algorithm – to achieve a high-ranking.
Here are some of Comstock’s suggestions in a summarised form:
Press Releases – Press releases are generally used to promote an event, service or new product and are usually time-sensitive. Therefore if optimised around your best keywords and sent to PR distribution sites, you can ensure that they have an optimum level of SEO values.
Doing this will increase the chances of them appearing in a search utilising Google’s new algorithm.
Social Media Content - Content such as blog posts and articles are extremely valuable in SEO strategy. Writing about time sensitive subjects will mean that your content is “more likely to target search results that would be affected by Google’s algorithm update,” according to Comstock.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Although the majority of SEO strategies are employed purely to drive traffic from standard searches, image search services such as Google Image Search shouldn’t be discounted – as a valuable traffic source.
Dave Davies, writing for Search Engine Watch, has produced a number of tips that can be used to optimise images to rank better on Google Image Search.
Here is a summarised version of the tips provided by Davies in the article:
Image Name – Images, when downloaded from an original source, will usually be pre-assigned a file name made up of a mix of letters and numbers.
To optimise the image for Google Image Search, the file should be given a more relevant name.
Alt Tags – Alt tags will provide your image some text with which it can be directly associated with; they also according to Davies give “engines a set of information to use a quasi-anchor text if the image is used a link.”
Page Copy – To determine the relevancy of an image on a page, Google will also crawl the text on the page. Therefore it is important to add some text to a page of images – as this will reinforce to the crawlers what the content of the image is.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
SEO undoubtedly plays a significant role in any digital marketing strategy. Ranking highly can often prove to be extremely difficult though; in order to generate traffic from other sources, you should ensure that any content you submit to other sites is optimised.
According to Kristi Hines, writing for Search Engine Watch, Flickr is one of the most prominent content submission sites that you should focus on optimising your content for.
Implementing these optimisation techniques will ensure that any of your images on Flickr rank highly in image searches:
SEO Title - On Flickr, the SEO title will use the title that you’ve given to your image – adding I Flickr – Photo Sharing at the end. So ensure that your image has an SEO-friendly title before you upload.
Meta Description – The Meta description for your image will be taken directly from the description that you give your image. Your image description also provides the perfect opportunity to place a link back to your site in.
Meta Keywords – These are pulled from the tag that you give your image and also aids users searching on Flickr – making it crucial to ensure that your tags are also relevant to the image.
H1 Tag- As with other sites, the H1 tag on Flickr is derived from the title that you’ve provided your image with.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
In all search engine optimisation strategies, the main goal is to get your site ranking as close to that coveted top spot as you can for certain keywords.
While the goal itself might be clear, the way in which it can be achieved is less so.
Kristi Hines, writing for Search Engine Watch, has suggested employing optimisation methods on other sites if your strategy to achieve a higher ranking is stuttering.
Ensuring your content on other sites is source-recognisable and ranking well could provide you with a slight boost.
YouTube Videos -
As YouTube is a site under Google ownership, videos featured on the site will have an increased chance of ranking well amongst SERP’s (search engine results pages).
Implementing the following will improve your video’s page optimisation:
SEO Title - Without doubt the most important feature on the page. To rank well, you should include the name of your brand with your special keywords.
Meta Description – This item is pulled from the video description. If you can produce a description that is rich in keywords, you will be in good stead.
Meta Keywords - Meta keywords will increase the chance of your video being located on YouTube. As YouTube uses a process that separates keyword phrases with a space, you should be sure to give each of your keyword phrases quotation marks.
H1 Tags - The H1 tag is the title you will have given to your video.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
As search engine optimisation as an industry has matured with time, the expectations have increased. While it might originally have been acceptable to provide good rankings – and good rankings alone – now the expectations are considerably higher – with in-house SEO teams expected to provide a combination of SEO services.
According to Bob Tripathi, writing for Search Engine Watch, there are nine characteristics of an in-house SEO.
We’ve taken a couple of the demands featured in Tripathi’s list and summarised them below:
SEO as a Thought Leader -
While many people outside of the industry may not have the knowledge or ability to provide people with a vision of how successful in-house SEO strategy could benefit their business, an in-house SEO, Tripathi states “can open many new opportunities for a business and generate new streams of revenues.”
This role basically involves a search engine optimiser leading the conversation on how SEO can improve a business’ digital marketing strategy.
SEO as a Salesman -
Within SEO you are always selling a number of things – be it ideas, ROI, projections, projects, consultants etc.
For SEO to take precedence within a business, as a optimiser you need to take on the role of a salesman “and build your case as to why SEO is integral to your overall business objectives,” Tripathi states.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
