GDPR is the biggest change to data privacy and processing in the last 20 years, and will be coming into force on the 25th May this year. It is essential that your business is ready and compliant by this date, or you risk fines of up to 20 million euros...
This is something business owners fear most – a complaint isn’t dealt with, the customer tweets about it, then suddenly it spirals out of control and your business’ reputation is tarnished with people who had never even heard of you before. The truth is, while most businesses are concerned about...
Losing rankings isn’t just disheartening – it can have a huge impact on your business and profits if you rely on organic traffic for sales. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses experience a sudden and dramatic change in rankings and don’t always know how to find the reason behind it. This...
Until very recently, the majority of SEO efforts were focused on ranking on page 1 and in position 1 for chosen key terms, usually based around your products, services, and service location. Two years ago, Google introduced Featured Snippets, which are slowly changing how people use Google and therefore changing...
A new website can give your business a boost, especially when it is properly planned, well-written, and has sound SEO foundations. Concentrating on good content and user experience can provide a huge improvement in both rankings and conversions, but relying on the new site alone isn’t enough for sustained growth...
If you’re working to improve your rankings on Google, it’s essential that you offer a good user experience. This week Google announced that sites need to make content easily accessible to mobile users if they want to rank. This means that sites using popups that cover the main content, interstitial ads,...
Businesses can’t ignore social media – the vast majority of consumers check out companies on social networking sites before buying, and a huge 93% of consumers want companies to have a social media presence. That’s probably why we have so many businesses, large and small, coming to us asking how...
Around a month ago, Google made drastic changes to the structure of their adverts in search results, and we can now see some of the effects of this change. Search Engine Land have reported that first page bids have increased by around 15% compared to this time last year, which...
Ideally, all site owners should spend some time every single month working on their SEO – adding fresh content to their website, working on their link profile, and optimising things like images so that they have the best possible foundation for their off-site optimisation. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses don’t...
The terms ‘Google’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in the same sentence have worried Digital Marketers over the last few weeks. Fortunately for us, it looks like RankBrain is likely to help your rankings by improving semantic search, and grouping terms and ideas together to deliver even more relevant results to users....
As consumers we can bemoan the Christmas decorations hitting shops mid-October, but as business owners we can’t wait until December to start preparing for Christmas. Did you know that a quarter of shoppers have already started buying gifts and decorations this month? By Cyber Monday (which falls on 30th November...
Scoping is already a verb and 10 million users have signed up to the live-streaming app, so should you be using Periscope? Let’s start with a quick introduction to this year’s most exciting new platform: What is Periscope? Periscope is essentially a live TV station, run from people’s smartphones. It’s a...
Last week Google announced that users won’t need a Google Plus profile to use YouTube and other Google products. Bradley Horowitz said, “we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve need to rethink” and explained that users will only need a Google Account to “share content, communicate with contacts, create...
Soon people will be able to buy your products online without going to your website. Google’s Chief Business Officer, Omid, Kordestani, announced that ‘there’s going to be a buy button. It’s going to be imminent’ at the Code Conference in California on Wednesday. The change will be rolled out on mobile...
Facebook is old enough to go to high school, Twitter is bigger than Brazil and Mexico combined, and – most importantly for you – 93% of consumers expect businesses to have a presence on social media. For a business today, not having a social media presence is the same as not...
This is a question clients ask us all the time; will the resources used to maintain their social presence provide results in SEO too? The short answer is ‘it depends’ – it depends on the platform, how you use it, and what Google is going to do in the next...
Your business needs to be mobile. It needs to be mobile-friendly, mobile-optimised, and ready for mobile conversions – how many times have you heard that in the last few months (if not years)? Last year we passed the mobile tipping point, and the internet officially saw more traffic from mobile devices...
Linkbuilding is one of the most discussed aspects of SEO; whether it’s finding ways to get authoritative links to your site or discussing Google’s latest way of identifying spammy links, there are so many discussions that it’s easy to think that it’s the most important aspect of SEO. While it’s...
Conversions are essentially the reason why most business sites exist; while traffic and engagement metrics are important in understanding how people get to the site and travel through it, everything that we do when working on a site is geared towards getting those enquiries or sales. The Challenge and the...
Choosing the right social media channels can be a challenge for small businesses; the biggest mistake businesses make is setting up accounts on far too many different platforms and then leaving them dormant after the initial push. When it comes to social, an abandoned account is worse than none at...
Small businesses in the UK are involved in over £600bn in commercial transactions, but an estimated 50% don’t even have a website. Not having an online presence can severely stunt business growth, or even reverse if it your competitors are easier to find. Unfortunately, simply building a website isn’t enough...
What is a Manual Penalty? A Manual Penalty is when Google removes your site from search results (or pushes it way to the bottom) due to unnatural links. They wreak havoc with businesses, who see a sudden and significant drop in traffic as almost all of their organic visits disappear...
Getting traffic to your site is only half the battle – once you have their attention, you need to push your audience towards converting. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t improve this process and lost a huge amount through lost traffic and abandoned carts. A huge 68% of people abandon their shopping...
Just 24 hours after launch, ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com is up for grabs. The viral sensation gained 1 million visits, 270k social shares, and five figures in sales after being shared on social networks such as Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Online news sources were quick to pick up the story, which further fuelled the...
Pinterest is one of social media’s latest success stories. In 2013 it was already delivering more traffic to publishers than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit combined, and it just keeps on growing. Now, a third of users follow a brand and 52% of daily users look on Pinterest for guidance while...
There are a lot of factors that contribute to your local SEO and a good placement on Google Maps (and the maps within search results) is a major one. Some businesses are having trouble getting their listing to come up in local searches, even though the profile is properly optimised...
January is a great time to make lifestyle changes and set goals for the next 12 months, but why limit yourself to making personal changes? When it comes to digital marketing, most businesses can make a few resolutions to improve their presence, increase their conversions, and get more customers in...
You might have caught some of the hype over the last few years or seen local retailers offering discounts or free products in exchange for social shares or check ins. Recently, a hotel went further by offering a totally free, 5-night stay for people with a certain number of Instagram...
As search engines go, Pinterest seems like an unlikely contender. The ‘browsing’ nature of the site meant that search wasn’t used extensively, but the platform has evolved from its origins as an online scrapbook. Pinterest now sees itself as a personalised search site, and it can actually offer unique features...
McDonald’s have announced that they’ll be launching 14,500 facebook pages by 2015. That’s a facebook page for every 2 restaurants around the world, or more importantly, a facebook page for every area where it has a store. The brand are now focusing on one-to-one engagement after yet another scandal involving...
Practically every B2C has a presence on facebook because it’s always been a free and efficient way to target an engaged audience. But the algorithm changes over the last year have meant that brands are questioning their investment in the site, and some have even left… and been better off...
Every year or so, a new social network gets enough coverage for journalists to wonder if it’s the new facebook killer. After a decade privacy invasions, interface changes, and general controversy a lot of people claim that they’re ready to jump ship, but it never actually happens. The truth is...
Simply put, SEO is a way of helping your website rank well on search engines – since Google is the dominant engine, most efforts are targeted towards their algorithms. Unfortunately. SEO is far from being a simple discipline. It has evolved from the early days of search engines where algorithms...
Google’s 2014 quality guidelines have been leaked; the 160-page document explains how page quality is determined and what a page needs to do to fulfil the raters’ quality requirements. The document has been leaked repeatedly – in 2008, 2011, and 2012 – so many times, in fact, that they considered...
Let’s be honest, most social media innovations come from larger companies or creative SMEs – they rarely come from governments or entire countries, where the attitude to digital can be quite conservative. But Sweden is different. In 2011, Visit Sweden and Svenska Institutet launched Curators of Sweden – a project...
For most businesses, the website (and homepage in particular) forms the first impression for the majority of customers – your website needs to be easy to navigate, attractive, fast, and it needs to meet your visitors’ expectations. However, website redesign can be a time-consuming and costly exercise, so despite the enormous...
Choosing where to allocate budget is an incredibly difficult task – especially when it comes to different digital channels. But the truth is that it’s a mistake to choose between them rather than finding great ways to make them work together. It’s best to vary your traffic generating activities online,...
SEO is increasingly important for schools, particularly independent schools that rely on brand awareness and recognition to fill places. Being at the top of Google’s results for your search term means that you gain far more traffic. It also provides an opportunity to engage with your audience on their terms...
Good reviews have huge benefits for local businesses. The improve your traffic and conversions while boosting your reputation (which improves traffic and conversions again). You can even increase the number of business listings on the first page of Google since your review profiles will be featured as well as your...
If you’re tired of Facebook videos playing automatically on your facebook feed, there are some easy ways to stop it using the settings on your phone or your browser. Unfortunately, there’s currently nothing in the Facebook settings to manage the account independently On your iPhone Autoplaying videos can eat up...
