Link building for local businesses

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We’ve been working with our friends over at Pure Power Solutions and helping them to market their PAT Testing services online. As part of that process, we have identified a number of PAT Testing and local business directories that we can advertise on to improve the equity of the website and begin to build ranking position within the search engines. A brand new domain will always take time to gather equity and gather significant momentum through page rank so be patient. You can always fast track your search engine presence through pay per click activity.

Pure Power Solutions are specialists in ensuring that businesses maintain a constant level of power that prevents blackouts and potential system downtime through their uninterruptible power supply products and services. In addition, they are now offering PAT testing in Essex for local businesses to ensure they meet with health & safety requirements.

Launch of The Armchair Trader

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Digital Matters has teamed up with some old friends to set up a financial trading website that is designed to help spread betting and CFD traders make informed decisions. The site is called The Armchair Trader.

The Armchair Trader features spread betting comparison tables, brokerage news and profiles, helpful articles on trading some of the most popular markets and a learn section explaining spread betting, CFDs and more.

Case Study: Search engine optimisation for a startup business

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As a small business owner, there are so many things you need to do in order to run your business well and there’s only a limited pot of money to do it with. If you own a business that has no real need for an expensively assembled online presence, you may think that optimising your website is too time consuming and expensive to consider at launch.

However, you’ll be surprised to know that there are some techniques available to you that can help you to make inroads with search engines with little or no cost.

Take our client, Woodland Meadows, a family run boarding kennels based on the Norfolk/Suffolk border. They approached us with a requirement for a startup website that would reflect their service and values, and help them to be found through search engines. The first thing we did was take a look at Google’s keyword volume tool and identify the keywords that visitors were using to find related information. The results were fairly limited as you would expect, with the following keywords coming out on top:

  • kennels norfolk
  • dog kennels norfolk
  • boarding kennels in norfolk

Next we looked at available domain names around those keywords and found that www.boardingkennelsinnorfolk.co.uk was available. This tied in nicely with our keyword volume research and gave us a target – boarding kennels in norfolk. The website was designed through a 3rd Party agency who worked with us to ensure that the on-page optimisation would give us the best chance of ranking for our chosen keyword.

Now, a little over a month after launch, the Woodland Meadows website has arrived on page 1 on Google for the keyword ‘boarding kennels in norfolk’. It’s a great springboard for the business, one that should provide over 100 searches on average each month and, hopefully, some all important customers. It’s a great example of what can be done with very little resource, time and money.

Search Engine Optimisation: Laying the foundations

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Getting the content right for your new website is critical in determining it’s overall success. It sets the tone for your entire business and we all know that first impressions count. However, a common mistake is to design and build a website without considering the potential audience and how to attract and engage them to the benefit of your business. Having a website that looks great and reads well just isn’t enough. How can you achieve your online goals if your audience are unable to find your business there?

The most effective way to achieve visibility is to tailor your site content and design for search engines. Don’t forget that search engines, Google in particular, account for more than 10% of all websites visited each month in the UK. Putting in a few hours of work on keyword analysis will help to ensure that your website is targeted around search phrases that generate significant keyword volumes.

Coupled with your keyword analysis, make sure that your web designer adopts search engine optimisation best practice and give your website the best possible chance to generate traffic organically.

Digital Matters can offer keyword analysis and site optimisation services. Feel free to get in touch to find out more.

Get the service you deserve from your PPC agency

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Working closely with local businesses in the last few weeks, it has become apparent to us in a short space of time that there are a number of online agencies (and we use the term  ‘agencies’ loosely) looking to make money from small businesses on the back of a perceived lack of understanding about internet marketing.

Twice in the last month, we have spoken with ‘Google’ agencies on clients’ behalf, who have been offered the chance to rank at the top of Google for a handful of keywords relating to their business. To the uninitiated, this sounds great, almost too good to be true. However, you mustn’t be fooled in to handing over your hard earned profits and here’s why.

The process of setting up and running three to five keyword campaigns is minimal, as is the time it takes to write the associated descriptions. Setting up the account on Google isn’t much harder either and switching it on takes seconds. To round things off, you are unlikely to see a significant uplift in sales and you’ll certainly be no nearer the jackpot with just a few uninformed keywords. These agencies will take monthly fees on the back of very little effort.

With this in mind, make sure that when you appoint your PPC agency, they are committed to driving real results for your business and offer you a detailed and transparent service. Here’s a few things you should be looking for:

  • A willingness to understand your business
  • Detailed keyword analysis providing insights and opportunities within your industry
  • Recommendations on landing pages and how you can improve them
  • Regular performance reports which include spend and conversion data
  • A pro-active approach to campaign optimisation
  • A focus on achieving your business goals

It is likely that you’ll have to pay more for the service but, while there are no guarantees, working with a professional agency is significantly more likely to result in improved performance.

Like most things, it’s well worth getting a second and third opinion before you take the plunge. If you are looking at a sizeable investment in PPC, don’t be afraid to engage agencies in a pitch process. That way, you are much more likely to get the right agency at the right price.

We’re passionate about the opportunities that are available to grow businesses through the internet here at Digital Matters and we are pretty unhappy when we hear about poor service.

If you are approached by a ‘Google’ agency offering to get you to the top of the Google paid listings for a few keywords, all we ask is that you do a bit of homework before you commit.

If you can’t see your search engine campaign, don’t panic

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We all do it, it’s so tempting to check up on your PPC campaign and make sure it’s up and running. Even more so if leads have dried up a little. But what happens if we can’t see our advertising on Google? We panic and make an assumption that the campaign isn’t running.

The truth is, it’s generally not that serious a situation. Just because you are unable to see your keywords, it doesn’t automatically mean that your campaign is down. Bear in mind that your campaign is likely to be running for hours at a time and search engines distribute your budget to ensure it lasts over the period you require. Your manual review of the campaign exists as a single snapshot in time and will not be entirely reflective of performance.

As an aside, it’s also worth considering whether the strategy of appearing every time a user searches for your keywords matches up with your campaign goals. Are you looking to achieve brand awareness or direct response? Direct response will not hinge on being visible under every search for every keyword. 

So how do you ensure that your campaign is running properly? The answer is pretty simple, but it’s a leap of faith for the uninitiated. You need to trust your campaign analytics data. It will tell you precisely how much money you are spending every day, provide plenty of keyword performance data and help you to identify where your conversions are coming from.

Checking your reports near the end of each day will give you a far more accurate picture of campaign performance. It will tell you if your campaign is running, how effectively it is being managed and what is has achieved for you. It’s a far more effective use of your time than manually checking your keywords.

Check out Google’s AdWords reporting overview video below to get an idea for the scope of information available to you.

Make the most of your online creative

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There have been huge steps over the last 5 years with online display advertising. From the early days of static logo images, opportunities have evolved through the adoption of broadband countrywide, and technology now enables advertisers to serve video files of 10MB and more in to on site ad positions.

It’s not possible to serve the whole file at once – ad serving technology enables a bite-size file to be served initially while the bulk of the file is being streamed through in the background. This ensures that the web page the visitor has arrived at will download at normal speed and the resultant file streaming has little impact on site performance.

As a result of this advancement in technology, you will see movie trailers and 3 dimensional interactive car ads with enormous filesizes streamed on to the internet. This creates a wow factor for visitors that enables advertisers to stand out from the page in what can be pretty crowded spaces.

A prominent call to action will ensure that visitors interact as you intend them to but make sure that the resultant landing page provides the appropriate information to enable the visitor to fulfil their commitment. A lack of consistency between your online creative and landing page is likely to result in decreased performance.

To get a good idea of what can be achieved, take a look at Eyeblaster’s creative zone. Don’t forget that it’s easy to get carried away with creative style but always keep in mind your campaign goals. However good your online creative looks, if the call to action is unclear, your campaign is likely to fail.

Working with a small marketing budget

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If you are a small business, the likelihood is that you will have limited funds available for marketing from the start. Don’t worry, even established businesses have similar problems when cost cutting strategies are in place. How can you get around this to find an effective online solution? Here’s some ideas to consider:

Directory submission

If you want to build traffic to your website, the first thing you need to do is submit your website details to the key search engines and directories. Most will provide a free option and many will offer premium listings which can bump your business to the top of search results or increase the speed with which your submission is dealt with. Key engines include Google, Yahoo Search and Bing while you can get free listings on the likes of Google Maps, Yell.com and Thomson Local

Pay per click

With a small budget, you need to forget about what position your pay per click advertising achieves. It’s all about generating response at this stage. Don’t worry if you can’t see your ad, trust the data coming through from your site tracking to determine whether it’s running or not. The key to making your budget work hard for you is to identify keywords related to your business that have very few competitors advertising . It’ll enable you to bid low for keywords and ensure traffic to your website. Don’t worry about wastage, if your description is accurate then you are ensuring a targeted audience coming to your website. If they don’t click, you’ve not spent any money so it’s a potential win win.   

Affiliates

If your website offers an online action such as an application or purchase, you may want to consider running an affiliate campaign. The idea of an affiliate is that you pay a specific value for an online action known as a CPA (cost per action) to websites that are referring quality traffic to your site. Providing you have site tracking implemented correctly, you will be able to monitor and pay accordingly, although some affiliates will insist you place their tracking tags on your completed action pages. There are two ways to initiate an affiliate campaign; you can use an established platform such as Tradedoubler or Commission Junction or approach websites directly in order to strike an agreement.  

Social Media

Setting up a social media presence on the likes of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter is free and can be a valuable way to engage visitors and drive traffic through to your website. However, it is important that you are offering some value here as audiences tend not to be shy when it comes to voicing their displeasure, so make sure you are able to take the positives from any criticism that comes your way. It’s a great way of engaging with your prospective and existing clients providing you are willing to put the time in to make it work. Regular communication is likely to attract an audience if your topics are hitting the right note, but don’t expect it to happen overnight.

6 considerations for a successful online display campaign

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Online display advertising is a very different proposition to more traditional forms of advertising. Unlike press and outdoor opportunites which can offer full pages or billboards, there are very few large canvass opportunities available on most websites and, where they are offered, they occupy premium positions resulting in limited availability and high costs.

As a result, standard positions tend to be horizontal or vertical in shape and require specialist solutions in order to make online ads effective.

With that in mind, it is important for businesses to consider the following 6 elements before going ahead with an online display campaign.

  • Goals
  • Budgets
  • Creative sizes
  • Brand
  • Competition
  • Tracking

Goals

The most essential part of any online campaign, setting your goals at the outset will determine the outcome of your other considerations. Without defined goals for your campaign, you will not be able to determine it’s success or failure accurately and identify what changes you need to make next time around.

Budgets

With any business, advertising budgets are an important consideration and online display campaigns are no different. Once you have identified your goals, you’ll be in a position to determine where your campaign will run and the costs involved. Don’t forget any creative, campaign tracking or media buying fees as they will need to be factored in too.

Creative sizes

You should be aware that there can be a significant difference in the performance of online creative sizes and it is important to consider your goals for the campaign before you look at the creative options available to you. Intrusive pop up positions are likely to yield a far greater level of clicks than horizontal banner positions but will cost substantially more to buy and may have a negative impact on your brand.

Brand

Your brand is a key consideration when choosing which websites you partner with and the creative sizes on those sites. Poor quality publications and intrusive creative may well have an adverse impact on how visiters perceive your organisation. Make sure that your online creative displays your company logo prominently so that you benefit from brand awareness in the event that the visitor does not interact with the ad.

Competition

In a highly competitive market, you will need to ensure that you have differentiation. This may take the form of a greater visual display or more prominent positions. It’s easy to get carried away with ‘one upmanship’ but make sure you stay true to your business goals and values and don’t be easily influenced by what your competitors are doing. Trust in your tracking solution to determine whether your campaign is working or not and not what you see on the website.

Tracking

The vital component in ensuring the success of your campaign, tracking will give you the data to determine which elements of your campaign are working, and which aren’t. Without this information, you are working on’gut feeling’ and will not be base your decisions on the facts in hand.

Search: Paid or natural?

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It’s safe to assume that search engines are the common way to filter information to help visitors find what they are looking for. It’s also pretty common knowledge that Google is the preferred choice of search engine for many in the western world, including the UK.

Hitwise is a well respected source of data and they regularly publish information on our habits online. Their top sites and engines data suggests that the Google monopoly is showing no signs of fatigue despite the best efforts of Bing and Yahoo! Search to increase their market share.

What does this mean for businesses? Well, if you are looking to broaden your online marketing efforts in to search engines, you can concentrate your efforts by focusing on Google. That’s where you are likely to find the overwhelming majority of  your potential customers. Don’t write off the other engines but bear in mind the size of the audience you are likely to attract in comparison.

Once you have taken the decision to use search engines for your business, you’ll then need to decide whether to focus your efforts on paid or natural listings, or both. You’ll need to bear in mind that paid lisings yield immediate results but require a fee in return for each click generated – the price of that click being determined by the maximum bid chosen. This flexible approach provides the campaign manager with the power to choose the appopriate keywords for their business. Needless to say, the more competitive the term, the higher the maximum bid will need to be in order to rank in a top position.

Natural listings require a much greater level of work and understanding at the outset and you may not see the reward for your efforts for months, if at all. There are no guarantees on ranking performance which poses a degree of risk to businesses where time is at a premium. However, the rewards can be significantly higher than paid search in the medium term where, depending on who you speak to, visitors are most likely to interact to a ratio of 80:20 in favour of natural listings.

You don’t need to be experenced in either form of search engine marketing to get started but it can be an advantage, particularly where your business exists within  a highly competitive market.