Google Shares 5 Common SEO Mistakes

This video was recently published on the Google Webmaster Tools blog. It's a great insight for small businesses or those new to SEO about some of the common strategic mistakes made by website owners. The video concludes with 6 tips which I find most useful since they highlight Google's thinking behind their latest ranking approaches. The 6 tips are: Do something cool Include relevant keywords in copy Be smart about site architecture Sign up for email forwarding in webmaster tools Attract buzz and natural links, +1s, follows Stay fresh and relevant (social media sites, accessible on new devices) Points 2, 3 & 4 are generally the easy part these days, they are well document across the web (including on SmartInsights) so easy to learn / follow and most popular content management systems will aid you in this area. Points 1, 5 & 6 however are not so easy…

A breakdown by country of the most popular app download services to help make the business case

As you hear so often, “there’s an App for that”. Yes indeed. Around 1 million, with 500,000 available on Apple’s iTunes App Store, and a similar number on Google’s Android Market at the last count, and multiplying at breakneck speed. Apps are a truly global phenomenon, with mass consumer appeal. Apple’s App store has now reached 25 billion downloads, tracking at 1 billion downloads a month, a figure nine times greater than McDonald’s sells burgers.  Apps have made a healthy contribution to Apple’s revenues, generating an estimated $6 billion, comprising the 30% Apple takes in the cost of App downloads, charges from in-App payments, and revenue from iAd, its in-App advertising business that is still finding its feet.

Android to over take Apple soon

If we…

Of the sixteen tools reviewed which two work best?

This article explains why we believe you’d benefit from using these services for feeding back on web page designs. You'll find you can use them for everything from campaign landing pages to new home page designs. Every week, our consultants meet to discuss the work they’ve created for clients. The process is fascinating. One consultant presents his or her work—a wireframe, a design, or maybe the client’s existing control—and the other consultants suggest how to improve it. This process allows us to draw upon our team’s wide-ranging experience. We use collaborative feedback software to keep track of the suggestions made. Here’s how it works: Consultants upload an image into the software. (It’s all web hosted, so it’s really simple to do.) The consultants choose whom they’d like to invite to comment on the image. Those invited annotate the image with their suggestions and comments. Here's an example…

What is the true meaning of online influence?

We hear a lot about influence now, it’s a commonplace term when we’re talking about social media marketing. With so many tools available to help us understand what that means and what to do - tools such as Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, and Radian6 – what does influence really mean to us, as individuals and brands? And, what about all of those tools that claim to be able to help us leverage it?

The new report

Brian Solis (now Altimeter Group’s principal analyst) has released a free report to help us understand the tools available, what they do and how we might best make used of them when marketing to influential people. He’s done this through interviews and software demos with vendors, detailed reviews of 17 services providers, a review of 6 brands that have publicly piloted digital influence programs and a final quantitative study of…

... Examples of how to make marketing campaign QR codes work with a short code QR tracking service

If you are running client campaigns with customised QR codes in them, you will want to make sure they scan every time. Not just on your graphic designer's iPhone after she wiggles it in the air for 15 seconds whilst muttering a prayer! Each scan could ultimately be a sale. Or a sale lost. So why do her beautiful creations not always scan?

Why do some QR codes scan quickly?

Putting aside mobile platform and chosen app, a fast scan requires visual clarity and simplicity of the QR code. The bare black and white code including the quiet zone border is (technically) the…

Including the 5 "must-know" lifecycle segments

I work in client services for one of the UK's fastest growing email service providers. Although I deal with numerous different organisations and people at various levels on a daily basis, in most cases the range of email topics we discuss is broadly the same.

Email FAQs

The re-occurrence of similar client issues and questions means I invariably end up saying the same kind of things to different people in response. Here are some of the questions clients most frequently ask: Is email marketing ‘on the way out’ and social media where we should now be investing? How can we work more effectively with our email technology? How can we optimise and save time while increasing our email activity? How can we ensure we are giving our customers what they need at each lifecycle stage but…

Infographic shows the preferences of 72 UK journalists

Seeding social media assets like video and infographics to journalists of traditional publications is still important today, particularly since the online sites of many publications now publish these type of assets. They have huge reach too, of course. Given the continuing importance of engaging traditional journalists in addition to blogger outreach, I though this was an interesting infographic. It shows how journalists prefer to research and be contacted. Twitter and blogs seems to be the most favoured approaches. This infographic is produced by Text 100 public relations to mark their sponsorship of this weeks Social Media World Forum. If you can't make it, you can follow it on #SMWF.  …

Using Google Analytics to review changes in mobile site usage by prospects and customers

As mobile device usage rapidly increases amongst buyers and influencers accessing content related to your products or services, it may be the perfect reason to start thinking about developing a mobile app or making your website mobile friendly as part of your sales and marketing toolbox. A client of ours saw mobile traffic to their website increase by 284% in 2011 compared to 2010. Our client manufacturer of stainless steel reinforcement rods (not the most glamorous of products) saw the rate at which the site is accessed from a mobile device increase dramatically. [caption id="attachment_11974" align="aligncenter" width="570" caption="Mobile visitor growth for B2B product manufacturer"][/caption] After conducting many audits on websites, the biggest growth I have reported every single time for every single client is the growth in mobile traffic. It’s time B2B…

A case study of how a family-run business gets an edge by using the latest social media tools

I love this recent campaign pointed out to me by Pritesh Patel. It shows you don’t have to be a big business to run big campaigns in social media. You just need to think big! McKay Flooring are a family business established for 40 years. I think they give a great example of how smaller businesses can be creative in using social media marketing to expand their reach. What caught my interest was the way that they use some of the newer social media marketing platforms like Pinterest and Instagram for competitions. These are all promoted through their blog, which is also a great example of how a specialist blog can act as a social hub for campaigns, while also building the credibility of a company by using testimonials and linking to product categories…

Infographic showing the growth of Slideshare

Here's an interesting infographic from Slideshare, reminding us of their reach to professionals, and those marketing to professionals. Are you using Slideshare? Some of the active B2B marketers put it to really good use as an external hub for their content: See Eloqua, and the less creative Dell.

7 reasons to take a serious look

Assuming that you're a B2B marketer, and have good content that can be directly used or re-purposed for Slideshare, we think that Slideshare is a grossly under-utilised tool, especially since the "Pro" version launched, after all if it's good enough for the White House... Here are the reasons we think it may be worth a look: Slideshare presentations are highly shareable and embeddable. It's similar to loading video content to YouTube - you get your content in an external hub and…