Google reveals what factors influence your sites 'crawl budget' and what you can do to boost it

Importance: [rating=4] For webmasters managing large sites (1000+ URLs) Recommended Source: Google Webmasters blog Your site has to be crawled by Google if it's going to rank for anything. That's SEO 101. If areas of your site are not getting crawled, it means they won't be appearing in any SERPs and are a total waste of time from an SEO perspective. If you have a small site with a simple URL structure, you don't need to worry about crawl budget at all. But if your site has several thousand URLs, or if it auto-generate pages based on URL parameters, then you might want to look at how you can increase your crawl budget. This post will outline what crawl budget is and how you can improve it, which Google have just explained for the first time.

What is Crawl Budget?

Google…

Chart of the day: Small businesses are missing out on some of the most effective marketing techniques.

Salesforce, a content partner of SmartInsights, surveyed 300 small business owners (defined as businesses with less than 100 employees. They found that whilst some marketing techniques such as social media and email marketing were very popular, the vast majority of small businesses were failing to use more advanced techniques which could deliver more value. 93% did not use marketing automation, and 91% did not use a cloud-based CRM system. 4 out of 5 businesses said they did not use any SEO techniques, and only 21% used digital advertising. To say they are missing a trick is an under-statement. Social Media Marketing, the most popular activity, often fails to deliver ROI, and should be used as more as an engagement tool rather than one to gain customers. SEO and Marketing Automation have huge potential, yet…

Draw inspiration from the greatest strategists and marketers when creating your plan for the year ahead

It's the time of year for setting out what you want to achieve in the coming twelve months at both a personal and business level.  Given that 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions', you'll also want to think through how and when you will achieve them. It's all too easy to get back into the work routine and find yourself so swamped with daily tasks that taking a step back and thinking about planning and vision for the long term ends up taking a back seat. Before you know it you're several weeks into the year and you still haven't found the time to sit down and properly plan out your strategy. For businesses working on digital transformation, inspiring digital transformation through vision statements can help here. To inspire action, we have put together…

Report shows the key trends small and medium businesses need to utilise this year

Small businesses have more marketing options than they have ever had before. Low barriers to entry on marketing automation and social media platforms present massive opportunities for smaller businesses, yet it also means increased complexity and more channels to keep on top of. This can be a big problem for smaller marketing departments which can quickly become overwhelmed. To give an idea of the scale of the problem, just last year the number of marketing technology companies doubled from around 2000 to 4000. In our infographic of digital marketing tools we identified 35 categories. That means way more options and loads of great new tools, but it also means there are twice the number of solutions to get your head around. How are you meant to know which tools you need and which are superfluous? Understanding trends across…

SMEs with limited time and budget should follow these simple strategies to get results in 2017

 Your website is the face of your company’s digital marketing strategy, yet one of the most common critiques today is that websites are too complicated. Sometimes it’s a case of gamification taken too far or overuse of the popular, but visually intense parallax format – a busy website, overdesigned or poorly formatted is simply difficult to use. What’s more, creating such a site, and maintaining an equally deep marketing presence on social media or via email, is time-consuming and may not pay off. A critique that we encounter far less often in the digital marketing world, is that a website is overly simple, but that doesn’t mean such sites don’t exist. Rather, the overly simple website tends to be described differently: they choose unattractive fonts, lack visual interest, or don’t implement their content effectively. Look at these…

Adapting the Growth/Share Matrix to Marketing

The Growth/Share Matrix is a business strategy tool that's been around for years, but it remains a useful way to think strategically about where you make investments and allocate company budgets. Although it's a general business strategy tool, it can be very useful for thinking about allocating marketing spend and so it is as important for marketers as it is for boards making big strategy decisions. The model is also known as the BCG model, the acronym of the group that created it. The model involves mapping business divisions or products across two key dimensions; Market Share and Market Growth, which then maps them into one of four quadrants. Products/Divisions operating with low market share in a low-growth market are dogs, those operating with a high market share in a low-growth market are cash cows. Divisions or products serving a high growth market but without…

What are the most important marketing investment priorities for Smart Insights members for the year ahead?

Each year, we ask Smart Insights members for their predictions of THE most important high-level digital marketing technique for their business or their clients. This has been really interesting to take the pulse of opinion on marketing trends across the main digital marketing techniques. Thanks if you shared your opinion, we had 2,352 responses from marketers around the world! Here are the results for 2017:

How the top trends were selected

From September to mid-December 2016 we asked readers of our post on Digital Marketing Trends for 2017 to select just one marketing tactic which would give them the biggest uplift in the year ahead. While this doesn't have a controlled sample of our free research reports like Managing Digital Marketing, it does canvas opinion widely.This isn't necessarily…

How to know your audience and create the right content for them

We've all heard the phrase ‘the client is king’. In practice, this means that an important part of marketing is an exercise of empathy, which consists of finding out who our audience is, so we can give them what they want in a better way than our competition. This simple idea should also be the center of your efforts when it comes to increasing your leads. You should adjust to them, and to their buying process. You should give your prospects the answers they are looking for, when they’re looking for them, in an appropriate way to address the subject of their interest.

The Inbound Approach

But let’s start from the beginning. You may have heard the term “inbound marketing” before. If you haven't, it mainly consists of making leads…

Chart of the Day: Key Financial Services Industry Marketing Trends

There were 347 million mobile payments made via banking apps in 2015. This is a rise of 54% compared with 2014. In addition to 417 million payments made via internet banking in 2015, a modest 2% rise from 2014. The chart comes from a report by BBA, which is the UK's largest trade association for the banking sector. The report found: With 40,000 financial app downloads a day in 2015, this is a 25% increase on 2015. The question for the beginning of 2017 is, what will 2016 show? There were also 4.3 million mobile banking logins in 2015 and 11 million app logins a day. There were 15 million Contactless cards issued in 2015 and 250% annual rise in spending using Contactless cards. There were just 71 bank branch visits a day in 2015. Source:…

Creating Pricing Strategies for Different Objectives

How much does it cost? This is one of the first questions that customers have when they see something they like, whether 'on the high street' or in an e-commerce store. That is why if there is a key decision a business has to make, it is pricing strategy. Price will define a great proportion of your attractiveness in the eyes of the customers, your revenue, and eventually your profits.

As with other marketing areas, pricing strategies have developed considerably lately. In this article we are going to give you an overview about them and in addition, some valuable insights for applying them to accomplish your objectives.

What to think about when making pricing decisions?

As an essential marketing decision, pricing affects…