The latest data on UK retail search volumes Value/Importance: [rating=4] Recommended link: BRC-Google Q1 2012 monitor - Published April 16th 2012

Our commentary on the latest Online retail monitor

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) and Google produce a regular Online Retail Monitor (ORM) that measures changes and trends in the growth of retail search terms over time. The latest version has some interesting data on the growth in mobile search which also has implications for all site owners. Since it’s direct from Google, using their data on searches for retail terms, it’s a reliable source, although it only gives relative changes not the absolute % of searches that are mobile. The headline figure is a 132% year-on-year growth in mobile search for retail broken down as follows:

Search volume variation through time

The data is also useful for top-level benchmarking…

Creating effective landing pages for SEO

If you have followed the first six steps in this series on SEO (plus added your own twist and freestyling) you should now be seeing increased coverage (pages & keywords) in search results for your target keywords. Now the real fun begins since... Being visible and getting clicks doesn’t guarantee you success. Success depends on many factors, of which landing page quality is one. It’s almost impossible to create a landing page that caters for the needs of all natural search visitors. Your aim should be to improve your landing pages over time, using proven optimisation methods, so that the natural search traffic you get positively contributes to your website’s KPIs. Please note that you don’t have to make immediate conversions and revenue the primary goals for all natural search traffic – there may be some research terms (head and mid tail keywords) for which your…

Key points to implement an effective global SEO strategy

Ecommerce sales are set to exceed $1trillion next year (according to Goldman Sachs) and, in the current economic climate, many businesses are considering exporting their goods and services abroad. However, going global can be daunting. The process of localising and optimising your website for overseas territories requires careful consideration before you launch your SEO strategy. Here are the top 10 common multilingual SEO mistakes to be avoided……….

1 Using the wrong keywords

The keyword a person in your domestic market might use to search for a specific product may not necessarily be a literal translation of the keywords or phrases used by buyers in other countries. Despite this being the most basic of errors, it is one people continue to make. Do not translate your keywords and don't forget to research new target markets…

It’s quick, cheap, personal, high impact: Are you taking full advantage of SMS?

SMS is immediate and easy for senders and recipients - making it an ideal communication tool to build loyalty and acquire new customers quickly and cheaply. Disappointingly, the 2012 Adestra and Econsultancy Email Marketing Industry Census found only 13% of those surveyed combined email and SMS to deliver their marketing messages - what a missed opportunity!

SMS communication leverages mobile phone ubiquity

How far away is your mobile phone from you right now? My guess is it’s going to be close by; either on the desk next to you or in your handbag or pocket. How often do you check your phone? As soon as you hear it, every half an hour or so, or every hour; depending on what you are doing? Do you ever go anywhere without your mobile?…

A step-by-step approach to identify and attract visitors with higher intent to purchase

In part 1, Why your conversion rate is lying to you, I explained why using average conversion rate to measure the performance of search campaigns paints a misleading picture of search success (or failure). Search traffic (both organic and paid) has a mixed potential for convertibility which dictates that you can reasonably expect visitors with different likelihood to convert to exhibit different behaviour. While that theory has legs (please leave your thoughts in the comments if you agree and especially if you disagree), Part 1 did not answer the question: How do you actually use people-focused analytics to identify visitors by potential for conversion? So let's explore this further.

Intent dictates the reason for visit

Visitor intent dictates reason for visit and as a byproduct, the potential for conversion. If the visitor is there for a completely different reason (like a customer seeking…

How to answer common objections about the value of social campaigns

I was working with a business a few weeks ago that wanted some help with its social campaigns. Its latest campaign produced  disappointing interaction levels. And, because of the campaign’s failure to attract a significant following, the business was tempted to pull out of social media altogether and focus on other areas - at least until people in their vertical market sector were deemed to be 'ready for social'.

Disappointing social campaign results can prompt good questions

The failure of the campaign prompted some interesting questions, such as; “Did the business’s potential clients (people working in hospitals / health care) have the ability and inclination to access social networks.“ “Was it feasible to be 'friends' with businesses? Was it possible that customers didn't want to form this kind of relationship with a business entity?” Finally, the business outlined…

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…

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.  …

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…

An example of how small changes can have positive impacts

I'm no SEO expert, but I think I've developed a bit of a knack for getting some decent organic search results from blog posts. All I've done is utilised a few basic SEO practices, so I thought I'd share them in the hope that it inspires others to make similar changes. Here's an example for a generic phrase that's important in the market for our company:

Editor's note: We checked with Marie this wasn't influenced by personal customisation in Google search. If you use Google's new Verbatim Search that strips out personalisation based on Web History (there even if you're not signed in), then this term still ranks position 2 or 3.

How did we do this?

This is for an established post, what we did was increase…