Over the last couple of years bloggers have emerged as the new tour de force in the world of marketing. With highly engaged audiences, bloggers can reach and influence thousands of people, tuning them in to new products and services within their area of interest. But who are these bloggers, and how can you include them in your marketing plan? What is a blogger? A blogger is someone who writes about a particular niche (parenting, health, golf – you name it, there’s a blog about it!) and they build up a following by posting interesting articles and photographs. Sometimes they’re highly informed, enthusiastic amateurs, blogging in their spare time. Others are professionals in their field, building a business through the…

Penguin, Panda – it’s easy to get confused about Google’s latest algorithm updates.  Panda 4.1 was released in September and Penguin 3.0 just last week (18th October).  But what do they mean for your business? In short, if you’ve been doing SEO the right way – by creating quality content and building natural links to that content, your website is likely to be unaffected.  What Google is trying to do is continue to clamp down on the websites which are trying to cheat the system with over optimised (keyword-stuffed) pages and poor quality backlink profiles. If you’ve been cutting corners, perhaps by worrying about getting keywords into your content rather than creating content that will answer your visitors’ most burning…

How to use Google Analytics to generate sales leads Do you know how many of your web visitors your site attracts, and what percentage of those become paying customers? Do you know what people do when they arrive on your website – which pages they visit and which ones cause the most frequent exits? Google Analytics gives us a rich picture of your website’s performance and plays a central role when we work with companies to increase their conversion rates. The data allows us to make assumptions about what’s working and what’s not, and gives direction for our online marketing strategy. As you can imagine, Google Analytics is a mammoth topic. The aim of this post, therefore, is to provide…

According to Google, the average mobile page takes more than 7 seconds to load. If this is the case with your site, it’s important to identify the issue and rectify it - people are notoriously impatient on the web and are likely to click away rather than wait. But page load speed is only part of the problem. If your page loads quickly, but users still have to spend time pinch zooming and scrolling in order to read the page, the speed of load seems immaterial. It’s frustrating to users to click on promising links, only to have to spend more time ‘clarifying’ the page before they can be sure they are where they want to be. Google has recently…