The much anticipated rollout of Google's Penguin 4.0 arrived on 23rd September and we're already seeing the big changes in search results. Previous Penguin updates have taken place intermittently whereas this update is in real-time.  This means that if your site is properly optimised and well managed, you'll see the benefit more quickly.  You'll also see that penalties can be lifted more quickly. Of course, if there's a problem with your site, or you've got some poor quality links coming to it, you'll feel the pinch straight away.  (As always, Google is keen on clamping down on link spam with its latest Penguin update. It's likely that Google collects data from disavow information in order to automatically detect spam sites…

Positive online PR in titles read by your target audience can provide invaluable publicity and help your search engine optimisation efforts. But getting the attention of busy journalists isn’t easy. For many businesses, the starting point in their PR journey is a press release syndication service like PRWeb or PRNewswire. While syndicated press releases now have little or no impact on SEO they can help your SEO efforts in other ways while also raising your profile among influential journalists. This article aims to tell you more about press release syndication so you know how they can fit into your overall marketing strategy.   What is a press release syndication service? When you sign up to a press release syndication service…

The practice of search engine optimisation (SEO) certainly looks very different today than it did 5 years ago. Even for professionals working in the SEO business 24/7, it can be hard to stay ahead of the curve. Not surprisingly, when Adwords is straight-forward to understand and measure in comparison to SEO, many clients ask where their budget is best placed. In our experience, there is a strong case for running Adwords campaigns while you build organic rankings for key search terms. In this article, we explain how Adwords and SEO can work hand-in-hand. The case for Adwords Generally speaking, we are strong advocates of Adwords, especially when clients are targeting particularly competitive search terms. The benefit of Adwords is that…

There are lots of reasons why your web visitors may not convert into customers. Perhaps they haven’t found the products they’re looking for, or maybe they’re simply browsing and are not yet ready to buy. Naturally, your products won’t appeal to all visitors at all times so a 100% conversion rate in unrealistic. However, if you’re getting a continually good volume of visitors to your site who don’t become customers, or people are adding items to their basket but failing to checkout, it may be worth reviewing your site. Often, a few simple tweaks can make a big difference to your conversion rate. Imagine what a 5% rise in conversions could do to your bottom line. In this article, we…

The difference between what you have and what you want is what you do. When it comes to creative digital marketing, there's nothing like a good solid strategy. But it's in the doing that the lessons are learned (and the results earned). All too many good marketing ideas never leave the page, partly because there are no guarantees of success.  To run a creative marketing campaign, you've got to be a little bit brave.  Experience, research and judgement will tell you to 'go for it' but the only way to see if a particular campaign will work is to run it and see what happens. If you need help in deciding what sort of marketing will give you the results…