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How Blogging Can Improve Your Site’s SEO

Friday, January 6th, 2012

We’re big fans of blogging as a way to boost your site’s SEO performance, but sometimes it can be hard to convince clients of their value. For some, the thought of having to add new articles every week is daunting both because of the time involved and the worry that they won’t be able to come up with enough content to fill the posts.

So why are blogs so useful for SEO, and what can you do to make your blogging as easy and effective as possible?

The Benefits of Blogging

Blogs are a fast and simple way to upload content to the web. Blogging platforms like Wordpress and Tumblr are extremely search engine friendly, and if you have picked the right keywords you could see your posts appear in the search engine rankings just minutes after you posted them!

Blogs also have a positive effect on the SEO of your whole website, because Google picks up on the fact that you are adding regular fresh content, and considers this to be an indication that the site is credible, authoritative and up to date.

A weekly blog also allows you to shine a spotlight on different parts of your site with every post. Selecting a different product or service to talk about each time, and giving links back to relevant bits of your site will ensure the SEO benefit is shared around the entire site, not just focused on the homepage and the blog itself.

(The best way to link to other pages is by using carefully selected keywords embedded into your copy e.g. “Key Multimedia is a leading Dorset SEO agency based in Dorchester”).

Top Blogging Tips

The internet is full of abandoned blogs. People usually start with the best of intentions, but lack the discipline to carry on posting regularly. Google hates a quitter and does not look kindly on blogs that have been left untouched for months or even years. Start blogging only on the understanding that it will be a commitment that you have to fulfil for a significant period of time.

The good news is that you don’t actually need to write heaps of content – about 300 words should be enough for an average blog post. Keep it short and sweet, and adopt a more informal, conversational tone than you would normally use for content writing.

When it comes to promoting your blog, make full use of social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, as well as social bookmarking tools such as Reddit. If your content is good enough, you may be able to get other bloggers/websites linking back to your blog, which is enormously beneficial from an SEO perspective.

We blog regularly for a number of our clients, so if you really feel writing is not your strong point, or if the demands of your business make doing a regular blog impossible, then why not give us a call? We can design, set up and write a highly optimised blog for your business utilising all our SEO tools and know-how. To find out more, get in touch on 01305 755609.

Chris Redhead

Posted in General, Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »

Can Google Predict the Christmas Number One?

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

In an era of ever-falling music sales, the battle for the Christmas number one is one of the few events we still manage to get excited over each year. This time around it’s a straight head-to-head between X Factor victors Little Mix and late favourites The Military Wives Choir.

With just two sleeps to go until the big day, we at the Key Multimedia office were wondering what Google could tell us about the fight for the top spot. Can we use their search data to effectively gauge the popularity of the two singles, and predict whether the Wives have what it takes to ruin Simon Cowell’s Christmas?

Here’s a graph showing the volume of searches for both contenders over the last 30 days. It shows a significantly higher level of interest in Little Mix, culminating in the huge peak on the 11th when they won the X Factor final.

However, when we look at the data for this week only (when the sales are actually being counted) we can see that it’s a much closer contest, with a late surge pushing the Military Wives out above Little Mix. It looks like the Wives have picked up momentum at exactly the right time, putting them in pole position for the Christmas top spot this year.

So there’s my prediction. Of course it’s a very crude exercise, but I think it’s a neat way of showing the kind of predictive insights that Google’s vast resources of data can give us. Google search data is now being used to forecast everything from flu outbreaks to house price fluctuations and unemployment figures, so it’s a godsend for any marketer trying to stay one step ahead of the curve and spot the breakthrough trends before they happen.

Chris Redhead

Posted in General, Pay-Per-Click, Resources, Tools | No Comments »

Choosing the Best Times to Tweet

Friday, December 16th, 2011

Knowing the best times to tweet is vital if you are going to make your time spent on Twitter count as much as possible. You want to get your messages out at a time when they are most likely to be seen and engaged with by your followers, rather than just vanishing into the dark recesses of their feeds.

How Can I Work Out My Optimum Tweeting Times?

Well, why not take a look at what the big names are doing? Here’s a list of the UK companies with the largest followings on Twitter. All these firms will have invested heavily in their social media strategies, and done some seriously in-depth research into the best days and times to post. In the early stages of your Twitter campaign, you could certainly do worse than to take a lead from these big hitting companies.

Using a basic Twitter analytics tool, we can get a visual representation of what times a Twitter user is most frequently posting, and when they get the most retweets and replies. So for example if your business is retail, it is well worth taking a look at which times some of the big chain stores are tweeting, and use their know-how to inform your own strategy.

We can see Waterstone’s (@waterstones) tweets are spread widely throughout the week, but they post with increasingly frequency on Monday and Tuesday after about 4pm. This suggests to me that Waterstones are trying to catch people on the last hour or so of their working day, when they will most likely be online and receptive to Twitter messages.

Seeing all the tweets from Visit Britain (@visitbritain) mapped out like this, what really jumps out is the density of tweets on Friday mornings, between 9am and 12pm. Presumably they know this is when people are planning their weekend activities, and are switched on to ideas coming from social media. Tourism businesses take heed!

When are my Followers Online?

While looking at other companies will give you broad insights, to get a more specific understanding of your own optimum tweeting times you need to look at when your followers are online.

The above graph shows what times the followers for one of our local clients, the Dorchester BID (@DorchesterBID), are most commonly on Twitter during the week. For obvious reasons, the peaks coincide with all the main breaks in the working day (10am teabreak, 1pm lunchtime, 5pm just before clocking off) and then it goes up again in the evening from 7-8pm.

We’ve taken this data and applied it to our social media strategy for the BID, meaning that instead of just taking a scattergun approach to pushing out messages, we now schedule their tweets to hit the peak times their followers are online, giving them the maximum possible exposure.

Of course Twitter is a broad church, and there are no absolute rules for the right or wrong time to tweet. Some times are inevitably better than others though, and it’s certainly worth doing a bit of experimenting to discover which times work best for you.

If you’d like to know more, why not give us a call? We’re one of the leading Dorset social media agencies, and you can reach us Monday to Friday 9am-5pm on 01305 755609.

Chris Redhead

Tags: social media strategy, Visit Britain, waterstones
Posted in General, Pay-Per-Click, Resources, Social Media, Tools, Website Management | No Comments »

2011 in Online Marketing

Friday, December 9th, 2011

Hear that mournful whistle? That’s the winds of change, my friend. 2011 is almost at an end, and it’s been an enormously exciting and dynamic year for online marketing. Here is our round-up of the most important online developments and changes we’ve seen in the last twelve months.

Google Panda Update

In February Google initiated its so-called Panda Update, tweaking the algorhithm the search engine uses to determine rankings in search results. The goal was seemingly to ensure the primacy of original content by demoting ‘content farms’ and other sites which use copied or recycled content. This had a noticeable effect on the article marketing we do, which involves essentially farming out content to other sites in return for links pointing back to our client’s website. It still works, and forms a part of most of the SEO campaigns we run for clients, but it is now no longer the quick win it once was!

Emergence of Mobile Browsing

It’s been on the up for a while now, and 2011 saw the continued rise in popularity of people using smartphones to access their emails and other online content. As of October, it was estimated that just under half of the UK population owned a smartphone, and we can safely assume that proportion is likely to go up a bit further on Christmas morning this year!

This key development is something every business with an online presence needs to be aware of, and in the next year or two we are sure to see a trend towards websites being optimised for mobile browsing. This means taking into account some of the important differences and limitations of mobile, so while an slick all-singing, all-dancing Flash based website might seem like a good idea, when you consider that the most popular smartphone, the iPhone, is unable to render it, it may make more sense for going for something plainer and more universal to avoid losing out on mobile traffic.

Google+

After a few problems getting off the ground in the summer, Google + is motoring on fairly well now, up to 40 million followers worldwide (for comparison, Twitter has 200 million, and Facebook has over half a billion). Time will tell if it can pick up enough momentum to challenge the big two of social media, but since Google + has now introduced brand pages, we think it certainly wouldn’t hurt any businesses setting up their own page and starting to build up their own mini network. Here’s what I wrote about potential SEO and customer engagement benefits of Google+ businesses may see in future.

Changes to Facebook

I wrote a piece on the Facebook changes back in October, and it’s interesting to see how some of the changes have since become an integral part of the Facebook experience, and others have been almost ignored entirely (Facebook video chat, anyone?)

The biggest thing that changed from a marketing perspective was the shift from a purely chronological wall feed to one in which posts are given prominence according to how important to you Facebook deems each one to be. This means that businesses on facebook can no longer just rely on getting as many likes as possible - if an individual ‘likes’ a business but does not ever engage with them, then Facebook will consider posts from that business to be of low relevance, and will bump them right to the bottom of the user’s feed, where they are unlikely to be seen.

Twitter

2011 was above all else surely the year of Twitter. Its role in the revolutions that swept the Arab world showed the incredible power and potential of social media as a tool for uniting people in creative and unprecedented ways. Take the example of the protesters in Egypt, who used the hashtag #cairo to tweet updates on their activities, meaning that even those in the city who didn’t personally know any protesters could easily find out where and when they were gathering, and join the demonstrations themselves.

As well as helping to topple governments in North Africa, Twitter users also caused a major headache for the UK legal system by flouting the super injunction imposed on Ryan Giggs’ off-field antics. A great leveller, Twitter was able to subvert the long-standing monopoly over news and information held by traditional media in this country, probably for good.

So in such a tumultuous twelve months, what was the biggest trending topic of all – the Arab Spring? the death of Steve Jobs? The London riots? The Japanese tsunami? No, in fact more widely talked about on Twitter than all these things was floppy haired teenage singer boy Justin Bieber (click here to see the full list of top Twitter trends in 2011).

As a barometer of stuff people on Twitter care about, the top trends list makes pretty desperate reading, but don’t give up on Twitter just yet. It may have its inane and trivial side, but this year also we’ve seen what a tremendously useful marketing and customer service tool Twitter can be, especially for those businesses who are willing to put the time in and use it the right way.

Just here in Dorchester, we’ve seen local traders take to Twitter with enthusiasm and energy in recent months, creating a vibrant little Twitter community based around the town’s shops, arts organisations and interest groups.

Conclusions

So what lessons have we learnt from the year? Despite changes to the Google algorhithm, content is still king – well-written, relevant content on your website, blog and social media platforms is still the core of any online marketing campaign. Huge new opportunities are opening up in social and mobile web, so it’s vital to stay on top of those and not be left behind. These points are well worth mulling over when you are considering your marketing priorties for 2012, and remember if there’s anything you’d like to discuss with us, you can give us a call Monday to Friday on 01305 755609.

Chris Redhead

Tags: facebook, google, Google Panda update, mobile browsing, twitter
Posted in General, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media | No Comments »

Why Brand Pages may be the Saviour of Google+

Friday, November 18th, 2011

In the five months since its initial exclusive launch, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Google+. The new social network has struggled to really get off the ground, with the number of its registered users rising steadily but unspectacularly since it was first introduced.

There is one big lifeline for Google+ though, which is that it has just announced business pages, a long-awaited development that will enable businesses to create a new customer hub that could prove extremely rewarding in terms of social engagement and SEO.

So what is a Google+ brand page, and is a significant enough addition to offer a real challenge to Facebook’s domination?

A Brand page is a google+ profile designed specifically for businesses, akin to Facebook’s fan pages. Before their introduction, firms could only get a standard Google+ profile, so there was nothing to differentiate them from regular users. Google have announced a number of unique features for brand pages, including customisable visuals and multiple admins.

There are a lot of businesses currently mulling over whether to set up a Google brand page – some commentators say ‘Google+ is Doomed’, while others insist Google+ is simply too good a marketing tool to ignore. My advice is to just go for it.

Benefits of Google+ Brand Pages

Lots of businesses already have Google’s +1 button on their website, and you will now able to tie these into the +1s on your Google+ page. Perhaps the main advantage is that messages posted on Google+ pages will be picked up in Google’s search results, which from a marketer’s perspective gives them a big advantage over Facebook posts and Twitter posts, which Google is unable to see. In the not too distant future, expect to see a firm’s website and its Google+ page as the virtually guaranteed top two results when you do a search for their name on Google.

Google is currently working on lots of fresh creative ways to link Google+ with search results, with the stated aim of making joining a brand page’s circle as easy and natural as doing a search. So for example putting “+Honda” in Google’s search box will in future be a way for you to subscribe automatically to Honda’s brand page.

Though not currently active, it has been revealed that brand pages will soon become location-aware, which is ideal for small businesses which only operate in one part of the country. The video hangouts feature (also a feature of standard profiles) is a particularly interesting one for businesses. Dell have already floated the idea of using Google+ hangouts for customer service, allowing for face to face communication between consumers and businesses in an easily managed and simple way.

Google aren’t actually pitching brand pages as an alternative to Facebook, but as a new channel to supplement your existing social media marketing strategy. It goes without saying that with different customers using different networks, it makes sense to spread your message as wide as possible, and this, added to the potential for serious SEO benefits down the line, should be more than enough to persuade you to sign your business up to Google+ at the nearest opportunity.

Click here to see the Key Multimedia Google+ Page and add us to your circles.

Chris Redhead

Tags: google, social media strategy
Posted in General, Social Media | No Comments »

Changes to Facebook - How to Keep Your Brand Page Engaged and Relevant

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

The times they are a’changing in the world of social media. We’ve already had the launch of Google Plus this year, and a couple of weeks back at the F8 conference in San Francisco, Facebook announced some big changes to their site, signalling a major shift in the way they want content to be viewed and shared by individuals and businesses using the platform. The reaction from users has so far been a little mixed, to say the least.

This week’s blog post looks at what has changed, and whether these changes will benefit or hinder brands on Facebook. Is it still business as usual, or is a new approach required in order for brands to get the very most out of their Facebook pages?

What’s New on Facebook?

The change which has had the most influence on ordinary users is the new-look timeline. Instead of a purely chronological stream with most recent posts appearing on top of the older ones, you now see ‘top posts’ at the head of your stream. These are the posts that Facebook perceives you will find most interesting and relevant, based on your previous behaviour and interactions on the site. So the idea is that friends who you communicate with regularly on Facebook will be given more prominence for their posts, while contacts who you rarely engage with will be relegated to lower down the feed, and may not get seen at all.

The top news feature may not be a welcome addition for brands on Facebook. Fans of a brand are often willing to ‘like’ a page, but may not subsequently want to engage with the brand regularly. This could mean that Facebook identifies the brand page as one of the user’s less important contacts, and therefore gives its updates diminished prominence, meaning that updates from the brand page may not be seen by the user.

For a long time, the emphasis for brands on facebook has been to go out of their way to get as many likes as possible. Expedia achieving a million likes has been used often as a case study of a massively successful social media campaign. Now, it seems that the number of fans is not important unless those fans are actively engaged with the business. A strategy of chasing thousands of likes will not bear fruit if your legion of new fans never see anything you post.

As a further signpost of Facebook’s new engagement-focused direction, there are now a few little additions to the layout of brand pages. You may have noticed that under the number of likes on a brand page there is now another number for ‘talking about this’. This, we are told, is a cumulative score worked out by Facebook to reflect how many people are liking, commenting and posting on the brand page. Many brands are likely to be in for a shock when they see how low their score is, which emphasises once again the point that just having lots of likes isn’t enough in the eyes of Facebook – they want to see your brand page become a hub of activity and a community that fans keep coming back to.

With this in mind, it is perhaps a little bizarre that Facebook have also decided to remove the discussion boards on brand pages, since this was a great place for people with an interest in a brand to communicate with other fans. We’d heard businesses tell us how useful they found these discussions for getting specific portions of their fans talking about certain aspects of the business, and now that chatter will be restricted to the main wall, meaning it will be much harder to segment your Facebook fanbase.

So what changes do you need to make to your social media strategy to deal with these alterations in the Facebook ’s makeup? The priority now more than ever is to make sure people are engaging with your brand, so you might want to consider holding competitions, asking questions and posting photos which people can comment on. If your business is location-based (i.e. a holiday park or hotel) then make sure you have enabled a Facebook check-in, which allows people to notify their friends when they have arrived on your premises.

If you’d like to know more about using Facebook effectively for your business, why not give us a call today on 01305 755609

Chris Redhead

Tags: facebook, facebook brand pages, google plus, Social Media
Posted in General, Social Media | No Comments »

Gearing Up Your Ecommerce Website for Christmas

Friday, October 7th, 2011

With Christmas now only a few months away, we thought it would be timely to write a post on putting together a successful online marketing strategy for the festive period. Firstly though, an apology for the lack of updates on this blog recently. It’s been a really busy couple of months in the office, and the blog gets a little neglected sometimes. Fortunately we have lots of ideas for future content, and even a new website coming up in the new year, so watch this space!

Planning your Christmas Marketing

While for most regular folk the run-up to Christmas is an exciting and happy time, for online retailers it can be the busiest, toughest period of the year. Last year they had to battle against the unusually adverse weather conditions, as snow and ice threw everyone’s delivery structures out of whack, and this year it is the deathly economic climate that poses the greatest challenge. Consequently, if you retail online you need to be more prepared than ever in order to make this Christmas a successful one.

So what more can you do to drive more traffic to your website and boost sales in this crucial Christmas run-up? Here are a few tips that we think will help to make the festive season go with a bang for your online business this year…

Pay Per Click

When advertising with Pay Per Click, you are inevitably going to have a limited budget, and will need to decide carefully where to distribute your spend. It makes sense to focus on products that you know make popular Christmas gifts (if you are not sure, use Google Insights to look at seasonal searching trends). Once you have decided on which products to promote, write a number of different ads and split test them against each other to see which are performing most strongly. To give shoppers a little extra incentive to click on your ads, try to mention a USP such as free delivery/shipping in the description fields.

Mobile

The current John Lewis tv advert explicitly mentions that you can now shop online, in-store, and mobile. With more and more of us using smartphones as part of our everyday lives, retailers are expecting mobile shopping to make up a significant proportion of overall sales for the first time this year.

By the latest reckoning, mobile visits now account for 10% of all e-commerce, so it’s important that your site is capable of rendering on a phone screen as well as a pc. To this end, it helps to keep your site simple and your shopping cart process as straightforward as possible. Conversion rates are currently much lower for mobile visits than for pcs, because mobile customers are likely to abandon anything that they find too fiddly or time consuming.

Social Media

The run-up to Christmas presents a wonderful opportunity for online retailers who are switched on to the potential of social media. All across the country, people are wracking their brains trying to come up with something to buy their friends and relatives. Take advantage of this by tweeting gift suggestions and advice – this will project a positive brand image and drive new traffic to your website.

Recent years’ statistics suggest the 4th and 5th of December are the most lucrative days for online retailers, so you may want to increase the frequency of your tweets and Facebook posts around this time. Keep it up in the final week before Christmas, to capture all those last minute shoppers and push them towards your site.

Tags: christmas marketing, e-commerce, Online Marketing, Pay-Per-Click, Social Media
Posted in General, Online Marketing | No Comments »

Analysing the Riots with Social Media Monitoring

Friday, August 19th, 2011

The 2002 Stephen Spielberg film Minority Report is set in a sci-fi world which police have the technology to see into the future to predict when a person intends to commit a crime, and are able to arrest and imprison the would-be offender before any crime actually takes place. If the recent UK riots are anything to go by, that technology may already be in police hands, thanks to the emergence of new and powerful social media monitoring tools.

This blog post looks at what impact social media monitoring could have on crime-fighting, particularly in the wake of the riots in London and other parts of the country last week.

The Twitter Riots

On Monday 8th August the Sun newspaper led with the headline ‘The Twitter Riots’, claiming that social networking was responsible for the widespread looting in London and calling for police to be given powers to shut down these networks during periods of civil unrest. As ever, the knee-jerk tabloid press demonization of technology was way off the mark.

In truth, shutting them down was the last thing the police would have wanted to do, and in all likelihood champagne corks would’ve been popping at Scotland Yard the moment they realised that this is how the rioters were communicating. While social media may give users the ability to interact and share information quickly and simply on laptops and smartphones, it also makes them incredibly easy to monitor and track down.

Social Media Monitoring is one of the most exciting growth areas in technology at the moment. It has sprung up in the last couple of years to meet the desire of businesses to see what is being said about them online, but the potential of this technology is much more vast and far reaching than that.

Today’s police have an opportunity to latch on to it as a way to keep track of what people are saying in social media, and recent evidence suggests this is what they have now started to do. Already several youths have been charged with trying to incite riots online, including one who set up a Facebook page calling for rioters to gather in Northwich town centre, only to get there and find the police waiting to arrest him. They had found his page by monitoring the social sphere and were able to stop the wannabe rioter in his tracks, before he’d so much as looked covetously at a TV in shop window. It was Spielberg’s vision come true.

Analysing the Social Sphere

As well as locating individual troublemakers and rabble-rousers online, social media monitoring can also be used for identifying overall trends and patterns in online behaviour. Using a couple of the social monitoring tools we’re currently working with at Key Multimedia HQ, I was able to chart exactly how the social networks responded to the London riots between the outbreak of disturbances on 6th August and the end of the riots on 11th August. I used the search string “London AND riots”, meaning that I could pull in all posts made in that time period that contained both of those words.

We can see from the daily mentions graph just how quickly the mentions rose after the 7th August, reaching a peak on 9th, when the riots in London were at their height. By the night of the 8th, the police had flooded the streets and London had started to calm down, while the riots spread to other cities in the UK. This is reflected in the timeline, which shows a significant drop-off in the volume of chatter discussing the London riots at this point in time.

As for the share of mentions, the data shows that the majority of people discussing the riots were doing so on Twitter. The instant nature of this platform makes it ideal for fast-moving events such as the riots, as worried London residents desperate for information would have found much more up to the minute (though not always reliable) news on Twitter than they could expect to get from even the 24 hour TV news channels.

A smaller number of people were discussing the riots on Facebook, and within days of rioting breaking out there were thousands of videos being uploaded on Youtube recording the carnage in London, many of them recorded and uploaded instantly via smartphones.

The ‘buzz graph’ is a useful tool for displaying which other words are being most commonly mentioned alongside my chosen search terms. So we can see in the centre the word ‘Tottenham’, which was the subject of a lot of mentions because it was borough where the unrest first kicked off. This is strongly linked on the graph with terms like ‘violence’, ‘injured’, and ‘loot’ – words which reflect the escalation of disorder in the days after the first incident in Tottenham.

Also linked are words like ‘Duggan’, the surname of the man whose shooting by police sparked the violence, and other terms like ‘protest’, ‘criminality’, and ‘race’ reflecting other dimensions to the discussion as people began to talk about the possible root causes for the riots.

Monitoring the social sphere in this way could potentially offer valuable insights to the authorities, and could help shape the way they react and respond to unexpected events. This goes not just for the police, but also the fire service, hospitals and other organisations, who could use insights from social media to improve the services they provide for the public.

Taking Advantage of Social Media

As well as monitoring conversations and analysing data patterns, there is also an opportunity for the police to take advantage of social media as a way to engage with and reassure the community in times of civil disorder. This was something several of the more forward-thinking forces were able to do during the riots, by using their official Twitter feeds to assuage public fears and dismiss hoaxes in parts of the country where rumour-mongers erroneously claimed riots were taking place.

This is also a way to bring a more human side to the police force, opening up a new channel to make them more answerable and open to the public. Just as everyone likes to see a friendly local police officer on the beat in their neighbourhood, having a prominent and approachable local police presence on Twitter is a great way for them to listen, learn and engage with the community.

Lessons from the Riots

The response to the riots suggests the police are now perhaps beginning to wake up to the extraordinary power of social media as a tool for communication and sharing information. The kids who took part in the rioting, despite their heads being emptier than a looted Dixons outlet, are already fully aware of these tools and how to use them, and it seems as though the police are now finally starting to catch up, and are now for the first time fully recognising the importance of these new technologies.

I talked in depth about the uses of social media monitoring for marketing on a previous blog post. If you have any questions about monitoring or would like to discuss how it could help your business, why not give us a call on 01305 755609.

Tags: facebook, monitoring tools, police, riots, social media monitoring, twitter, youtube
Posted in General, Social Media | No Comments »