Archive for the ‘Search Engine Marketing’ Category

Google have recently added a nice little enhancement to its Adwords service. You can now add a phone number to a text ad so that users can click on that ad and instantly dial your number. This is clearly to help mobile user to connect more easily with advertisers.

All non-clickable phone numbers displayed in AdWords ad text will be automatically converted into a Click-to-call number.

You will need to activate this on your account and once in place users will be able to click the phone number directly. The interesting bit is that you will only be charged for the clicks that result in a call.

And by getting the cofiguration right, you can get an extra line on your ad, making it larger, more appealing and more likely to get clicks.

Tracking will allow you to review how many calls you receive on the clickable phone number listed in your ad text for each campaign, ad group, keyword and ad on the Campaigns tab in your AdWords account.

If you would like to help configuring Adwords to get the best out of this new feature then just get in touch.

How Will Google+ Affect Search engine optimisation?

By now you’ve probably heard about Google+, the latest social networking craze and most recent effort by Google to take on Facebook and Twitter. But did you know that it could affect how your business’s website gets found on Google’s search engine?

In addition to building a social networking, Google aims, with its ‘+1′ button, the equivalent of Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, to determine the value of websites. They want consumers to add personalized recommendations to Web content and business sites.

More than 20 million people have already jumped onboard Google+ and many internet marketing professionals are beginning to wonder if those ‘+1′s will also start affecting how businesses appear in the search engine rankings.

Google+ has some remarkable similarities to Facebooks, utilities a similar suite of names for areas of the software, including ‘Hangouts’, ‘Circles’ or ‘Sparks’.

We have to assume at this stage that these ‘+1′s are likely to affect in some way the positions of sites within the search engine rankings. Only time will tell, either way, if you were to see recommendations against a certain site, how would that effect your decision process.

So how do you optimise for recommendations?

The more searching becomes about real people, the more we, as marketer, need to promote such recommendations in a natural a way as possible.

Watch this space…

Masters Allen has created an iPhone app for LED lighting company QE Global, aimed specifically at business. The app is a useful sales aid and allows the user to instantly calculate the benefits of LED lighting.

The Agency, which is responsible for all QE Global marketing was commissioned to create a sales aid and information piece that could illustrate the credentials of LED lighting to an industry which currently uses a variety of lighting solutions.

Masters Allen Production Director Aidan Rooney says, ‘The fact that QE Global can now use a sales tool which provides instant results is great, but the icing-on-the-cake is that this information is now available globally. By using an app, we have increased our client’s brand awareness and enabled users to instantly see the benefits of LED lighting on their pocket and the environment.’

The QE Global energy saving calculator allows users to enter details of their existing light fittings, for example; hours of operation and cost of fittings, and then compare against a series of QE Global LED products. The results illustrate cost, energy and maintenance savings against existing products. An additional element to the brief was to allow users to compare non-QE Global products too, to provide both transparency and awareness of general LED products.

QE Global Managing Director Carl Haffner added, ‘Whilst this was an exercise to promote the benefits of QE Global products, we were also keen to open this up to a wider audience so they could see for themselves the benefits of LED lighting, not only with our products but any LED lighting products.’

The ‘QE Global energy saving calculator’ app is available as a free download from the Apple App Store. Plans to roll out the app on a number of different devices are already in progress.

We thought that this was an interesting approach to the explaination of the concept of long tail in Search Engine Optimisation:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/8279634/Keyword-research-the-basics.html

This is a particularly important concept to small business owners, where focussing SEO efforts into a niche will quite often be the only viable option for successful rank positioning of their pages.

Enjoy!

As it has been made very apparent in the recent news, facebook users’ profiles are open for all to see. The change in privacy settings has exposed huge numbers of users to having their profile appearing in the search engines. As social networking continues to grow and more people join these websites, their security issues can esculate.

By simply opening your profile and selecting privacy settings from the ‘My Account’ tab at the top of the page you can view all your privacy settings immediately.

Setting your profile to”friends only” can stop your profile being shown on google and other search engines reducing the amount of information you share online. It’s certainly sensible these days to only add details to your social media profiles that you really don’t mind sharing with the world, as you never know, the world just might be looking.

Over recent years we’ve seen a shift in where businesses focus their marketing activities. Advertising spend online topped that of offline spend for the first time this year as companies are now fighting to find their space online, rather in traditional media.

So what do this mean for the typical business owner? Well they suddenly need to think about how to put together an online marketing plan. Do you sign up to Facebook? What about online PR? Should you start Pay Par Click advertising or create a Banner Ad? What about Blogging, RSS or Feeds?

All of a sudden, an understanding of a variety of new technologies is critical to taking advantage of the online marketing opportunities. No longer can you simply write a new plan and then carry it out. You need to either take on an Online Marketing Manager or find a suitable company to manage it all for you. Outsourcing your online marketing might be the right way forward as you would be taking on the expertise of a number of specialists and at the same time, drastically reducing the monthly outgoings required.

Either way the new technologies cannot be ignored, perhaps the first step is to start talking to someone who can help to shape the online marketing plan and to focus on the right places online to start marketing.

On the back of a previous MA news posting, ‘Web browser viewing trends’ we have discovered, whilst looking through our analytics report, that Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer in terms of browser popularity when visiting our site. The significance is not a big deal, but it does point out once again the importance of testing sites on a variety of browsers.

The discovery also highlights the usefulness of the Google analytics tool in discovering the viewing habits of your website visitors. For more info on analytics visit: www.google.com/analytics/

For those of you that like your stats, below is some interesting info on the popularity of Firefox.

Source: StatCounter (web web analytics firm). Firefox 3.0 has become the most popular web browser in Europe, taking the crown away from Internet Explorer 7.0. Firefox 3.0 took 35.05% of the European web browser market followed by 34.54% for IE 7.0. It would appear that the shift is partly explained by a small switch from IE 7.0 to IE 8.0 but also by growing market share overall by Firefox 3.0.

If you are keen to drive more traffic to your website and want to increase your search engine ranking, then blogging might be for you.

We would describe a blog as – “an online journal that is regularly updated with content and built on a platform with automated syndication”. In simple terms, consider a blog to be the equivalent of an online diary or bulletin board that is very easy for web users to access.

Blogs can be hosted with blog software or can be hosted by a blog host company. The downside of a blog host company is that you will not get the benefit of SEO (search engine optimisation) for your website.

Blogs and search engine marketing marry extremely well. Search engines have historically looked for content rich websites that are updated frequently, blogs provide the perfect solution for this, provided they are updated regularly. Search engines like keyword links, which blogs can provide. Assuming of course that they are written with keywords in mind. Search engines also like unique and popular content, so it is fairly safe to assume that if your blog is topical then visitors will want to read it!

In a nutshell, active blogs can rank well in search engines, provide quality links back to your main domain, and expand your traffic and presence on the web. So the question is, what are you waiting for?

Web 2.0 content is really starting to become useful in making purchasing decisions. User feedback and customers reviews on websites can aid the website visitor in making a decision and website owners shouldn’t be afraid to allow users and visitors to add comments or post reviews on websites.

Just recently, whilst searching for a hotel in the Lake District, new Lake Windermere, I was taken on a journey across a number of websites reviewing content and ended up on www.activehotels.com. The web 2.0 content there was extremely helpful in understanding a lot more about the resort, the facilities and the hotels available there, right down to reading reviews from people of a similar demographic and their thoughts about not only the hotel itself but about the specific rooms that they stayed in.

This was followed up by a quick call to the hotel to check availability of the exact room that we were interested in. Not only did we manage to book that room but we got a significant discount off the prices on the internet!

Without doubt we will be leaving our review on the very same website in the hope that other visitors will benefit from our comments. Hotels are just one example, but web 2.0 content could be used in any industry from automotive to telecoms, any website should consider the opportunities offered by this new wave of interactive web content.

There are many Search Engine Optimisation experts offering various opinions on how to optimise a website. But there are several things you can check and change yourself, with a little bit of knowledge that may prove to be a golden nugget in the mystical world of SEO.

All search engines, especially Google, read the window title when trying to translate the meaning of a web page. Out of all the components that make up a web page (page titles, meta information, page text etc.) the window title is the most important element that will determine the relevance of a web page matching a search term when searched for on the internet.

So what do we mean when we talk about the “window title”? Web developers and SEO experts will know this as the title tag in the html code, “<title>Graphic Design | Web design | Leicester</title>”. When seen in a web browser it displays text at the top of the browser window in a blue bar (IE only). See below:

Combine this with some basic research to identify how many people are searching for specific keyword phrases, and an understanding of the competition on those phrases and you can achieve some remarkable results, quickly and at little cost.

Don’t forget to focus on traffic. It’s all very well being number 1 on Google, but if that isn’t bringing you traffic then it’s a waste of time. Following on from that, the focus has to be on conversions and return on investment (ROI). Are these the terms that your potential paying customers are entering into the search engines to find your website?

If you want a free report on your website then go to www.mastersallen.co.uk/online_marketing_leicester.htm and fill out the form at the bottom of the page and we will run a report for your website, absolutely free.

Note: The reports are not automated and will be run by real people, so please bear that in mind, it may take a few days to get the report over to you at busy times.