Our Thoughts

Search engine optimisation is a long-term process, while pay per click can deliver very quick results. If you like, SEO is the tortoise to the PPC’s hare. Ideally, you’d like to have both working for you in perfect harmony but, in reality, resource and budget constraints may leave you with decisions to make about where to focus your efforts.

These days, successful promotion strategies are generally based around three elements: content marketing, paid advertising and search engine optimisation (to garner organic search results). Even though the importance of content marketing is now widely appreciated, realistically, you may wait a long time if you rely on that alone for results.

If you’ve been around since the early days of search engines, you’ll probably remember the time link-building was a crucial part of search engine optimization. Now, it’s back, in an updated form, with an emphasis on quality rather than quantity. That means that link building can be a valuable SEO tool and so it’s worth learning how to use it effectively.

Here are four tips on how to generate high-quality backlinks.

​It’s beginning to seem a lot like Christmas, the time of year when retailers, both online and in the real world, will be working flat out to entice customers through their doors.

Christmas comes but once a year and, for many businesses, it’s the most lucrative time of the year – if they play their cards right.

Here are five tips to ensure that your social media supports a successful sales period.

‘Give the audience what they want’ has been a maxim successful entertainment companies have lived by for years. Now, companies and their associated brands are having to come to terms with the fact that content marketing is here to stay and fundamentally it’s all about giving customers what they want in order to gain their trust and build a rapport with them.

Video and the internet were pretty much meant for each other, but not everyone wants to go to the effort and expense of producing professional-quality YouTube videos. Fortunately, there are now plenty of other ways you can make use of the benefits of video in a less resource-demanding format.

An oft-repeated gripe about the internet is that everyone who uses it expects everything for free. It’s one of many common sayings with an element of truth to it but it is not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that people want some kind of reassurance that their money will be well spent before they part with it. They are increasingly aware that value can be measured in other ways than money, for example their time has a value, as does their personal data such as their email address.

Back in the days before the internet, Monty Python’s famous “spam” joke, was harmless fun. These days, spam is the bane of the internet and has made its way out of our email inboxes and into our social media accounts.

Right now, there are about 2 billion active users on Facebook (out of a global population of around 7.5 billion people). In other words, about a quarter of the entire population of the planet are active users of the site. This means that, even though there’s plenty of competition from other social media platforms, the sheer weight of numbers makes Facebook a great place to advertise.

Hashtags started out as a quirk of Twitter and have since gone on to take over the online world. They’ve even featured in a hit song - Lost Generation by Rizzle Kicks. The irony is that even though hashtags have now arguably become integral to the functioning of the internet, it’s clear that there are people out there, including people managing social media for brands, who really need some help on how to use them.

Your headline has literally seconds to convince the reader to read the rest of your story. And it has to grab attention without descending into the murky realms of clickbait.

Here are four tips for creating engaging and informative headlines which sell your story for you:

The overwhelming takeover of mobile devices for people using the web has obvious implications for how people use search in the real world, meaning that mobile users are far more likely to use voice search than those searchers who are sitting at desks. That being so, modern SEO is, in part, about optimising websites for voice search. Here are three tips as to how to do this.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a fact of life for companies big and small and yet, in spite of this, it’s surprising how many companies make basic errors in its usage. Here are three to watch out for and what to do about them:

Updating your website regularly is vital if you want to reach (and/or stay at) the top of Google’s search results. There is a question, then, about deciding what sort of content to upload and, in particular, whether to use evergreen content or topical content.

Email marketing is a useful tool, but the harsh reality is that it’s getting harder and harder to get people to open emails at all, let alone take action on them. Most people have now gone past the point where email is exciting and pleasurable and for some it has even become a source of stress.

We all know SEO is important and we’ll assume that you’re already familiar with basic strategy, meaning that from a technical perspective you’ll have covered off points such as page speed and ease of navigation and you’ll have worked out a way to provide great content at regular intervals.

Now, it’s time to step it up a gear and move your website even further forward because, in SEO, every step up the rankings is a gain, sometimes a very meaningful one.

In the early days of Google, SEO strategy was largely based around a combination of keywords and backlinks. Its simple nature was easily exploited by practitioners of black-hat SEO, forcing Google to counter-attack by updating its algorithms. Currently, keywords and backlinks are rather more minor components of an effective SEO strategy, but it’s still rather too early to write them off completely and they both potentially do have some uses.

Content marketing and its spin-off, influencer marketing, are big business and, if you haven’t already got in on the game, it’s time to make the leap. You don’t want to miss out on what influencer marketing can offer you and your brand, so here are three key developments we expect to see:

Conversion tracking simply means keeping a record of each time you succeed in prompting a customer to take an action you consider to be beneficial. This could mean clicking a specific link on your website (for example to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter), downloading an app or calling you.

It has been reported that Twitter is testing a new $99 a month promotion option. We look at the way that strategy appears to be intended to deliver that value to advertisers.

Video and the internet are a perfect match. Now that fast broadband is a reality for a significant percentage of internet users, live video is quickly becoming the next big step forward in content creation and therefore content marketing.

In the early days of the internet, websites often had one, single, landing page (and in some cases very little else). These days, astute companies will generally have multiple landing pages, each one optimised for one, specific purpose. Here are five tips on how to do this effectively.

When placing PPC ads, there are several factors to take into account, and getting each of them right is vital to your advertising success. One of these factors is the ad copy; the words you use to describe your product, service, offering or deal. Here are 5 top tips to get it right:

There’s nothing quite like a deadline for getting people’s attention and, if you want to make the most of your carefully-crafted, time-limited offers, then you need to optimise your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to suit them.

Nowadays, the need for great content is widely understood and self-evident. It is vital for every brand that wants to differentiate itself and produce keyword-rich content to help its discoverability online. Great content, however, can also be very expensive. It therefore makes sense to investigate what you can produce on using internal resources.

Paid search bidding, as its name implies, is essentially an auction for your chosen keywords and has all the challenges and potential pitfalls inherent in the auction format.

Companies, therefore, have to develop a strategic approach to pay-per-click advertising and the first step in developing a strategy is to decide on manual or automated bidding.

There’s now less than a year until the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is officially launched (25th May 2018). Firstly, what does this new legislation entail and more importantly, what does that mean for your online activity?

We’ve been researching the effects GDPR will have on our marketing channels and here’s a roundup of 6 important points you need to know…

Instagram has a massive 500 million active users, 80% of whom live outside of the United States. 300 million are active every single day, which shows how important Instagram can be as a platform for businesses as well as individuals.

Businesses need, sometimes, to spend money to make money, and advertising costs are a good example of this. In a world where so many people are making Google their first port of call when making a purchase decision, it’s hardly a surprise that the costs of some pay-per-click keywords are going up and in some cases becoming very expensive.

Back in May, Google began to roll out changes to its ad rank weighting process. The changes are now complete, so companies are starting to see what impact, if any, the change is having on them.

If content marketing is at the top of the marketing ladder, then influencer marketing is probably the highest rung – when done properly. Brands seeking to maximise the value of their influencer marketing strategy need to be aware of the dynamics pushing this area forward and, with that in mind, here are what we consider to be three key trends for influencer marketing in 2017 and beyond.

The reason why brands need to get clued up on voice search can be summed up in one word: mobile. Speaking a query into a mobile device can be far easier than tapping it in using a tiny keyboard, so much so in fact that, according to Google, about a fifth of searches made from Android devices were made using voice search.

Every effective advertising campaign has to be optimised for mobile. While mobile users may be looking for the same information as their desktop-using counterparts, the way in which they access it will be very different. With that in mind, here are three tips for making the most of your mobile campaigns.

Internet users are always focused on speed, and Google is well aware of this. Therefore, in addition to rewarding website owners who ensure that their websites quickly serve users with the content they require, Google is working hard to deliver “quick answers” to straightforward questions.

At the WWDC conference on 5th June, Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering announced the launch of their new Safari feature: Intelligent Tracking Prevention. According to Federighi, this feature will use machine learning technology to block third-party ad trackers in a bid to outwit the digital stalkers. At the same time Google quietly announced its own in-browser blocker, aimed at blocking “obnoxious” ads.

The internet has become synonymous with photos and video, so it’s arguably quite surprising that it’s take this long for hyperlinks to go visual. Admittedly, Google did try visual sitelinks once before, in 2013, but they never quite got off the ground. Bing, however, has had visual links in full production (i.e. out of beta) for about a year now, so perhaps Google decided that it didn’t want to risk losing out to a competitor.

Whatever the reason, visual links are back at Google, so here are two key points to understand about them.

Price extensions, formerly known as table extensions, are a means by which advertisers can highlight specific products, with their corresponding prices, in the text of an advert and provide a direct link to the highlighted item. They started life as a mobile-only feature, but are now available on the desktop too.

That being so, you may want to start incorporating the feature into your advertising.

If the internet has taught us anything, it’s taught us just how easy it is to fail. Twitter has had more than its share, probably because the fact that it is such a fast-moving network means that it’s only too easy for a mistake to go viral before a social media team has managed to get its act together.

Here’s some of the “best”, or at least most (in)famous Twitter fails, and the lessons to be learned from them.

I know what you’re thinking… Instagram: memes, #foodporn and selfies. But there’s a serious side to Instagram too, with more and more brands taking advantage of the power of visual advertising. Instagram, which has a UK audience of around 19m, a global audience of 700m, and the incredible targeting options powered by Facebook, is one of the most visual and powerful ways to engage effectively with your audience.

In the early days of the internet, there was very little content available online. Now, it can be so hard to find relevant content is because there is so much out there. Hence, brands generally need to put in a bit of effort to get their content seen by the world. In practical terms, this means either or both of search engine optimisation (SEO) or pay-per-click advertising (PPC).

Twitter is great for brand engagement, with users being three times more likely to follow brands than they are on Facebook. While that’s a good start, if you want to make the most of Twitter, you need to write effective tweets. Here are 10 tips to help you.

SEO is the tool that supports your content marketing and so, if you get it wrong, you can get into a whole world of pain with your search rankings. Here are four mistakes you could be making, which could be stopping you from reaching the precious number one spot.

At this point in time, regardless of whether you’re running a large business or a small one, you should be aware of the importance of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and of the fact that making the most of it means being constantly on the lookout for ways to fine-tune it to make it even more cost-effective.

Up until relatively recently, search engines inadvertently encouraged the production of low-quality websites. The early algorithms focused on technicalities such as the use of keywords and backlinking, which made it possible for content-poor websites to get to the top of the search rankings by means of black-hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing and paid, promotional link exchanges.

Summer is almost here and that means conference season will soon be upon us. As well as being informative and fun (and offering great networking opportunities), conferences, conventions and such like are also great blogging opportunities, so here are three tips as to what preparation to do in order to make the most of them.

Having a social media presence means that a company must post meaningful content on a regular basis and engaging with its followers. That’s a lot of work, in fact it can literally be a full-time job.

Backlinking has always been an important part of SEO, but the way to make the most of it has changed massively over the years. In fact, you could even arguably say that at this point in time the right approach to managing backlinks is exactly the opposite of what it was in the early days of the internet.

Mobile devices, nowadays, are used for internet access when people are at home as well as when they are on the move. As a result, incorporating mobile into an effective SEO strategy has long since ceased to be optional. Nevertheless, there are a number of common mistakes made by SMEs in particular that can really hurt your ranking. Here are three of them…

Software creators have cottoned on to the fact that SEO is the focus of many website owners. As a result, there is a wide range of software options available for practitioners. So, here are 4 SEO tools we love and, what’s more, two of them are free!

One of the challenges of content creation is the need to come up with original, engaging posts, even on days when your brain could use a break. Here is a lucky list of seven ideas to bank for those days when you feel like your content is getting into a rut and you need to find your way out of it.

Negative comments can really hurt, whether they’re fair or unfair. They are, however, a fact of life in the real world and most definitely in the online one. Here are five tips on how to deal with them.

Social media is frequently used for direct sales, but at this time its main value is for relationship building or brand engagement. Avoid these 3 basic, but common, mistakes:

The importance of content is modern-day marketing cannot be denied, with ¾ of digital marketers believing that brands are ‘becoming publishers’. There is, however, a difference between knowing that something is important and knowing how to do something effectively.

These days, companies that use pay-per-click advertising (PPC) have to answer one crucial question: who does the job best – humans or computers? The answer is rarely straight-forward, but we will look at where to start.

The internet is so impossibly huge that finding what is relevant to you has become quite a challenge. Guiding people to the information they need has become the mission of some of the world’s biggest, richest and most influential companies and 2017 could see some very interesting developments in this area.

It is most likely that social media can benefit your SEO rankings. What may come as a surprise is just how it does so. Here is a very brief guide to the wonderful world of social media and SEO.

Since the arrival of Siri in 2010, voice control and, in particular, voice search has come on a long way. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have also thrown their might behind the technology, with Google Voice Search (OK Google), Cortana and Alexa respectively. Because of this, voice may become the new mobile in terms of its importance to SEO.

Selling on social media is a delicate topic, however it can be done. The trick is to do it well. Here are three tips to help.

Launch a Facebook competition without breaking the rules Facebook has become something of a hub for competitions and it’s easy to see why. There are lots of organisations on the platform, many of which have obviously grasped that a lot of people like being offered the opportunity to win something.

A fundamental truth of pay-per-click advertising is that effective PPC adverts are linked to effective landing pages. Gaining a click (and paying for it) and then leading your prospect to a page that doesn’t impress is a waste of everybody’s time and your precious resources.

It’s easy to start a blog with good intentions, but really getting the most out of it takes time and effort. You have to promote your content after creating it or it may well have underwhelming results.
Here are three ways to promote your blog effectively:

In response to an increased brands desire to collaborate with influencers, here are 4 of the most common influencer marketing questions we’ve been asked this month:

Whether you’re already equipped with an influencer strategy or have recently secured the budget for this activity, I’ve outlined 4 key tips to help you hit the ground running with your influencer marketing activity in 2017 and onwards.

A quick search on a term like “Automate Social Media Posts” will bring up a choice of several tools of various descriptions, all of which aim to make your social life easier, more efficient and more effective by automating various aspects of it. As is so often the case in life, used properly, automation tools can make life easier and free up humans for more productive tasks. The key point is to use them properly.

The idea of using someone else’s influence and following to promote your own products is nothing new. Its modern incarnation is working with social media influencers. As with any social media strategy, there are some fundamentals which need to be understood in order to make this work effectively.

It’s been about a year, since Google Webmaster Central, back in March 2016, issued a best practice guide to influencers who receive products in return for a review. The post stated that if influencers were to link to the website of the product they’re reviewing, they should use a “nofollow” link.

Some predicted the end of influencer marketing…

User engagement on Facebook is far more important than the total number of likes a Page has, and a higher number of shares, comments and likes on posts means that the site’s Edgerank algorithm will favour future posts from a Page, showing them to more people. Because of this, it’s important to create the sort of posts which encourage those vital likes and shares.

One of the quirks of the internet is that, although its very nature breaks down global barriers, it is also hugely important for local businesses looking to connect with local customers. Basically the internet has, to a large extent, taken over from adverts in shop windows and is even ousting the likes of advertising in local papers.

In the past year, we’ve watched, and even helped launch, the development of the consumer-turned-digital influencer; a new tribe of pseudo celebrities, who’ve become famous brands in their own rights. In response, top brands’ desire to collaborate with influencers has seen a dramatic increase, and according to reports, influencer marketing budgets in 2016 rocketed up by 60%.

The trusty blog remains a stalwart of both SEO and content marketing for modern, online businesses. When managing a blog, it is crucial to maintain consistency of presentation (e.g. your readers need to know when to expect your blog to be posted), while keeping the content fresh. Here are three ideas for different types of blogs you can use to ring in the changes:

Pinterest has long since moved on from being “the other” social media platform (behind Facebook and Twitter) and is now a well established site with a loyal and active following. Like other social media platforms, it needs to turn user enthusiasm into money and advertising is one obvious way to do this. It is therefore hardly a surprise that Pinterest has moved to introduce search advertising.

If you’re serious about blogging, you can improve your workflow and benefit from using some key tools to streamline your content production and promotion. Here are our top four picks:

In the early days of SEO, getting to the top of the rankings was largely about knowing technical tricks such as keyword stuffing and mass back-linking. This led to Google adjusting its algorithm to make it more effective at seeking out the high-quality content users want, defeating people who were trying just to manipulate SEO criteria to their advantage.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Snapchat must be the most flattered social media platform there is right now. The mighty Facebook is having another try at taking on the platform that has generated a whole lot of buzz amongst digital marketers.

The issue of selling directly on social media has always been a bit of a contentious topic. In theory, it sounds great, as it opens up a new sales channel with a lot of virtual footfall. The reality, however, has conspicuously failed to live up to the dream, with high-profile social media sites either struggling with the challenge (Instagram and Pinterest) or just admitting defeat (Twitter and Facebook). There are two main schools of thought as to why this is.

Facebook is one of the key advertising and marketing platforms on the web. To maintain this, it has to be able to attract custom from the numerous small businesses that are such a feature of the economy and, for that to happen, it has to make sure that using Facebook as an advertising platform is at least as easy as using arch-rival Google. It is for this reason that it has introduced Facebook Automated Rules.

Everybody seems to want their content to go viral. The problem is that creating a viral article has long seemed to be as much about good luck as about good judgement – until now. Neil Patel has scientifically analysed almost 12,000 of last year’s viral articles to work out just what it is that sets them apart from the competition.

In the pre-Internet days, word-of-mouth recommendations were the most valuable way to convince potential customers to engage with a company. In the internet age, the digital equivalent is known as social proof and it comes in various forms, from likes and shares to user reviews. Incorporating elements of social proof into your PPC ads can really give a boost to your results.

If you want your content to be seen on Facebook, you can focus on organic reach but may only have limited success. Paying for advertising on the site can be a more effective way to get your fans and potential customers to see what you have to offer. So, when you are advertising on Facebook, you need to focus on getting the absolute best value for your money

If you want to capture the attention of people who are busy deciding which of the millions of web pages out there deserves their time, you’d better get very good at writing effective titles for your blog posts.

The old joke about “lies, damn lies and statistics” may need to be updated to reflect Facebook’s apparent inability to get its metrics straight although, to be fair, this does appear to be a case of (a series of) genuine mistakes, rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead.

Video and the internet are a compelling combination and, now, the major social media platforms seem to be getting to grips with making it work economically. Live streaming is fast becoming a major draw, since it offers the highest level of personal engagement currently possible in the digital world.

Smartphones and tablets are everywhere and used by people of all ages. While it’s unlikely that B2B sales transactions will be greatly influenced by this in the near future, in the B2C world, it’s becoming increasingly important to tap into this mobile channel.

Despite the saying, most of us do judge a book by its cover. And, on the web, we judge websites by their landing pages, too. Hence it pays to get these right. Here are 3 top tips to improve your landing page and boost your conversions:

The classic fishing story is about “the one that got away”. For owners of ecommerce website the “ones that get away” can be a matter of huge frustration. All the effort put in to enticing a customer onto a website basically counts for nothing unless the visitor becomes a customer and yet, even with the best design and content in the world, the reality is…

Virtual reality will transform digital communication with a seismic impact on SEO and Digital Marketing.

Inbound marketing can transform the way you connect with potential new customers. Unlike the direct approach needed for a successful outbound marketing campaign, you need to employ a far more human, helpful, and empathic approach.

Pinterest allows users to share everything from pictures to recipes, craft ideas to interior design tips. Many big-brand companies have utilised this social media site.

Back at the start of 2015, the internet (and several newspapers) had a collective giggle at a teenage boy who found himself in dire need of toilet paper when on a Virgin train. The boy decided to tweet his predicament to amuse his followers, but thought to copy in Virgin’s Twitter handle. Within 2 minutes, Virgin had responded to ask him what carriage he was in and the toilet paper was duly provided. Toilet humour aside, this incident showed just how powerful a customer service tool Twitter can be, if you know how to use it. Here are three tips on making the most of Twitter for customer service..

According to research, 67% of online shopping carts are filled with goods and then abandoned by the shopper. A constant source of frustration for e-commerce retailers, shopping cart abandonment represents the loss of profits and customer dissatisfaction. So we’ve come up with three tips on how to prevent this..

“Don’t just take my word for it…” has been a standard advertising catchphrase for many years. Successful companies are well aware that many people have an instinctive suspicion of sales people and their claims and want to see evidence to support them. That’s where social proof comes in..

Bing has recently joined Yahoo and Google in offering native adverts. At this point, they are only available for advertisers in the U.S. but it’s likely they’ll be rolled out globally in the future. Here’s a quick summary of what you need to know about this move..

The majority of Google searches take place on mobile devices, yet – until now – Google usually uses the desktop version of a website to rank its content and relevance in search results.

From this week onwards, brands advertising on Facebook will be able to buy ads that display in Facebook Messenger. They will be News Feed ads that will be able to be launched in a Messenger conversation.

It’s that time of the year, and whether or not you believe it’s as wonderful as the songs preach, there’s no denying that it’s an important period for marketers to get the most out of their customers.

The way we shop is virtually unrecognisable compared to online shopping even a few years ago. The dominance of mobile browsing means that retailers have to make a much bigger effort at engaging customers at this point in their purchasing journey.

Google have announced it is splitting search index into separate versions:

1. A rapidly updated mobile index – the primary index
2. A secondary index for desktop searches

When you oversee AdWords campaigns, you will have many irons in the fire. One of these, and often one of the hardest to get a handle on, is the quality score, which can affect your ads’ visibility and the price you pay for clicks.

Creating content for your blog is only part of a successful strategy. You know you need a brilliant title that explains what you are talking about concisely, and you might want to include subtitles or bullet points to break the page up in a visual way. But hitting publish is actually just the start because, if you want people to read and share your work, you have to promote and publicise it extensively yourself.

Instagram for Business: Tips and Tools Instagram has a massive 500 million active users, 80% of whom live outside of the United States. 300 million are active every single day, which shows how important Instagram can be as a platform for businesses as well as individuals.

A few years ago, Halloween wasn’t an especially significant celebration in the UK. We saw all the dressing up and partying that went on in the States but the event was marked here by low-key trick or treating amongst small children and little else. In recent years, however, Halloween has become a much bigger deal.

Start-ups are constantly juggling; they have a lot of balls to keep in the air, and marketing and promoting their business is just one of them. Carrying out market research and liaising with potential partners and investors take up the rest of their time and, other than developing their new product or service, nearly all of the tasks they need to carry out can be enhanced by social media marketing.

Facebook has been making the news for all the wrong reasons. The social network has been found to have miscalculated its video view metrics, which the site admitted in its Advertiser Help Centre. The errant statistics that have been presented to advertisers could be argued to be inflated because they did not include very short video views.

Having a thorough audit of your website is something every business should periodically do. Content audits, usability audits and SEO audits are especially important, so consider scheduling them in every 6 months or so to ensure your website is performing at its best and your content is serving your customers and driving traffic to, and interest in, your brand.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of our internal link tool which is now free to use for everyone. Read on for the use-case and how to use.

There is an awful lot of information about search engine optimisation on the internet. Some of it is accurate, some outdated, and some is downright dangerous. So we wanted to take a look at some of the most prevalent myths that people believe about SEO, such as whether link building still needs to be done, and whether ‘Yeah, we did some SEO last year’ is sufficient.

Many people who have participated in Facebook advertising unexpectedly fell foul of the 20% ad rule. Facebook would reject ads that contained more than 20% text, but the testing for this measurement was a bit of an inexact science: if you placed a 5x5 grid over your image, there should have been text in five or fewer of the boxes, no more than that.

Everybody who knows what they’re doing in the web development space talks about the importance of split testing when building a website. After all, it makes sense to go with the design, UX, content and promotions that people respond to most enthusiastically.

Effective search engine optimisation often involves carrying out certain tasks repeatedly to achieve the best results. Difficult to automate while still maintaining quality, SEO work can be repetitive and involve calculations and judgements based on facts that are not immediately accessible. Unless you use the right tools.

In June, Facebook issued an update to its algorithm that decides what its users see in their news feed. Admitting it “may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages”, Lars Backstrom, their Engineering Director, explained that the site was going to prioritise personal updates from friends and family over Page posts from brands and businesses.

Facebook’s organic reach has been steadily declining. Find out everything you need to know, including how to improve your reach and the effectiveness of paid ads.

More webmasters now understand the importance of making their websites accessible to mobile users, so much so that Google is removing the ‘mobile-friendly’ tag from their search results as it is no longer necessary. However, Google has identified another area of website building that is getting in the way of people enjoying their mobile browsing experience: intrusive interstitial ads.

The recent surge in brand and influencer engagement, caught the attention of Google, who released advice on the best practice for influencer and brand collaborations, in order to ensure that content is both helpful to users and of course complies with the official Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Pay-per-click advertising allows marketers to put themselves in front of potential customers in a range of settings across the web. It’s easy to focus on social media platforms and search ads, but being aware that there are other places on the net that you can place your ads can open up new possibilities.

Ad blocking technology may be popular with web users to make their browsing experience more streamlined but, for websites and apps that rely on ads financially, they are leading to a growing crisis.

You can’t have missed the massive new trend of Pokémon Go, where users go out into the real world and catch Pokémon that are superimposed onto a live map on their mobile devices. More people are using the app now than are using Tinder, on a daily basis, and over 60% of those who have downloaded the Pokémon Go app are using it daily. These stats are immense, making it an interesting prospect for marketers.

Snapchat, the image- and video-based social networking platform popular with young people, has made impressive progress with its advertising options for marketers. Although some were unsure how the brand was going to monetise, it has developed some advertising options that are likely to prove popular with marketers, and that – so far at least – do not seem to feel intrusive or annoying to its users.

More and more people are using voice searches on their devices. These are the ways in which this is affecting - and will affect - SEO.

LinkedIn, never quite at the cutting-edge of social media development, takes its time with new innovations and launches them cautiously. However, it develops solid functionality that works well and is popular with its users, as we have seen with, for instance, LinkedIn Pulse.

E-commerce brands often look to social media to drive traffic to their website and encourage sales. However, certain platforms allow businesses to sell directly from them, and Facebook is one of these. Some smaller businesses sell only via Facebook, but building an entire business on somebody else’s property in this way is generally inadvisable. However, offering some of your best-selling and most popular products for sale on the site is something brands should look into. When you consider the vast numbers of active users who engage with the site, it is well worth the effort.

There’s big news in PPC advertising: Google has launched expanded text ads, which allow for longer copy and double headlines. At twice the size of current standard text ads, they will enable advertisers to increase their online presence and perform better on mobile search in particular. For the time being, standard text ads will continue to be available to advertisers. However, from October 26th this year, marketers will no longer be able to create or upload them.

If you want to know whether you’re following a real celebrity or a fake wannabe on Twitter, you can check whether they have a blue tick (or, more accurately, a white tick on a blue background) next to their name. Twitter explains that “An account may be verified if it is determined to be an account of public interest. Typically this includes accounts maintained by users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas”.

A recent study by Stone Temple Consulting has reinforced what has been understood for some time: that backlinks still play a significant role in search engine ranking factors. But actually gaining more backlinks to a website has become a little more complicated in recent years, as Google has clamped down on some of the more spammy ways of building links.

Social media profiles can serve a range of different roles for a modern-day brand. A prominent social presence is now expected for businesses with any kind of online presence, and Facebook and Twitter accounts in particular provide a useful and accessible way for customers to communicate with the brands they engage with on the web.

As pay-per-click channels make themselves more user-friendly and slightly less ‘techy’, many businesses and marketers have started to run their own campaigns without the help of outside specialists. To a degree, this can be successful, but there is so much new information and so many new features all the time that it’s easy to lose track and fail to maximise your success.

We all love to track how people find our websites online (that’s not just us, right?) so that we can learn about what is effective and what is a waste of our time. However, an increasing awareness of ‘dark social’ traffic is making it clear that there is an awful lot going on that we don’t understand.

Gaining valuable coverage can be hard, there’s no question about it. It takes significant time, investment and planning to develop and execute a digital PR plan which is tangibly successful. This article will be covering the basics of how and why a digital PR campaign can be truly valuable to your company, and where you might come across some setbacks.

You can’t have failed to notice the rapid growth of online video in recent months. Whether it’s Facebook Live video, Blab, live YouTube videos or Periscope, videos are taking over the internet with the increased availability of WiFi and the technology to create them in our pockets.

When thinking about digital marketing, many firms are aware of the importance of search engine optimisation. However, local SEO is frequently overlooked, when it actually carries significant importance in the ‘findability’ of a business online.

Influencer marketing has evolved drastically over the last decade. Part of the reason for this is the breadth of value that a successful influencer marketing campaign can have; social media, content marketing, PR teams, you name it- they’re all developing outreach strategies!

Running a busy AdWords account can be a lot of work and you will find that a lot of the tasks are repetitive. Using Account Automation, you are able to automate a lot of the repetitive actions you carry out on your AdWords account on a day-to-day basis, while also optimising your ads to perform effectively.

A recent study, carried out by SimilarWeb and Majestic, has found that the number of referring domains is still important for a website’s traffic levels. The teams analysed half a million backlinks from 100,000 websites to establish whether or not there was a correlation between referring websites and traffic in January 2016. The websites studied were the top 100,000 in the world, according to referral, social and PPC traffic.

A recent survey published on Moz revealed that over 40% of SEO professionals at large companies have been waiting at least 6 months for their latest change. This did not come as a surprise to many, and is very typical of what we hear from clients every day; when it comes to progressing in digital many large companies are their own worst enemies.

If you’re a search professional or work within a search team, then the chances are you will have heard of Google’s featured snippets. These featured snippets essentially provide the searcher with a direct answer to their query. The answer is pulled directly from the site in question, and is displayed at the top of Google’s search results.

Pay-per-click advertising is a fast and effective way of getting traffic to your website, but it’s not really appropriate to set it and forget it. You need to continually optimise your ads in order to get the best results, and the best value for money, so consider the following factors when both setting up and revising your PPC ads

Content marketing, when done well, enables businesses to improve their search engine visibility, increase the number of website visitors they receive, and build relationships with their customers and followers.

Social media paid advertising is being made more and more accessible, even to businesses without much experience in the pay-per-click field. Its targeting options are enviable, and there are options to limit daily spends so that campaigns can be tested with a relatively low barrier to entry.

I know Twitter, you know Twitter – we all know Twitter.

But, do you know it as well as you think?

We have listed 11 Twitter hacks which are simple, but could make a whole load of difference.

You’re likely to be aware that a few weeks ago the recent surge in brand and influencer engagement, caught the attention of Google, who released advice on the best practice for influencer and brand collaborations

In the last few days Google have targeted brands giving away products in exchange for reviews and links. Google’s team issued numerous outbound linking penalties, directly related to the warning recently issued for bloggers to disclose free product reviews, and utilise nofollow links.

Imagine if you could put an ad in a newspaper but only pay for people who had expressed a definite interest in buying your product to see it. Or if you could change that ad depending on how engaged a customer is with your business…

Every business that has a blog wants to increase the amount of traffic it attracts. After all, why put all that effort into creating content if nobody’s going to see it?

Pay-per-click advertising campaigns require good planning and a well-thought-out strategy if they are to be as successful as possible. It’s easy to throw money at a campaign and see what sticks but, with a bit of work in advance, you can avoid some of the wasted investment and go straight to what is likely to be both effective and cost effective.

With the growth of content marketing as a central to digital strategy in 2016, we’ve seen the rhetoric around content marketing spiral out of control. According to some agencies, your content needs to be revered, provocative and above all uncompromisingly unique and never seen before.

Content marketing is one of the most important aspects of your digital campaign. While SEO is absolutely necessary for your website’s longevity in the search landscape, it is content marketing that pushes you to the forefront of the market place, ignites your audiences interest in you, and allows your brand to display how creative you can be.

As you will all be aware, over the next couple of weeks the changes Instagram have announced will become a reality. What was previously a chronological timeline, will now be decided by an algorithm which puts the posts it thinks the users will most want to see at the top of the feed.

Over the past 2 years we’ve observed fascinating developments within the realm of influencer marketing. Traditional marketing is no longer enough for the consumer; who has expressed an increased preference for a trusted opinion. As a result we’ve observed the development of the consumer- turned- digital influencer, a new type of pseudo celebrity, who’ve become famous brands in their own rights.

​It can sometimes seem like SEO advice is constantly changing. And it’s true, there are new guidelines, suggestions and penalties all the time. However, there are also great recommendations that are likely to stick around for the long term… How do we know which to pay attention to?

Launching a new SEO campaign can feel overwhelming. There are so many factors to take into account to ensure an all-round success that missing something out could jeopardise the entire strategy…

Pay-per-click advertising can be a highly cost-effective method to generate high-quality leads to your website. It is carefully targeted, so the site visitors you attract are generally interested in your products or services but, when managed badly, a PPC account can be a pricey investment. Mistakes can be made, and they cost money.

Search engine optimisation is an essential part of any online marketing strategy. With work, it can lead to a great amount of unpaid, organic website traffic, but the results can be less predictable and stable than strategies such as PPC.

Many brands have a Twitter and Facebook presence but, when this is not part of an overall social media strategy, the work done on these profiles can show minimal results.

You may be able to muddle along for a while without a plan, but miscellaneous content and random share times will not do the trick overall. Here’s why you need a social media strategy:

Every e-commerce firm wants to increase its sales, but often a store will run out of ideas and hit a plateau, with conversions staying the same or even starting to drop.

So what can you do to improve your e-commerce conversion rates?

The first step in measuring the ROI of content marketing is to decide which metrics you want to track and improve upon. Without these, you can’t set targets and you won’t know whether you have improved or not.

Check out which metrics we think that you could include…

Pay-per-click ads are an effective way of generating relevant, targeted traffic to your website. With careful optimisation and planning, PPC ads can lead to conversions and sales, so it is important to get the best possible results.

Inbound marketing can be a powerful way to attract new customers – and keep existing customers engaged – and its use is growing in popularity. However, it is not guaranteed to work, especially when common mistakes are made.

After years of requests for a ‘dislike’ button on Facebook, the site finally expanded its options last week beyond the traditional ‘like’… but yet again, a dislike button did not appear. However, the site has introduced five new ‘reactions’ for consumers to use in response to posts from their friends and brands.

Everybody wants more website traffic, especially if it delivers a highly targeted and relevant audience. But many businesses find that their traffic numbers stagnate and they need a boost to increase site visitors.

In the beginning, it was known as the app that added funky filters to make selfies look vintage and, while Instagram still gets plenty of vintage-selfie action, it is also increasingly being used by businesses and organisations to increase their social presence and build a larger, more cohesive brand.

Twitter has announced a new type of ad format for its platform. First View – a way for video advertisers to have their ad presented near the top of a user’s Twitter stream – is described as “an engaging and highly visible way to share your brand story with compelling video creative across Twitter’s massive audience”.

Is your business’s pay-per-click advertising strategy up to scratch? Are you using the tools available within Google AdWords to get the best possible results?

There is a danger, when planning a content marketing strategy, of creating any old content for the sake of it. It is important to understand that just posting a new blog article or video is far less important than what the video or post actually contains.

There are several useful steps that can be taken to identify what content your website actually needs.

In SEO as in life, a small amount of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. People new to the field face a steep learning curve and risk making considerable errors while they are gaining their knowledge.

We have put together these tips for rookies in the SEO industry. Whether you are in-house, agency or going it alone, you will find information you’ll be glad to know.

Twitter followers are not much use to your brand unless they are engaged; engaged followers do not just follow, they interact with a your updates, clicking on links, replying to tweets and retweeting them to their own followers.

There have been many articles over the last few years about how it is no longer a good idea to report on keyword rankings, this Whiteboard Friday from February 2014 highlighted several far more important metrics to concentrate on when reporting on SEO progress.

DBD’s Harry Clarke gives us his insight into using Google’s SERP…

If nobody reads your blog, that is not going to change unless you take concerted action to gain traffic and attract attention. Mark Schaefer coined the term ‘content shock’ to describe the phenomenon of there now being so much content produced on the web that it is overwhelming. The result is that brands and businesses need to work extra hard to stand out in this crowded market.

Websites naturally “lose” backlinks periodically when pages on a website are moved or taken down, and the URL is not redirected.

This post will give you a quick remedy in reclaiming those ‘lost’ links…

When you have a decent Twitter following (or even when you are still building this up), you don’t want to waste the opportunity to draw potential customers in and increase your site visitor numbers.

We take you through best-practice guidelines to boost your blog traffic from Twitter.

For bloggers, or any brand website that hosts a blog, there are a range of plugins that can help to not just customise a site, but also optimise it for SEO and social media marketing. Here are some of our favourites.

If you ask the person in the street what they know about Twitter, one of the features they are likely to mention is the 140-character limit to each update. But, according to reports by re/code, Twitter is considering upping that to a whopping 10,000-character limit in the next few months…

It’s that time of year when we’re all full of new ambitions and goals, and any brand that is engaging in content marketing could benefit from firming up their content plans for the new year with a robust new content calendar.

Twitter has announced a new format for its paid advertising, called conversational ads. Described by Revenue Project Manager Andrew Bragdon as “a powerful way for advertisers to extend their presence across Twitter”, conversational ads allow marketers to incorporate call-to-action buttons and customisable hashtags in their Promoted Tweets.

Proofreading our own writing is difficult, because we tend to read what we think we wrote, rather than what we actually wrote. Yet presenting high-quality, professional-looking content on our blogs is vital if we are to be taken seriously.

Take a look at these great proof-reading tips.

Facebook Pages are used by businesses, organisations and brands to promote what they do and share relevant content with their audience.

One step that businesses can take is to ensure that their Facebook Pages are well optimised, which can help to improve SEO and boost relevance in internal Facebook searches.

There is a danger, when planning a content marketing strategy, of creating any old content for the sake of it. That having a new blog post or video is more important than what the video or post contain.

There are several useful steps that can be taken to identify what content your website actually needs.

When websites and blogs link to your business site, this can boost your search engine presence. Google can consider a backlink to be a recommendation for your website and will increase its search engine positioning according to the number and quality of the backlinks you receive.

​In a year where more money than ever will be ploughed into Content Marketing, you need to be sure you’re creating content for the right reasons. Luckily, as a digital discipline, Content Marketing is measurable and therefore easy to allocate value to. The assumption is that by now, you’ll already be investing in Content Marketing, but what can we learn from how people used content in 2015 and should this impact our budgets for 2016?

2015 has been an exciting year in search, and we’ve certainly seen some interesting changes. In 2015 we seem to have experienced a shift in the whole paradigm of search, to a more audience-centric way of doing things. So before the sun sets and we say sayonara in 2015, here are some of the most interesting developments to hit search this year!

Digital marketing scaremongering became rife as 2015 evolved, from the looming mobilegeddon announced early in 2015, to the drastic growth of ad blocking going into overdrive later in the year. But what did it all mean for SEO?

For the past 5 years the landscape of digital PR has evolved dramatically with the ever growing presence of online influencers, who, we’re told time and time again, can propel your brand to stardom. By 2015 you should have had your blogger outreach strategy well moulded into your marketing calendar.

Nobody can deny that digital marketing is now essential for the vast majority of small- and medium-sized businesses. Having no online presence, or limiting your digital footprint to a single-page website, just does not cut it, yet even those brands that have extensive websites and a strong social media presence can be making common blunders that are relatively easy to resolve.

Content marketing, when done properly, can be an expensive affair. To some degree this is understandable as content is time-consuming to create, and quality and expertise come at a price.

Creating new blog content week after week can feel a bit like being on a content-creation hamster wheel. No sooner is one post published, the next needs to be planned out and written. Again and again.

Google has released a copy of the guidelines it gives to ‘evaluators’ to assess the quality of websites. Evaluators’ assessments of the quality of a website do not affect that site’s Google ranking; instead, it is used to measure the success of algorithm changes and ranking experiments.

Creating content that is relevant to the time of year can be an effective way to generate ideas for unique, original content. However, this needs to be done with care to avoid clichéd content that tags a seasonal theme onto something completely unrelated to your industry.

Do you create content with high hopes of attracting attention and gaining influence?

It’s a crucial time of year for e-commerce and other online businesses to engage their customers and prospects in the run-up to Christmas. Twitter has worked with Conversion to analyse tweets sent between September and December last year, to look for patterns in the ways customers and brands interact.

Google is great at finding answers to questions that millions of people out there most likely already asked before. Now imagine what happens when you ask Google something it has never seen before?

With just a few more weeks until the festivities peak, e-commerce businesses need to prime their websites for a potentially huge rush of traffic.

​Many brands invest a lot of time and effort into building up their Facebook Fan Page as a way of reaching out to customers and prospects. However, with organic reach calculated at just 6% last year, getting your posts seen by those who have hit ‘like’ on your Page is harder than ever before.

Google has introduced a new way for advertisers to connect with the people they really want to market themselves to. Google Customer Match allows advertisers to create and target a pre-defined audience, based on email address matching.

Many online brands now understand the importance of reaching out to bloggers, social media personalities and the media to expand their reach and promote their business.

Why team collaboration helps freshen up your online marketing strategyMarketing strategies are often formulated by people working on their own or in small groups, either in-house or outsourced, and they can be created outside of the day-to-day workings of [...]

Content that is produced for a website needs to be promoted if a business is to get the best value out of it.

Instagram has been testing out ads with a variety of advertisers, big and small, over recent months, and the image-sharing social media site is now due to roll out advertising capabilities to all businesses around the world.

Building relationships for effective outreachRelationship building is a vital aspect of modern-day SEO and social media marketing [...]

You might have heard of evergreen content, but what is it exactly?

Instagram can be a powerful branding tool. It offers businesses a way to present themselves, in a visual format, in a way that they can control.

Beautiful, stunning and even sensational content is no good – unless it moves through the web.

Spreading your bets and distributing the same content across all social channels is the easy option. But is it the easy option we are after?

As more and more businesses embrace content marketing, thousands of blog posts, video tutorials, webinars and articles are being produced every day.

Gain New Site Visitors with Highly Shareable ContentWhen you create new content on your business website, you want it to get as much attention as possible. Today, this tends to mean capitalising on social media traffic and promoting all [...]

The Pros and Cons of Native AdvertisingNative advertising is “a form of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears”. It can be found on a range of websites and media [...]

Native advertising is growing in popularity as a way to get a brand in front of a new audience. By creating compelling content that matches the style and focus of a third-party website, businesses can attract new fans and followers [...]

  There is a lot to consider when building a brand-new website. However, something that is frequently overlooked is the inclusion of important SEO factors. Most people building a new site will be keen for it to rank highly in [...]

Moz Local, which has been available to the US market since March last year, has now been launched in the UK.The service helps business owners to ensure that their business is listed in relevant, high-quality, local directories, while tackling [...]

Landing pages are webpages specifically designed to welcome visitors to a website. Frequently, they are tailored according to the referral source, so that people who arrive at your site having clicked a PPC ad see a landing page that [...]

Every e-commerce store should consistently be looking for ways to increase their conversions and sales. There are a number of ways to boost these stats, but sometimes some important factors are overlooked.As well as looking for opportunities to improve a [...]

10 months after the last Google Panda rollout (Panda 4.1), Google has confirmed that Panda 4.2 began its launch in July.Don’t worry if you didn’t notice… Unlike some of its previous updates, where many brands’ site rankings dropped or [...]

As the number of available .com or .co.uk website addresses dwindles, new top-level domains (TLDs) are being introduced. This will give website owners a way to get the URL they really want, without coming unstuck because so many existing [...]

Many mobile app creators have already got the hang of optimising their apps and descriptions to be discoverable in the Google Play Store or App Store. Using keywords and phrases that users search for, and appropriate tags, helps consumers [...]

Nowadays, business reputations are often built on online reviews and testimonials. When everybody loves your product or service, the abundance of glowing reports can boost sales and improve your reputation, but what if you’ve had a rash of bad [...]

Hollywood blockbusters spend tens of millions of dollars on promoting their latest films, keen to make a profit on the works they have spent so much money on. The potentially highly lucrative sales of licensed merchandise require a film to [...]

Even though Google is one of the most useful sites on the Internet, most people only use about 3% of its abilities.Smart Google users, on the other hand, know how to turn Google into a currency converter, a food comparison [...]

As search engine optimisers, we deal with a lot of data. The insights we get from the analytics and tests we carry out can make a significant difference to how a business manages its online presence, yet it’s easy [...]

In the UK, the sports market is enormous. Everyone from sporting goods retailers and manufacturers to sports clubs is competing for attention in this crowded environment, and many of these brands are realising that, by placing themselves in a [...]

Link building has got a bad reputation which as a search engine marketing agency we care about greatly. Years of questionable link-building tactics, in a bid to cheat the system, have made many website owners wary of doing [...]

For many brands, content marketing means blog posts. Yet, limiting the content that is produced and shared in this way also limits the effectiveness and reach of their marketing efforts.The truth is that audiences love variety, and different people respond [...]

What is it?GDN (or Google Display Network as it is termed) is a display advertising network consisting of numerous websites selected by Google. Such websites include Gmail, YouTube, Blogger and Google Finance, along with Google sites, the network contains [...]

As content marketing continues to dominate online business, the ability to write in a way that combines writing for both the search engines and your readers is an increasingly in-demand skill.You feel confident in your SEO knowledge, but do you [...]

When attending industry conferences or networking events, you can make good use of social media to connect with other attendees and follow the trends.But, after the event, it does not have to end. There are still opportunities to get your [...]

Content marketing is about telling a story that resonates with your audience and finding a relevant channel to deliver it. Here are 3 big brands that have led the way and, more importantly, what we, without the multi million pound budgets, can learn.

Sometimes, content ideas flow thick and fast; there’s plenty of industry news and lots to talk about.Other days, however, coming up with an idea for a blog post seems impossible. You know there must be something to write about but [...]

Following Facebook’s success with auto-play videos in its feeds, Twitter has now introduced the same feature. It is not a huge surprise, given how much of a triumph this move has been on Facebook, where the site now gets [...]

As an SEO professional, the chances are you probably face technical web issues on a daily basis rather than coming up with more (fluffy) creative ideas. However as an SEO agency ourselves we are working in an industry that [...]

Until now, Instagram advertising has only been available to a small number of large businesses. However, the site has now announced that, through the course of this year, the opportunity to advertise on their image-based social network will open [...]

When you look in Google Analytics, how high is your bounce rate? Does it vary from page to page, or based on whether your visitors arrive via organic search or PPC ads?These are stats that you need to be [...]

​If you’re moving offices you will have a packing list. Aside from all of the physical elements you will be moving, have you made a list for everything you need to do to move your organisation digitally?

If you are not already making use of images as part of your social media marketing plan, it makes sense to start doing so. Now.

The average click-through rate in Google’s search network is 2% so if your CTR is falling below this it’s worth trying these top tips.

Social media is becoming progressively more visual. Google+’s new ‘Collections’ are said to rival Pinterest in style and purpose, Facebook timelines are full of photographs, and sites like Pinterest and Instagram are going from strength to strength. If you are not [...]

If you’re moving offices you will have a packing list. Aside from all of the physical elements you will be moving, have you made a list for everything you need to do to move your organisation digitally? Think about local search One [...]

Many businesses are attracted by the power of Pinterest to drive traffic to their websites and the way in which the site seems to strongly influence purchasing behaviour.However, unlike with, say, Twitter and Facebook, which have a plethora [...]

According to TechCrunch, Facebook is piloting a new feature with some users of its iOS app, where links can be searched for from within the app itself.This move removes the need to search for links on Google and [...]

Whilst this election has been the closest for generations (at the time of writing the Conservatives and Labour were neck and neck), there has been much talk of how voters have been divided by press and the internet.This is [...]

Is it even possible? Ann Summers has certainly managed to do it! During the heavy snowfall in December 2009, an American digital marketing company bid on snow/weather terms with ‘Brr... cold out there, why not stay in and get steamy [...]

A lot of advice is available online for increasing Facebook reach, boosting Twitter followers, and so on but, for brand new businesses with no social presence whatsoever, it can be difficult to know precisely where to start with social [...]

Pay-per-click ads are not something to set and forget; once they have been created and published, they need regular checks and updates to ensure they perform effectively.As part of your standard ongoing reviews, there are some account checks [...]

Last Friday we saw a solar eclipse in the UK, something that we won’t see for another 75 years in this country. The eclipse was the perfect platform for brands to showcase their creativity and social talents, and many brands [...]

Regular, consistent blog content is important for content marketing, but sometimes it is difficult to come up with new, original and interesting ideas on an ongoing basis. Sometimes, ideas flow freely but, at other times, it seems there is [...]

After many months of speculation, Twitter and Google have reached a deal where tweets will be shown as part of Google search results.I have always been curious about search and social's symbiotic relationship. SEOs are always obsessed with the next [...]

Automating certain social media tasks is a useful way to maximise productivity and efficiency; it avoids the need to be constantly present on Twitter, Facebook etc. and means that tasks can be processed in convenient batches.However, automation in social media [...]

Only two or three years ago, Black Friday and Cyber Monday were relatively unknown phenomena in the UK. However, in an incredibly short time, these lucrative marketing ploys have spread from the States, along with the sight [...]

In the UK, 32% of adults make a purchase via their smartphone at least once a month, compared to only 8% in France. Smartphone usage as a whole has gone up to 68%, and more than 40% [...]

Brands with Facebook Pages will have noticed a recent increase in prompts to start creating PPC ads on the platform. Pop-ups and notifications encouraging the take-up of promoted content and Page advertisements are appearing on Pages that have never [...]

Planning and implementing an SEO strategy for a business can be a complex matter. Once a plan has been established, then measuring and analysing results - in order to then improve on them – is another essential factor for [...]

Native advertising is a way for brands to promote themselves using content or ads that resemble their surroundings. So, on Buzzfeed for example, native advertisers might produce humorous list posts and, in The Guardian, they could create authoritative-looking feature articles.

Businesses with brick-and-mortar premises can benefit considerably from investing some time and energy into capturing local search engine attention. In our Guide to Local SEO, we detailed on-site and off-site tips to gain maximum benefit from [...]

Working with bloggers relevant to your industry is an invaluable use of your time- particularly for small to medium businesses looking for relevant coverage. When done properly, collaborating with online influencers that align with your brand values can propel your [...]

BuzzFeed is a site that content creators love to hate. We might all be sick of teasing headlines and the time-thief that is a page of 28 animated gifs representing what you hate most about your job, yet we [...]

The saying goes that to be forewarned is to be forearmed, and this is perhaps something you should apply to your search campaigns. Competitor research can be invaluable when starting a new campaign, how competitive is the market place [...]

Big brands build fans. So do small businesses and those in between. Sometimes ‘likes’ are built naturally and legitimately, sometimes by paying for them and sometimes as a result of get hit by click farms, who will click ‘like’ on [...]

Have an app? Check. Looking to boost downloads across Android and iOS devices, but don’t know where to start? Check.If this sounds like you then read on! Below are just a few ways in which you can promote your app [...]

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads were introduced by Google earlier this year enabling us to use remarketing targeting options on search campaigns. Provided you already have the remarketing pixel implemented across your whole site, multiple audience [...]

Marketers and pay-per-click (PPC) ad managers have always recommended that promotional campaigns are scrupulously tested to get the best results. Split testing, also known as A-B testing, is a particularly useful technique that is commonly used, where different variations of [...]

The Media and Entertainment practice of Deloitte, the prestigious professional services firm, carried out a comprehensive survey of 2,085 UK and 16,000 people worldwide to question them about their usage of media, including their entertainment habits and their consumption [...]

Google is continuing on its mission to get rid of sites which gained their place at the top of the search engines by excessive manipulation of backlinks that were created by automated or spammy processes.While such backlinking tactics may have [...]

LinkedIn has more than 10 million users in the UK, with an incredible 4 out of 5 British professionals now using the site. It distinguishes itself from the other social networking sites by having a distinctly professional focus, which [...]

Guest blogging is a powerful and effective way to expand your reach, build your brand and make connections with other people and businesses. When done correctly, you will find that you get new, and highly targeted, visitors to your site [...]

Founded in 2004, IgnitionOne (formely SearchIgnite) is a global leader in digital marketing solutions enabling companies to integrate cross-channel marketing efforts within one platform, thus allowing deeper insights and greater online success.Last week I had the opportunity [...]

Hi analytics lovers! My name is Mike and I'll be running through some cool Google Analytics tips that can make your analysis of the world of search that bit more useful.First off, I thought I'd talk a little bit about [...]

It’s a crucial time of year for e-commerce and other online businesses to engage their customers and prospects in the run-up to Christmas. Twitter has worked with Converseon to analyse tweets sent between September and December last year, to look for patterns in the ways customers and brands interact.