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5 Topspot Marketing Spring Clean Ideasby Andrew Redfern @ 10th February 2010 7:24 pm SEO News
A recent report from the Consultancy group found UK businesses are set to increase their digital marketing budgets by around 17 per cent this year. With this in mind what is your business doing online to prepare for the extra competition? We have come up with five new and fresh approaches to look at your digital strategy and squeeze out extra performance. Spring Cleaning has never been so profitable! (1) Twitter Marketing (2) Adwords PPC Campaign (3) On-Page Website Optimisation (4) Linking Strategy (5) PR Hit Search Online Marketing: Paid Search Predictions for 2010by Andrew Redfern @ 8th February 2010 12:07 pm SEO News
It is widely expected that the amount of money invested by businesses into the paid search market will grow significantly over the next 12 months. This means that the need for campaigns to deliver an ever-increasing return on investment (ROI) is greater than ever. Digital marketing community Econsultancy has posted its predictions for the paid search market in the next 12 months. • High keyword prices will force marketers to try new strategies According to research carried out in the US, two-thirds of marketers see their biggest challenge in the paid search market as high prices for keywords. Despite the growth of paid searches beginning to slow down, advertisers are continually pumping more money into the industry, and as a result, keyword prices are becoming more expensive. Because of this, marketers will need to focus on careful keyword management, testing, and targeting, in order to increase the ROI on their campaigns. Quality Score optimising will become a priority; this will bring costs down whilst simultaneously driving conversions up. Geographic and demographic targeting will also be more widely used this year, with these strategies reaching out to national advertisers and retailers. • Paid search will be more integrated Although search marketing accounts for more than half of digital marketing budgets (representing tens of millions of pounds for the larger companies), most search marketing programmes are still managed separately from traditional marketing departments. This year, organisations will look to integrate their paid search operations more tightly into the business, rather than running them as a standalone unit. Integrating systems will make search marketers change the way they report and organise their KPI’s, leading to a big shift in how this information is communicated upwards in the business. Search marketers will therefore need to adjust to new processes, using dashboards and proposals for investment. In return, they will be looking to see more executive support and therefore larger budgets. • Paid search will go multichannel Google recently found that over half of online shoppers research their purchases on the internet before eventually buying the products in-store. On this basis, search marketers are currently missing out on credit for half of the revenues their campaigns are driving. However, the tools for measuring across channels are now much more accessible to businesses, whether it’s linking phone numbers to keywords, or taking in-store surveys to see how the customer learnt about the products they’ve purchased. These tools will make it much easier for firms to make properly informed decisions on the allocation of their search budgets, and also make sure that they are driving both online and offline conversions. Learning how offline buyers are researching their needs will allow multichannel traders to find new, low cost keywords to drive profitable expansion of their paid-search programs. • Facebook and Twitter Will Give Google a Run for Its Money Social networking sites like Facebook, which currently has over a billion queries on its site every month, will extend their own search technology to allow users the ability to query the content in their news feeds. This will make it much easier for users to get recommendations from their friends on anything from restaurants and mobile phones, to films and TV programmes. Advertising money for keyword placements is sure to follow suit, therefore search marketers will need to alter their campaigns to account for a more social set of keywords. This will enable them to catch consumers earlier in the consideration process than they could on traditional search engines like Google or Yahoo! And since these users will still in the research phase of purchasing a product (ie, placing a lot of value in word-of-mouth recommendations) these clicks could be very valuable. While it will be difficult to incorporate all of these changes into campaigns, those marketers who can capitalise on some of these trends will most likely be a step ahead of the competition. Ref: HSLP0101AA206 Google AdWords PPC - Optimising The Content Networkby Andrew Redfern @ 7th January 2010 6:54 pm SEO News
A blog post on the official Google Inside AdWords blog today was some helpful insight into some new initiatives to optimise the content network. The blog post by the Inside Adwords crew comments “We’re often asked, “How can I maximize the ROI from Content Network campaigns?” As part of our new Optimisation University initiative, we’ve developed a Getting Started Guide and a series of 6 videos to help answer this question for you. The guide and videos provide a conceptual walk-through and demo of the major steps involved in executing a Content Network campaign. These include: Campaign setup best practices Along with simple tips and tricks to improve ROI, we also go over several tools, such as the Wonder Wheel, the Keyword Tool and Conversion Tracking, that can help you be more efficient. These recommendations are based on our analysis of thousands of campaigns to understand what works and what doesn’t. We hope you can start applying them to your campaigns today. If you’re starting a new Content Network campaign, watch the first video below; you may find it to be particularly valuable. The content network has for a long time been a massive opportunity for Google if it can get the quality right; this initiative from Google will only go to help improve the quality. Hit Search Guide - Online Journalism : 6 Key Skills Of The Digital Journalistby Andrew Redfern @ 6th January 2010 12:54 pm SEO News
The rise of the online journalism one of the aspects became particularly noticeable in 2009 and looks like a trend that will continue into 2010. The ability to source information quickly and push out to worldwide audience with shocking immediacy has lead to journalists becoming much more efficient and copy is written much closer to a particular event. With the rise of the online journal ism; Hit Search have produced a list of digital tips that will help traditional journalists in the scary world of online. 1) Twitter - The micro blogging site is perfect for the budding journalist, for sourcing business contacts to finding people to talk about your topics. Twitter will also provide great insight into what the public are talking about on an hourly and basis. Examples of UK journalist on Twitter are as follows BBC The Guardian The Telegraph 2) Facebook - Facebook has over 350 million active users all of which in true Facebook style have something to say and the sheer volume of groups online is becoming a great resource to test the pulse of the nation. Facebook groups make the news on regular basis - just today ITV reported of a newly formed group opposing the Wootton Bassett protest march. Traditional journalists are already using Facebook to gather data for stories and it can be a great way to research the reputation of a brand or topic. Use Facebook’s search function combined with a RSS feeds for Facebook to steal a march on your competition. 3) Groups and Forums - Whilst there is a massive number of people using Facebook and other social networks Web forums should not be ignored and can a rich vein of content in niche area. Take for example one of the biggest Parenting network in the country MumsNets.com. MumsNet boasts over 1 million registered “mums”, so powerful in fact that both Labour and the Conservatives have provided interviews in recent weeks to boost their election campaign. 4) Hot Topics - As a journalist you always know what are the growing trends from the general public but there are some great online tools that will help quantify this. For example the trends report below shows the scale of searches for Gordon Brown and David Cameron in the last thirty days; and allows the savvy journalist to writing about rising trends and quantify the size of small topics. 5) Different Content Formats - The digital journalist should be not only conform table in written text but should look at developing this format into more engaging media like video and speech. voice podcast and online videos are an increasing elements in journalism and something you need to add to your portfolio 6) Embrace Technology - With all different elements mentioned above are bound by one single body, the ability to react and change to new technological developments in the world of journalism. Setup your own blog and work out what stories work best and why they worked; blogs can be setup easily and freely @ Wordpress.com and require little technical knowledge. Subscribe to YouTube channels in your specialist areas and get familiar with who are the most popular people posting. Research audioboo.fm, a Audio Blogging website which is perfect starting place for distributing the spoken word. Would you like to know more about these subjects? Contact Hit Search on 0845 643 9289. Remember, its a big world, make sure you become visible. Social Media Marketing In A Crisis: Eurostarby Andrew Redfern @ 23rd December 2009 2:50 pm SEO News
Eurostar’s nightmare Christmas continues. First it was the fluffy French snow causing it problems and now Eurostar’s communication with its customers is coming under the microscope. In the initial stages of the crisis with thousands of people were trapped on Eurostar trains there was a problem not only with passengers not having any food or water but a complete lack of communication from the train operator. The background to this should serve as a warning to any major company unsure if its needs to establish a powerful Social Media presence. Eurostar have only very recently contracted an agency to handle its Social Media and its half hearted approach has compounded its problems with the cold weather. Crucially this marketing campaign focused around the “Little Break, Big Difference” concept and didn’t include any form of brand protection. Thus two crucial Twitter addresses “eurostar” and “eurostar_uk” remained outside the control of Eurostar, with the http://twitter.com/eurostar address being used by a chap in Shanghai whose tweets, in Mandarin, were unlikely to be of much use to passengers trapped on trains in France and England. As thousands of stranded passengers looked online to seek up to the minute information and perhaps pose a question to a Eurostar representative they found a company who had sadly neglected its Social Media presence. The information gap was most keenly felt by passengers stranded in the tunnels as Eurostar couldn’t even communicate to its staff on the ground as Eurotunnel controls all communication. Queue an online torrent of abuse for Eurostar with many tweets from the stranded passengers describing the chaos and the lack of communication from Eurostar about the unfolding situation. Since the initial chaos Eurostar have drafted in Social Media experts who have been managing and updating Eurostar’s Tweets and Blogs and creating a Questions and Answers page where customers can get the very latest up to the minute information. Hit Search Director to Speak at Actinic User Conferenceby Andrew Redfern @ 9th October 2009 3:43 pm SEO News
Hit Search director Andy Donaldson will be speaking at the 2009 Actinic User Conference next week.
Andy will be delivering a talk entitled “Driving Traffic to Your Site”, which will introduce the delegates to the role of Hit Search, and the benefits of search engine optimisation.
The event is Actinic’s first User Conference, and will be held at the PayPal offices in Richmond, Surrey on 14th October.
Andy is delighted to have been invited to speak at the conference. He said: “This has presented a great opportunity for me to give Actinic’s user base a few hints and tips of how to generate more traffic to their website, which in turn, will increase their profits.”
Actinic provide e-commerce and electronic point-of-sale (EPOS) solutions for small and medium retailers across the UK. Founded in 1996, its software is used on over 10,000 sites including the Royal Navy, Barnado’s and the Royal Opera House. Research shows that over 50 per cent of small-to-medium enterprises in the UK run their online stores using Actinic software.
Their product range, suitable for both web designers and self-builders, includes web-based and desktop solutions such as Actinic Enterprise, Actinic Business, Actinic Catalog, Actinic Express and Actinic Designer.
Marketing Manager for Actinic Simon Armstrong said: “We’re delighted to have Andy speaking at our inaugural User Conference this year.
“I’ve previously worked with him and Hit Search at Richmond Systems, and I was very impressed with their work and what they were able to achieve.” Online Privacy : This Email is Set to Self Destructby Andrew Redfern @ 20th August 2009 5:36 pm SEO News
Many users seem blissfully unaware that each and every time they send an email a copy is not only kept on the sender’s machine, but the recipient and even the ISP’s server. Now depending upon where about in the world you live, a copy of that record may also be request-able under a European Directive. Imagine if every time you sent a letter, the postman made a copy. Or whenever you, under a European commission directive, to dip into some of that data. There may however be a solution at hand. Seattle based researchers have a free self-destructing-email program. “Vanish” was created by Roxana Geambasu and Prof Hank Levy at the University of Washington. A delivery date set within the message and expiry date transforms emails to become unreadable when this date has passed. Even to the creator of the message. The need for the service implies that a user may have some sinister reason for privacy, but do they? Many users will have sent emails which contain private data such as credit card details or names and addresses. These message swill often remain until the user upgrades their computer. Similar sites have offered email services such as Hushmail which offered an encryption service. In 2007 Hushmail admitted that it wasn’t in fact as secure as it would like to make out as Canadian law enforcement had been forcing the company to decode the messages or face jail. “Vanish” operates in a more innovative manner, following the encryption process the message becomes useless without the “key”. Vanish splits the key into 10 parts then spreads those across 1.5m computers. Making it impervious to hackers as every second goes by less and less machines hold the key until eventually it can never be decoded. Clever. Other Related Stories That May Be Of Interest:
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