How to prevent slips and trips, some useful tips for your organisation – an infographic by risk management specialists Ecclesiastical

I’m not really one for New Year’s resolutions but like to set a few targets and try a couple of new things. Yes, alright then let’s call them resolutions.

Last year’s can pretty much be summarised by a poster I have above my desk:

Work Hard and Be Nice To People. Simples.

As mantras go it worked out surprisingly well. For SEO, digital marketing and life in general.

So, for 2013 I plan to do the same. But on steroids. Not literally. Just more working hard and helping people out.

To get the ball rolling, if anyone knows a bathroom fitter/plumber type person in Gloucestershire who’d like a free website I’d happily build them a new search engine friendly site. I’ll even throw in digital marketing advice (jargon free), set up a Google Adwords campaign, do a bit of initial link building and get them set-up in Google Places. All for free… Ish.

OK, I’ll level with you. I need a new bathroom fitted. And an old one ripped out.

But a labour exchange/skill swap/whatever you want to call it (weighted heavily in their favour) seems a fair shout to me. Although I may still be drunk from Christmas.

So, if you know anyone  who you think would be up for it tell them to contact me via the contact form here.

I thought about trying one of the skill swap type sites which exist out there rather than writing this post but most looked like a wasteland. So much so that I’m considering building a new one for Gloucestershire businesses to exchange skills and expertise. What do you think? Or is there one out there I missed?

And as I may never get to it, feel free to steal that idea.

In the meantime I’d extend the same offer of a free site to a Gloucestershire based landscape gardener, a painter/decorator and – as it’s January – a local gym too. Spread the word!

In the spirit of giving, I’ve put together a little interactive advent calendar thing below which I’ll update each day with a useful tip, trick, tool or blog post that has helped me this year. There might even be some books… ooh! Some you may know, others may be new – so check back daily.

From web design and usability to SEO, social media and email marketing – there should be something you can take away and put to work in the New Year.

Just click on the image then hover over or click on the festive icon next to each number to reveal each tip.

And in the spirit of receiving feel free to share this on Twitter, link to it from your blog etc!

Anyway, does anyone know if Debenham’s take returns without a receipt?

And a Happy New Year!

Mike

According to the man himself this update was expected to impact 0.6% of search results.

Is the Exact-match domain algo live in the UK yet?

It doesn’t look like it… yet! But I’d expect it to roll out once any initial tweaks are made.

How do I (kind of) know this? Because Matt Cutts said so. Kind of!

So, if he believes US only – so do I! This seems to be backed up by several comments across blog posts including this on the SEOMoz blog:

BUT… As Elliott Richmond of Square One Web and Design said to me earlier this evening on Linkedin, if you’re a UK business with .com exact match domain with hosting in the US you may have been affected . In conclusion, best to check your analytics and the SERPs! But it’s only a matter of time if you’ve been falsely riding high on an exact match domain factor alone.

How many sites have been affected?

The best summary I’ve read so far comes from SEOMOZ’s Dr Pete. His post shows a fairly sizeable impact in graph form.

Basically 41 of 1,000 exact-match domains in his tracked list fell out of the top 10 in search engine results BUT none of these previously ranked no.1 for the exact-match term.

It’s too early to say what the full impact is and whether this is the first in a series of similar updates (a la Penguin and Panda) but if your exact-match domain is full of quality content with a good back link profile as a natural result you should be fine. Hopefully!

Let me know if you’re UK based and have an exact-match domain that’s been impacted. I should probably declare I have two low level affiliate sites in the jewellery sector with exact-match domains which haven’t been impacted as yet.

Finally, two more good round-ups below:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-emd-update-15776.html

http://searchengineland.com/low-quality-exact-match-domains-are-googles-next-target-134889

The one-day digital conference features a range of digital marketing specialists speaking about a range of areas – from mobile to paid search campaign optimisation.

I’ll be adding updates on useful tips and advice shared by speakers every half hour or so – just hit the refresh button for the latest updates!

Bit of an epic post…

First up… René Power, Business Development Director & Head of Digital, BDB

“It’s not how big it is, it’s what you do with it” – Best practice B2B social media strategy

Recommended reading: Permission Marketing by Seth Godin (2002) – ten years’ old but rules still apply today.

As business marketers we struggle for best practice and good advice on social media. Fundamentally it is about doing things that are relevant to your audience.

Why companies suck at social?

• Not being relevant to their audience
• Not being engaging or exciting
• All broadcast and not segmenting messages by platform i.e. same message on Facebook, Twitter etc.

A sale = story x passion + trust divided by time! Tell your story with conviction over time.

Stop thinking about yourself, start thinking about your customer – marketing 101 but often forgotten in real business situations.

Credibility factors can be clearly displayed through word of mouth and social. These factors are increasingly important towards the end of the buying process. Therefore social media even more crucial for products or services with long buying process.

Recommended website: If you don’t already check Hubspot please do! Great source of inbound marketing tips.

Rene introduces his CARE acronym to remember key factors in social: Content, Audience, Relevance, and Evaluation.

Content – how do we want to be perceived?
Audience - who do we want to associate with
Relevance - what are important issues to your audience?
Evaluation - measure and track success. Not just likes and RTs but harder business metrics too.

Check out more on this model in Dave Chaffey and Rene’s upcoming book on B2B digital marketing. Link to follow!

Think about your customers watering holes! Where do they congregate, what do they discuss etc.

Don’t forget the importance of curation alongside content creation. Be seen as the expert by funneling advice and expertise from others.

5 steps to curation…

1 – Get Google reader
2 – Visit namechk.com and get set-up
3 – Set up your big 5 – Linkedin, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc
4 – Set up Hootsuite
5 – Check Google Reader – schedule daily updates

As a useful starting point audit what content you already have and make the most of it.

Map your content to buyer needs. Set objectives and select different tools for different audience types.

Build a suitable content hub for all of this content.

Amplification – the big five social platforms deliver search optimisation, brand amplification and audience.

Video is still a massive and underestimated tool for B2B.

Google Plus still a slow burner but greater profile and ranking likely to be given to content from users on the platform over time.

“Facebook a slow burn for B2B” (Really? Anyone else got any good examples of B2B doing it well?)

Measuring social media… Loads of measures – check the slides above!

Takeaways from the presentation -

• Think about helping first!
• Turn this in to useful actionable content
• Research where audience goes
• Repackage, repurpose materials
• Stop talking, start listening!

Follow @renepower for more of this great stuff.

Next up Ringo Moss…

Product visualisation – Telling product stories
Ringo Moss, Production Director, Nerv

What is product visualisation? Visual demonstration of product. Important as 90% of brain’s retention is visual.

65% of people are visual learners.

Crikey, it’s hard to live blog about Hedonic indexes, interesting but complex stuff!

Importance of interactivity online to get products virtually in to the hands of potential customers.

If you can’t actually touch product what do you do? Ringo uses the ‘Miracle of life insurance’ campaign to illustrate how you can increase engagement with he most intangible of products by telling stories impactfully.

Second mention today already of the importance of video. Viewed video increases conversion by 40%. Other stats show that a video on page can increase conversion even if it isn’t watched by the visitor!

Sometimes technical gimmicks can just get in the way, even if they’re a beautiful piece if work – Heinz augmented reality recipe app used as example.

Don’t shoehorn technical gimmickery in to digital packages for the sake of it. They need to add something for the user.

Technological gimmickery to look out for… Leap Motion - will allow us to control TV with our hand movements for just $70. Will work with any screen to create virtual touch screen. Will have interactive ad benefits in the future.

Adding a bit of magic helps your customers forget how much money they’re spending (look in to my eyes, look in to my eyes…

Summary – Use digital to persuade psychologically, use touch, storytelling and neuro linguistics where possible.

Follow @ringomoss for more info on this kind of awesomeness.

Mobile Technology – The Experiential Revolution – why experience is the new holy grail for marketing
Grégory Roekens, Chief Technology Officer, Wunderman

So far, we’ve established a crowd of digital people have lots of devices. I suspected as much when trying to upload the last update via the wi-fi!

First use of Prezi of the day so far!

“Mobile devices are a fixture of an overall journey. The mobile element is the experience”

“Connected users want connected experiences.”

Tim Berners-Lee responsible for enabling the experiential revolution!

Example of Domino Pizza’s tracker functionality which enables you to check whether they’ve burnt your pizza yet.

Lots of recent UI developments… E.g. Siri using machine learning via user validation to improve user experience.

And A.I developments too… Recommended reading- Jeff Hawkins – “On Intelligence”. Some amazing examples of AI and UI making virtual reality a reality.

Prezi sea sickness ahoy!

The only senses missing from iPhone are smell and taste.

Shift from search engines to ‘Do engines’.  Technology now capable of providing us all with a virtual PA.

Two useful knowledge delivering tools to try…
- Qwiki.com
- Relfinder dpbedia.org- visually experience the data web!

New rules for marketing – 4 Ps becoming 4 Es!

New layer of Maslow hierarchy – Peak experience. Progression of economic value from services to staged experiences.

Ever growing importance of Customer Experience Management – from CRM to CEM.

Brand is simply customer experience over time. Personalisation key. Be Unique!

You need creative technologists in your business to build the best interface you can.

Summary – Experience is the new holy grail. Data has a currency. there’s a shift from search engines to ‘Do Engines’ taking place right now.

Link Development – how to attract and generate the right links
Lisa Myers, CEO, Verve Search

Still some search loopholes being exploited despite Penguin and Panda Updates e.g. article spinning still prevalent.

SEO and social continuing to merge closer. Examples of Tasty Placement and SEOMoz research in to impact of social signals on natural ranking.

Rel= author the biggest change to search recently. Fundamental shift from website importance to author importance.

Big reveal…. The best tool in search is… Your brain! No substitute for creativity.

Don’t restrict yourself to a certain type of content or link development e.g. Clothes retailers can talk about more than fashion.

SEO link builiding is not a tech role, it’s a creative one and will become more so.

Recommended tools to use… Linkdex

Use to analyse anchor text, depth of links (now even more important with algorithm changes), type of links, strength of links etc.

Analyse the DNA of the types of links your competitors use

Link Prospecting

• An area many in-house SEOs struggle with
• Analyse competitor links BUT you need different ones too!

Some useful free tools to try here … mangiamarketing.com/free-link-building-tools

Creative and Development

• First stop should be utilising existing relationships. It can sometimes be the biggest tool you have! Target partner organisations, associations etc. A definite quick win.
• Which university did your CEO, founder or MD go to? Approach them with a case study of how the course helped with their success for a quality .ac.uk link or similar!
• Propose a case study for partner organisations in return for a link

Avoid recipricol link exchanges! It’s  equivalent to exchanging a pint – you don’t end up with any more beer! (although thanks to @addyjoe for pointing out you might be a little bit up on the deal if you bought yourself a cheaper pint.)

Avoid low level directories – use in small doses only!

Link baiting:

• Create great digital content. Very closely related to social media, the two need to work together.
• Great link building has to stem from a great idea
• Infographics are great link bait – but they have to be useful
• Use infographics to explain complex topics simply. BUT always include an embed code to get the full SEO link benefit.
• Run competitions which require user generated content
• Give something back – create relevant, useful content

Find sites you want to ge a link from and then write them content rather than tryin to place content you’ve already created.

The biggest sites aren’t always the most difficult to get the link from – if you have the right quality
content for their audience

Try adding discounts to university sites – you might not just get the .edu or .ac.uk link but also real sales!

Think long term relationship building, don’t just chase short term links.

Great presentation from Lisa, a whirlwind tour of the state of search and what you need to know. Follow @LisaDMyers for more.

Video – How to harness video to gain serious competitive advantage in any market
Tracy Thomas, Owner & Founder of Saucy Horse

#wififail! Can never rely on venue wi-fi for videos it seems…

Video can help place your potential customer where you want them to be to help encourage them to take the action you desire them to.

Video creates a halo of trust and credibility around your business.

Video leads to more time on websites which increases the chances of the user taking the positive action you want them to.

Examples of using video on single minded landing pages alongside data capture form to aid conversion.

Video doesn’t have to break the bank – and you’ll have plenty of tracking to evidence it’s impact.

Stat alert! You are 53 times more likely to appear on page one of Google (Forrester research).

(Lot’s of debate on that stat in the room many feeling it’s a bit of a #madeupstat! – I kind of agree, would like to see where it came from and a bit of context…)

Action points

• Clearly define your call to action on your website. What is the reason for video?
• Then use video to drive the action
• You don’t have a YouTube channel?! Seriously, get one!

Quick, duck here comes another stat… 400 tweets per minute contain a Youtube link.

Unsure of what videos to create for your Youtube channel? Simply make videos of your most frequently asked questions. It may even come across better if unscripted – how simple is that!

You can set-up a channel in an hour! Do it!

BUT always optimise your video so people can “encounter your brand through a side door.”

Video for mobile – More than 20% of Youtube videos are accessed from mobile. Make sure your website is mobile optimised.

Video mistakes to avoid
1 – Don’t talk about yourself!
2 – Consider getting your script written by a professional. There’s a skill to getting it right.
3 – Get the audio and picture quality right!

Sales pitch for corporate video brochures… (I’m not convinced by these tbh!)

DollarShaveClub gets another mention, well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. The presenter’s company have done a bit of a rip-off of it for a company in Weston on Youtube here.

Summary

• Incorporate video in your strategy, it’s not difficult!
• It doesn’t have to be more expensive than other activity – but measure it!
• Focus on the quality contents your customers want.

Next up Mike Essex on paid search, should be good…

How to spend less and sell more with Paid Search
Mike Essex, Online Marketing Manager, Koozai Ltd

Full slide deck here…

Myth 1 – you don’t need paid search if you have organic SEO

• You need both. And SEO isn’t free – how very dare you!
• Paid search hasn’t changed anywhere near as much as SEO – a more stable and reliable environment if managed correctly
• Increasingly difficult for unknowing public to identify which results are paid and which are natural on first page of SERPs.

Myth 2 – Default settings are ideal for new accounts

• In reality the default settings from Google are set to maximise your spend!
• Don’t trust broad match (really, don’t!!!) – make sure your exact match is set if you’re new!
• Ensure you set-up negative keywords correctly and update regularly. Expect to have more negative than positive keywords as you sell less types of product than you don’t
• Rotate adverts evenly rather than leaving Google in charge of your spend.
• Add at least 2 new ads every 90 days or Google will pick which of your ads to run! Naughty, naughty Google…

Myth 3 – Companies at top of Adwords pay more

• Not true – it’s not just a traditional bid system… Quality score is the key
• To improve click through rate: write appealing ads, use ad extensions and site links, look at competitor ad wording and improve on it!
• Regularly remove poorly performing ads, test everything and view your change history
• Relevancy factors – target locations you sell to, only target devices your site actually works on. If your site renders terribly on mobile why waste spend!
• Focus on small ad groups of 2-3 keywords per group and write ads for those keywords. Then split-test ads to see which is more effective.
• Keyword relevancy – experiment with match types, use negative keywords and specific landing pages. A/B test to see which is more effective

Myth 4 – Paid search and SEO are connected

• BUT good SEO approaches can help aid paid search campaigns – apply same principles e.g. good page headers and a page per topic etc
• Keep content clear and focused

Recommended tool… SpyFu - spy on competitor keyword tools! See when they bid on terms and an indication of how much they paid. SpyFu Kombat shows you visually a comparison of competitor paid search spend.

Pro Tip 1… When using Google Keyword Tool, if you don’t want a keyword added to your campaign add it as a negative! There should be no waste in keyword research. (Love it!)

Pro Tip 2… If a page is converting well but not getting much traffic then try running a paid campaign targeted to the page.

Another tool… Adwords Editor - allows you to set-up accounts in Excel before importing to Adwords.

Pro Tip 3… Use a simple ‘find and replace’ to update keywords in Excel for mass changes quickly.

Try SEOgadget Adwords API extension.

Myth 5 – The display network isn’t effective

• Example of a property company displaying impactful images of hotels rather than plain old boring text ads!
• Make it personal with a remarketing campaign placing the exact searched product in the ad
• Remarketing only costs when people click – realistically the next time people click it’s because they’ll buy it!

BIG STAT! Retargeted customers are 70% more likely to buy.

Download the slides at the Koozai website!

Great presentation from @koozai_mike there.

Reputation Management and Page 1 Domination in a Digital Age
Samantha Noble, Digital Marketing Director, Koozai

Reputation Management

• Example of BT’s response to the oil leak and Primark’s reaction to exposure of poor supplier conditions – both responded with websites full of useful, social friendly content to try and change perceptions.
• Interflora named as example of a corporate Twitter account completely ignoring negative comments and just pumping out one way promotional messages.

Acknowledge and reward those talking positively about your brand online.

Brand Monitoring

• Monitor negative and positive comments, competitors etc.
• Wow, only about 5% of people in the room are monitoring their brand – a scarily small percentage
• Identify which specific sites to regularly monitor as well as the big social platforms.

Some useful tools… Brandseye - online reputation management tool, costs around $500 pcm.

Free ones such as Google Alerts, TweetDeck and SocialMention also worth trying.

You can set-up useful tools in Google Analytics like negative brand search reports i.e. did anyone arrive at your site with brand name plus negative term.

Set alerts in Analytics so if percentage of traffic via brand terms increases significantly you can take a closer look.

Google+ Ripples now available directly in Analytics so you can see who is sharing your content.

2 really useful brand monitoring dashboards available free on the Koozai website.

Brand Protection

• Trademark your brand
• Claim your social media profiles before someone else does! If you haven’t already, use Knowem.com to register them all in one swoop!

Page one domination

• Do you know all the results that appear on page one of Google for your brand name search
• Example of KFC search results page often being full of negative news stories!
• Go through top 10 pages of results for your brand and pull out all of the positive results. Then do the same for your competitors and do a gap analysis.
• The top sites for brand results are in order: domains, wikipedia, news, financial, customers, social profiles, niche sites, vouchers, industry, video. In short lots of variety for you to optimise and dominate page one results for your brand searches proactively!

Google now often showing just 7 results on page one for branded searches

If you own or control sites with positive comments about your brand but they rank on page 2 or 3 for your brand searches, optimise them for search to improve how they rank and bump more negative results.

Summary

• Take control
• Understand your brand mentions
• Protect your brand
• Be seen in a good light!

The Ultimate Guide To Search Marketing Tools
Stephen Lock, Digital Producer, GPMD

Slides now available at www.slideshare.net/stevejlock

Steve well known for Analytics SEO, and involved in SEO pack for Magento.

Check out Distilled’s Excel course for SEOs and ImportXML guide for Google Docs.

Also check ImportXML cookbook from Seer Interactive and Daniel Butlers Hot Content Tool.

There are literally too many useful tools being mentioned here for me to keep up with now so I strongly recommend checking out the slides!

Extending Your Reach – Building your community for business benefit
Jon Payne, Founder & Technical Director, Noisy Little Monkey

The final presentation of the day from Jon is now available here.

So, when Marketing Gloucester recently launched their Believe in Gloucester campaign – aimed at promoting pride in our City and all it has to offer – I jumped at the chance to help.

I suggested an infographic might be a good way to help raise awareness of the campaign locally and set about creating one. And here it is!

From random facts to Gloucester’s  top Twitter users, hopefully there’s something in there of interest to you. Please spread the word about the campaign by tweeting about it or adding the infographic below to your own site by simply copying and pasting the code below the Gloucester infographic.

Thanks!

Gloucester, the Infographic – part of the Believe in Gloucester campaign by Marketing Gloucester

Embed Gloucester, the Infographic on your site: Simply copy and paste the code below

<br /> <img src=”http://www.threereasons.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/big-infographic-final-revised-MO.png” mce_src=”http://www.threereasons.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/big-infographic-final-revised-MO.png” width=”540″></p> <p>Gloucester, the Infographic – part of the <a href=”http://believeingloucester.com” mce_href=”http://believeingloucester.com”>Believe in Gloucester</a> campaign by Marketing Gloucester</p> <p>

Infographic designed by ThreeReasons.co.uk

It’s too early to say who the main winners and losers are but I’ll aim to get a summary post of any recommended practical tips ASAP.

In the mean time, if you don’t know your Google Penguin from your Google Panda, here’s a useful summary infographic:

Difference between Google Penguin & Panda Infographic by Reload Media

Read the full post over at 10 Yetis blog.

The key highlights for me are that Google is continuing its trend of making improvements to focus on:

• Freshness of content
• Quality of content
• and, perhaps most interestingly, more playing around with the relevance of anchor text.

Freshness – stale pages are toast!

The update describes the introduction of:

“More precise detection of old pages.  This change improves detection of stale pages in our index by relying on more relevant signals. As a result, fewer stale pages are shown to users.”

There’s also a change to improve determination of the date of blog and forum posts.

Action: So, you know that page on your site that drives a steady flow of visits each month? The one you last updated in 2010? Don’t you think you’d better update it!

Panda continues to reject poor quality bamboo

Once again Project Panda gets a mention! The update states that:

“Like many of the changes we make, aspects of our high-quality sites algorithm depend on processing that’s done offline and pushed on a periodic cycle.”

“We launched an improvement to freshness late last year that was very helpful, but it cost significant machine resources. At the time we decided to roll out the change only for news-related traffic. This month we rolled it out for all queries.”

Action: Stop  pretending your site has some quality bamboo to satisfy the Panda’s increasingly well trained palate and actually create some!

Anchors away?

For me, the change I’m watching closest is the ongoing shifts in anchor text signals. These were also mentioned in Google’s update in late February but a theme now seems to be appearing.

The update specifically refers to:

“Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.”

So not particularly specific there then! But it continues:

“This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text. Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.”

Action: Google is obviously getting better at detecting unnatural anchor text links. I for one plan to be less reliant on them and focus more on the quality of the site (and the page) linking to my sites rather than chasing a high percentage of exact match anchor text links.

Recommended reading:

SEOMoz had a useful whiteboard session on the next generation of link signals beyond exact match anchor text – check it out!

Read the full update from Google for more. And let me know your initial thoughts on the changes by leaving a comment.

+Mike Overthrow

Not one to miss out on a new(ish) trend we set about creating a hard hitting, timely, newsworthy and relevant infographic of our own.

We’ve researched our market, checked our facts and come up with this beauty.

Please note - we’ve not created this to just give you something pretty to drool over. No, we want a link from your site to it. Do it. Now!

Yes, the good old EU Cookie directive. The legislation comes in in May this year.

“You! Yes you – with your hands over your ears – I said MAY THIS YEAR!”

And if you’re wondering which are the four UK websites which have had the foresight to realise that May is definitely actually a real month in the 2012 calendar they appear in this useful post.

Want to see a compliant site in practice? Have a look at what happens when you visit goodie-two-shoes Delia Smith’s website

Want to know more? Really? Contact us and we’ll tell you what we know.