A recent survey carried out in partnership between the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), reveals that in the past three years, UK Internet advertising spend has increased by £2 billion.
This growth shows no sign of abating and indicates that investment in online advertising will overtake spend on television by the end of 2009.
No real surprise there, but do you know by just how much Google is dominating the UK Internet landscape? Well, according to those well respected Analysts at Hitwise, the search behemoth now accounts for over one third of all Internet traffic in the UK through it’s major properties, e.g. Google.co.uk, Google.com, YouTube, Blogger etc., (Google delivers over a third of all UK traffic).
The co.uk and .com versions of the search engine even account for an amazing 87.7% of all UK searches. Putting this into context, in third place you’ll find Yahoo with just 2.85%.
The Hitwise article goes on to explore the impact of Google’s dominance considering the fact that Google will allow non-trademark owners to bid on trademarked terms within the UK from the 5th May 2008. In other words, from the beginning of next month, you will not be able to stop third parties bidding on your trademarked terms. Given the dominance of Google, this will have a major effect on many UK businesses. When compared to the US market where this is already the case, Hitwise estimate a potential drop of just under 8% in terms of traffic once competitors and affiliates are able to bid on trademarked terms, such as brands.
We’re in! The move was successful and we have now moved from our managed Regus offices in Whiteley, Fareham to our new premises in Park Gate, Southampton.
It has been a long slog to get all of the cat5 cabling, phone systems, servers and techie bits installed in time to enable a smooth move in but it couldn’t have gone better. We are now up and running without a minutes downtime so it’s business as usual.
So make sure you update your contact addresses for us (telephone numbers stay the same) and if you’re in the area why not pop in for a chat and say hi?
RedWasp Marketing Limited are a high-end b2b telemarketing company; whose growing client base consists of professionals such as Accountants, Solicitors, Insurance Brokers, Banks, I.T consultants and HR consultants.
We have been appointed as RedWasp Marketing’s search marketing partner; tasked to improve their online visibilty and increase the volume of web generated leads.
We are delighted to be working with RedWasp and we anticipate a successful campaign over the coming months.
Well, today is the last day in our present office with Regus (more on that later) before we move to our own premises. Our new offices are just a short way from Whiteley in Park Gate (near Southampton).
Our MD Ben has been busy getting the new building ready for us all and is already in talks for a new series called ‘Business Property Ladder’ with him playing the Sarah Beeny role.
We’re all looking forward to the move and settling in to our new offices.
Dolce V Ltd specialise in sourcing exclusive designer lingerie and beachwear from around the world; they want to raise their visibility across the major search engines in order to vastly improve online sales.
We are delighted to announce we have been appointed as Dolce V’s professional search marketing partner; and we are very much looking forward to working with them on this project.
e-Three Ltd are a spend management company; they want to raise their visibility across the major search engines in order to increase the volume of relevant web based enquiries they receive.
We are delighted to announce that we have been appointed as e-Three Ltd’s professional search marketing partner, and we are very much looking forward to working with them over the coming months.
I wrote a post back in February that highlighted social media marketing problems.
Now, eMarketer have just published an interesting article (UK Advertisers Shy From Social Networks) that takes data from a recent study conducted by SPA Research and Synovate.
The article refers to a number of major UK companies that have tried the social networks only to move away. No great surprises there as clearly this platform is not going to be appropriate for all-comers.
As with anything new online, there’s going to be a lot of hype surrounding the ‘next big thing’. When it comes to marketing, the same ‘old’ rules apply: Understand your market, your goals and test.
This is a very basic issue but one that we see crop up regularly.
Duplicate content, in very simple terms, is to be avoided. This could be a page that has been used elsewhere on your site or a very keen Webmaster buying every domain extension of your brand and replicating the content on each.
We sometimes have a situation where a client purchased a domain and then through a branding initiative or other strategic reason, have gone on to buy a second domain. This could be a different name or just a change of extension, e.g. .com to .co.uk.
Either way, if not properly managed, this could lead to duplicate content penalty and one or all sites could be negatively affected.
So what should you do? If you’re dealing with a potential issue of duplicate content within the same site, e.g. landing pages used for Pay per Click, these should be excluded from the natural search results by use of your robots.txt file.
If you have moved from ‘old.domain’ to ‘new.domain’ you should implement a 301 re-direct, i.e. permanent redirect in your .htaccess file. A 301 can also be used to manage ‘old.page’ to ‘new.page’ and acts basically as a sign-post informing the search engines that there has been a change. If used correctly, as well as re-directing the visitor to the correct destination, other factors such as in-bound links and search rankings should carry over to the new location.
There is an excellent article at Google Webmaster Central Blog that discusses dealing with duplicate content in more detail.
We are often asked to perform Search Engine Optimisation on sites that have little or no meaningful content, i.e. relevant text. Images are great but if you have a site and want to boost your natural rankings, you need to give the search engines a clue about your site’s purpose.
There’s much talk and spin about SEO copywriting but, for me personally, the very fact that ‘SEO’ and ‘copywriting’ get used in this context is a mistake.
If you are a website owner, you should focus on copywriting but not for SEO; you should create your content in the same way as any other marketing medium, i.e. for your visitors.
Having said that, here are a few pointers that you should consider when developing your web pages:
- Write naturally, i.e. the text should be created with the visitor in mind not SEO.
- Despite the reference to writing ‘naturally’, keywords that your page is about need to appear on the page. Sounds obvious? It is, but equally surprising how many times this has been over-looked.
- Use Header Tags, where appropriate. Break your paragraphs down with header tags which help with both your natural rankings and your visitors when they are reading the page.
- Internal linking helps with SEO, i.e. don’t use ‘Click Here’ or ‘More’ for internal hyperlinks. Try to use the title (or close variant) of the target page.
In summary, certainly think about the structure of your site and the way your content is developed but make sure you read it back. If it doesn’t flow naturally, consider changing. If you get tempted to ’stuff’ keywords in to your copy, don’t!
Perhaps a better question to ask would be, why wouldn’t you?
Many of our clients use our Google AdWords services simply because they don’t understand how Pay per Click works and take the pragmatic view that to get their campaign working well they could either go and study PPC or out-source to a company who specialise in search marketing and employ AdWords experts. We have 5 Qualified Professionals in Impact Media and the company is proud to be an AdWords Qualified Company.
Some of the accounts we manage and optimise have been wasting large sums of money regularly simply because the person who created the account didn’t understand the finer detail of assembling a campaign and how to make it effective.
As good as it is, AdWords is also deceptively simple to create an account, set-up a campaign, pop in a few keywords and add your first advert and lastly (but certainly not least!) update your billing details so your campaign can be activated (and Google paid). Then what? You look at your account the first day and see some impressions and a handle of clicks. Great! It’s working already. A week goes by and you’ve spent £200. This is the result of 400 clicks but have they been effective? How would you know? If the visits to your site were the wrong ones, how would you prevent it from happening again? How well did your ad copy perform? And so it goes on until you end up pausing your campaign, cursing Google and swearing that Pay per Click doesn’t work.
Using Google AdWords untrained is a bit like giving a car to someone who’s never driven and asking them to take a trip. They may get so far but it’s bound to end in tears!
We’re proud of our what we do and believe our professional AdWords services are a cost effective way for any UK business to maximise the return from their online marketing budget. We don’t tie anyone into a contract and even offer a free Pay per Click report for anyone wanting to have their current campaign assessed.
Taurus Beds have been making and selling wooden beds & furniture for almost 30 years; having been established in 1979.
As a company they are more than aware of the value that Online Marketing can bring to their overall marketing communications; it will give them global exposure within their target market 365 days a year. By not taking full advantage of the internet they know they are missing out on valuable opportunities, and loosing business to their rivals.
We have been appointed by Taurus Beds to implement a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign aimed at maximising their visibility to potential clients across the top search engines natural/organic rankings; and to increase the volume of highly targeted traffic visiting the site.
We are delighted to be working with Taurus Beds and we anticipate great success with their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) project.
OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA Examinations) is a leading UK awarding body; who require increased online exposure within their target market.
We are delighted to announce we have been appointed to work as OCR’s search marketing partner; and look forward to working with them on this project.
