We’ve been working with Complete Driveway Designs – a Bury based pattern imprinted concrete driveway company – for a couple of years now. And in that time our services have had a definite, measurable impact on the effectiveness of their web presence; thanks to our Web Analytics supported SEO and PPC work, they’re now getting conversions and qualified leads for approximately 10% of what they were paying before we got involved.

In the time we’ve been working for Complete Driveway Designs, we’ve built up an excellent understanding of their work, their business, and their goals. This is something we do with every one of our clients; it’s the only way to achieve sustainable results.

The longer we’ve worked with Complete Driveway Designs, the more we’ve come to identify with the skills they use when they’re installing pattern imprinted concrete driveways. Like, for example:

• A professional attention to detail.
• An excellent understanding of the capabilities of different specialised tools.
• An appreciation of client’s needs.
• A willingness to put the effort in.
• Pride in the end result.

Despite the differences in the services we offer, at a core level we’re very similar.

We’d be interested to hear what values other agencies and freelancers feel they share with their clients: leave a comment and let us know.

The dashboard is the first screen you see once you’ve logged in to Google Analytics. It’s an overview page, and it displays a number of reports. You can choose which reports you want to be displayed; this means that it’s possible to set up an Analytics Dashboard that presents you with key analytical business information as soon as you log on.

A well set out, well thought-through dashboard will give you a general idea of your website’s performance through bounce rates etc, important business metrics like conversion rates, and any anomalies. Then, if something catches your eye, you can drill down to get more detailed information.

You can incorporate any of your analytics reports into your dashboard by clicking on the ‘Add to Dashboard’ tab within your Google Analytics. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve been concentrating on SEO (always a good idea!) and want to track bounce rates for visitors generated by a certain keyphrase. Find the relevant report in analytics, add it to your dashboard, and it’ll be one of the first things you see next time you log on.

Some Tips:

• Don’t swamp yourself with too much information. You can have a maximum of twelve dashboard elements; use them wisely.
• Clear Identification of your business’s key metrics should dictate which reports you prioritise. Picking reports that represent your website’s goal completion rates is a good place to start.
• Remember that each of your websites or businesses may require different dashboards to show key data.
• Different analytics users need personalised dashboards so each person sees the information that’s relevant to their role.

You can add and remove new reports with ease. And, when it’s necessary, you should. Over time your business will develop, and your use of analytics will become more sophisticated. Remember that the dashboard is customisable for a reason: don’t miss an opportunity to keep tabs on relevant information, and don’t be afraid of streamlining your dashboard.

It’s a reaction to the ever-increasing amount of content on the web. The official Google blog explains it like this:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index.

What does this mean for potential developments in the SERPs that Caffeine will allow Google to develop? We’ve seen the inclusion of video and real time search. Is this going to lead to more complex SERPs, moving further away from Google’s original design simplicity?

By altering their SERP generation process to reflect the rate at which content is being published, Google have made it more important than ever – and easier than ever – to drive traffic to your site via updating your content.

At Moo we’re well aware of the results that can be achieved through well optimised, well written content. Caffeine isn’t going to massively revolutionise SEO; it’s a reflection of the importance that Google – and its users – place on “fresh” content. Quality and quantity aren’t mutually exclusive, and all SEO strategies need to be user-focussed; Caffeine consolidates the importance of good SEO content.

Implications? Well, the difference between visits to social and search sites isn’t exactly huge; social sites are currently 0.55% more popular than search engines when you compare percentage of total UK internet visits. Of course, every leading edge can be leveraged, and 0.55% of total UK internet visits is still a potentially significant amount of traffic. Search engines are still receiving 11.33% of total UK internet visits, a more than healthy amount.

While Facebook is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, there’s still no Google-equivalent amongst the social networks. Facebook’s share of social network visits is 55%. Whilst that’s impressive, it’s nowhere near the market domination that Google has achieved. Facebook is making some big steps interconnecting with other social networks, and diversifying its functions into areas like ecommerce. This latter development could have massive implications, but it’s still early days; we’ll be looking into it in more detail in a forthcoming blog.

Social network users are there to interact with each other and with organisations and brands. Hence the opportunities for brand exposure and customer relations that make social networks an important arena for businesses.

As surfing habits change, it’s important to redeploy your strategy where potential customers spend their time, whether that’s users looking for engagement on a social network, or within search engine results. More than ever, ensuring that there’s cohesion between your social strategy and your search strategy is important. There’s a need for a coherent brand message and targeting across both.

There’s significant change in the way people are using the internet. Social networks and blogs are taking up the majority of time spent online. The growing focus on information sharing and interaction between users and the sites they visit is clearly reflected in UKOM’s report.

What does this information mean for the online marketing industry? An increase in web use means there’s more potential for engaging with visitors. Well, although UKOM’s figures might seem distressing at first, showing a relative 3% fall in the use of search engine websites, there’s a concurrent 10% increase in the use of portals, which increasingly incorporate their own search functions. Think Yahoo!, MSN’s integration of Bing on its homepages, the increasing ubiquity of iGoogle… People are using the web more, so they’re using search more, they’re just getting used to having search come as part of their portal.

It’s the increasingly social nature of web use that presents the biggest opportunities in our industry. Brands and businesses – i.e. our existing clients and our future clients – need to react to this change, and we need to be there to offer them the skill-sets and the tools that meet their needs.

It’s in the interests of the search platforms to facilitate effective advertising and marketing, hence Google’s quick response to changes in web use (Content network remarketing, for example). It’s in our interest, and the interests of our competitors, to do a number of things:

• Continue to develop our analytics methodology so we can deliver actionable insights within a changing online environment.
• Adapt our use of advertising platforms so we’re always exploiting the opportunities that will benefit our clients.
• Ensure that we continue to deliver best-practice SEO which is always centred on the visitor.

We’re well up for it.

Does anyone have any other opinions on what UKOM’s report indicates for our industry? Leave a comment and share your insight.

Focus on what you want to say, and work out how you’re going to say it. If you’re struggling, there’s a treasure trove of advice on numerous blogs and websites dedicated to the business of SEO copywriting. They all agree on the basics…

Keep in mind your client’s needs, identify the correct tone for your copy, and be ready to edit and redraft.

It’s at this editing and redrafting stage that you should really focus on your keywords and keyphrases. Copy that fits your client’s needs should be easy to optimise. Exact match keywords (brand name, product name, etc) should be in place already. A review will throw up opportunities to balance keyword density, removing them from areas where they seem too numerous, and fitting them in where there’s the opportunity.

The kind of long-tail keyphrases that can significantly improve your search reach may not have appeared fully formed in your copy. Some research, however, should identify related words and common queries that existing/potential visitors are combining with your keywords when they search. Alter your existing copy to include these phrases; you should be able to identify opportunities for placing them in a way that benefits your copy. Keep it balanced, with the focus on communication, but don’t be shy about using your keywords.

Remember that when you’re using keywords and keyphrases, you’re communicating with your visitors using the same language they’ve used to find you. They expect to see your client’s name, the name of their product or service, and so on. It’s an SEO copywriter’s job to repeat without seeming repetitive; it’s every copywriter’s job to engage, persuade and communicate.

The need for content strategy comes from the changing ways in which people use the web. Visitors have come to expect more from your website than a simple storefront. Which means you need to be providing content that’ll engage and inform your visitors, at the same time as being as SEO friendly as possible.

It’s time to think about quality and quantity. Regularly updated content featuring relevant information as well as relevant keywords; that’s what’s going to win you links, retain visitors, drive conversions and get return on your investment. Tailoring content for the “long-tail” keywords and phrases that reflect the language your customers use allows you to engage them in a dialogue; you’re capturing them early in their buying cycle and building your brand at the same time.

Keep supplying that kind of content and not only are you more likely to get conversions from existing visitors, you’ll also increase your search engine ranking. That’ll bring more people to your site, who’ll engage with that content and pay you back in more links and more conversions.

Content strategy and SEO are a long-term investment; dedicate enough time to them and it should result in you being able to reassess your PPC campaigns and redistribute your advertising spend. Early content strategy and SEO work can be balanced by driving traffic with PPC. The quality content on your website will persuade visitors captured via PPC towards conversion, whilst simultaneously increasing your search engine listings.

Targeting and capitalising on exact term matches with PPC whilst optimising for broader terms in your content helps you to avoid common difficulties with on-page keyword density, and makes your content more readable. The quantifiable nature of PPC traffic, plus the amount of user experience data available through Web Analytics, can be used to tweak your content strategy; it’s all work towards the same goal, conversions and listings.

A well thought through content strategy, combined with a similarly targeted PPC campaign and supported by insightful Web Analytics is a pretty dangerous combination. By employing a content strategy you’ll generate awareness by upping your profile, actively bring in more customers at an earlier stage in their buying cycle, and optimise your website for product categories and keywords. And here’s the kicker: however your visitors get to your website, whether through PPC or natural search, high quality content is persuasive content.

Simultaneously optimising your website for the search engines, improving your visitors’ user experience, and managing your brand?  Not to be sniffed at.

In actual fact any landing page should have been relevant to the key phrase already if a SEO strategy was in place, but for those obscure phrases and new landing pages it was emphases even more.

The new Dynamic Quality score works on a number of the same principles as before but it can utilise your landing page much more, with the ultimate goal of helping shoppers find the correct information, which in the long run should hopefully dynamically lower the over CPC and bounce rate for a PPC Campaign.

The Quality score now takes every phrase searched for and looks to the landing page to ensure that it is relevant to the searched phrase. It t hen will dynamically change the quality score, which in turn will adjust the position of the ad to ensure the end user is seeing the most relevant ads for their search. Because exact searches do not differ this will be most widely used on the broad match phrases.

Therefore to ensure that your quality score is at its best take advantage of the dynamic quality score by ensuring that all your landing pages are targeted to a not only your exact match phrase but to those phrase which might come along side your broad match phrases.

Spam affects both webmasters and web users in different ways. As a webmaster spam can become the bane of your online life taking up more and more time checking and deleting comments. This is necessary so that your website and brand do not get associated with the products, scams or views that spam articles often contain. As a website user you are forced to be more selective about which comments you read and this can also make following a thread or series of comments much harder if it is interspersed with spam. Users have different tolerance levels to the amount and kind of spam that they are willing to accept. This can also be different if the user is viewing a blog regularly or has come to the blog from a search engine looking for a specific solution to their query, as users looking for a solution are more likely to scan content and identify and ignore spam content quicker than a user that is reading all the comments since they last visited.

Ok so it is pretty much common sense that SPAM IS BAD, it eats away at administration time for the site and can negatively affect the sites brand. Users experience of the site is worse when there is spam so how can you cut it out. There a many ways on the web for cutting out spam comments the most effective way is to verify each post before allowing it to be published, but this can be very time consuming and can stop real time debates and discussions from users. You can implement a CAPTCHA ((C)ompletely (A)utomated (P)ublic (T)uring test to tell (C)omputers and (H)umans (A)part) where a word or phrase is converted to an image and distorted so that automated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs cannot solve them whilst humans can still read them. This approach cuts a lot of spam out but also makes the submission process more time consuming and incontinent to the most valuable users to the site, the ones are generating content for your site. Finding the best method for your site requires research and testing of the different methods that can be found on the web, but hopefully it will not be long before a solution is found that is less intrusive into the user’s experience. Our main strategies on this blog are a mathematical sum and comments are moderated by humans before they are published. What methods have you found to be most successful?

Well yesterday it seems that Google has finally rolled out another page rank update showing live stats on most of their data centres around the world. It can be estimated that the page rank is updated every 3 months but in this case it has been approximately 4 or a little over since a full update was taken out.

With the improvements over the last months in the Google webmaster tools allowing the viewing of back links not yet seen in the link:wwwmoomarketing.co.uk feature of Google. This has open doors to a more realistic view of how Google looks at a site, although to giving too much away.

Hopefully we will see more tools form Google i.e. when the next update is likely to happen, allowing web masters to set goals, but it must be said that the Page Rank does always mean that a site will appear above another we can never forgot the trusted site factor and must only use page rank as an estimate of how strong a site could be