What’s the alternative to Facebook & Instagram?
It’s a question I am being asked a lot at the moment – is there an alternative to Facebook & Instagram for our business? There are a few reasons that businesses are asking this question.
Content plan
How Bluebird Care smash it at SEO
Bluebird Care ranks highly for competitive keyword terms around home care. They have achieved this by implementing a comprehensive digital strategy. This includes technical optimisation and user experience. They’ve improved content, local search results and integrated marketing. Here’s how they ‘smash it’ at SEO. User-centric website design This was not an overnight change. Bluebird Care … Read more
Home care marketing
The home care market in the UK is highly competitive. And in highly competitive markets, marketing has to be stronger to increase prospective client trust and drive growth. That’s the primary goal of home care marketing. There are an estimated 12,500 registered providers and the majority of these are in England (Policy Bee). Thousands of … Read more
How can I use Facebook ads to target local customers?
Finding customers local to your business is essential to making it a success. Without customers you cannot make a profit and stay in business. I will explore how to use Facebook ads to target local customers. I do this every day for a number of local service based businesses. TL;DR Target locals Facebook Ads Manager … Read more
Why am I seeing a drop in new client enquiries?
Interesting one this. It’s a health clinic that was managing to grow client enquiries year on year for the last few years but they’ve seen a drop in new client enquiries in the last year. There could be any number of reasons for this, which I will explore. TL;DR? Health clinic marketing Firstly, what is … Read more
The most common mistakes made when measuring the success of SEO
There are a few common mistakes I see made when measuring the success of SEO campaigns and ongoing work. Focusing only on search engine rankings Don’t get me wrong. Ranking is important and everyone wants to be in that top three for search terms but ranking is not the only measurement of success for SEO. … Read more
Measuring the success of seo strategy
Measuring the success of SEO strategy is the only way to know whether what the SEO consultant is doing is effective. These are the metrics that will make the difference to your bottom lines as a business. They need to align with your overall business goals. Factors for measuring the success of SEO strategy: These … Read more
8 of the most common problems businesses face on social media
I’m letting you into some secrets. Here are 8 of the most common problems businesses face on social media. They are access, budgets, resources, reach & engagement, negative reactions, positioning and tracking. The problems businesses face on social media If you ask me, one of the most common problem businesses face on social media is … Read more
How to sell handmade furniture on social media
Selling online can be difficult in a competitive marketplace like the handmade furniture market. The price, positioning and product itself will impact on the income. But despite these factors you can still make a healthy income from selling online. Here are some tips for how to sell handmade furniture on social media. Inspire interiors Take … Read more
My inbox is full
My inbox is full of emails from Pay4Later, Paypal and Channel Advisor regarding Singles Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday with tips on how to use email marketing to maximise the benefit of these key retail dates and gain those extra sales. It’s also full of the eCommerce retailers that I have signed up for … Read more
Know your panda from your penguin?
I was asked recently to explain the difference between these two algorithm changes made by Google in 2011 and 2012 respectively. Panda, named after a Google engineer, was designed to root out real content. It was no longer enough to stuff a bunch of keywords onto a page to achieve page one ranking. Google got … Read more
We have no marketing plan
Two of my customers, reasonably sized companies turnover in the millions, have no marketing plan, nor any kind of digital strategy that I have been able to unearth. Maybe it’s because they also don’t have a marketing manager, like a lot of businesses*? They do a bit of this with this company and so and … Read more
We want Twitter/ Facebook/ Google+/ Instagram/ Pinterest/ Linkedin…
“We want social on our site”, I get told. My first question is why? Does your target market hangout on Google? Is Facebook suitable for your B2B business? What are you hoping to gain from being on these platforms – sales, brand recognition, customer support? What type of social works on your website? I can … Read more
Copywriting woes
A friend of mine is a freelance copywriter and she has just taken part in a survey of UK copywriters, most of whom were grumbling about the state of the industry. It seems that a copywriter suffers from the same problem that a graphic designer does, the customer often thinks they know better than the … Read more
Employee training on the web
An awful lot of business owners, especially small business owners who are too busy to do it themselves, delegate ‘the website’ to the nearest employee. This can be a good thing or a bad thing and depends on the competence and interest level of the person involved. Early adopters A computer savvy youngster might not … Read more
Content for mobile
LOVE the article by Dan Scott for econsultancy about golden rules for responsive web design as he mentions content first for mobile (also because it talks about hierarchy of content, but that’s another post). So many times the website gets to content ready stage and the content doesn’t fit the design or no-one has thought … Read more