Ok, so ‘Ad blocking should be banned’, maybe a little overdramatic, but Internet adverts are the primary source of revenue for most of the websites. The majority of sites are free to browse which is thanks to the advertisements displayed on the web pages. This model of the internet has been steady over the last two decades. As time goes by, ad companies have become more and more aggressive in their approach, and this has led to the use of ad-blocking software rising dramatically.

At the present time, if you open a web page, you are to likely to see many ads based on your browsing history, cookies and other private information. More annoyingly, many ads are merely deceiving, forcing the users to click on them to view the original content. No one will disagree that the digital ad business has now reached a point where the users find the ads an annoyance rather than useful.

This atmosphere has given birth to ad blockers. You just install software or a browser plug-in to block the ads from being displayed. This prevents the ads from displaying and also prevents hefty ads from eating up bandwidth and lets pages load faster. Ad blockers are gaining more and more popularity. From old players like ‘AdBlock Plus’ to Opera’s new, free built-in blocker. The rise of ad blockers is threatening the economic model that the internet is based on. For these reasons maybe ad blocking should be banned. Read more…..

During the Christmas break, I’ve been helping out Ivory Promise Brides in Bolton with their small business SEO strategy. Like a lot of small companies Ivory Promise have a WordPress website. They are selling designer wedding dresses from the likes of Pnina Tornai, Eve of Milady, Naama & Anat, Blue by Enzoani, Mon Cheri and Charlotte Balbier. 

I hadn’t heard of these designers before – but they are really impressive and there’s clearly a market here for affordable luxury. The shop are also offering competitive prices and exclusivity to the UK or Europe, so there is a clear value proposition. They have even had enquiries from Dubai where people will fly across the world to their shop in Bolton to see their exclusive dresses.

The first thing I did was try to define who the buyer persona is and then think about the appropriate channels, content and data in order to inform the digital marketing and SEO strategy. This is of course from our very own #Passion4Digital Buyer Persona Spring (shown below) from our book Digital and Social Media Marketing: A Results-Driven Approach. It’s ideal for Small business SEO strategy or indeed for larger companies!

I logged in to their WordPress dashboard and then looked at the data they have from their social media channels, Google Analytics and Google Search Console to start snooping around for data and insights.

What I found was that the site was driving a pretty reasonable amount of traffic, but not really generating many enquiries or conversions. The majority of users are female between the ages of 25-54 and generally from the UK. They were browsing the site usually on mobile (60%).

Analytics shows that the buyer persona is female, age 25-54 and usually on a mobile from the UK

I’ve also recently been reading the excellent book E-Commerce Website Optimization: Why 95% of Your Website Visitors Don’t Buy, and What You Can Do About it. Ivory Promise isn’t an ecommerce site in that, it doesn’t sell through the website, so the goal is to generate interest and enquiries. That said, there are a lot of useful insights in the book around user experience, copy optimisation and testing. Basically, the book advocates testing and subtle changes, which can make a big difference.

I formulated a list of things for improvement such as:

• Install the Yoast plugin for SEO and use to optimise pages
• Do some keyword research using Keyword Planner and Search Console
• Split the product pages up so that each could be SEO optimised
• Create unique titles and meta descriptions based on keyword research
• Create and encourage more external links including from social media, suppliers and others
• Make sure the pages are mobile friendly, no errors and explore AMP (accelerated mobile pages) through an AMP plugin
• Add a contact form and make the contact page clearer and linked from key pages and AMP
• Take into account the buyer persona in terms of use and behaviour
• Added a goal in Analytics for the contact page and derived keywords used, demographics, traffic etc.
• Various other tweaks, copy changes and others
• Sat down with the client and talked them through the changes and what needs doing on an ongoing basis

Pleased to say, soon after the changes were made, page views have doubled and the shop had a record day for enquiries through the website. Still much work to do – but I think this goes to show that some small changes can make a big difference. It is still a work in progress of course, but shows that you don’t need to spend a fortune, sometimes some small tweaks and attention can make a difference. Have you got any similar experiences or thoughts about small business SEO? We also run short face to face or distance courses in Search and Social Media Marketing. Please Drop me a line on any of this, I’d love to hear from you!

Corporate reputation, corporate reputation management and online reputation management are all becoming familiar terms to the world’s largest companies and their leaders. We at Reputation Consultancy are helping them to make sense of them all.

As they come to terms with the consequences of digital communications; with a new generation of connected and engaged stakeholders and with the rapid speed of online conversations, the appetite to understand, measure and manage online reputations has never been so strong.

And many are struggling.

From the corporate reputations of the FTSE 250 and the Fortune 500 to the local electrician at the end of your street, businesses across the world are waking up to the fact that reputation can make or break a brand and a business, in hours. Knowing how best to manage and measure that reputation in a digital world is now crucial for sustained success.

Read more…..

All entrepreneurs have a dream of starting a business, watching it grow and making their millions, but to do that in this day and age without using the internet would almost unthinkable. 

The internet is a global phenomenon with an estimated 3.2 BILLION users. 45.9 Million in the UK alone, 89.8% of the population!

If that isn’t the perfect playground for entrepreneurs I really don’t know what is. Nothing even comes close to the reach the internet has.

The internet can be used in almost every aspect of an entrepreneur’s journey to success. The thought that you can come up with an idea, check to see if there is a market, find someone to develop/produce your idea, then sell it to a potential customer base in the billions without even leaving the comfort of your own home never ceases to amaze me.

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I started this course because I wanted to learn how to utilise the Internet and social media to start selling any kind of product or service… The problem was I didn’t know what I wanted to sell, so I just began brainstorming. It was very daunting and I was really nervous as I thought I would never have a chance in the industries that I was interested in. To top it off, my computer skills were very basic and I had never used any social media platforms before. So, I just started googling SEO courses in Manchester and guess what…

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I wanted to start by covering 2 of the most common questions searched online according to results on www.answerthepublic.com: What is SEO? What is a great SEO strategy for my business? and relate them to the experiences I’ve had with a friend and colleague who runs her own online business.

Please let me know in the comments below if you find this helpful or like and share the post with your social media.  This blog follows my completion of the Search and Social Media Marketing course at The University of Salford.

What is SEO?

First of all, SEO means Search Engine Optimisation and describes how we take your business and increase your rankings on a search engine such as Google or Bing.  The aim is to bring the listing for your website or physical store to the top of the search results and ultimately increase your business revenue.

There are many different search engines worldwide, I have listed the top 2 in the western world; however, the same strategy can be used no matter which engine or device is used to find you.

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Technologies such as Google’s search engine and the other search engines out there have made our life easier. We now live in an age where people rely on search engines for answers to their problems. Online business now rely on  search engine and good user experience help to improve their product and services which leads to the topic of how you can use user experience for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). I work for a company called HX Training and this post outlines my experience trying to optimise our web pages for things like our Legionella Awareness training and learning more about search and social media marketing.

The speed at which search engines give answers to queries also makes it so reliable that some people trust search engine results more than what a fellow human says. Have you ever been in a gathering of friends who are trying to remember or establish a fact which leads to an argument and someone says let’s “Google it” which almost seems so obvious? While a search engine provides immediate access to information, sometimes we still tend to get personal answers from official and reliable resources, or a friend.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – the process of making your digital profiles visible on search engines for a range of relevant search queries – has changed drastically over the last few years. Google is the market leader in the UK and has reshaped the SEO landscape. Google is one of the top leading search engines in the world, believe it or not. Where Google goes others follow. Read more…..

What is SEO?

What is SEO? That is a great question, and one that will be explained in detail throughout this blog post. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has vastly become an essential part of any digital marketing strategy, due to its proven effectiveness and wealth of benefits (don’t worry I will explain in detail later).

Search engine optimisation is a marketing technique where you aim to grow your visibility organically in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages). SEO is done to improve rankings, increase the awareness of your product or service and drive traffic to your website. However, an important tip to take away is that with SEO, you shouldn’t just create a search engine optimised page, you should make the page user friendly, relevant to your audience’s needs and easy for search engine robots to understand.

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5 Key Points of Progression

In both 2014 and in 2016, members of the team at Wildings Solicitors have joined The University of Salford in MediaCityUK for the SSMM course. For Solicitor Director, Kid Harwood, who attended SSMM in 2014, the course reaffirmed just how much of a pivotal role legal marketing would play in the development of the legal sector.

Getting involved with the communities in which we work is extremely important to us at Wildings. Seeing The University of Salford offering real value to businesses in the North West is something we found extremely heartening and is one of the reasons we were keen for our staff to rejoin in 2016.

Away from the SSMM course, Wildings have been involved with some great events at The University of Salford. KickFactor, launched at Creative Entrepreneur, was a Wildings Solicitors sponsored competition that took place in Media City in April 2016. The event saw young entrepreneurs from the business school competing for a one thousand pound investment in their business ventures.

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IVA Advice and IVA Debt Advice SEO

Company introduction

X-debt is a debt company dealing mainly IVAs (Individual Voluntary Arrangements) a form of debt management and IVA debt advice . The company relies on introducers of new business which can be expensive. The aim of this SEO work is to try increase the amount of business through the company website www.x-debt.co.uk and improving the google rankings will help with this.

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