StephenC

About Stephen

A senior Marketing professional with extensive B2C to B2B International experience in large organisations and start-ups. Industry sectors include Government, Automotive, High Service Level distribution and manufacturing. A CIM marketing professionals guest speaker and trainer.
17 01, 2017

SEO vs PPC

By |2019-01-30T21:20:49+00:00January 17th, 2017|SEO, Google, Keyword Research, Keywords, PPC|0 Comments

SEO vs PPC

“I want to grow my business in the online world, what do I focus on and the question of SEO vs PPC is maybe not a clear cut as we think.”

This is a question that digital firms hear all too often. Both can have a massive impact, but the answer depends on your business. Are you large and established? Do you sell a product or service? What are your budgetary needs and concerns? Are you a local business?

The Benefits of SEO

What’s it all about and what is it useful for?

Now, it is important to know that SEO is not simply about optimising your content with keywords (although the use of ‘Semantic keywords’ is very helpful in organic search). Consider the plethora of information search engines use to measure a company’s online potential. Amongst many other factors, search engines monitor your services in the offline world, your social media interactions and the ‘relevancy’ of the content you produce to help prospective clients at crucial touch-points. This information has much larger ramifications on your overall marketing strategies outside of the digital world, as well as in. In fact, one of SEO’s primary functions is about discovering and finessing these touch-points.  

In practice, SEO is a long process of measurement and research. It is heavily content driven and time consuming because of Google’s semantic search technology. Your primary goal should be to understand the keyword landscape of your market, honing in on the variety of search terms the consumer is using and gaining a better understanding of their intent. Investigating the why, as opposed to the what, is a much larger benefit to your future marketing efforts. So, SEO is very useful for businesses that have some time. Getting your pages to be indexed for ideal keyword search terms is a gradual process and fluctuations are to be expected in highly competitive markets. The margin for error is much larger and strategies are as exploratory as they are results driven. From a UX point of view, one serious benefit of SEO is that your efforts will have made your site a lot cleaner. On a bridal website, for example, instead of having headings like ‘Wedding Dress Accessories for Vintage Weddings’, you can go with ‘Wedding Dress Accessories’ or the more specific but still high volume ‘Vintage Wedding Dress Accessories’.

Don’t be discouraged by the indefinite nature of SEO. It will bring you the most qualified leads over time and will directly influence your PPC results. Since SEO has no fee per keyword, you shouldn’t shy away from high competition words, especially as it will help you to qualify for longer tail keywords (something particularly useful for local businesses). Primarily, SEO is an integral framework for your digital marketing efforts. In the short term, it is a form of good ‘house keeping’ that can be used as a solid jumping off point.  Everything counts towards understanding your market’s behaviours and this is why a good SEO strategy can often be useful for small and local businesses, if they have the time. SEO vs PPC is the question that we have been asked more times than any other. Its generally good practice to engage with your knowledge and we think that writing at least one article of 300 – 600 words.

The Benefits of PPC

How does it differ to SEO and how can it benefit my business?

PPC is a great way of kick-starting your business’s digital efforts. It is a very concentrated way of driving potential leads to your site. However, it is a vastly different process to SEO. PPC consists of bidding on and competing for specific search terms that appear in display networks. As a result, you need to be absolutely precise with your keywords and copy, always keeping one eye on the cost per click and one eye on the quality score. You must make absolutely sure that your ad copy is tightly correlated with the corresponding landing pages and that your campaigns are tightly categorised. This approach makes it much easier to cut away ads that are not working. Due to the fastidiousness of PPC, the margins for error are much smaller, simply because it costs you money every time a mistake is made. Although Google does not always put the ‘highest bidder’ at the top of its sponsored results, affording PPC long term can be tricky.

In practice there should not be a choice between SEO vs PPC, PPC is very useful to a business that does not have the time to wait for the long-term benefits of SEO. Lets say you have a brand new product that has to be launched in the next 3 months. You could use a campaign to gauge the demand for the product, by bringing attention to it quickly and taking an early look at its reception. This data will not only inform your longer-term SEO efforts, but also your overall marketing strategies. Another huge benefit of PPC is something called the ‘panic scenario’. With many small businesses that are still trying to establish a steadfast form of revenue, PPC offers the possibility of gaining traffic quickly. And, because of its highly targeted nature, this can be relatively inexpensive in the short term.

However, if budget is not a large problem, PPC does have some very serious long-term benefits as well. Often, SEO consultants cite the classic ‘most people have trained themselves to actively ignore the ad spaces on search engines’. Whilst this might be true sometimes, they are forgetting the deeper value of a high-ranking ad in the search results. In an article from Search Engine Land, a study found that 82% of ad clicks are incremental when the associated organic result is ranked between 2 and 4, and 96% of clicks are incremental when the brand’s organic result was 5 or below. Google says that those visits would not have occurred without the ad campaigns. What is important to consider here is that as a result of having a strong ‘ownership’ of Google’s ad space, the appearance of that business in the organic search section seemed more ‘clickable’. Thus, the biggest long-term benefit of a PPC campaign is reputation, and how that reputation directly affects clickthrough rate and conversions.

Conclusion of SEO vs PPC?

Whether it’s a much-needed source of traffic, or necessary architectural changes that will stand up in the long run, both PPC and SEO have their separate uses. In fact, the only way to ensure success in the digital landscape is to use both in tandem at different times. A good digital firm knows this. So don’t be swayed by a consultant that offers you one service to fix all as this really isn’t good practice. The question of SEO vs PPC will not disappear for a while and will be enhanced even further with Google and Bings increasing emphasis on Semantic keywords becoming more important. So SEO vs PPC will never a choice between the two, but the two being used in a smarter way together. 

Please see other articles that you might find interesting.

Digital Fundamentals Training

Digital Glossary

20 10, 2016

Penguin 4.0 – What Does It Mean For You?

By |2017-01-24T13:21:56+00:00October 20th, 2016|Penguin Update, Algorithm Changes/Updates, Backlinks, Google, SEO|0 Comments

What is the Penguin update?

Google’s Penguin update was first introduced in 2012 and is one of many factors they use to affect Search Rankings in a positive way. This update targeted those websites using black-hat techniques such as keyword-stuffing and any link-building schemes that blew up rankings artificially.

Why is Penguin still relevant?

In the last couple of weeks, Google have started rolling out the 4.0 update that has come with a host of new features, causing a shift in the search rankings for websites that weren’t aware.

It has been 2 years since the last penguin update and many webmaster’s have been preparing in that timeframe with the other minor and big updates (Mobilegeddon anyone!), wandering what Google would have up their sleeve for penguin.

Key features of 4.0

  • It was a worldwide launch. So everyone was affected at the same time, meaning certain websites in other locations wouldn’t get to enjoy those extra couple of weeks they would usually get at the top of the rankings. Even slate for everyone.
  • The update is now in real-time. Google will now update the rankings every time they update the information discovered by the crawlers, meaning you will notice changes to your rankings at a much faster rate than before.
  • Recover from Google penalties faster. Factoring in the real-time nature of the 4.0 update, if you have been penalised before you will know how much of a long process it is to recover from. But thanks to the update it is now a faster process to recover once you have made the necessary changes.
  • Google has now made Penguin part of its core algorithm. This now means you wont see any official announcements regarding penguin, so keep an eye on your link-building.
  • It is targeting more specific pages instead of whole websites when penalising toxic links. In other words, Penguin is becoming more granular making it crucial that websites are audited on a more regular basis.

Why is it a good thing?

  • The algorithm is now much faster in picking up updates to websites. This is a good thing as a lot of companies are put off SEO in the first place due to it being a long process to see any benefit. But thanks to this update, you should start to see the rankings benefit much sooner.
  • Like I’ve mentioned in the key features, it is now much faster to recover from Google penalties. This is great for the webmaster’s who have been stuck with penalties for a while, since the last update for Penguin was 2 years ago.
  • The granular nature of the update makes it less harsh on websites that are generally in the green save for one or two pages that may have a toxic link by only penalising those pages specifically.

What issues may websites face?

  • Whilst granular may be a good thing it also makes it more difficult to track any changes to affected pages, meaning deeper analysis is required to pick up any problems.
  • Since Penguin is now becoming a part of Google’s core algorithm, this now means there will be no more announcements regarding updates to the specific algorithm. This can be a problem for webmaster’s as it means they will have to start consistently analysing and auditing their websites for any changes, adding more work to their already busy SEO schedules.

How will I know when Penguin 4.0 is live and what can I do to stay ahead of the pack?

The Penguin 4.0 update launched on September 23rd 2016 or as Google have stated it is “Rolling out” so there is still time to make the necessary changes and tweaks to keep your website on top.

But how do I make sure I have covered all bases for the update?

Keep a constant eye on your positions in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) – Put it into a daily plan to check your most crucial pages in the search results, keeping an eye on any fluctuations positive or negative based on the keywords you are tracking.

Make sure your backlink profile is regularly in the green – Put it into the daily plan again, ensuring your link-building efforts are not including any toxic or low-quality links.

Perform deep backlink checks on your website weekly – It may take longer than a normal audit but it will be worth it to discover if there any pages that are letting the rest of your site down by having a toxic link. Penguins new granular approach makes this step a priority.

Our SEO experts deal with all the latest updates from Google, so if you think your website has taken a hit thanks to one of these updates then check out our SEO page to see how we can gain ground back on your rankings. Or why not check out the 5 killer SEO methods that you may not be using!

5 08, 2016

PPC Marketing £2 Made For Every £1 Spent Really?

By |2019-01-30T21:20:49+00:00August 5th, 2016|PPC, AdWords, Blog, Keyword Research, Keywords, SEO|0 Comments

PPC Marketing – Where Do You Make Your Money?

PPC Marketing – Jupiter Research a Forrester Research company said that 81% of users find their desired destination through a search engine. Broadly speaking, you need to be in the top of the SERP (search engine results page).

PPC marketing is still a relatively new concept and from the outside looking in it can look a bit daunting. What with it looking like a war zone with multiple companies trying to outbid each other on keywords to get their ads to the top. There are many more business not doing PPC Marketing than there are, so therefor Google and Microsoft stand to get even larger in size.

But its important to be aware of whether or not it is right for your business. There have been multiple success stories when it comes to PPC, but it has also seen its fair share of companies who haven’t seen success with the advertising platform.

I want to share with you some amazing statistics before I get into the good & bad of PPC Marketing.

When it comes to AdWords, businesses make an average of £2 in revenue for every £1 they spend PPC Marketing on the platform.

Organic results are 8.5x more likely to be clicked on than paid search results! However, PPC holds a slight edge in conversion rates, as paid search results are 1.5x more likely to convert into sales or email sign-ups for example than organic search. After all the average click-through rate for a Google ad is 3.16%

While those may be huge positives, let me share with you what I found to be the bad points of PPC……

The Bad

It can get very expensive

PPC Marketing costs money, after all its in the title Pay Per Click, you pay up every time someone clicks on your ads. Depending on your experience with the advertising medium it can appear like you are burning cash with no return on investment. So it is essential and good practise that you have defined objectives before you start. Keep your PPC objectives and strategy at the forefront of your mind. What is your CPC (Cost Per Click) target. Even then with the fact that you are bidding with hundreds of other companies for keywords – costs can still skyrocket if you want to see your ads in the top 3 of the first page in Google or Bing.

As an example, “Insurance” is the most expensive keyword at £55 per click! Now can you imagine if 100 people clicked on your ad. That would end up costing you £5500!

Of course this is all relative depending on the size of the business and how much a conversion is worth compared to the PPC spend. Another essential element of effective PPC management is knowing how much you are making in profit margin terms. The product or service you are advertising will have a profit and this should be included as a goal to measure against your PPC efforts.

Did you know, a YouTube homepage ad can cost on average £4,000!

Constant management

One thing a lot of companies don’t realise is the constant management required to run effective PPC Marketing campaigns. A lot of companies start out not knowing this fact and believe it is a set and forget job, burning cash and not achieving results in the process.

For small companies this can be a problem as they usually do not have the resources or time to allocate to manage PPC on an ongoing basis. Many get disillusioned and will say ‘it doesn’t work after trying it briefly’.

Keeping up to date

This almost ties into the previous point in some respect, as being on the ball with PPC Marketing will make sure you are aware of the latest updates and changes. Looking at AdWords for example and Google being Google, they are constantly updating the algorithms and if you are not aware of the changes until its too late, then your campaigns suffer. A good example is Google expanding the character limit for text ads. If you weren’t made aware of this, then you’ll be losing out as your competitors will be one step ahead of you, all because they are constantly aware of what Google have planned and act upon it.

The Good

Instant results over SEO

It’s a fact that SEO takes times before any improvements or changes take effect within the search engines. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, its not great if you are looking for results in a short space of time.

This is where PPC Marketing comes in! you can put together a campaign with ad groups, keywords and ads – set it live and the next morning see results from the get go. These may mainly be impressions and only a few clicks but results nonetheless. Getting these results instantly also enables you to make changes whereas you would have to wait for SEO to take effect before seeing if you need to make any improvements.

That’s not to say you should neglect SEO entirely, as they both go hand in hand in improving your visibility.

Data, data and more data!

Using AdWords as an example again, there is so much data you can pull from campaigns that help you make smarter decisions and optimise effectively. Data like quality score, average CPC, average position, impression share, % impressions lost and the rules around these.

As an example of how data heavy PPC Marketing can get, the Google Display Network serves about 180 billion impressions (views of an ad) each month, which is about 6 billion a day!

You can also pull data from Google Analytics to find out the effect the campaigns are having on traffic, bounce rate and new sessions.

Some may also see this as a negative because of the overwhelming amount of data, but I like to look at it in a positive way. The more data means the more opportunities you have to make smart decisions that improve your campaign and therefore improve click-through and conversion performance.

Specific Customer Targeting

This is great for businesses of any size, location and target market.

For example you can specify locations down to individual counties which is great for local businesses, this means you won’t waste money from clicks by individuals who are not in your location.

Another great feature is the ability to schedule when your ads are shown. Like the previous point, it helps to reduce click wastage by making sure your ads are shown when your target audience is at its most active.

Conclusion

I have aimed to provide a completely even view of the benefits & negatives of PPC Marketing, to summarise it works for some companies and others not so much. It requires diligence, understanding and real commitment to see true results that become conversions for your business.

If you find that the process puts you off, then we would love to help manage your PPC and show you just how successful it can be for your business. We have years of experience and proven results! If that interests you Click Here!

Some further reading we would recommend includes :

  1. Microsoft Adwords
  2. Google PPC Adwords
  3. Digital Glossary

We are currently making an offer that will enable the

15 07, 2016

Digital Web World Content Calendar 2016/2017 Free Download

By |2019-01-30T21:20:49+00:00July 15th, 2016|Content, Download, Resources|2 Comments

Your Seasonal Guide to Content Marketing Success!

If you struggle to create engagement with your readers or struggle to drive traffic to your website, you may need to create an effective content marketing strategy.

But how? You ask me. It is not a process that can happen overnight. Creating content shouldn’t be taken lightly, it needs research and constant analysing to get right.

What people tend to forget is planning for the seasons, events and months. Many users love content that is relevant to something. For example, when the Christmas period is two-three months away, you should already be planning your Christmas content marketing strategy and have a detailed plan of when and what is going to be posted.

The Difficulty of Creating an Effective Strategy

It can be difficult to create a detailed strategy and stick to it, we understand a lot of businesses don’t have the time or resources to allocate, but it is worth in the long run.

This is why we have decided to create a content calendar that will help you to plan out your content strategy. With helpful notes and major holidays all accounted for, this is the ideal solution to your content marketing woes.

The calendar itself goes through to December 2017 so you can ensure your company gets a full year and half of planned, quality content that will drive traffic and encourage return visits.

How do I use the Calendar?

You may be wondering, well how do I use the calendar and why can’t I just use a normal calendar? The first answer is, it’s simple all you have to do is spare some time during your day to go through the calendar and plan out your content marketing efforts for that month. We have provided you with tips and ideas to boost your creativeness each month, distancing itself from being just a regular old calendar.

Another way you could do it is to develop a strategy that runs for 18 months with the next 6 months of content and topics and plans detailed, and the next rolling 12 months outlined. Review every week. Monday morning, Tuesday morning, get your content review in the diary. How many of us do it?

But Surely This is Going to Cost me Money

What’s amazing about this content calendar, it’s FREE! Yes you saw that right, FREE! We believe in offering value as a Digital Marketing Agency and this in-depth calendar we have created represents that.

Register your details below and receive your free content calendar shortly after.

8 07, 2016

How To Make Content King

By |2019-01-30T21:20:49+00:00July 8th, 2016|Content, Blog, SEO, Website Design|0 Comments

So How Do You Make Content King?

If there is one thing we haven’t talked about enough, its Content. Get it right and not only will Google love you but your readers as well. But how do you get it right? How do you make content king?

Before you begin, you need to understand what you are trying to achieve with each piece of content. Web form sign-ups, leads, sales conversions, or just for impressions (users viewing without taking any action). Once this has been established you can then start to understand how to make content king.

1. Using Resources To Your Advantage

Creating content from scratch is not easy, I think we can all agree on that. But the process can be made easier by looking at the vast wealth of resources available to you online.

One great resource to use is Answerthepublic.com. This tool enables you to enter any keywords you can imagine and get multiple different results. Including visual graphs/data based on questions, prepositions and alphabetical results of the keyword input. The reason this is a great tool is because it gives you insights into what people are looking for in relation to the search query. If you are struggling for ideas, I would give this website a try.

There also many other keyword tools that you may find useful. For example Google’s Keyword Planner and Übersuggest.io. These are great tools in their own right and if you want more information on them and others, I wrote an article on the Best keyword research tools which you can check out here.

Depending on the industry you are in there is usually a forum for it. Use these to your advantage as they can be a goldmine for discovering about the current state and questions being asked within your chosen industry. Therefore providing some great ideas for content and giving you a platform to become an authority in your niche.

Whatever industry you are in, it is wise to keep abreast of the latest information and set the trend. Remember to put the wealth of resources available to good use.

2. Search Engine Optimised Content Is The Best Kind Of Content

This is absolutely key if you intend your target audience to discover the website. Especially now Google cares about content more than ever. Not only do it’s algorithms like a well optimised page, but now more than ever, the uniqueness and length of content when determining where it will rank the page on the search results.

Depending on what website platform is used, how you optimise content may differ platform-to-platform but the principle still remains.

Lets say for instance the platform being used is WordPress. This platform does a good job of giving you the tools to optimise pages effectively without the need for plugins. But to truly benefit your website, it is ideal to download one of the numerous SEO plugins available. My recommendation is Yoast SEO.

Yoast is a fantastic plugin for streamlining the SEO process and making it easy for content writers to optimise what they have written. Once you have picked a focus keyword for the particular page, the content will be analysed against different criteria. These range from the keyword density, to making sure the focus keyword is used in the page title and meta description. The plugin gives you ratings of red, amber and green based on how well the page is optimised, so the more in the green the better.

3. Now All That’s Done, How Do You Get Conversions From The Content?

This goes back to the first point I made, about what you want to achieve with each piece of content. Many ideas can be considered a conversion, it then comes down to if your content is compelling enough for the reader to take action. It’s great having well optimised content that is bringing in a wealth of organic traffic, but what is the point if no one is taking the intended action at the end of it.

There are many different ways to optimise content to improve conversions, it’s just a matter of understanding what your conversion rates currently are. This way you can decide where an area may need improving. For instance split-testing (splitting the traffic to multiple pages) is a great feature that enables you to test e.g. two different images or two different headers to see which one performs better with users. This way you can analyse the data and make decisions for the betterment of the content and overall conversions for the business.

Of course this isn’t something that will improve over night, it requires constant testing and refinement to start seeing an optimised conversion rate.

Summary

The ultimate goal of a business is to gain conversions at a sustainable pace to succeed and online is no different. There is so much content out there for so many different niches, it makes it a really difficult place to shout and get noticed. But if you take the time to discover the next best topics and how to make content king, then the final goal of consistent conversions will be truly attainable.

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