Name: Smart Cow Marketing
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Day 3: Ask for feedback from customers

07/13/202103/01/2015 by scmarketing

Once you’ve set up you’re site, you’re going to know exactly how it works and what to do to test the functionality. For example when you enter keywords into a search engine, you’ll choose words you know will point you towards your site. However, this is going to be a lot different for everyone else. For example, if your website was a clothes shop and someone was trying to find a new pair of jeans, ASK THEM what they’re most likely to search when looking for this item, ask them whether or not they tend to look at ads on the side of the Search Engine Response Pages (SERPs) and if the majority of people do, then you’ll know you need to have ads! Use the feedback you’re getting from the customers to help you to make the necessary changes.

There are many ways you can engage with your audience to ask them for feedback, a very simple way would be to post on social media, asking your followers to comment back with what they think the areas are that you can improve. Other ways would include email campaigns asking your customers to reply with their feedback.

Not everything is going to work perfectly straight away, there are going to be features of your website that users may not like. Take Facebook for example, when they make changes to their interface there is always people giving them feedback, not always positive, but they use this feedback as a way of knowing what they can do to help make it more of a user friendly experience. In some cases the feedback you may receive will come across negatively, but you need to respond politely and inform the customer that their feedback has been noted and you will try to the best of your knowledge to try and improve this.

Getting feedback is a key part of Search Engine Optimization, it tells the search engines that you’re website or social media is kept up to date and also that other people are interacting with you, therefore your information must be useful. This will all help in ranking your site above your competitors.

Prompting your customers to leave reviews about your company on your Google+ local page should be your first priority.

Try to make it simple for your customers to leave reviews – if you have a database of email addresses, filter out the customers who have a Google Mail account and point them in the direction of your Google + Local company page. Reviews left from people with an active user account and Google + profile are likely to appear more authoritative. Here at Smart Cow Marketing, we also do free website reviews. If that is something you think you would be interested in, get in touch with us today.

It is also beneficial for people to leave reviews about your company on a selection of trusted online business listings and social hubs. Sites such as Yelp, Qype, Four Square and Trip Advisor, with an active and varied community, are at the forefront of local-social search.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

SEO trend predictions for 2015

08/03/202102/13/2015 by scmarketing

So 2015 is upon us and this looks like to be another exciting year in the world of online marketing. Well, when we say “exciting” it is for us at Smart Cow Marketing. But maybe not for those of you who like skydiving or running with the bulls in Pamplona. But for us it floats are very, very well, call us sad that this is what we really like.

Anyway, enough of our own inadequacies in being able to jump out of an airplane. Let’s look at what can get your business noticed on search engines in 2015.

In a nutshell, we can see that the search engines are going to continue on their drive to make search engine results as realistic as asking a real person over the phone. We can see the goal maybe five years’ time when most searches are done through talking to your technology. This is still a bit awkward for us today, but it’s becoming more popular.

So as well as keywords placed into the search, the search engines have also been to taking into consideration your location and also your own personal preferences of what you have searched for in the past and also what you’ve searched for in the immediate past. So your search may be “what is a California pizza?” And the results might come up with a menu on how to make this type of pizza. If your next search is where I can buy one of these, currently your results will show you one of many things to buy. But as the search engines get more intelligent, they will realise that you are talking about a California pizza place that’s in the search results.

The search engines will continue in their quest to remove black hat techniques in front of all the search engine results. So such as far too high density of keywords within a webpage or having far too many artificial links pointing to your website will continue to be penalised. They will also look at rewarding more and more sites that have got good relevant and fresh content placed onto the pages.

It will be interesting to see how much Google will still place businesses having a Google plus page, even though it is still not popular. We think that this is still going to be a factor moving forward. Whether this is just for the benefit of Google places and for reviews or if they will start taking into to more consideration content placed on your Google plus page is yet to be seen. But being Google. I’m sure they will try and push it much as they can.

We can see the use of video becoming more relevant this again, partly because Google owns the largest video sharing platform, YouTube and therefore can easily link the number reviews the video to your website.

There is loads of advice we can give in order to help ensure that your site is optimised and your business works well, however the most important bit would just to be as natural as you can with regards to placing great content and building good links to your site.

Digital marketing expert Croydon

We are a digital marketing agency based in South London working with small businesses, as well as those in accountancy and the construction sector to help get them noticed online. Drop us an email at Saymoo@smart-cow.com or give us a call on 020 3137 1826.

Day 2: Domain names

11/29/202102/01/2015 by scmarketing

A domain name is a unique name for a website. For example Smart Cow’s domain name is smartcowmarketing.com. The domain name serves as an address to access the website. When you visit a website, the domain name appears in the address bar of the web browser, it is often preceded by ‘www.’ but this isn’t part of the domain name. All domain names have a domain suffix also known as top-level domain (TLD) such as .com, .org, .net, .co.uk etc. the domain suffix helps identify what type of website it is, for example .org websites are used for non-profitable organisations, whereas .com is used for commercial websites. Second-level domain names (SLD) are also used, this is the portion of the domain name to the left of the “.” So the SLD for smartcowmarketing.com would be ‘smartcowmarketing’.

Without a domain name, you would still be able to access a web page, but you would have to type in a long string of numbers (IP address) this locates the website but isn’t very user friendly. A domain name provides a friendly and much more memorable alternative.

You can also use domain names for email addresses. There are many good free email providers such as Gmail, Hotmail, and yahoo. But if you’re looking for a username that is professional and personal to you or your business, it is becoming increasingly harder to find one that isn’t already taken, so you’ll most likely be left with something like ‘Jack16382@gmail.com’ this doesn’t look professional and it isn’t personal to you. Therefore buying your own domain name allows you to have an address that is much more specific to you or your business. For example you could have ‘yourname@yourcompany.com’ this is a much more approachable address for your business. There are many online services that let you create your own domain addresses for a website or email for a small price, usually per year.

One of the best reasons to purchase your own domain name is for security. One of the most popular reasons for buying your own domain name is to register your name or your company’s name regardless of whether you intend to use it or not. While this is a great reason to buy a domain name, it also protects you from other people trying to register your identity and trading off your identity.

Domain names have become increasingly valuable over the years as the ‘better quality’ domain names become registered. It is now incredibly rare to find a domain name of just one word that is in the dictionary. This means that if you’re lucky enough to find one, you could be sitting on a pot of gold as some domain names have sold for tens of thousands of pounds. Domain names have no limit on the price they’re sold at as it is completely down to the value it has to the buyer/seller. There is an increase in the popularity of random domain names so you can never tell if yours will be valuable.

Digital marketing Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re well placed to offer local businesses digital marketing services and online marketing advice.

Get in touch to chat about your business goals.

Simon Says: Come dine with me – SEO special

11/06/201901/12/2015 by scmarketing

At the end of each year we get together with a group of friends and over a course of several nights have a come dine with me competition. For those of you who are not familiar with Come Dine With Me, this is where we take it in turns to cook for the other guests each night and the performance gets marked. After all, contestants have cooked the scores are counted and a winner is crowned.

We do this every year and have noticed how closely the world of SEO mimics the real world. The example of this is that in the first year when the competition was new one of the competitors decided to be “creative” with a scoring. Thinking that by scoring everybody with zero this would give them a better chance of winning the competition. This might sound a little bit underhand and yes I did feel a bit guilty at the time. However, we did have some great results and we won the inaugural competition. We walked away with the gold rolling pin trophy proud as punch. Not to mention some of the other competitors were a little bit upset with this (and boy do they go on about it year after year) and so as a penalty we were unmarked rather harshly the following year and came last.

You may equate this to the early days of SEO when people may have embedded their web pages with keywords to try and trick the search engine algorithms. They might have filled the pages with so many keywords that some of them were printed on white text with a white background to hide them from invisibly recognised. Other methods were that the site would have a page for 10 different locations with the same content except for the name of the town they were targeting. This worked well for a time and like ourselves with a come dine with me trophy, great results at the top of the rankings. However, just like our annual competition the people got a bit upset and thought that this was unfair and they have quality work into their websites. So Google quickly learned this and set building computer program known as the algorithm with a nickname “Panda” and closely followed by another called “Penguin”. These are here to make sure that the quality sites will be praised and sites that try and trick the results will be penalised.

So after learning a lesson we returned to the competition with our tail between our legs, however after some time and a lot of hard work eventually came back and regained the trophy. Resting on our laurels and subsequent years meal was not up to standard as the year before and hence dropped down the rankings again. Whereas other couples in the come dine with me competition were consistently putting full day’s effort to create a superb meal are always in the top two.

So just like the world of SEO, it goes to show that you can only choose a system for very short time for being caught out and penalised heavily and that people that perform consistently best over a long period of time for those that we are sitting and produce high-quality work.

That said you can always ply your guests with alcohol in hope for a good score or if you are in business for your website to provide them with some goodies such as tips and tricks to help them with their business.