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SEO croydon

SEO trend predictions for 2015

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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. 

domain names

Day 2: Domain names

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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.

Categories SEO
Smart Cow Digital Marketing

Simon Says: Come dine with me – SEO special

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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.

Day 1: Understanding keywords

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Ranking keywords can be difficult to get the hang of, and lots of people are going about it the wrong way.

Common Keyword mistakes

The most common mistakes people tend to make are:

  • Choosing keywords that are too broad
  • Keywords with too much competition
  • Keywords without enough traffic
  • Keywords that don’t convert
  • Trying to rank for one keyword at a time

The biggest mistake people tend to make is to try and rank a single keyword at a time, it is much easier and more profitable to do hundreds, even thousands at a time. The best way to get around this is instead of ranking for a single keyword, you’ll want to base your research around a keyword theme.

Using a keyword theme can solve many issues surrounded by ranking keywords. You can focus all your keywords into one general topic instead of trying to find the perfect keyword. If this is done correctly, the results can be fantastic.

It is easier if you get more specific with your keywords. For example, if your topic is football you’ll find it hard to rank for ‘Barclays Premier League’ but slightly easier for ‘Barclays Premier League 2014’ and even easier for ‘Best goals from Barclays Premier League 2014’.

keyword qualifier

The next step is getting to understand keyword qualifier.

Qualifiers are words that add specificity to keywords and define intent. They take many different forms.

  • Time/Date: 2014, October, Afternoon
  • Price/Quality: Cheap, Best, and Most Popular
  • Intent: Buy, Shop, Find
  • Location: Croydon, Outdoors, Online

The best thing to do is to find as many qualifiers as possible to suit your target audience. This is where keyword tools come into play. You can use any keyword tool you like, but some favourites include Wordstream, Keyword Spy, SpyFu and Google AdWords keyword planner.

Now that we have a basic keyword set, you need to find out if you can actually rank for your phrases. You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:

  1. Automated tools like the Keyword Difficulty Tool
  2. Eyeballing the Search Engine Response Page’s (SERPs)

There are some online tools that you can use, including Moz, either the paid subscription or even the free trial will allow you to use the Keyword Difficulty Tool which calculates, on a 100 point scale, a difficulty score for each individual keyword phrase you enter.

Keyword phrases in the 60-70+ range are typically competitive, while keywords in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.

To get a better idea of your own strengths, take the most competitive keyword you currently rank #1 or #2 for, and run it through the tool.

Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to eyeball the Keyword Research: Get Strategic with Competition.

SERPs. Run a search query (non-personalized) for your keywords and ask yourself the following questions:

Are the first few results optimised for the keyword?
Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
What’s the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
What’s the inbound anchor text?
Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword?

You don’t actually need to be ranking at #1 for any of your words to earn traffic, but you should be comfortable cracking the top 5.

PPC agency Croydon

If you need a boost in search engine results pages (serps) or want to specifically target an audience segment then Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) can help your firm be found and to stand out in local search results against your competitors.

With many digital marketing tactics whether social media, new website design, search engine optimisation (SEO) or PPC management, we can help guide your online marketing.  

We can provide a tailored digital marketing strategy for your business needs. Book a free consultation. 

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