Smart Cow Digital Marketing

Simon Says: Come dine with me – SEO special

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

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. 

Business ruler

Smart Cow means business

Smart Cow is, yet again, exhibiting at the “We Mean Business” expo at the Fairfield halls on Thursday 16th October. We are proud to be associated with the top Business show in South London, making it our 4th year in a row of attending the event.

This year looks to be even bigger and better than ever, with the eco drive show in the forecourt and a chance to have your photo taken with the premiership trophy.

Being number one for “Online Marketing in Croydon” Smart Cow also realises that businesses also need to meet with other businesses and in Croydon this annual expo is the best place to do this.

Come and visit us at stand 50 our regular spot at the expo, looking at the list of exhibitors the are some great failure faces we are looking forward to catching up with as well as making new friends and business partners.

So what’s on offer at the  Smart Cow stand, we have our Business card draw for a free online marketing review, social media training or a bottle of wine. Just come by and say hello, drop by your card and take a jelly baby or two. We’d like you to meet our growing team and we’d you to find out what we can do to grow your business. you can register for we mean business 2014 online.

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.

Social media letters

What is Twitter churn?

Many Businesses are still falling into the trap of following back everyone who follows them, this can be a very risky strategy of building up and audience, as they may not all be interested in your brand.

However, having a large audience of people who are interested in the brand and who will talk about it can have many benefits, from increasing lead potential to good old fashioned brand lift.

Although, it is difficult to know the difference between followers who will engage with the brand and those who are ‘ghost’ followers and will not interact. But how would you find out?

There are many sites that can monitor data from twitter feeds such as www.justunfollow.com or www.followerwonk.com. These sites provide information on who is following/ unfollowing you on a daily basis. There can be many reasons as to why someone may unfollow you and these sites give you the ability to try and find out why.

You can look at the time at which they unfollowed you and try and see if there was a correlation to a post you may have tweeted at this time? Check their profile, perhaps they are no longer active on twitter? Maybe they’ve changed career and no longer need the information you’re providing? Perhaps you were tweeting too much and flooding their feed, or they may just want to change things up and keep their feed fresh. It is then down to you to decide what action you’re going to take to prevent this from happening too much.

Twitter does have limits on following to followers so unfortunately you can’t just follow loads of users and hope they follow back. Although twitter have kept the exact ratios a secret, it has become obvious that once a page has reached over 2000 followers you can’t follow more than 10% of that. So if you had 5000 followers, you couldn’t follow more than 5500 users or you’ll run the risk of having your account suspended. As well as this, if you use third party websites or apps to follow/unfollow users, this would also leave you at risk of your account being suspended, to avoid this from happening you shouldn’t let the website/app automate who you follow/unfollow, you should choose yourself as the suspension of accounts is automated based on patterns.