Name: Smart Cow Marketing
Price range: $$$

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.

Day 1: Understanding keywords

07/13/202101/01/2015 by scmarketing

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:

Automated tools like the Keyword Difficulty Tool
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.

What does “white hat” mean when talking about SEO?

09/13/202112/24/2013 by scmarketing

White Hat SEO is the generic term that refers to optimising any website without violating the terms of use (TOS) of all search engines which you need to use.

Search engines use small programs called robots to crawl and index the internet, this process is focused generally on making the site easier for a machine to understand at the same time to maintain a friendly interface for people.

White Hat search engine optimisation is different to Black Hat search engine optimisation. The title and meta tags in black hat SEO might be used in fooling most of the search engines by making search engines think that the page is about something which it is not – e.g. an entertainment website masquerading as an education site.

White Hat search engine optimisation is an honest and reliable approach when optimising your website and the common principle is to do your best in order to be liked by the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The whole strategy is to make a right coded website that makes it easy for search engines to understand and to mimic optionally about what should happen for web pages that are liked by users.

So, for example, if a guest found a site and found that it was a good site then he/she would possibly write a good article about it, create a topic about it on the different general forums or add it in his/her social sites, make a group for it and open the discussion so other people try it as well. White Hat accelerates this process and is sometimes an automated process.

SEO company Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re well placed to offer local businesses digital marketing services and online marketing advice on relevant Local SEO Services and content marketing to help increase presence in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Get in touch to chat about your business goals and how a tailored SEO campaign can help your marketing strategy.

We can walk through ideas for video and the potential of using it for your business.

How to brainstorm for keywords for your online business

07/05/202111/19/2013 by scmarketing

Brainstorming for keywords is about generating the root for different keyword ideas. You will need these keywords to assist with your online marketing campaign. Make sure you keep the content within your site real and not just stuck with keywords that you think the search engines might like, doing this is just looking for trouble.

Below is some advice on how to find keywords for your online marketing campaign.

These keywords are to be used in Google Adword keywords tool or any other keyword research tools in order to get additional ideas and select the keywords intended to target the website niche.

There are different ways and methods for brainstorming in order to generate keyword ideas such as:

1. Look Around. The items you see in your room, on your desk or anywhere else within your view can be the source of great keyword ideas.
2. Watch Television. Write down names of Television shows, items you see during a Television show and many more.
3. Go Shopping. Stores hold thousands of items that could be a root keyword. When you look at items, don’t write down the name of the item only but you also should note down the generic item.
4. Use Google Trends. If you can’t think of anything, go to Google Trends and see what the people are looking for right now.
5. Use Affiliate Networks. If you have no good ideas, check any affiliate network such as: Clickbank, Commission Junction and many more then check the products and find the relevant keywords that are usually written in descriptions of any product.
6. Go to Library. Titles of Books are considered to be a perfect method to find ideas for your niche. Actually, the obscure section in any library must be a big online niche. The library doesn’t have enough room to add books for all niches that you can fine online.
7. Look for long tail keywords. Head keywords are considered to be the most popular searched item, such as “shoe” this however only takes up a small percentage of total searches the majority being long tail and specific searches such as “find a brown leather shoe in Croydon” so look for specific long tail keywords.

Once you’ve found your keywords you can use this as the basis of your marketing campaigns however do not under any circumstances abuse this.You will be clearly found out for any keyword stuffing and penalised accordingly.

Add content often to your site however make sure it is always relevant to your target audience and always worded with their interest in mind and through your own sites personality.

This is just one of many ways you can optimise your website. It’s important that you understand why optimising your website is key when it comes to the growth of your business.

Good luck and happy marketing.

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.