by Michael Cropper | Dec 14, 2014 | SEO |
2014 has been an exciting year where everyone has taken to social media to share their experiences in life. Let’s take a look what the world has been doing this year, how many of these do you remember?
YouTube
Facebook
Top 10 topics discussed on Facebook in the UK in 2014;
- Scottish Referendum
- Ice Bucket Challenge
- World Cup
- Premier League title race
- Conflict in Gaza
- Robin Williams
- Louis van Gaal takes over at Manchester United
- Ebola virus outbreak
- Champions League Final
- First World War Centenary
Top 10 places discussed on Facebook in the UK in 2014;
- Warner Bros. Studio Tour London
- Madame Tussauds (London)
- Tower of London
- The London Eye
- Old Trafford – Manchester United stadium
- Chester Zoo
- ZSL London Zoo
- Alton Towers
- LEGOLAND Windsor
- Wembley Stadium
More exciting information: http://uk.yearinreview.fb.com/
Twitter
Explore the full website about everything that happened on Twitter this year: https://2014.twitter.com/moments
Google Search
Where would we be without Google? Here is how the world searched on Google in 2014
Read more about what the world searched for on Google in 2014 and explore the stories in more detail with Google Trends 2014.
Your 2014 Year in Review
What have you loved doing in 2014 that you have shared with the world on social media? Let us know in the comments below. Here is to an exciting 2015!
by Michael Cropper | Nov 23, 2014 | Events, PPC |
As you know we recently renewed our Google AdWords qualifications for another 12 months after spending a couple of days over at Google’s Manchester office. Following on from this, we have a little over £5000 of Google AdWords vouchers to give away to businesses looking to increase traffic, sales and enquiries through their website! In addition to this, we are going to be hosting a full day event to help businesses get started with using Google AdWords and setting your account up in the best way possible.
Whether you are a complete beginner and know nothing about Google AdWords or if you are looking for some expert guidance, this training session is designed for you. We will talk you through the benefits of how Google AdWords can be used for your business and how it can be used to directly increase revenue for your business. Even better, all of this will be explained in a simple way that you can understand. If you don’t know your AdWords from your Analytics, then we will demystify this for you and get you set up on Google AdWords in no time.
Far too often businesses will jump in with both feet and set up a PPC campaign without fully understand the finer details about how Google AdWords actually works. What this inevitably leads to is a campaign that often doesn’t perform very well and businesses coming to the conclusion that Google AdWords doesn’t work for their business. This is such a shame to see as Google AdWords is an extremely powerful marketing channel that can grow your business. You just need to make sure that your campaigns are set up correctly to get the maximum return for your advertising spend.
The event will be a full say session with the main agenda outlined below.
When: Friday 5th December
Time: 9:30am – 4:30pm
Venue: Contrado Digital, The Innovation Centre, 1 Evolution Park, Haslingden Road, Blackburn, Lancashire, BB1 2FD
Morning Session
- Introduction to Google AdWords
- Account management
- Campaign and ad group management
- Keyword targeting
- Language & location targeting
- Ad formats
- Budgets and bidding
- Measurement and optimisation
- Performance, profitability and growth
- Managing multiple accounts
Lunch
Afternoon Session
Bring your laptops, it’s time to put everything you have learnt in the morning session into action and start your AdWords campaign running. Hands on second half to set up your campaign with qualified Google AdWords professionals on hand to help you along the way
As you can imagine, we are likely to get quite a large number of businesses looking to take advantage of this free training and Google AdWords voucher worth £150 per business, so get in touch now and fill out your details below;
[gravityform id=”1″ name=”Request Google AdWords Vouchers”]
Due to the popularity of the event, we cannot guarantee a place although we will do our very best to accommodate where possible. Get in touch now and you will be updated next week when places will be confirmed for qualifying businesses.
What’s the catch? There isn’t one. There will be a small charge between £15-£20 for the full day training event which is purely to cover the cost of lunch, drinks and room hire. What we would hope is that once you have your account set up correctly and it is working well for your business, that when the time comes that you decide to work with a company to manage your pay per click advertising campaigns, you would get back in touch to discuss things further. Managing pay per click advertising campaigns is something we understand in a lot of detail.
by Michael Cropper | Nov 23, 2014 | SEO |
As you know we recently renewed our Google AdWords qualifications for another 12 months after spending a couple of days over at Google’s Manchester office. Following on from this, we have a little over £5000 of Google AdWords vouchers to give away to businesses looking to increase traffic, sales and enquiries through their website! In addition to this, we are going to be hosting a full day event to help businesses get started with using Google AdWords and setting your account up in the best way possible.
Whether you are a complete beginner and know nothing about Google AdWords or if you are looking for some expert guidance, this training session is designed for you. We will talk you through the benefits of how Google AdWords can be used for your business and how it can be used to directly increase revenue for your business. Even better, all of this will be explained in a simple way that you can understand. If you don’t know your AdWords from your Analytics, then we will demystify this for you and get you set up on Google AdWords in no time.
Far too often businesses will jump in with both feet and set up a PPC campaign without fully understand the finer details about how Google AdWords actually works. What this inevitably leads to is a campaign that often doesn’t perform very well and businesses coming to the conclusion that Google AdWords doesn’t work for their business. This is such a shame to see as Google AdWords is an extremely powerful marketing channel that can grow your business. You just need to make sure that your campaigns are set up correctly to get the maximum return for your advertising spend.
The event will be a full say session with the main agenda outlined below.
When: Friday 5th December
Time: 9:30am – 4:30pm
Venue: Contrado Digital, The Innovation Centre, 1 Evolution Park, Haslingden Road, Blackburn, Lancashire, BB1 2FD
Morning Session
- Introduction to Google AdWords
- Account management
- Campaign and ad group management
- Keyword targeting
- Language & location targeting
- Ad formats
- Budgets and bidding
- Measurement and optimisation
- Performance, profitability and growth
- Managing multiple accounts
Lunch
Afternoon Session
Bring your laptops, it’s time to put everything you have learnt in the morning session into action and start your AdWords campaign running. Hands on second half to set up your campaign with qualified Google AdWords professionals on hand to help you along the way
As you can imagine, we are likely to get quite a large number of businesses looking to take advantage of this free training and Google AdWords voucher worth £150 per business, so get in touch now and fill out your details below;
[gravityform id=”1″ name=”Request Google AdWords Vouchers”]
Due to the popularity of the event, we cannot guarantee a place although we will do our very best to accommodate where possible. Get in touch now and you will be updated next week when places will be confirmed for qualifying businesses.
What’s the catch? There isn’t one. There will be a small charge between £15-£20 for the full day training event which is purely to cover the cost of lunch, drinks and room hire. What we would hope is that once you have your account set up correctly and it is working well for your business, that when the time comes that you decide to work with a company to manage your pay per click advertising campaigns, you would get back in touch to discuss things further. Managing pay per click advertising campaigns is something we understand in a lot of detail.
by Michael Cropper | Nov 20, 2014 | News |
Recently we were invited over to Google’s Manchester offices to renew our Google AdWords qualification and I’m pleased to announce that we have successfully renewed the qualifications for the next 12 months!
What this means is that we know a thing or two about how to manage a successful pay per click advertising campaign on Google AdWords. The ever increasing complexities involved with running a high performing PPC campaign means that you really need to be speaking with a professional if you are looking to seriously grow your business through Google AdWords.
There are an awful lot of changes within AdWords, on a regular basis, which is challenging for businesses to keep up with. At Contrado Digital it is our job to keep up to date with these changes and work with businesses like yours to improve the performance of AdWords campaigns.
Like with every celebration, it isn’t complete without a cake or two!
Contrado Digital Google AdWords Qualification Celebrations
While we were at the offices, we thought we’d share a bit more of the Google experience with you. Here are a few more photographs of the Google Manchester offices;
The Hacienda Lives at Google Manchester
Google Manchester Office Wall Deco
Google at Manchester Wall Art
Here is to more involvement between Google and Contrado Digital!
by Michael Cropper | Nov 20, 2014 | SEO |
Recently we were invited over to Google’s Manchester offices to renew our Google AdWords qualification and I’m pleased to announce that we have successfully renewed the qualifications for the next 12 months!
What this means is that we know a thing or two about how to manage a successful pay per click advertising campaign on Google AdWords. The ever increasing complexities involved with running a high performing PPC campaign means that you really need to be speaking with a professional if you are looking to seriously grow your business through Google AdWords.
There are an awful lot of changes within AdWords, on a regular basis, which is challenging for businesses to keep up with. At Contrado Digital it is our job to keep up to date with these changes and work with businesses like yours to improve the performance of AdWords campaigns.
Like with every celebration, it isn’t complete without a cake or two!
Contrado Digital Google AdWords Qualification Celebrations
While we were at the offices, we thought we’d share a bit more of the Google experience with you. Here are a few more photographs of the Google Manchester offices;
The Hacienda Lives at Google Manchester
Google Manchester Office Wall Deco
Google at Manchester Wall Art
Here is to more involvement between Google and Contrado Digital!
by Michael Cropper | Nov 20, 2014 | SEO |
Blogging is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website from Google. It gives you the opportunity to increase your authority over time by sharing news, relevant information, key industry events and company information to your current customers and potential customers. That said, we often see times when people simply get the implementation of a blog completely wrong which means that their website is gaining very little or no SEO value from the content that is being created. With a few guidelines, you can make sure that your blog is benefiting your customers and search engines.
Platform and Location
A blog is simply a place where you can write blog posts (like this one you are reading now) which are displayed in reverse chronological order. This allows you keep your customers and potential customers up to date with what is going on in your business and industry.
You have quite a few options when running a blog, although for us there is really only one option that we would recommend, which is WordPress. We will cover the different options first and then explain why we would only recommend WordPress as a platform.
First you have several options where you can create a blog on one of the many free platforms such as Blogger which was previously called Blogspot and is still in use by some blogs today. To do this, you simply visit one of the websites, create an account and you are ready to start moving with your blog.
This can be a great option for running a personal blog as it doesn’t require any technical skills to set up. Simply sign up and start blogging within minutes. Using these platforms for a business blog probably isn’t the best option though. The main reason being branding. You are extremely limited by the branding options available to you on these platforms, so when a customer or potential customer visits your blog and it doesn’t look like the rest of the website, they are going to get a little confused. In addition, you generally have to stick with their domain. So for example, to access your blog, you would visit http://your-business-blog.blogger.com or http://your-business-blog.blogspot.com which again doesn’t present your business in the best way possible.
Aside from the branding aspect, this setup from an SEO angle is adding very little value to your website. The reason behind this comes down to how Google calculates authority and hence how visible you are on Google. Google calculates authority based on the domain name, i.e. your website address. In this case, to halves don’t make a whole. The image below shows an example of website authority when you separate out your blog and main website on two different domains;
Google will see your main website at http://www.your-business.com and also your blog at http://your-business-blog.blogger.com and treat them as two separate entities, each with their own authority. While it often isn’t quite as straight forward as this, but if you think of authority being an exponential curve for the purposes of this example. What this means is that both your main website and your blog will be seen as mediocre instead of having one single website which also hosts your blog being seen as a highly authoritative source of information. In the examples above, imagine the higher the authority, the more visible your website is on Google. Here, we have 2.5 + 2.5 making 5. So for a total of 100 pages on a website, with an overall authority of 5. Now let’s compare this to how this would look when both the website and blog are on the same domain name;
Here you can see that from the same quantity of pages, your overall domain authority is much higher. Double in fact. This is the reason why it is essential that your business blog sits on your main website rather than an external website.
This is why we would always recommend using WordPress as your blogging platform. To be clear, we are talking about the self-hosted version of WordPress opposed to simply creating an account at WordPress.com. The self-hosted version of WordPress allows you to have a blog at www.your-business.com/blog/ which may also be powering your whole webiste.
Going back to what we just spoke about, this means that from Google’s perspective, that all of the content on your website is on a single domain so your website will be seen as a more authoritative source of information. WordPress has been designed with blogging in mind and if you are in any doubt about how good it is, well we could give you a lot of features and functionalities lists, but instead we’ll just let you know that WordPress powers over 20% of websites on the whole internet and is by far the most popular content management system which has over a 50% market share. Still not convinced? Then get in touch and we will be more than happy to give you a demo of the platform to show you how powerful it actually is.
Depending on how your website is set up currently, there may be some technical challenges to implementing the above which require ad smarter work around. We will cover these a little later in the blog post.
Internal Linking
Ok, so you are writing content on your blog. Firstly, let’s just check that it has relevance for your website, products and services. It does, right? Ok, good, so you are writing relevant content on your blog. Now let’s look at how to get the most out of this content so Google will understand which pages on your website are Important.
This may sound blindingly obvious, but you would be surprised at how many websites don’t do this correctly. Link to the pages you are talking about, you don’t have to do anything smarter than that. When you are talking about your products and services on your blog, make sure you link to the page that explains more about that product or service. For example, when we write content that is around the topic of digital marketing or website design, we will always link to those pages. This will tell Google that the page being linked to is an important one, so this can give you a nice little boost. This isn’t going to be a case of just doing it the once, but instead start to build this into the process of writing your content and over time this small benefit will be compounded. Likewise, if you talk about a previous blog post, then link to that too. And again, if you talk about an authoritative source of information or website, then don’t be afraid to link to those too, as long as they are good quality then you are on to a winner.
Technical Challenges
So we mentioned earlier that using WordPress may be a little challenging if your website isn’t built in WordPress already. Without wanting to go into all of the finer technical details, to put this into perspective for the non-technical people. It is like having a meal with both sweet food and savoury, it just doesn’t quite work. On the technical side, it actually means that you can’t run several server side languages from the same web server, you have to do a bit of jiggery pokery in the background along with having access to two web servers that are each capable of running the different platforms. Specifically for WordPress, your web server needs to be able to run PHP. So if your website is built in PHP already, then you are good to go. If on the other hand your website is running .Net or Java, then you are going to need another web server that is capable of running WordPress.
What all of this means is that if your website isn’t built in PHP already, then you need to have a discussion with your website developer. Speaking in geek, the blog on your website, I.e. www.website.com/blog/ needs to be set up to point to your web server that is hosting your WordPress blog, which will likely be through a proxy redirect. This will then mean that when Google looks at your blog, it appears to be on the same domain name as your main website, which can significantly help with your on-going SEO efforts. The quick and simple solution is to set up http://blog.website.com, but this often isn’t the best solution from an SEO point so bear this in mind. If your main website is running on an IIS server, then there are specific modules you need to add on, which gives you similar functionality to Apache’s .htaccess file.
Summary
To summarise how to get the most out of your blog for SEO, firstly make sure you are writing about relevant content for your audience. Secondly, make sure your blog sits on your main domain and not a sub domain or another website altogether. Thirdly, make sure you are linking your main products and services up within your blog posts where relevant.
by Michael Cropper | Nov 20, 2014 | SEO |
Blogging is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website from Google. It gives you the opportunity to increase your authority over time by sharing news, relevant information, key industry events and company information to your current customers and potential customers. That said, we often see times when people simply get the implementation of a blog completely wrong which means that their website is gaining very little or no SEO value from the content that is being created. With a few guidelines, you can make sure that your blog is benefiting your customers and search engines.
Platform and Location
A blog is simply a place where you can write blog posts (like this one you are reading now) which are displayed in reverse chronological order. This allows you keep your customers and potential customers up to date with what is going on in your business and industry.
You have quite a few options when running a blog, although for us there is really only one option that we would recommend, which is WordPress. We will cover the different options first and then explain why we would only recommend WordPress as a platform.
First you have several options where you can create a blog on one of the many free platforms such as Blogger which was previously called Blogspot and is still in use by some blogs today. To do this, you simply visit one of the websites, create an account and you are ready to start moving with your blog.
This can be a great option for running a personal blog as it doesn’t require any technical skills to set up. Simply sign up and start blogging within minutes. Using these platforms for a business blog probably isn’t the best option though. The main reason being branding. You are extremely limited by the branding options available to you on these platforms, so when a customer or potential customer visits your blog and it doesn’t look like the rest of the website, they are going to get a little confused. In addition, you generally have to stick with their domain. So for example, to access your blog, you would visit http://your-business-blog.blogger.com or http://your-business-blog.blogspot.com which again doesn’t present your business in the best way possible.
Aside from the branding aspect, this setup from an SEO angle is adding very little value to your website. The reason behind this comes down to how Google calculates authority and hence how visible you are on Google. Google calculates authority based on the domain name, i.e. your website address. In this case, to halves don’t make a whole. The image below shows an example of website authority when you separate out your blog and main website on two different domains;
Google will see your main website at http://www.your-business.com and also your blog at http://your-business-blog.blogger.com and treat them as two separate entities, each with their own authority. While it often isn’t quite as straight forward as this, but if you think of authority being an exponential curve for the purposes of this example. What this means is that both your main website and your blog will be seen as mediocre instead of having one single website which also hosts your blog being seen as a highly authoritative source of information. In the examples above, imagine the higher the authority, the more visible your website is on Google. Here, we have 2.5 + 2.5 making 5. So for a total of 100 pages on a website, with an overall authority of 5. Now let’s compare this to how this would look when both the website and blog are on the same domain name;
Here you can see that from the same quantity of pages, your overall domain authority is much higher. Double in fact. This is the reason why it is essential that your business blog sits on your main website rather than an external website.
This is why we would always recommend using WordPress as your blogging platform. To be clear, we are talking about the self-hosted version of WordPress opposed to simply creating an account at WordPress.com. The self-hosted version of WordPress allows you to have a blog at www.your-business.com/blog/ which may also be powering your whole webiste.
Going back to what we just spoke about, this means that from Google’s perspective, that all of the content on your website is on a single domain so your website will be seen as a more authoritative source of information. WordPress has been designed with blogging in mind and if you are in any doubt about how good it is, well we could give you a lot of features and functionalities lists, but instead we’ll just let you know that WordPress powers over 20% of websites on the whole internet and is by far the most popular content management system which has over a 50% market share. Still not convinced? Then get in touch and we will be more than happy to give you a demo of the platform to show you how powerful it actually is.
Depending on how your website is set up currently, there may be some technical challenges to implementing the above which require ad smarter work around. We will cover these a little later in the blog post.
Internal Linking
Ok, so you are writing content on your blog. Firstly, let’s just check that it has relevance for your website, products and services. It does, right? Ok, good, so you are writing relevant content on your blog. Now let’s look at how to get the most out of this content so Google will understand which pages on your website are Important.
This may sound blindingly obvious, but you would be surprised at how many websites don’t do this correctly. Link to the pages you are talking about, you don’t have to do anything smarter than that. When you are talking about your products and services on your blog, make sure you link to the page that explains more about that product or service. For example, when we write content that is around the topic of digital marketing or website design, we will always link to those pages. This will tell Google that the page being linked to is an important one, so this can give you a nice little boost. This isn’t going to be a case of just doing it the once, but instead start to build this into the process of writing your content and over time this small benefit will be compounded. Likewise, if you talk about a previous blog post, then link to that too. And again, if you talk about an authoritative source of information or website, then don’t be afraid to link to those too, as long as they are good quality then you are on to a winner.
Technical Challenges
So we mentioned earlier that using WordPress may be a little challenging if your website isn’t built in WordPress already. Without wanting to go into all of the finer technical details, to put this into perspective for the non-technical people. It is like having a meal with both sweet food and savoury, it just doesn’t quite work. On the technical side, it actually means that you can’t run several server side languages from the same web server, you have to do a bit of jiggery pokery in the background along with having access to two web servers that are each capable of running the different platforms. Specifically for WordPress, your web server needs to be able to run PHP. So if your website is built in PHP already, then you are good to go. If on the other hand your website is running .Net or Java, then you are going to need another web server that is capable of running WordPress.
What all of this means is that if your website isn’t built in PHP already, then you need to have a discussion with your website developer. Speaking in geek, the blog on your website, I.e. www.website.com/blog/ needs to be set up to point to your web server that is hosting your WordPress blog, which will likely be through a proxy redirect. This will then mean that when Google looks at your blog, it appears to be on the same domain name as your main website, which can significantly help with your on-going SEO efforts. The quick and simple solution is to set up http://blog.website.com, but this often isn’t the best solution from an SEO point so bear this in mind. If your main website is running on an IIS server, then there are specific modules you need to add on, which gives you similar functionality to Apache’s .htaccess file.
Summary
To summarise how to get the most out of your blog for SEO, firstly make sure you are writing about relevant content for your audience. Secondly, make sure your blog sits on your main domain and not a sub domain or another website altogether. Thirdly, make sure you are linking your main products and services up within your blog posts where relevant.
by Michael Cropper | Aug 9, 2014 | News, SEO |
On the 24th July, Google quietly released a new significant algorithm change which has since been unofficially titled the Google Pigeon Update. Within this blog post we are going to cover what this change is, how this impacts your business website and most importantly, what you need to do about it.
Image source: http://searchengineland.com/
What is the Google Pigeon Update
You may have heard about the Google Panda and Google Penguin algorithm changes on Google over the past few years. Well now we have Google Pigeon. Why such a strange name? Because someone at a popular search engine blog, www.searchengineland.com, decided it would be a good name.
So what exactly is the Google Pigeon update designed to do and who does it impact? In short, this algorithm change is only currently being used within the US for English language queries. So for UK based companies, then don’t panic, but do be prepared.
Algorithm changes always start off in the US for English language queries, which is shortly followed by all English language queries around the world and then finally followed by other languages as they are rolled out. What this means is that if your business is based in the UK and is only trading in the UK, then you have a bit of time to implement the changes and plan for this. Google hasn’t announced any specific dates when the algorithm change will be rolled out wider than the US so it is best to be prepared for this as it is rare that significant changes aren’t rolled out globally.
The Google Pigeon update is designed to tie the local search algorithm deeper into the main web search algorithm which uses hundreds of ranking signals. This includes search capabilities such as spelling corrections, synonyms and the Knowledge Graph. The change means that the new algorithm improves a few other factors for local search including the distance and location ranking factors for local businesses. The whole aim of the new algorithm is to provide a better experience for people searching for local results.
How Google Pigeon impacts your business website
What all of this means in simple terms is that your local business will show within the carousel area straight at the top of the search results on Google which can be seen here;
Image source: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-pigeon-update-18938.html
The algorithm is designed to give a boost to real world places, expanding beyond the initial places of interest that were originally being listed within the carousel. Search for “Things to do in Manchester” on Google to see how this looks at present in the UK;
As this expands within the UK, we will start to see the carousel appearing more and more for searches such as;
- Builders Merchants in Manchester
- Timber Merchants in Manchester
- Plumbers in Manchester
- Builders in Manchester
- Restaurants in Manchester
…and many more similar types of phrases.
The carousel area is being used for local listings instead of what is currently being used which is known as the ‘7-Pack’ which is a group of local listings that are often given prominence when people are searching for phrases with a local intent. For example, here you can see the current ‘7-Pack’ listings when searching for “Restaurants in Manchester”;
With the Google Pigeon algorithm update moving the local listings into the carousel, this also means that directory type websites are also getting a boost. With all of the local listings moving up into the carousel, this means that the other directory style websites are showing higher up the page. Higher visibility generally leads to higher traffic levels. Below shows a screenshot from the US whereby local businesses are listed within the top carousel and larger directory style websites are being listed within the main results (click for larger image);
It is going to be interesting to see exactly how this plays out over time, but it seems that everyone is a winner here – as long as the correct measures are put in place. Some large directories are already seeing a 5-10% increase in organic traffic from this change.
Large branded web directories such as Yelp and Yell are likely to benefit hugely as they have extremely strong brands which helps greatly with the Search Engine Optimisation work. Which means that smaller businesses have to make sure they have the right pieces in place to be able to earn a listing within the carousel at the top to beat the large directories.
What you need to do next
Ok, so to put the Google Pigeon algorithm update into perspective and to lay out a clear plan of action there are several things that need to be done. While this update hasn’t been rolled out into England just yet, it is better to be ahead of the game as it is extremely likely that this will be rolled out within the next few months.
Complete your listing on branded business directories
It is important to stress here that this is for branded directories, not cheap, nasty, horrible traditional ‘SEO directories’. Stay away from those, stay well away. Here we are talking about well-known brands. Think Yelp, Yell, Urbanspoon, TripAdvisor, OpenTable and more.
While there are well known generic directories, there will also be some industry specific directories that will be worth getting listed in. So do your research, or get in touch and we can help you with the process to make sure your business is being listed in the places where it needs to be.
What this will mean is that if a person doesn’t click on your listing within the carousel, then you will have a greater chance that your business will be seen in one of the top business directories. By covering off both angles, this will increase the chances of a potential customer finding your business online.
Make sure Google knows about your business through Google My Business
Make sure your business is listed on Google My Business. Whether you have a single shop / store / outlet / office, or hundreds throughout the UK. Make sure you are listing all of your physical locations on Google My Business. You may have heard about Google My Business recently but if not, Google My Business has replaced the old Google Local and Google Places tools to list your business on Google.
If you aren’t listed on Google My Business and need some support with this then get in touch and we can work closely with you to get your business listed in preparation for when the change is rolled out within the UK and further afield.
by Michael Cropper | Aug 9, 2014 | Uncategorized @en-us |
On the 24th July, Google quietly released a new significant algorithm change which has since been unofficially titled the Google Pigeon Update. Within this blog post we are going to cover what this change is, how this impacts your business website and most importantly, what you need to do about it.
Image source: http://searchengineland.com/
What is the Google Pigeon Update
You may have heard about the Google Panda and Google Penguin algorithm changes on Google over the past few years. Well now we have Google Pigeon. Why such a strange name? Because someone at a popular search engine blog, www.searchengineland.com, decided it would be a good name.
So what exactly is the Google Pigeon update designed to do and who does it impact? In short, this algorithm change is only currently being used within the US for English language queries. So for UK based companies, then don’t panic, but do be prepared.
Algorithm changes always start off in the US for English language queries, which is shortly followed by all English language queries around the world and then finally followed by other languages as they are rolled out. What this means is that if your business is based in the UK and is only trading in the UK, then you have a bit of time to implement the changes and plan for this. Google hasn’t announced any specific dates when the algorithm change will be rolled out wider than the US so it is best to be prepared for this as it is rare that significant changes aren’t rolled out globally.
The Google Pigeon update is designed to tie the local search algorithm deeper into the main web search algorithm which uses hundreds of ranking signals. This includes search capabilities such as spelling corrections, synonyms and the Knowledge Graph. The change means that the new algorithm improves a few other factors for local search including the distance and location ranking factors for local businesses. The whole aim of the new algorithm is to provide a better experience for people searching for local results.
How Google Pigeon impacts your business website
What all of this means in simple terms is that your local business will show within the carousel area straight at the top of the search results on Google which can be seen here;
Image source: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-pigeon-update-18938.html
The algorithm is designed to give a boost to real world places, expanding beyond the initial places of interest that were originally being listed within the carousel. Search for “Things to do in Manchester” on Google to see how this looks at present in the UK;
As this expands within the UK, we will start to see the carousel appearing more and more for searches such as;
- Builders Merchants in Manchester
- Timber Merchants in Manchester
- Plumbers in Manchester
- Builders in Manchester
- Restaurants in Manchester
…and many more similar types of phrases.
The carousel area is being used for local listings instead of what is currently being used which is known as the ‘7-Pack’ which is a group of local listings that are often given prominence when people are searching for phrases with a local intent. For example, here you can see the current ‘7-Pack’ listings when searching for “Restaurants in Manchester”;
With the Google Pigeon algorithm update moving the local listings into the carousel, this also means that directory type websites are also getting a boost. With all of the local listings moving up into the carousel, this means that the other directory style websites are showing higher up the page. Higher visibility generally leads to higher traffic levels. Below shows a screenshot from the US whereby local businesses are listed within the top carousel and larger directory style websites are being listed within the main results (click for larger image);
It is going to be interesting to see exactly how this plays out over time, but it seems that everyone is a winner here – as long as the correct measures are put in place. Some large directories are already seeing a 5-10% increase in organic traffic from this change.
Large branded web directories such as Yelp and Yell are likely to benefit hugely as they have extremely strong brands which helps greatly with the Search Engine Optimisation work. Which means that smaller businesses have to make sure they have the right pieces in place to be able to earn a listing within the carousel at the top to beat the large directories.
What you need to do next
Ok, so to put the Google Pigeon algorithm update into perspective and to lay out a clear plan of action there are several things that need to be done. While this update hasn’t been rolled out into England just yet, it is better to be ahead of the game as it is extremely likely that this will be rolled out within the next few months.
Complete your listing on branded business directories
It is important to stress here that this is for branded directories, not cheap, nasty, horrible traditional ‘SEO directories’. Stay away from those, stay well away. Here we are talking about well-known brands. Think Yelp, Yell, Urbanspoon, TripAdvisor, OpenTable and more.
While there are well known generic directories, there will also be some industry specific directories that will be worth getting listed in. So do your research, or get in touch and we can help you with the process to make sure your business is being listed in the places where it needs to be.
What this will mean is that if a person doesn’t click on your listing within the carousel, then you will have a greater chance that your business will be seen in one of the top business directories. By covering off both angles, this will increase the chances of a potential customer finding your business online.
Make sure Google knows about your business through Google My Business
Make sure your business is listed on Google My Business. Whether you have a single shop / store / outlet / office, or hundreds throughout the UK. Make sure you are listing all of your physical locations on Google My Business. You may have heard about Google My Business recently but if not, Google My Business has replaced the old Google Local and Google Places tools to list your business on Google.
If you aren’t listed on Google My Business and need some support with this then get in touch and we can work closely with you to get your business listed in preparation for when the change is rolled out within the UK and further afield.
by Michael Cropper | Aug 1, 2014 | News |
We have officially reached the grand old age of 1!
What an amazing first year in business. It astonishes me how fast time flies yet at the same time, realising that we are only 12 months old as a business which is a very short time indeed. It is at this time of year when it is good to look back at the challenges we have overcome and the accomplishments we have achieved as a business throughout this time. All of which wouldn’t have been possible without the large network of contacts and connections with other businesses we have made during the last 12 months.
The Challenges and Opportunities
To give a bit of background about myself prior to launching Contrado Digital. Over the last few years during my career prior to launching Contrado Digital, I had the fantastic opportunity to work with leading UK and multi-national brands including LateRooms.com, AsiaRooms.com, Travis Perkins, Berghaus, Oxfam, PDSA, TransPennine Express, Carrier Luxury Holidays and many many more. Working with large and well-recognised brands is great as they really understand the importance of digital.
Since launching Contrado Digital 12 months ago being based in Blackburn, we have spoken with an enormous amount of businesses throughout East Lancashire, ranging from small businesses to large multi-million pound organisations. One of the largest challenges we have faced during this time is talking to businesses about digital and the importance of it. Honestly, the one item that has surprised me most since moving from a Manchester based business environment to an East Lancashire based business environment is that lack of focus on digital technologies. Our experience of this to date is that East Lancashire businesses are 5-10 years behind Manchester based companies when it comes to utilising digital technologies to increase revenues.
This may sound like a sweeping statement to make since there are clearly some very innovative businesses within the area, often businesses that manufacturer products that are sold globally, although when it comes to their digital presence, this often is left lagging far behind. What this also means is that there is clearly a huge opportunity to help these ambitious companies within the East Lancashire area.
We originally launched offering purely search engine optimisation services, although quickly realised that within East Lancashire that businesses simply weren’t ready for such a specialised service. Manchester yes, East Lancashire, no. As such, we expanded our services significantly to cater for the wide range of requests from businesses around how to profit from digital technologies. To make this simple for businesses to understand we broke this down into 5 key areas that set out a clear path for businesses to increase revenues through digital marketing, starting with getting the basics right first then moving onto the more advanced areas;
- Design: Looking at how you are communicating your key messages as a business with creative design, photography, video production, copywriting and content marketing.
- Build: Looking at how adaptable your website is to meet your ambitious business goals including expansion into mobile applications.
- Traffic: Looking at how your digital marketing channels are working to increase revenue for your business including search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, email marketing and social media strategy.
- Track: Looking at how you are tracking your digital marketing efforts with tools such as Google Analytics, call tracking and our new WiFi Analytics and Marketing service which is designed to bridge the gap between the online and offline world.
- Optimise: Looking at how to squeeze every last conversion out of your website traffic through the use of conversion rate optimisation, user testing, marketing automation, user feedback, live chat and customer reviews.
Businesses who really grasp the possibilities with digital over the next few years are the businesses that are going to thrive. The efficiencies that can be achieved through digital are enormous and the marketing potential is global. With a clear, robust and ambitious digital strategy, any business can experience significant growth, as long as they are willing to make the necessary changes to adapt quickly. To paraphrase Charles Darwin;
“It’s not the strongest of the species businesses that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change”
Accomplishments
Within the short space of 12 months since launching, we have had tremendous success and recognition for the work we have completed. Being nominated for a total of 8 awards for the work we have completed with clients, which put us up against well established companies with over 250 members of staff and one company that recently sold for £18 million. Not bad going for the first year of trading!
We were first shortlisted in the Lancashire Red Rose Awards within the Ecommerce category;
We were then shortlisted in the Prolific North Awards within the Best SEO & PPC Agency category;
We were then shortlisted in The Bibas in four categories including Creative Business of the Year, E-Business of the Year, New Business of the Year and Most Inspiring Business of the Year
We were then shortlisted in the Chartered Institute of Marketing Northern Awards in two categories including Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year and Northern Agency of the Year
All in all, not bad going for the work we have done for clients.
Giving Back
We are firm believers that the next wave of talent for the digital industry is coming from people leaving university. That’s why we regularly get involved with speaking at local universities including Manchester Metropolitan University and Blackburn College’s University campus to talk to students and staff about how the digital world is changing and what this means for them and the courses that are being run.
Following on from this, we have also had two separate work placement people come in and work on internal projects which has given them a great opportunity to increase their skills.
Partnerships
Within this time we have also partnered with some of the leading digital software providers which means we can offer clients a superior service. Tools including HootSuite, where we are an Official HootSuite Solutions Partner and where our staff are Certified HootSuite Professionals.
We have also recently become a Purple WiFi Authorised Reseller which we are delighted to be part of. This allows us to work with companies who are looking to join the online and offline experience together for customers through the use of smart technologies.
Special thanks
In the true style of Miss World, I’d like to personally thank everyone who has helped us along our journey so far, too many to name individually, so suffice to say that if you are reading this then you are one of these people in one way or another. I’ve met so many amazing business people and had the opportunity to talk with ambitious businesses within the area about how they can utilise digital marketing to increase their revenues, it’s been a fantastic first year in business. Oh yes, and world peace.
The Future
Starting a business from scratch is a tough thing to do and one where there are many challenges that you simply cannot foresee, no matter how much planning you do. Within the first 12 months in business we have had tremendous success and we have also had to re-focus based on the discussions we have had with businesses.
We have BIG plans for the future, so watch this space closely. We are always interested in speaking with ambitious high growth companies to see how we can help to increase revenues further, so if this sounds like you, then get in touch.
