Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how blogs work from an SEO perspective and one of the core things I’ve been experimenting with recently is length. Specifically looking at blog word count.
There’s quite a lot of information out there about how long a blog should be and it’s something I’ve been experimenting with recently. Read More
We’re pleased to announce GrowTraffic’s Managing Director, Rachel Weinhold, has been nominated for the Enterprising Woman category of the Rossendale Business Awards 2017. Read More
Often in SEO, we discuss the issue of duplicated content. It’s something that many people working in the realm of digital marketing and copywriting are aware of, however, what do we know about the real impact of duplicated content?
Probably one of the most common myths in SEO is that duplicate content is penalised. Google reads the content of a page from an HTML perspective and when you take into account all the replicated elements shared between each page including templates etc most of the content on a page appears duplicated to Google. Read More
Google’s keyword tool was originally developed with Google Adwords users in mind. I’ve been using Adwords for more than ten years now and whilst it’s essential for this task, it’s also the basis for SEO research and many other business decisions including product development.
From the perspective of gaining rankings in Google SERPs, and thereby increase the number of visitors to a website through SEO, Google’s keyword tool can be used in a number of ways.
Before going any further I should point out that I’ve been in this game so long I still call it Google Keyword Tool when it’s proper name is now Google Adwords Keyword Planner.
The way we think about keywords has changed dramatically over the years. However many of us are still guilty of thinking about keywords too much. I think you could probably argue that our focus on keywords is a vestige of the bad old days of SEO and digital marketing. Read More
There’s going to be a huge impact to the way we do business and the way we carry out our marketing activities when The EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) comes into force on 25th May 2018. This got me questioning what the implications are for SEO consultants and SEO managers. Read More
I’ve been working in marketing since 2003. I created my first website in 2000. Sometime around 2004 / 2005, I started to get interested in SEO. It was during this time that I was managing a magazine called Professional Van and Light Truck Magazine. It was also around this time that I started noticing the impact promoting press releases had on our website’s rankings. Read More
This blog could as well be called surviving in marketing but I’m thinking specifically about what happens when a company restructures and results in redundancies in the marketing department. Read More
I’ve headed up a number of marketing teams in my time. Recently I’ve been thinking about what it takes to be a CMO. The answer, I realise, is so much more than Head of Marketing or even Marketing Director. Read More
There are a lot of different ways a business can facilitate growth. In order to do this, businesses will grow their sales team, create new products, explore different markets, create a new brand or merge with or acquire other businesses.
But over the last few years, businesses have taken up the mantle of content marketing to share out the knowledge they’ve accumulated as a business. They do this to project themselves as thought leaders in their industry and to attract new customers through SEO or through arrangements with industry publications. Read More
Since the dawn of the internet, businesses have been collecting data about our online habits. These organisations have a huge amount of information about us, but Google knows more about you than most. Read More
Every now and then someone says to me that PPC is really expensive and they’d rather go down the route of using SEO to generate enquiries or sales for their business. But as with all things marketing mix orientated, it’s never an all or nothing approach and it’s important to understand where each tactic fits into your plan. Read More
Over the last year, we’ve heard a lot about fake news. Even before that there were questions about celebrities and social media stars connections with large brands. Who believes the photos in glossy magazines haven’t been airbrushed? Or that celebrities write their own autobiographies? Increasingly, the general public is getting wise to the reality of the people they aspire to be like. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a post and believed Clint Eastwood has died! So what does this heightened awareness of ‘the fake’, do for influencer marketing? Read More
Most departments within a business conduct their day-to-day activities based on the perceived rules, processes, best-practices, metrics and targets. However, many marketers often begin to fail at marketing when they start to fall in line with the rationale of most of the corporate world.
Think about most teams within a business; finance being the standout, but also operations, logistics, production etc. They’re all on the lookout for a winning procedure that can be copied, repeated and optimised. There tends to be a right and wrong way to do things in some departments. In some practices of business, if you do things in the wrong way, people will be injured or people could end up in prison. It’s all very scientific. If you speak to business owners and marketers about whether marketing is a science or an art you’ll get a range of different answers. Read More
I’ve got a rule that I don’t do party political when I’m blogging. So I’ll try my best to remain as objective as possible whilst speaking about the Labour Party’s 2017 manifesto pledge to increase the number of Bank Holiday’s to 12 if they are elected.
The reason I feel obliged to get into this debate is because I carried out some research on this last year as part of a campaign concept creation for a certain absence management software firm, so I’ve spent many hours getting a perspective on this.
The basic premise of the campaign was to educate business owners about the benefits of employees taking time off. I believed this would facilitate the creation of a campaign that wasn’t overly sales orientated, but which was well aligned to the core functionality of the product, and which was also contrary to the prevailing machismo of entrepreneurial literature – at least enough to make business owners sit up and take notice. Read More
Probably the biggest issue the internet is wrangling with at the moment is the scourge of fake news. But this got me wondering if there is some benefit of fake news to SEO and content marketing. Read More
A good friend of mine is the CFO of a multi-billion dollar transnational and one evening we got into a relatively drunken conversation about how people are promoted to the positions they’re in. He introduced me to the concept that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. This got me thinking about how long I’ve got in my career, what my level of competency is and what I could do to ensure I don’t fall victim to the concept known as the Peter Principle. Read More
We’ve all heard about the offices of the world’s leading tech-brands. But have you ever wondered if you should be adapting your workplace to follow these trends? Based in Bacup in Rossendale in deepest darkest east Lancashire, we don’t see many businesses embracing that ethos around here – but on a day to day basis I see this spreading from outwards from the centre of Manchester. And Rossendale really isn’t that far from Manchester.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved in a comprehensive research program, working with leading business psychologists and workplace consultants, reviewing the emerging phenomenon of engaging workspaces. Despite having summarised this to some extent before, in this post I wanted to summarise some of the things we learned and apply some of those thoughts to Rossendale (where I live). Read More
The branding cycle is a never ending process which businesses go through to maintain, develop and overhaul their brand.
Made up of the 6 Ps, the branding cycle consist of product, positioning, promise, presentation, perseverance and perception analysis. After that, you repeat, cyclically forever! Ish.
I think probably the most misunderstood branding cycle P is perseverance, and this is something I thought I’d explore in a blog post. Read More
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