We are very proud to announce that the GrowTraffic team has picked up the prestigious Business of the Year award at the 2018 Rossendale Business Awards.
We were honoured to be able to attend the R Awards as a shortlisted business and it ewas an even greater pleasure – and surprise – to come away as winners. It’s a testament to the commitment and dedication of our hardworking and talented team. Read More
Most people have some questions about SEO. Too many people think it’s all about the dark arts. So I thought I’d pull together the top 50 most frequently asked questions about SEO and their answers. Read More
I was reading an email yesterday from someone who shall remain nameless and it was, quite frankly, terrible.
The sentences were too long, the grammar was incorrect, it read terribly. In fact, it didn’t just read terribly, it was impossible to read. By the time you’d got to the end of one sentence, you’d forgotten what it was all about. Or why you were even there in the first place. Or what your name was.
Now, to be fair, the email hadn’t been written with the intention of being used for any marketing purposes; it was a personal email. In fact, it was technically a HR document, sent with the need to be legally binding.
Nevertheless, it got me thinking about the way people write and what they want their reader to do with that piece of written information. Read More
It’s Halloween.
I have to write a blog post.
So, because I’m a good content marketer and I know how to link my content to the calendar dates – no matter how tenuous that link may be – I’m naturally going to give you a ‘Scary SEO Facts for Halloween’ blog post.
The trouble is, that whilst you can find loads of such posts already online, they’re not actually that easy to write. Or at least, not without massive caveats.
And you know why that is? It’s because SEO is not a fact based discipline. And that makes it very hard to write a blog about the SEO facts! Read More
Here at GrowTraffic, we like to position ourselves as the antidote to SEO companies.
We do say that slightly tongue in cheek – we’re not that big headed really – and it’s not that we think we’re a million times better than any other SEO agencies out there (although, we do think we’re a little bit better than a lot of SEO companies out there! Just a little bit.).
No, one of the main reasons we say that we’re different is because of the fact that we give our clients measurable KPIs, so they can assess what we’re doing and how well we’re doing it.
But if you’re trying to do SEO by yourself, or if you’re working with an agency that hasn’t told you what you’re supposed to be watching out for, how do you know which metrics to keep an eye on? Well luckily for you, GT have come up with our handy little infographic on The Top 10 SEO KPIs to Monitor (below), so you can see at a glance what you’re supposed to be checking, why you need to check it, and where. Read More
Well, yesterday we all had a little bit of a boost, because we found out that we’ve been shortlisted as finalists in two categories for the 2018 R Awards!
Yep, that’s right, little old us have made it through to the R Awards finals. Last year we were nominated but didn’t make the finals. This year we were nominated and are finalists. Maybe, on that law, next year we’ll be nominated, finalists AND winners, who knows!?!
Or…maybe 2018 is our year. We’ll find out on Wednesday 14th November, when all will be revealed. Read More
I have a confession to make.
I’m a marketer, with well over 15 years’ experience and I really, truly hate advertising.
I’ve worked with many marketers over the years and it’s apparent that there’s a lot of marketers out there who loathe advertising as well. Read More
If you are a small business owner working all the hours you can to grow your company, or you are an entrepreneur with some great ideas but no route to market, starting out can be a really tough time.
You have this superb product or service that you know everybody will love, you have an all singing and dancing website that you are truly proud of, you have invested heavily in to your ideas, but you just can’t quite put your finger on why you are not yet reaping the rewards for all your hard work.
It’s demoralising, demotivating and down right frustrating.
This is where you need some magic dust sprinkling to kick start your dreams and ambitions, that one lucky break as they say, could turn your dream in to a reality, your small business in to a FTSE 100, and you in to the next Richard Branson flying your own jet.
Well although SEO isn’t magic dust, it can certainly help to open up your business or your ideas to a global audience, giving you the leg up you were hoping for.
Want to know more about SEO can help your brand? Read on… Read More
Here, at Ahrefs, we firmly believe that the key to building a successful SEO Tool (or any tool for that matter) lies in our customer base itself. Because who else is better to tell you what people who buy your product need?
Obviously, we do some filtering and adjusting. But, nevertheless, we are good listeners, always open to learning something new.
And by providing assistance to our customers, each person on our team feels like they do something bigger than just guiding or answering common questions. Well, the position is called Customer Success Specialist for a reason. Read More
When 2018 began, the total number of social media users in the United Kingdom (UK) reached over 39 million users, with estimates going up to 42 million users. Breaking it down by platform, this translates to:
That’s a lot when you consider that, at the end of 2016, the population reached a record-high of 65.6 million. Read More
If you run a blog, if your business website has a blog, or if you have ever toyed with the idea of starting a blog, you have likely adopted the maxim of “publish quality and publish often”. Which comes as no surprise, as the world wide web is simply teeming with articles instructing you to do just that: publish blog posts regularly, so as to always have something new to offer readers and potential customers.
Don’t get me wrong – publishing quality content on a regular basis is something we all should be striving for, in one form or another, but in reality, this is never easy, is sometimes very challenging, and at times neigh-on impossible. Especially if you are the only one writing for said blog. Read More
Are you singing the song yet? If you’re not, you should be! Aretha should be blaring out in your ears as loud as possible. Go on, sing it loudly. Let that woman stare at you.
OK, that’s enough. Don’t get carried away.
Because, difficult as it is to believe, I’m not just writing this blog post as a tribute to the late, great Aretha Franklin. Although I probably should be; she deserves it.
But no, on this occasion, I’m writing about the fact that we, the GrowTraffic dream team, are a group of four women, fighting our corner in a very male dominated world. We’re independent women in SEO. And we love it. Read More
First of all, if you are new to SEO then it’s a good idea to get yourself around the basics and understand that Keywords are one of the fundamental parts of good content marketing and getting your page actually noticed.
If you are an e-commerce site for example, it is good practice to have maybe 4 or 5 keywords about your product that appear throughout your site that draw traffic from relevant searches.
Keywords, if you like, are the skeleton of your website, the bones around which the meat hangs, (Sorry to all the vegetarians out there for that analogy!).
They need to be nourished and kept strong to support the rest of the frame, so understanding how Keywords have evolved is an important part of SEO.
Want to find out more? Read More
More and more, traditional marketing strategies are either going out the window or being saved for the big boys.
Since the big boys obviously don’t need little old me writing their marketing strategy, I’m going to talk to the rest of you, rest of us anyway. How do you compete?
Content marketing has changed the game. Stop swimming and die, or in this case, stop evolving, stop adapting, stop giving great answers, and die. Read More
Now I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not (it’s not as though I bang on about it much!) but I’m an SEO Copywriter by trade. My job title might be Managing Director now, but having come from a previous life as a freelance copywriter, before I got dragged into the crazy world of GrowTraffic and SEO, copywriting is pretty much what I’m obsessed with.
Which is why all my blogs are about copywriting. You might have perceived the theme? Read More
You know it’s coming to the end of the year when Sports Personality of the Year is on the BBC and the annual reviews start appearing in the tabloids and on social media, whether they are about film releases, the year in politics, fashion hits and misses or generally the stories that made the headlines from January to December are reviewed and make the headlines once more!
When it comes to Digital Marketing developments however, it’s worth remembering that changes to SEO algorithms moves so quickly and Google updates happen in the blink of an eye, that it’s worth stopping half way through the year to reflect and ensure you’re digital marketing strategies are still on track.
Want to find out if you are still winning the SEO strategic battle? Find out here in this week’s blog! Read More
It’s been quite a while since I’ve created a top SEOs blog post, but I consistently SEO orientated digital marketers reaching out to me to see if they could be included in one of my top SEO lists.
So, let’s get something straight right from the start. The GrowTraffic, TOP SEO list is created using the vaguest of methodologies. There is a bit of science behind it but I’m not going to try to pretend that this is a scientific analysis of who the top SEOs are in the UK. You could probably conclude that this is at best competitor analysis of those competing in the SEO space in Google’s SERPs from a GrowTraffc perspective. Read More
The website is all good to go, the pages are well optimised, the product pictures look great and the E-Commerce shop is waiting for customers to spend their money and generate sales. It’s all very exciting, you have spent ages planning and setting up a business and you’ve depleted your hard-earned savings on having a professional website built.
But what do you do about keeping your content fresh once the website is launched? Content is King after all, and it’s a huge factor in those all-important SEO rankings that ensure your website comes out on top in the Google search.
Well you plan. That’s what. You plan your content like you plan everything else to stay well organised and on top of your game.
Want to know how to plan content for your website? Read On… Read More
How much business networking do you do for your company?
I wrote a blog way back in 2015 entitled The Power of Networking, which was about how GrowTraffic had recently started networking in the Rossendale Valley, having moved to the area a year or so earlier. It wasn’t a new venture for us, as such, because we’d done networking previously in other areas, but it was a bit of a revelation to find a community in our new locality that was so much more switched on to the benefits of networking than we’d encountered at our old one.
That’s why, since I wrote that last blog in 2015, networking has become a central pillar of GrowTraffic’s sales and growth strategy, and it’s something that all of the team take part in on a regular basis. Read More
I love copywriting.
Whilst I’m currently the Managing Director of GrowTraffic Ltd (I say ‘currently’ because who knows how long this will last?!? I might win the lottery next week, in which case I’m outta here!) I started off as an SEO Copywriter, so copywriting is kind of my bag.
In fact, if you gave me the option of doing something Managing Director-ish or something copywriter-ish, I’m going to do copywriter things. Hence this blog now.
But even I, as a loyal devotee of SEO copywriting, know that writing your content is only half the battle.
Once you’ve written it, if you want to give it the best chance of ranking (which you do, otherwise what was the point of writing it in the first place?!) then you have to optimise it as you’re uploading it. Forget to do that bit, and you might as well chuck half of your lovely blog post straight in the bin. Read More
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