SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the practice of making your website search engine and user-friendly so that it is listed high up in a search engine when a person searches for something.
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
I’ve been working on PPC campaigns since 2007, in that time I’ve managed huge campaigns with tens of thousands of keywords spending £80,000+ a month down to small campaigns spending a few hundred pounds a month with only a select group of keywords and one of the key things that makes a successful campaign is the message and the landing page it’s on. Read More
Most business people will understand the difference between paid for listings and organic listings on Google and most of them will be determined to appear highly in the organic listings as they generally percieve this (often erroneously) to be the cheapest way to get online traffic. Read More
The world of online marketing is a funny old place and has been described to me in many different ways over the years, recently someone said internet marketing is sexy, fun and addictive and this got me thinking about what I think about the world of SEO, PPC, SMO (and various other acronyms), inbound marketing in general, email marketing, web design and development – and all the other things that I’ve been invovled with over the years. Read More
On Grow Traffic I very often write about what it’s like being a freelance seo consultant but as a search marketer (as well as an online marketer) I have a much broader understanding of the scope of internet marketing as a whole and I sometimes don’t shout enough about the amount of PPC management I’ve done in my time, including managing several campaigns with budgets in excess of £80k a month. Read More
Whenever I explain to people what I do and my methodology, one of the things I’m at pains to say is that I’m a marketer that focuses on return on investment.
All my career we’ve been talking about tracing how conversions are attained and working out cost per conversions. It’s a standard format however recently I’ve been starting to think about the point of marketing and how it works to change the way the marketed to interact and engage with the brand and how difficult that is in reality to quantify. Read More
I try and take a step back on a regular basis and ask myself what have I learned about myself from the things I’ve just done. It always surprises me that people are happy to plod on allowing themselves to get into the same situations where they have to make the same mistakes because they haven’t learned anything about themselves from their experiences.
Gnoshi Seauton
The ancient Greeks had a saying and although the spirit of the original meaning is lost to time, Gnoshi Seauton or Know Thyself still resonates with me today. I remind myself of this on a daily basis, whatever I do I approach it from a situation of how I will best cope with it, where it is likely to test me and how it is likely to enable me to develop, both professionally and personally.
Agency vs. In-house Marketing
I’ve worked for agencies and I’ve worked client side and it’s fair to say that when I’ve found myself in the position of a client side role I’ve hated it. There are a couple of reasons, firstly I love the variety that working a number of different projects brings, this gives me loads of opportunity to develop and hone my skill set, f I can do it in one industry I can do it anywhere. The second reason I prefer agency work is that I like being in the role of being an industry expert, maybe this is an ego thing, but I think it’s good to have that ego sometimes, I make the things happen through my advise and strategy. There is no real difference as to where this advice goes to a client or to a marketing director / managing director however it’s often harder to advise the guy that’s paying your wages than the guy that’s paying for your service, especially if you work for someone who has used various internet marketing techniques in the past.
Plan the event in advance or plan for the event / Overview vs detail
I probably bang on about this too often. One of the reasons I think I’m so good at search marketing is that I can disatach myself from the detail and see what’s going on as an overview. It’s a useful skill, sure it’s important to get a little bit fixated on the percentage of keywords on a page and where they are located however once you’ve done that you’ve got to be able to say “what’s the bigger picture, what are the general trends”.
I used to work for a guy who asked me how I knew what was going to happen with PPC, I explained it was experience, I also explained the reasons and he looked a bit blank – then I said “I just know, I cam’t really 100% tell you the complexities of how I know, I’ve been staring at this date for so long I can see the patterns.” He seemed quite happy with that response and let me carry on.
Quite often I’m talking to people and they tell me they don’t want to do pay-per-click (PPC) as they don’t like paying for traffic, it’s at this point that I tell them that there is no such thing as free organic traffic.
Sometimes you are lucky and you write a blog post or a page and it ranks really highly and you get loads of traffic from it, this is the exception, normally you have to spend ages tweaking your onpage content and building links, it can take months to get onto the first page of Google and often about the same amount of time to get from the bottom of page 1 to the top 3 (which is where the money and traffic is).
I’ve met a load of designers in my time as an internet marketer, I’ve steered them in most cases to get from them what I want, however I think it’s fair to say every now and then you come accross someone that you want to take a step back from and say “there you go, do what you got to do”. That’s trust, trust in their abilities and their understanding, I’ve come to realise recently how important this can be in getting a fantastic web design and not just a mediocre web design.
When I first meet with a client to discuss Pay Per Click, after all the excitement is over I have to have the conversation of how much, it generally goes like this:
Me: What kind of budget do you have?
Clients: Well how much do you think we should spend?
Me: You can spend as much or as little as you want, how much does your average sale cost you at the moment?
SEO is an essential element to the marketing role of most marketing departments in most business. The main problem with SEO is that it’s difficult to measure.
It’s therefore important for anyone carrying out SEO for a client or internally to make sure they scream and shout about what they are doing.
Remember often the changes that you make in seoing a website will take weeks to have any real impact, so it’s important to log every single change that you make to the website – you’ve got to be really anal about it, being able to go back is essential, and sometimes you know what? Even this won’t help because your seo efforts are effected by other factors such as the seo efforts of a rival website, or changes to algorithms.
he other thing is you can be adding 20 relevant pages a day with great content however they’ll probably only get what appears to be a small number of visits, maybe a few a day in some cases – so you’ve got to focus on the overall picture and strategy when talking to the decision makers, after all if you can add 20 really good pages a day to a website and you get a few visits to each the seo team are going to be generating some serious traffic overall in a week.
It’s when the accountants get involved that you have a problem – seoing a weebsite is about the future of that website and the busines, it’s not like ppc were the returns are instant, with seo the returns take months and they are incremental and you’ve got to speculate about the success of a page.
If you focus on the individual aspects of seo too much your decision makers will lose sight of the overall bigger picture and start to devalue the seo your are carrying out for them.
As ever in business, and especially marketing, if it’s going to be done you better make sure you can back it up with data and it’s especially true when managing an seo campaign.
Pay per click (PPC) advertising, is probably the best form of marketing currently available to businesses with a website.
Pay per click advertising is an innovative marketing method that only displays your advertisement when people search for your products or service. Meaning that your user is prequalified before they arrive on your website
What’s more, the results are almost immediate, unlike SEO strategies that can take months and sometimes even years to pay off.
Better still, you only pay for the clicks that deliver traffic to your site – so unlike historical marketing methods (such as display advertising), you don’t get charged for the number of times your ad will potentially be seen.
Years of PPC Management experience
Pay per click management is one of GrowTraffic specialities, in which we have years of experience, understanding just about every aspect of the pay per click management process. Simon has been managing Google Adwords accounts since 2007. He’s managed pay per click campaigns for some of the countries leading brands, handling millions of pounds of marketing spend per year, to deliver significant growth through this targeted customer acquisition activity.
Whether you are new to the whole PPC game or have an inhouse team working on your PPC activity we are here to help. We can work in a consultative capacity or carry out pay per click management on your behalf.
Whatever you do when you’re working with PPC you’ve got to make sure your pay per click marketing campaigns are a success from the start and continue to maximise ROI by incremental improvements and growth. That’s where we come in.
As an integrated search marketing operation, we know how important it is for your PPC activities to feedback to your SEO campaign and whether you want us to engage in SEO on your behalf or not, we’ll work with you to demonstrate how the insights we garner from PPC can be best applied to your ongoing organic search activities.
Real PPC Management. Not just set and forget.
If you’ve previously outsourced your PPC campaign activity you might have already experienced the ‘set and forget’ mentality. These are the companies that win your business then set your campaign and then leave it running whilst they chase the next PPC client. Rest assured our team will be in and out of your account on a regular basis, optimising, tweaking and being ruthless when we need to be. We’re not the cheapest pay per click managers on the net but you know we’ll be on it for you.
Additionally, whilst we have a number of pieces of software that help us to manage PPC campaigns we don’t rely on the automatrons to tell us what to do, we’ll be there in the account and on the end of the phone to make sure your campaign is performing as it should do for you.
Book a FREE PPC Management Consultation
Get in touch today to discuss your PPC management requirements. There’s nothing scary about this, just let us know what you’re looking to achieve and we’ll get back to you with some ideas. We’ll probably have to have access to your account at some point but to begin with we’ll be happy just to talk through your business’ requirements. Contact us today to get started.
GrowTraffic gets your business noticed online. Our approach is fresh, yet reliable, and guarantees results.
We will boost your search engine rankings and grow your social media following to increase your client base.
We work with clients of any size, and with any budget. We work flexibly and adapt to change. Our contract lengths can be adapted to suit you, making us the perfect digital marketing partner for any business.
Our services are broad and are fully tailorable to suit your businesses’ needs. We don’t have a standard package to push on people, but allow businesses to create a bespoke package of digital marketing.
This means you never pay for what you don’t need.
We take the time to get to know your business, your market, and the competition. Without doing that, we can’t see how any Digital Marketing agency can possibly know what actions to take to help your business grow.
We do this through a full SEO Audit before we quote you. This comprehensive review of your online presence looks at not only the SEO health of your website, but, unlike most SEO agencies, also includes a thorough key word analysis, market, and competitor analysis. That way, we can be sure that we are providing your business with the right amount of services to get you ranking, rather than just giving you a ‘one size fits all’ package.
Our onsite optimisation services give your website the best chance of being found and ranked by search engines, and, when coupled with our online content marketing provision, is a powerful tool in driving traffic to your website and raising through the ranks.
And of course, social and printed media plays a big part in any marketing activity. Our expert content creators do one, holistic content calendar, so that your online and offline presence are perfectly aligned.
Having worked with clients from both ends of the spectrum, we can work equally well with those who know either a little or a lot about Internet marketing. We don’t patronise our clients or talk in ‘cyber babble’ and are always professional in our approach.
We promise to give you an honest appraisal of your situation and offer constructive advice based on our combined experience gained through many years in the digital marketing sector.
Whatever your business or budget, we can find a solution that will help you achieve your goals, however big or small they be.
If you have any further questions or would like any further information, then please give us a call on 07850556244, or use the contact form on the website to get in touch.
Ready to find out more? Drop us a line.
Why Bother With Digital Marketing?
The goal for any business owner is to increase their share of the market, gain more customers, and grow the bottom line.
The advent of the internet heralded a brave new world for businesses and means that every organisation can speak to their target audience and customers in a way they never previously dreamed of. This both makes it easier to reach customers, and harder.
Not taking advantage of this means your business is far less likely to grow in the way you want it to. Being left behind by the competition means your brand becomes less and less recognisable, and has less of a voice.
It is vital for business owners to review how their organisation uses the internet to communicate with potential and existing customers in order to decide how best to utilise this massive resource as a vehicle for business growth.
The mass of information flowing through the internet means your businesses’ message needs to be clear, original, and simple.
This is where GrowTraffic can help.
Most businesses have, or should have, a website. But a website is pointless investment if no one can find it on search engines. Or worse, they find the website but don’t like it enough to use it!
That is where GrowTraffic can help.
GrowTraffic are a digital marketing agency that helps businesses increase the traffic to their website through SEO, content marketing and brand consultation.
SEO Audit
Have a look here to find out more.
Onsite SEO
Have a look here for more information.
Printed Media
Have a look here to find out more.
Web Design
Have a look at here for more information.
SEO Training
Browse our list of courses here.
Why does my business need SEO?
Most people set up a business because they want to make it a success. There are a few who do it because they want to tick over, but lets assume you are here because you want to grow your business.
Business growth comes from a variety of places, but by only targeting one of them, for example word of mouth, you are severely limiting your growth potential.
Many business owners think their website and social media presence is just a business card, but with more and more tech savvy millennials entering the workplace, they need to be so much more than that.
They need to be your shop window, your megaphone, and your brochure. They are your most effective way of speaking to the customer, regardless of whether you are B2B or B2C.
A good website and social media presence gets across your brand and services, and is your first step towards closing that deal.
SEO and digital marketing makes that easier. Without SEO, its very difficult to show up on search engines. Without digital marketing, whatever does show up might not be effective or correct. Having one without the other is a bit pointless.
That is why GrowTraffic offer a whole range of services designed to help your business grow.
Want some advice? Get in touch!
Meet the Team
Rachel Weinhold
Managing DirectorOur MD and the one you'll hear from most. Rachel makes sure our quality is sky high and ensures we deliver.
Hannah Weinhold
Commercial DirectorOur Commercial Director brings massive commercial and operational experience to the service we provide.
Simon Dalley
Founder & DirectorFounder of GrowTraffic, with a decade and a half's experience in senior agency and client-side marketing roles.
Elicia McManus
Head of Content MarketingElicia creates and strategises high quality, perfectly optimised content to get your business noticed on and off line.
SEO for Small Businesses
Here at GrowTraffic we pride ourselves on being friendly and approachable. We aren’t smug city centre SEO agents, kidding ourselves that what we do is a dark art. And nor are we bedroom, freelance SEO agents who find it hard to communicate with clients.
We are a small, but growing agency with a diverse skill set and can handle any size of clients with a personable, professional service you would struggle to find anywhere else.
We believe it is our approach to our customers that makes us stand out from the crowd. We don’t bamboozle with jargon, we don’t oversell, and we would never suggest a course of action if we don’t believe it is the right thing to do.
We hear so much about SEO agencies who just want to take the money and do very little for it, or flog pay per click, but that’s not us.
Have a look here to see what makes us unique.
Friendly SEO Consultants
Many business owners believe SEO and digital marketing is reserved for only large businesses with huge marketing budgets.
Here at GrowTraffic, we believe every business should be able to grow, regardless of budget, target audience, or experience.
That is why we have fully tailorable packages to suit all budgets. We guide you through the entire process, so you don’t have to worry about knowing the ropes yourself.
Not only that, but we will train you on the basics of content creation and SEO, so you can manage the monthly spend and use your internal resources to full effect.
We are here to help your business grow.
Additionally, if you’re having any issues with your existing website or are in need of a new website altogether, then we’re always happy to take a look and offer our advice, with no strings attached, so please get in touch.
Have A Look At Our Recent Posts
We have another great guest post this week! This time, Aljaz Fajmut from Nightwatch has some great tips for using Twitter to boost your SEO rankings.
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