Picture the scene; two weeks ago Rachel and I were at Rossendale’s Mayor’s Ball, which is an annual black-tie event held by our local council to celebrate the mayor’s year in office. We didn’t have a care in the world. GrowTraffic was flying, we had money in the bank and a couple of property deals on the go. Two weeks later it seems like the whole world has diametrically shifted; our digital marketing agency has had some serious setbacks and a lot of things are going to need to change. Read more
SEO Copywriting Predictions for 2018
Happy New Year!
Having not written a GT blog for some considerable time, I have now been given the honour of writing our first blog of 2018 – and what an honour that is! I know, you’re jealous. I would be too.
And so, as it’s the start of a shiny new year and we’re all feeling positive and looking forward to all the good things that lie ahead (come on; it’s only the second week of January…we’re still positive!), the GT team are going to take it in turns to make some predictions on what this year may have in store for each of our areas of expertise. I know, the world and his dog are doing it, just bear with us…we need the keywords! 😉
So, as copywriting – or SEO copywriting, to be more specific – is my thing, I’m going to give you my predictions for SEO copywriting and content marketing in 2018, based on the questions I’ve most been asked recently. So, whether you’ve been content marketing for years or are a content virgin, you can make sure 2018 will be the year you finally start to grow your business online. Read more
Our Essential Small Business Tools
As busy SEO consultants, our obvious number one priority is delivering results for our clients. We deliver actionable insights, that ultimately help them achieve their business goals. But how do we achieve our goals? More specifically, what tools do we use to help us achieve our business aims? Not from an SEO or marketing perspective, but the behind the scenes, daily running of a business sense.
4 Extra Bank Holidays? That Ain’t So Bad!
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
Networking With The Next Generation
I’ve been a little bit quiet on the old blog front recently because, to tell you the truth, I’ve just been swamped with work (which – as Simon Dalley says – is a good problem to have!) but I wanted to tell you about a fabulous event that I attended last week courtesy of Alder Grange School Sixth Form College in Rawthenstall.
As part of their Enterprise Week for Year 10 pupils, and representing GrowTraffic, I was lucky enough to be able to spend a morning with pupils as a business mentor, offering support and advice for their project on Tourism in Rossendale. Not only did I enjoy myself much more than I was expecting to, it was also really heartening to see such enthusiasm and dedication from all the students involved. Read more
On Yer Bike!
A couple of months ago, GrowTraffic were doing a little bit of networking at our local Shout! Network Group and we were fortunately enough to hear a talk by Wendy Bell from Lancashire County Council (LCC) about the council’s Sustainable Travel Grants, which had recently become available to businesses in the East Lancashire Area. We thought ‘we could do with a bit of that’, so we applied and – guess what? We were granted a Sustainable Travel Grant! Fantastic. Read more
What Did I Learn From Building A Website?
About 6 months ago, I embarked upon my first project management of an SEO web build. As a Freelance SEO Copywriter, the building of websites is not usually my domain and that was a state of affairs that I was perfectly happy with, but the boss said project manage and so project manage I did. Well, I tried. Read more
Why Google Dislikes Blog Networks?
This is the next SEO technique that Google appears to be going after (or has gone after big style in the last couple of months). A blog network is a group of blogs – normally bog standard wordpress installs, with basic wordpress templates and lots of content. Generally this content is generated explicitly for the purposes of creating links back to a website. Read more
What does Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links mean?
Recently there has been a flurry of people reporting they have been hit with a Webmaster tools penalty that focus’ on the backlinks coming into the site – as this coincides with the most recent update to the Google Panda update (Panda 3.3) I’m assuming it’s part of this update.
Google’s Panda updates exist outside Google’s normal algorithm changes, they are run regularly to tidy up the rankings and the aim of them is to hunt out wrong doers and penalise them for their wrong doings. Read more
Is it OK to fail?
I’m a bit of a part time runner. What I mean by that is used to run and I run every now and then, sure I run 10k everytime I go to the gym, but there is only so far I can run, only so long I can push myself before I start to fail. Read more