Our Daily Articles: Complete Index 2008–2022

We should all try to simplify our home page, but it is important to get something on the page which the search engines can get hold of.

There’s a growing trend to strip out all of the home page menu choices and to ask the visitor what they want

SEO has a number of aims, and it’s often easy to focus on one at the expense of the others. Higher rankings are not everything.

Price is always less of an issue when customer service is perceived as being better. So why hide the advantages of doing business with us?

Images are appearing with greater frequency in Google search results, including now on desktop. Here’s how to make the most of this.

The most important lesson in copywriting is to write in the way a human might speak, not using strange phrasing found only in business text.

Sometimes, especially when our customers are OEMs, it can be a productive strategy to undertake “ingredient” branding to their customers.

If a video’s view count is high, it’s likely it has a sharp title and a decent thumbnail featuring a strong text overlay.

Our team here has made the list of people we turn to for technical writing into something presentable, and it’s now available here.

Personalised videos doesn’t necessarily mean ‘per-prospect’ level of personalisation …although it could do! Instead, target prospect groups.

For the majority of websites, one of the simplest SEO boosts is to make the site faster. Here are some tools to analyse the possibilities.

It can be tempting sometimes to include pop-up windows making offers. Can these be designed not to hurt SEO?

With the Performance Max advertising campaign strategy, advertisers give Google a campaign goal, some ad copy, and it gets on with things.

I don’t think there’s too much difference between selling politicians and selling products or services. What tips can we transfer?

What to do when search engines have more patience than real visitors, finding the answer to a search query which is not prominent on a page.

Once we’ve targeted a search query that we want to rank for, it’s really important to create the right type of content.

The index of everything that’s been in our ‘An Article A Day’ blog in the last month.

If web pages aren’t linked to, humans and search engines are going to have trouble finding them. Can we set up an audit for their existence?

Styling is important, but it’s a very specific activity which should not be mistaken for rebranding, and it can signal a loss of ideas.

Why you should display your best content freely and in full, and combine the content with compelling calls to action.

If inclusion in a directory is free, there’s little reason not to be included. If it requires payment for inclusion, insist on a free trial.

We should make a note of any Google results which prominently link to poor pages …because this happens more often than most of us realise.

It’s essential to have an SEO advocate as a major player right from the concept stage. So how do we build in good SEO from the start?

A CMS should maintain a sitemap in real time, but I’ve seen sites where someone created a ‘manual’ sitemap which has not been updated.

One piece of information that customers appear to like about using online stores is becoming increasingly important: stock availability.

The “Refine this search” and “Broaden this search” features are now being seen in the wild, several months after being previewed.

Existing customers. Prospects. Competitors. Our own staff. There are so many places to listen and find out what people want.

Adding more content to our websites isn’t a target, it’s a necessity. The trap we mustn’t fall into is having no schedule.

I like the idea of an article not focusing on what the ‘best’ widget is, but referring to that almost in passing, as if it was a given.

Google’s Universal Analytics product, which most of us have had on our sites for years, is closing in the middle of next year.

Google Search Console now reports directly on how we’re doing on the Page Experience criteria: it’s essential to take a look.

Research by McKinsey & Co suggests that “B2B selling has truly changed much faster and more dramatically than many would have imagined.”

If we take a ‘customer-centred’ approach to our marketing seriously, we should use that view to guide the content in our marketing material.

There’s always been some debate about how much past activity affects the results people see in Google search.

Buyers are much better educated. An increasing number desire a “seller-free sales experience”. So how do we cope with that?

If we lose our domain names, we lose our email as well as our website. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But it happens.

What’s not to like about something that adds to a website’s usability, helps with SEO, updates itself, and costs very little to implement?

A smart way to combat hacking, apart from having good website security in the first place, is to check all the outbound links from our sites.

Where this situation exists, I’d consider bringing the external websites’ content into the main one, redirecting the old domain properly.

It’s up to us to check that our website prints out well on to A4, and it’s worth considering what web pages people might print out frequently

If we explain our prices well, we come across as trustworthy. If we hide them, why should customers assume we’re good value?

Would it really somehow put the sales team at a competitive disadvantage if the price list were out there? Are we just making excuses?