Our Daily Articles: Complete Index 2008–2020

Google Ads users may have spotted that the search giant slapped a 2% surcharge on their ads from last month.

Ignoring Google’s forthcoming ‘Page Experience Update’ will be a risk too far for most of us. So what is it, and what should we do about it?

You won’t be surprised to read that nobody knows, but for those of us who rely on Google search rankings, ignoring it is too big a risk.

English is a lovely language in that we can mess around and things usually work out fine, but consistency requires some sort of style book.

Although we can track any source of traffic using visitor analytics, the advantages begin when you reverse back into LinkedIn.

There are many things we can offer existing customers which are morally and professionally acceptable, and can be very good investments.

I’ve sat through so many terrible online presentations in the past few months and thought: “Why are these people doing this so badly?”

It’s a great idea to have annual audits, with budget to sort out SEO, structural or aesthetic issues that may have come up during the year.

There’s not much you can do about bad reviews, but at least Google has now made it possible to put in a complaint about spammy ones.

The objectives from the ‘announcement’ point of view and that of SEO should be the same: to persuade a third party site to report the story.

If two pages have similarly good answers, the passages of text answering the query will be what are compared, rather than the overall pages.

If an SEO audit pulls up enough opportunities to add hundreds or thousands of visitors a year, it can be a very sound investment.

A huge win in content marketing is to find the intersection of questions that people are answering and questions that we want to answer.

It’ll be different to normal interaction, but potentially just as useful. We just need to identify what’s going to work for us.

Even in this venerable medium, new publications launch every day. The best time to start an email newsletter is as soon as you can.

Think about how your headline might reflect the aims of your LinkedIn profile. Can you align these in just a few words?

One deciding question I once heard was: “Would I want my competitors to see this?”. It’s not an unreasonable place to start.

If you get an email from Google Search Console, do read it carefully – often it won’t be a serious problem.

If a document is unreadable to the recipient (as an A4 PDF document often is, on a mobile screen), whether they click on it is immaterial.

Our email newsletters can be as effective today as 20 years ago, but only if we take on board the simple lessons learned along the way.

Twitter and Instagram have been using ‘hashtags’ for many years, but fewer people use them on YouTube, where they can be just as effective.

Microsoft’s visitor behaviour analytics product, Clarity, offer several useful capabilities including heatmaps and session-replay.

I can see a lot of changes happening in sectors where some companies move heavily to remote working and others go back to the office fully.

Saying that products need to be bought through a sales representative is fine. But should products and prices still be laid out on a website?

Your company name’s results page is valuable one, seen by some important people. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to impress them.

There’s always going to be some sort of ‘buying journey’ going on, and a smart flow of email information can aid this.

Recently I narrowed down a choice of supplier based on the efficiency and friendliness of their response. What did they actually do though?

It’s well worth looking at as many data sources as possible, because even the Google Ads Keyword Planner may not have that many suggestions.

Images won’t get you a higher open-rate but they can pique the recipients’ interest or keep them engaged as they scroll down a long message.

A quick web search on your old address will give you a long list of websites which need to be contacted and the address changed.

Even just an improved layout for what you’ve already got will say to the very few website visitors who get that far: “We’ve got nothing to hide”.

YouTube is ubiquitous, but it may not be the best place to host videos for other purposes, including embedding them on our own websites

Microsoft could use its ubiquitous Office environment to persuade more people to search through that rather than ‘Googling it’.

It’s a great idea to legitimately a page with new or expanded information, and to ensure that the new date is on the page and in the sitemap.

Looking and sounding good is half the battle. Then it’s a question of having the right agenda and the right support material.

The “stories’ idea is becoming commonplace on social media: in essence they’re just full-screen slideshow presentations.

There are so many products where you’re not quite sure what you’re going to get. An unboxing video literally lays it all out in front of you.

There’s much more to making PDF documents work online than SEO considerations. Think of this next time you’re saving a document as a PDF.

Don’t pretend they’re not there, or that people will ignore them. And since they exist, you want them to reflect well on you.