Business Marketing Online

Recipients might not have taken action simply because the email was received in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

Windows 11 will be the first time Microsoft has not bundled Internet Explorer with a new version of Windows for more than 20 years.

Surely having good references to reliable sources makes a page stand up? And if something makes a page better, wouldn’t Google like it more?

It turns out to be almost certainly the case that having quality outbound links with good anchor text will help the page hosting those links

If your goal is to make your site more ‘sticky’, it’s a good thing to monitor. Otherwise, I never include it in analytics reports.

With most marketing channels, if they fail, it’s probably not critical. But have you considered what would happen if they do?

Why we should ask the prospects where they want to go, and frame our products as being the outcome that they desire.

A new ‘Best practices for ecommerce’ guide from Google makes points equally relevant to sites that list products not available online.

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

SEO has changed over the years, and pages now need to be targeted at ‘search intent’ rather than ‘keywords’.

Whatever market you’re in, I’d bet AnswerThe Public can come up with ideas for articles that you hadn’t thought of.

Many companies undermine their product launches by making it all about them, rather than the benefits to the customer.

If we have separate products or services which overlap, it’s important to choose between them on the customer’s behalf as early as possible.

The types of websites we manage are more likely to be looked at in an everyday office, so we should opt for black text on a white background.

If you’ve got a long and important document to publicise, one of the best ways is to create an intermediate-length article. Here’s how.

Sure, the amount of ‘link equity’ we’re going to get from a local business directory isn’t great, but it’s something.

Whether your video is a product demo, a how-to, an interview or a case study, focus entirely on that, both in the content and the presentation.

My suggestion for pages which Google doesn’t seem to be acknowledging is to get some decent external links to them.

Google seems to be playing around with a new format when the first result has ‘sitelinks’ under the main heading. These sitelinks are usually seen on company name results and the like, and are intended to provide quick links to what Google sees as the most important pages on the site. Here’s an example of the old format vs the new one: As you can see, the new layout shows the sitelinks one above the other, rather than in two columns, separated by horizontal rules. If you’re thinking that this… Read More »A new layout format for Sitelinks in Google results and Ads

In certain markets, where products and applications provoke a level of discussion from users, Twitter Communities may be worth keeping an eye on.

A proper analysis of SEO effectiveness should be separating search terms related to our own brands from more general searches.

If you divide up your time or budget between different activities, PR and Content Marketing need to be separate items.

Start with a few notes, for sure, but a good style guide is probably something best created by growing it over months and even years.

Numbers jump out of a page anyway, but numbers in a graphic even more so. What’s more, it only takes seconds.

In another move towards full search advert automation, Google is moving advertisers completely to ‘responsive’ ads next year.

For QR codes in magazines to work in predominantly desktop-based exercises, we’ll need a way to scan them using a desktop device.

A new report has found an increase in the number of team members involved in the buying process over the past 12 months.

I think the tip which most experts agree on is to include a strong action word such as “Buy”, “Read”, “Watch” or “Download”

One of the big giveaways that a website is neglected is the ‘latest news’ page which seems to have stopped dead in 2018.

This article has managed to find 22, if you’ve got time but no budget. There’s also another interesting angle…

We need to give prospects all the data they need, including prices, but what if services are too complex or specialist to list these?

Always get any new site evaluated professionally from an SEO point of view before exposing it to the world.

Don’t be afraid to follow up whatever channels of communication Google is offering, and to be forceful in getting positive response.

Paper is awful for getting online response, so if you have no alternative, then at least make it as easy as possible for the reader.

Google has a string of suggestions for website images in addition to just ensuring the image needs to be there in the first place.

The suggestion that we display images “only where they add original value to the page” is something to take on board.

‘Customer-focused’ has become one of those marketing phrases which has lost all meaning, and is just part of a sentence on an ‘About Us’ page.

While it’s good to give readers something they can relate to, we need to get it out of the way as quickly as possible.

Media sections on websites are useful resources for journalists, so they work for everyone. They’re also a good place to host images.

Landing page experts Unbounce reckon there are at least four common landing page mistakes, and have outlined how they would fix them.

Just about the only marker of importance is links to the pages. We should generate some externally, but also create them internally.

Introductory autoresponders are great – I’ve had many over the years which really got me engaged with a business.

A useful article from Google suggests starting to analyse falls in search traffic by eliminating forces outside of the site itself

The ‘User Explorer’ report tells you when individual users visited, where they came from, what pages they looked at and what else they did.

Google Ads users are now able to provide images to go alongside their ads. Here are the details and some of the suggested best practices.

We should all be reading around what we do for a living, even when most of what’s published is a long way from the world we inhabit.

Nobody wants error codes on their websites. So if you ever see one on your own site, what does it mean, and what should you do?

Gratisography is a free stock image website which is worth noting if you’re looking for images which are more eye-catching than normal.

‘Lead magnets’ should have the same focus on benefits as the products themselves. They can even be a better thing to advertise.

I was on a video conference call the other day with 6–8 people, and every single person on the call looked unnecessarily unprofessional.