Business Marketing Online

Don't just look to upgrade your page to something similar: see if you can spot weaknesses in competitor pages and gain a real advantage

Smart marketers have pop-ups that don't appear on first arriving; they wait until the visitor is more likely to be receptive to an offer.

Take a look at a page on your website where the call to action is to contact you. Are you forcing mobile users to fill in a form?

Faster loading websites are something we should all be looking to provide, but next generation image formats may not be a good strategy

Some new methods allow "more fine-grained configuration of the preview content shown for your pages... through two types of new settings".

Most businesses are doing very little. Your company will have to make up its own mind as to the risk it's prepared to take.

Try to minimise the number of websites you run, with just one, if possible, being the easiest, cheapest and most effective of all

If BMON had been set up as an SEO consultancy, we'd probably have ended up as a PR agency – if we'd survived the intervening period

This is a big advert which will autoplay on the YouTube home screen on TVs – and can be purchased on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis.

With respect to SEO, I've not heard anyone show that it provides a ranking advantage, so there's certainly no panic

You might notice in the Google results that the green URL under each result has now changed from the actual URL to a 'breadcrumb' link.

Why a bigger task for sales now is not to advocate our particular product, but to encourage the buyer to get on with deciding to buy something.

Google now treats the nofollow attribute as a "hint" for ranking, rather than a rule, and will do the same for crawling and indexing.

Much more than in desktop browser forms, it's important to keep mobile forms simple. Here are a few design tips.

Publish a web page, click on the browser toolbar button, and all the links on your page are instantly checked. Simple as that.

Continuing my look at useful browser add-ons for website marketing, here's one that lets you find email addresses related to a website.

What this does is to bring keyword data into everyday applications; I use it with Google Search, Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

There are so many reasons to go the extra mile I don't know where to start, but tying in the advert headline with the landing page is one.

The knee-jerk response at many businesses is to slash activities including advertising, so marketing needs to market itself better internally.

There are several sets of people who might be leaving your list who you really don't want to annoy. Irritate these people at your peril.

Ten years ago a small site could do well in the search engine results accidentally. Today you'll need a smart, targeted strategy.

Sigstr allows you to control the email signatures across a company where employees are using Office 365, Exchange, Gsuite,etc.

Your efforts are wasted if people don't do something. And your instructions on what to do need to be simple.

One of the most intriguing keyword research tools around, Ubersuggest, now has an expanded database, which makes it well worth a look.

When you send out the first announcements, there may not be a finished landing page on your website for people to quote.

Bullet points are a list of specific, important items. As such, they deserve to be crafted well. They also need to be kept simple

It'd be interesting to know if people were reading to the end, and to do this, you need to be measuring what's called 'scroll depth'.

As a website owner, I'm not sure I like it – why does Google think it's OK to start marking up my website in this way?

Storytelling and journalism have to be accessible to a wide audience. Technical marketing content needs to target customers.

The sensible place for links to your social media accounts is at the end of every piece of content. It's what the 'footer' was designed for.

But what can you do if your page speed score leaves something to be desired? Here are a couple of quick tips.

These things are relative, so take a look at the scores for the competitors who are doing best for key searches. That's a target to aim for.

This is how Google judges your page as having provided a good user experience, and there's little that beats that in the SEO stakes nowadays.

There are a lot of things you can do to protect your site, and they're well worth the time and/or financial investment involved

Two of our clients have had this experience in the last year. I've had a site hacked as well. It's been a learning exercise for all of us.

Have a look at yours and ensure any standard landing pages or forms are updated to be as good as your main offer pages

Even if you're a confident writer and an authority on the subject, I'd suggest that 'none' would be asking for trouble

It's one of those decisions that a bit of testing might help with, but we may also have to rely on some intuition

I always recommend adding a constant stream of authoritative background articles and FAQs. What else can we put on the website?

Google soon won't be supporting the command 'noindex'. So if your robots.txt contains any lines with that in it, you may want to change it.

I've known businesses change their marketing message for a product to something far more effective, based on this sort of customer feedback

Google has said it will soon only use what it sees on our websites using the equivalent of a mobile device.

Expertise, authority and trust: as usual, Google is only trying to quantify and specify what prospects probably look for without thinking.

As I've mentioned many times before, a how-to video is one of the most cost-effective pieces of content any company can produce.

What worries me a little is the many businesses who could be getting ads showing that don't make much sense.

The 'canonical' tag should be generated automatically by your content management system. But do make sure it is.

Wordpress is free, and there are so many people who know how to maintain it that your installation will be pretty well future-proof.

The codes '301' and '302' tell browsers that the URL requested is understood, but the server is going to send them somewhere else instead.

The traditional 'three-act structure' is an easy approach that can be as applicable to a technical article as it can to a novel