The UK's economy has encountered persistent challenges since the pandemic, intensifying worries for businesses amid uncertainties in the economic landscape, further exacerbated by increases in living costs, material expenses, and the ongoing repercussions of Brexit. However, there are ways to help your business prepare for whatever is around the corner and completing a full marketing audit (assessing all marketing activity, benchmarking effectiveness and developing new st...

Investing in our people and their development, is something we continually support. Kim & Amy headed to brightonSEO for two days, their first in-person conference since they joined Cognique last year. Here’s what they got up to in the fun packed city of Brighton… brightonSEO here we come We’d booked our tickets, found an Airbnb with a seaside view, figured out the tube to get across London so we didn’t miss our connecting train. We were ready… As we headed down to Brighton, cracke...

We specialise in providing bespoke website design and digital marketing for OMBs and SMEs. Winners of the Somerset Business Award Small Business Of The Year 2021, we are enjoying a period of business growth. In response to increased client demand, we have recently expanded the marketing team with Marketing Manager, Kim Barnard who oversees the marketing team and Amy Scriven, in the role of Digital Marketing Executive. Combining their skills and enthusiasm will help take Cognique to the next lev...

You've dived into your Google Analytics and you know where your website visitors are coming from and how they find and use your site. You also discover that your bounce rate is really high. Is this a problem and if so, what can you do about it? What exactly is a bounce rate? A website bounce occurs when a user visits your website, views just one page and then exits immediately. They essentially 'bounce' off your website. Your bounce rate is calculated by dividing all single page sessions by all...

So you’ve launched your brand spanking new website and it's received fantastic feedback. But does a website have a 'shelf life' and if so, when should you start thinking about developing a new one?Let’s be SMART about itIn principle, the success of a website can be measured against its intended purpose. Was it developed to attract new customers? Is it an eCommerce site that needs to deliver a specific ROI? Maybe it adds credibility to your business or service? Or perhaps it's purely...

People leaving your website straight away is bad news. There’s never a time where you’d want someone to leave your website, but now it’s more important than ever thanks (or no thanks) to Google’s RankBrain. RankBrain is a complicated animal, but in a nutshell, Google are now paying closer attention if people click to your website from search results then immediately click back again. If someone does this, it’s a sign that your website didn’t satisfy them, and it’s likely Google wi...

You might have looked at how many people are visiting your website, but do you also pay attention to how many are leaving?Using Google Analytics to find out where people leave Google Analytics can give you insight into where people are leaving your website, and you can then do a bit of detective work to try and work out why that might be. Here's three metrics to look at. Related blog: Learn how to set up Google Analytics1) Exit pages Go to 'Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages' and cli...

Struggling to find the stats you’re looking for in Google Analytics? Then you’re going to love Google Data Studio! A relatively new product from Google, Data Studio allows you to create at-a-glance reports from multiple data sources, including Analytics, Adwords and Google Sheets. And even better, since February this year, Google Data Studio has been free to use for all businesses. Why use Google Data Studio? Instead of having to go into Analytics and spend time unearthing the key statis...

In previous posts we've explained why you should use Google Search Console, plus provided instructions on how to get set up. This is the first in a series on how to actually start using Google Search Console. A lot of the features of Google Search Console aren't something you need to use every day, and that's certainly the case with the disavow tool. In this blog, you'll learn how you can use Google Search Console to disavow backlinks, and why you might need to do that in the first place.W...

In the second of our posts on using Google Search Console, we look at how you can tell Google that your site is no longer compromised if a "This site may be hacked" message is displaying above your website in search results. This can happen if your site has been the victim of hackers, spam or phishing scams.Sign up to get updates via Google Search Console If Google add “This site may be hacked” to your search listings, they will notify you via your Google Search Console. Even if your si...

Ever wondered where your website traffic comes from? How do people find you and end up on your site? Thankfully, it’s easy (and free!) to find out with Google Analytics. If you don’t have Google Analytics yet, here’s how to set it up.How to check your website traffic Once your website is set up on Google Analytics, head to Acquisition > Overview in the left hand side menu. From here you will see an overview of all the different sources that are sending traffic to your website.Ide...

If you’ve looked in Google Analytics and seen that people are finding your website through search engines, you might have wondered what they typed in to find you. You may have tried to find the answer within Google Analytics, in which case you probably came across the unhelpful term “(Not provided)” where you expected to see the keywords. So does that mean you’ll never know what people are searching for to find you? Thankfully not! Although Google Analytics no longer displays search ter...

Measuring your progress is an essential part of any successful digital marketing strategy. Google Analytics is a great free tool for measuring and analysing your web traffic, plus it’s fairly straightforward to get set up. If you’ve never used it before, here’s how to get started... Sign up to Google Analytics If you don’t already use any Google services, you will need to create a Google account at google.com/analytics. Ignore all the stuff about premium and sign up for a free account...

To find out if your website stats are already being affected by referrer spam please read our blog post Is referrer spam affecting your website metrics? Many websites are hosted on web servers that use .htaccess files to control how the server should behave in response to specific requests. The .htaccess file is found in the root of your site directory and can be accessed either by FTP, SSH or web admin control panel such as cPanel. There are two possible methods to block referrer spam to your ...

There are a number of WordPress plugins designed to block referrer spam from accessing your website and affecting your analytics data. To find out if your website is affected read our earlier blog post Is referrer spam affecting your website metrics? You can find instructions on how to block referrer spam with WordPress below: The following instructions assume you are familiar with both WordPress and installing plugins. We cannot be held responsible for any detrimental effects and we do not pro...

The most effective way to block ghost referrer spam from accessing your website and affecting your analytics data is to set up a custom filter directly in your Google Anaytics account. To find out if your website is affected read our blog post Is referrer spam affecting your website metrics?Set up a View in Google Analytics Before you can begin to use any of the techniques below we recommend setting up an additional view in Google Analytics. The benefit of views is that you can see the effect...