“Social media isn’t rocket science and we’ve got a graduate who’s a dab hand with Instagram.” Sound familiar? It's true, social media isn’t rocket science! However, like all marketing activities, it is truly effective when utilised as part of a wider strategy. Whilst the office junior may have a great following on Snapchat or perhaps even be an emerging YouTube star, running, managing and growing social media channels for a business requires planning, quality content and t...

You’ve been on the food market circuit for a while and perhaps even have a couple of local retailers stocking your products, but how do you grow your stockists and reach new retailers potentially hundreds of miles away? The time might be right for you to start talking to food and drink wholesale distributors.Working with food and drink wholesale distributors can be an effective way to reach a wide network of retailers and can significantly aid your business growth. However, there are several...

If you're not already investing in clever content marketing as an estate agent, you might be falling behind your competitors. Good content can help prospective customers find you, and, even more importantly, trust you. To take it to the next level, create content for your target customers throughout the process – from before they want your services to after they’ve taken them up. For example... Consideration By creating content for your target audiences before they need your services (in ...

As a local estate agent, you have something national chains don’t have – local knowledge. When it comes to helping people find you in search engines, that local experience can be invaluable. Here’s how to use local SEO to your advantage... Get to the top with Google My Business When people search for terms like “estate agent” in Google, the search engine often takes into account their location and shows them relevant businesses nearby. This box appears above the main search results s...

Have you heard about Google’s RankBrain? Here’s why you need to take it into account for your search engine optimisation. What is RankBrain? Many of the details (like much of Google’s operations) are shrouded in secrecy. But since it was revealed in 2015, more information has come to light. Basically, it’s an artificial intelligence machine learning program. It teaches itself and applies its learnings to search results. It first came about (as far as we know) in 2013 when Google were...

Want more people to find your blog posts via Google and other search engines? Here’s what to do... 1. Answer questions The easiest way to optimise your blog for search engine is to research what questions people are already asking that relate to your business. There are lots of ways to do this. Read our keywords blog for some ideas, or try a tool like Answer the public. Once you’ve found a question to answer, Google it yourself and look at the current search results. Prioritise topics th...

Now that there’s so much content online (over 2 million new blog posts are published every day!), writing a good blog post is key if you want it to have any traction. Here’s what every good blog post should contain: Title Your title needs to be compelling so that people will want to click on it. This is easier said than done, so try keeping a note of every blog post you click on and refer back to them when you’re writing your own titles. Your title should also be optimised for search e...

Put simply, keywords or key phrases, are what people are searching for in search engines. As a business, they’re important because you want to come up in search engines when people search for the keywords or phrases that are relevant to your products or services. To stand a chance of being near the top of the results, you need to include those words and phrases in your website. For example, if you’re an accountant that specialises in small businesses, you need to have the words “Small bu...

If you've tried content marketing and it didn’t work, try again with these five topics.  What type of content to create With more content online than ever before – you’d think we have reached content saturation. In many ways, we have. Some topics (ironically, the ones that no one wants to read) have been covered to death. No matter how carefully crafted your blog is, if it's on the wrong topic, it goes out in the ether and hardly anyone ever reads it. But, if you want to succeed at co...

SEO (search engine optimisation) can seem like an daunting task, but the key is to remember that search engines use bots to index your content, so by organising and writing your site in a way that make sense to the bots, you'll make it easier for them to find and index your pages. Here's 10 ways you can do just that... 1. Use structured site navigation  Group similar pages together under menus and try not to let pages get "orphaned" as it will be harder for bots to find them. 2. Creat...

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 t...

Are you considering investing in content marketing? These facts and statistics may be useful for starting to build a business case for content. Who is using content marketing? 85% of UK marketers say they are using content marketing as a tactic, and this figure increases to 90% for B2C marketers. 72% of marketers have a content marketing strategy in place (30% documented; 42% non-documented). 78% are creating more content than last year and 50% of B2C marketers expect their content marketing...

Planning your marketing strategy for 2015? Here's four trends to keep in mind... 1. Content marketing is here to stay According to a recent survey, 30% of businesses think content marketing will be the most important marketing tactic they will use in 2015. Plus, more than half of B2B marketers are planning to increase their content marketing spend this year. With more competition for views, content will need to be high quality and closely aligned to the needs of your target audience. Many...

Search marketing can be confusing - it’s a constantly changing field and you never know what Google has up its sleeve next. Through all these changes one thing has remained constant - keywords. Although Google now places emphasis on lots of other ranking factors, such as the quality of your content, until searchers stop typing words into search engines keywords will remain relevant. So how do you work out which keywords are right for your business? Through effective keyword research… Gett...

Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing valuable content to attract and retain customers. As many forms of traditional or 'outbound' marketing become increasingly ineffective, content marketing is gaining popularity because high quality content can help increase trust in your brand and also attract traffic from search engines and social media. The content itself can take any form - it could be written, visual, a video, or any other format that your audience may find interes...

To attract the right kind of visitors to your website you need to create VALUABLE, OPTIMISED content REGULARLY. To help you achieve these aims we have created a free content calendar template, which is ideal for planning blog and news articles.How to use the free content calendar template The template has been set up for creating content on a weekly basis, and there is a blank worksheet (page) for each month; obviously you can adjust the template to suit your needs. Please read the notes be...