A round-up of Brighton SEO

At the end of last month I attended the best Brighton SEO yet. From the opening keynote to the afternoon’s content-focused talks in the Corn Exchange, the day was packed with actionable takeaways. However, the five talks that really stood out for me were:

  • How I Earned Loads of Links by Ignoring SEO – Malcolm Coles
  • The Habits That Land You Links – Stacey Cavanagh
  • How journalistic principles will shape the digital marketing of tomorrow – Julia Ogden
  • Using Content for Direct Response – Matt Evans
  • The Content Marketing Blueprint for Boring Industries – Mike Essex

Below, you’ll find my summaries (largely taken from my frantically scrawled notes) of the key points from each talk plus links to slide decks where available.

How I Earned Loads of Links by Ignoring SEO – Malcolm Coles

The conference kicked off with a keynote from Malcolm Coles, General Manager at The Daily Mirror and founder of UsVsTh3m. Malcolm spoke about how UsVsTh3m’s goal has always been to gain the biggest share of their traffic through social rather than search. They’ve achieved this through creating topical, highly shareable content in the form of games and quizzes, such as:

  • The ‘Where’s Damascus?’ Game – thousands of people played the game online and failed miserably, including people from the Houses of Parliament, which resulted in news coverage.
  • How Much Are You Hated By The Daily Mail? – though impossible to get to the end of unless you’re Michael Gove, this short piece of interactive content attracted over a million players, multiple pieces of online coverage with hugely authoritative links and caused UsVsTh3m to rank 3rd for the search term ‘Daily Mail’ for months.

Malcolm also spoke about how The Daily Mirror now sees more mobile traffic than desktop. Therefore, you must ensure that any content you outreach to publications (e.g. infographics) needs to look good on mobile. Your outreach email will probably be read in mobile too. What’s more, infographics sent as huge JPEGs won’t look good on mobile – these should be created in HTML and should be responsive. When UsVsTh3m launched their ‘Northometer’ quiz, 85% of plays came from mobile. In fact, the entire UsVsTh3m site is designed for mobile – Malcolm even went as far as to say that they “don’t really care” how it looks on desktop.

The most important takeaway of Malcolm’s talk was about content headlines. The best-performing headlines are interesting (you want to read them) and mysterious (they don’t give too much away) – these are the headlines that get you clicks AND shares.

Essentially, online content can be divided down into four categories: 

  • Gets clicked AND shared (what goes viral)
  • Gets clicked NOT shared (tends to be content that includes swearing – after all, “your Mum is on Facebook”)
  • Gets shared NOT clicked (rubbish headlines, but good content)
  • Doesn’t get shared OR clicked (most online content) 

You want your content to fall into the top category and sites like Buzzfeed work extremely hard to get this right – it’s standard for them to A/B test up to 25 different headlines for each piece of content.

Three more key points from Malcolm’s talk were:

  • If you’re creating content that’s getting shared, the most important thing is that it’s visual – this means people writing about it are forced to link to it because it’s not something that they can describe with the same level of impact
  • The reason quizzes work so well when it comes to generating content that gets shared is because people want to share content that’s self-affirming – i.e. it reinforces the way that people perceive themselves and/or want to be perceived by others
  • Use Facebook Ads to deliver niche content to the right people – when people in a niche start talking about something, it’s likely to get picked up by relevant publications

The Habits That Land You Links – Stacey Cavanagh

Next up was Stacey Cavanagh, Head of Search at Tecmark, talking about getting into the habits that land you links. Stacey spoke about the importance of allowing time to be creative, championing the 6-3-5 method which enables six people to generate 108 ideas in 30 minutes. Next, you should use NUF testing (New, Useful, Feasible) to work out which ideas are worth following up – score each idea out of ten for each of these things and prioritise the highest scoring ideas.

Additional takeaways from Stacey’s talk were:

  • Use a tool such as fivesecondtest.com to A/B test the effectiveness of your tweets
  • Don’t underestimate the importance of having a Flickr page with high quality, original images – ensure all images have a Creative Commons attribution license and include direction as to how to attribute
  • Have regular image reclamation sessions – imageraider.com helps to find sites using your images, then you can request attribution and a link
  • Create stories from surveys – this is a great tactic for getting news links, even if you just write a story about it (you don’t need a fancy infographic to get quality links)
  • Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of offline content – e.g. doing something “real” that results in coverage; links are a by-product of coverage
  • Old-fashioned communications are disruptive – when it comes to outreaching to your contacts, doing something like sending a hand-written letter will get you more attention than an email

How journalistic principles will shape the digital marketing of tomorrow Julia Ogden 

Julia was a journalist before she went on to work at Zazzle. Her talk was about how she’s used the skills she learnt while working in local media to inform her digital marketing tactics. Key points were:

  • Most people don’t read more than 250 words of a piece of content so make sure all the important information is at the top – the introduction to any piece of content needs to hook the reader and make them want to read on
  • The internet is crying out for high quality, well-written content – in essence, this is all that “SEO content” is
  • Content marketers should take advantage of the citizen journalism approach and crowd-source content from brand advocates and social influencers
  • Google rewards a website/business which has a range of followed links, no follow links and even just online mentions – Google recently released a patent to reward content that just mentions a brand or associated keywords, but has no links
  • When you’re creating content, always think about what’s new or different – why should people care about what you have to say?

 Using Content for Direct Response Matt Evans

It was Matt’s first time speaking at Brighton SEO and I thought his talk was one of the most useful from the day. Matt spoke at length about selling through content and provided some really great takeaways.

In essence, we’ve stopped stuffing Google with keywords and started stuffing it with content – but what so many online marketers overlook is that the sales funnel is content.

Matt outlined that there are four stages of the sales funnel that your consumers go through:

  • Unaware – content at this stage should catch peoples’ attention
  • Know the situation – content at this stage should inform people of the situation
  • Product awareness – content at this stage should inform people about the product
  • Purchase intent – content at this stage should push people to sale

Too often, content created “for SEO” overlooks this and completely misses the sales process:

  • Your content should inform your audience – because an informed audience is more likely to purchase
  • Get your content in the right place at the right time – tailor your content to what your audience want / need to see at each stage of the buying journey 
  • Re-market to your content, not just your products – use your content to move your potential customers down the funnel until they’re ready to purchase
  • Don’t underestimate the importance of post-purchase campaigns – it costs 5 x more to acquire a new customer than to sell again to an existing customer
  • Stop thinking about links first – create content with a real purpose

The Content Marketing Blueprint for Boring Industries – Mike Essex

Mike Essex from Koozai spoke about how we’re so obsessed with “great content” that we often totally overlook that fact that “boring content” is actually the best opportunity in content marketing. Great content might achieve awareness, but boring content is what sells.

Opportunities to create boring content include:

  • Your ‘About’ section
  • Technical specifications
  • Press releases (these are still important and great for targeting niche audiences, which can be critically important)
  • Company location pages

Ways that you can achieve stand-out “boring content” are:

  • Repackage boring content in a visually interesting way  – e.g. highly visual technical specification pages
  • Distil your product information down into simple-to-follow comparisons – sometimes you have to focus on what stops people buying and create content to address this
  • Think about customer aftercare – for example, other sites were ranking for Vax user guides so Vax invested in creating their own
  • Have great product pages – Aviva are a great example of a company which uses its product pages to give them a competitive edge

Above all, remember that on-site content such as this MUST convert – that should always be your end goal!

 

 

 

What does the future hold for the Google+ platform?

Last week it was announced that Vic Gundotra – “The Father of Google+” – was leaving the company after eight years. Justifiably, this has sparked plenty of speculation about the future of the social platform, with TechCrunch going so far as to describe Google+ as “the walking dead.”

Since its launch, brands and business have been weaving Google+ not just into their social campaigns but wider natural search strategy. Here’s our round-up of some of the past week’s discussions around developments at Google+ along with our thoughts about what the future may hold for the platform.

Division and evolution

TechCrunch posit their article entitled Google+ is Walking Dead that: “Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform – essentially ending its competition with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.”

This makes complete sense, seeing as Google+ has failed to generate anywhere near the number of daily active users (within the social stream specifically) that Facebook achieves.

TechCrunch also highlights Google’s statement, which has been quoted in all the additional discussions we’ve read, that Gundotra’s departure “has no impact on our Google+ strategy – we have an incredibly talented team that will continue to build great user experiences across Google+, Hangouts and Photos.”

While there may be no impending changes planned, this comment could be an indicator that these three things end up being separated out into three different products, with Google+ evolving into something else entirely.

Advertising gold dust

In his article, The Impending Demise of Google+ for State of Digital, Barry Adams writes that we should “prepare for a dramatic shift in how Google+ is positioned, and how we as digital marketers are currently using the platform.”

Adams’ view is that the platform is unlikely to disappear altogether as Google has invested too much in acquisition of “advertising gold dust” surrounding users’ connections (via Circles) online activity and device usage. However, he agrees that it has “truly and irrevocably failed” as a social network.

Personalised search

Over at Marketing Land, Danny Sullivan is likewise sceptical that Google will make the decision to kill off Google+ completely. In What Would Happen if Google Really Did Kill Google+?  Sullivan compares Google’s attempt to rival Facebook to Bing’s attempt to challenge Google’s supremacy in search.

His view is that even if Google+ ceases to exist in its current incarnation, Google Accounts would still be a product “perhaps with a profile page, perhaps offering all the integration with Google services as there is now. It just wouldn’t be called Google+.”

Sullivan also points out that Google+ data is largely what’s been used by Google to deliver personalised search results. Without Google+ personalisation will be harder, but – on the flip side – could mean that Google starts to take into account social signals from other accounts such as Facebook and Twitter.

The social stream

Last but not least, in a Recode article headlined Minus its Leader, What’s Left at Google+? Liz Gannes and Mike Isaac suggest that the future of Google+ could see the platform divided up several distinct parts:

• Social stream
• Photos
• Messaging / hangouts
• Identity (Google sign-in)

They observe that “the Facebook-like social stream seems to have the least support, with multiple current Google employees expressing scepticism that it is worth keeping around.” Despite serving 300 million active monthly users (according to Oct 2013 figures), this is still a long way from Facebook’s user base of over a billion monthly active users.

Our thoughts on Google+

In summary, nobody knows what Google are planning for Google+. We’ll be continuing to use the platform as a social network both as an agency and on behalf of our clients, but at the same time preparing ourselves for the fact there’s likely to be a re-positioning in the way the platform sells itself to brands and users.
Despite Google’s assurance that nothing is changing (for now) we’d certainly be thinking about moving your focus away from direct engagement within the social stream – think the opposite of your Facebook strategy – and focusing on the asset creation and sharing capabilities that Google+ can offer your brand such as photos and hangouts.

Remember also that data such as reviews and page summaries are still being pulled into the SERPs, therefore it’s important to have an active presence, while personalisation is informed by Google login data. It seems that – for the time being anyway – Google+ is here to stay.

Alice Reeves on Google+

The Weekly Shop (28th April – 2nd May)

Welcome to another edition of The Weekly Shop. This week we take a look at how Instagram blows other social networks away for engagement, the future of Google+, luxury brands and their online presences and how social media impacts SEO.

Instagram ‘blows other social networks away’ for engagement, delivering 58 times more interactions than Facebook, says Forrester

According to a new report from Forrester, Instagram is the stand-out social network when it comes to delivering engagement. The study was based on three million user interactions with over 2,500 brands and found that while Facebook and Twitter may dominate in terms of user base, people on the networks are less inclined to like, comment or share posts. More over on The Drum.

What does the future hold for the Google+?

Earlier in the week, the man who created Google+, Vic Gundotra, announced he was leaving Google after eight years. Justifiably, this has sparked plenty of speculation about the future of the social platform. Our senior social media and content consultant, Alice, has rounded-up some of the past week’s discussions around developments at Google+ along with our thoughts on what the future may hold for the platform.

High street set to drive 89% of sales by 2020 as shopping evolves: study

O2’s The Future of Retail report predicts that the role of the high street is set for a sea change as shopping evolves still further into a leisure activity. Analysis has calculated that a high street presence will influence retail sales worth as much as £338.5bn a year by 2020. Without stores, online sales would fall by as much as £52bn.

Where are luxury brands going wrong online?

The next two articles from Econsultancy explore luxury brands and their online presences. In this first post, Graham Charlton, looks at what makes a website luxurious, and where some luxury brands are going wrong with examples from the likes of Chanel, Dolce and Gabbana, Manolo Blahnik and Bang & Olufsen.

Five great ecommerce sites from luxury brands

Following on from the above, this second article takes a look at the elements that give sites a luxury feel using some examples of brands that are doing this well by successfully blending style and user experiences.

7 Legitimate Ways That Social Media Impacts SEO

In search news this week, this article from Clickz looks at how social media and SEO overlap and how social can contribute to the overall success of websites in several ways with seven specific examples.

5 New SEO Mantras to Replace Old, Inefficient Thinking

There’s no doubt that SEO has changed and evolved and definitely for the better. This last article from Search Engine Watch provides five new mantras to replace old and inefficient ways of thinking that have permeated across the search industry.

The Weekly Shop (7th – 11th April)

Welcome to a new edition of The Weekly Shop. This week, we take a look at customer lifetime value, the importance of post-purchase interactions, an example of brands using Google’s Shoppable Hangouts, and the rumours that Google could be about to block paid search keyword data.

Just 42% of companies are able to measure customer lifetime value

Econsultancy’s new Building Loyalty and Driving Revenue in the Digital Age report looks at how customer lifetime value (CLV) is a crucial concept for companies looking to improve retention rate, but one which companies find hard to measure. Econsultancy surveyed almost 900 agency and company respondents, and found that, though the vast majority agreed that CLV was an important concept, just 42% said they were able to measure it. Head over to Econsultancy for more on the findings.

The sale doesn’t end at checkout: survey shows the importance of post-purchase interactions

A new survey has shown that 86% of consumers said it was important to them that they have a positive experience after making a purchase, highlighting the importance of post-purchase interactions. This article highlights some of the findings from the study and how you can make improvements to your post-purchase communications to encourage repeat customers.

Asos and Nike team up for first shoppable Google Hangout

Last week, we featured a new concept from Google, Shoppable Hangouts, and recently ASOS and Nike have teamed up for the first shoppable video web chat to celebrate 27 years of Nike’s Air max trainer. On the day of the hangout, users could shop while they watched, and make purchases directly from the promotion.

Mobile is now the main driver of global ad spend growth: stats

Forecasts suggest that mobile advertising will continue to grow by an average of 50% a year between 2013 and 2016, thanks to the widening penetration of smartphones and tablets. These figures come from ZenithOptimedia’s latest advertising expenditure forecast, which reveal that overall global advertising spend will rise from 3.9% in 2013 to 5.5% in 2014, with further growth expected to increase to 6.1% in 2016. More over on Econsultancy.

10 Surprising Facts About “Keyword (Not Provided)” For Paid Search

The big news in digital marketing this week was the rumour that Google could be about to block paid search keyword data. Last year, Google did this with organic search data which was a major setback to publishers, who began to losing data about the keywords used to reach their sites. This article from Search Engine Land aims to clarify fact from fiction and provides 10 things you need to know about the Keyword (Not-Provided) for paid search issue.

‘No-Links Ranking’ – The Battle for Better Organic SERPs

In light of all the changes from Google, this last article from Search Engine Watch explores the possibility that links may no longer be a ranking factor in the future. Yandex, the biggest search engine in Russia, has just recently announced that they will be no longer using links as a ranking factor and this article looks at how this change might actually have an international impact and indicate the way in which search is heading.

Thanks for reading!

The Weekly Shop (31st – 4th April)

Welcome to a new edition of Leapfrogg’s Weekly Shop. This week, we take a look at Shoppable Hangouts, channel integration, Google Authorship, insight into how consumers buy online and some exciting news from Leapfrogg!

Browse & Buy in a Google+ Shoppable Hangout Without G+ Account

Google has announced an exciting feature for Google + Hangout users – Shoppable Hangouts. A Shoppable Hangout works much like a normal Hangout, but as the title suggests, users will have the chance to shop and interact with a business’ products. Since Shoppable Hangouts are currently in Beta stage, only a limited number of brands have taken part including Diane Von Furstenberg, ASOS and Nike who have reported increased website traffic, brand recognition and engagement. Read more.

Shoppable Hangouts with Diane Von Furstenberg.

Almost two thirds of retailers now operate four or more customer touch points: new survey

Results of a new survey of retailers have shown that channel integration is proving increasingly difficult as more and more retailers turn multi-channel. The study found that just 34% of the retailers polled felt their current customer touch points were well integrated, compared to 48% two years earlier, revealing that existing technology systems are the key barrier to a coherent and innovative multi-channel customer experience.

Four Revealing Facts About How Consumers Search And Buy Online

A recently released study by retail engagement firm Parago examined how consumers research and buy across several product categories. The research is full of insight about how people buy and this article from Search Engine Land looks at one aspect of the research: insight into consumer behaviour when the buyer is in purchase mode. This research produces several insights for digital marketers which can help serve the growing shift to online ecommerce.

Google Authorship and SEO

Google Authorship is a way for content authors to connect their Google profiles to their online content to establish original ownership, and the benefits for the author can be immense. Google authorship could be one of the most significant SEO factors to help improve rankings since Hummingbird and this article from Clickz explores what it is, what it can do and how you can start to take advantage of it.

Leapfrogg wins at the European Search Awards!

We had some very exciting news last Friday, when we found out we had won a European Search AwardBen and Alice headed over to Reykjavik for the rather swanky awards ceremony and took home the award for ‘Best use of PR in a Search Campaign’ for our ‘Bride of the Year’ campaign for Wedding Rings Direct. We were absolutely thrilled!

Thanks for reading!

The Weekly Shop (10th – 14th March)

In the Weekly Shop this week…reasons you need buyer personas,  the five types of ecommerce shoppers and tips on how to find your best customers,  plus demystifying iBeacon’s and some possible changes from Google on the issue of “not-provided” keywords.

Five Reasons You Need Buyer Personas

Developing buyer personas is a great way to start being more targeted with your marketing and ensure you’re speaking your buyers language from the first interaction to the final sale. Our first article this week, explores five reasons why developing a set of buyer personas can provide value to your organisation.

Designing for 5 Types of E-Commerce Shoppers

Following on from the above, the Nielson Norman Group have identified five unique types of e-commerce shoppers. These different user-types are well worth bearing in mind when you’re designing your website as they can help design teams ensure that they are building usable and useful experiences for all types of shoppers.

Finding your best customers with the RFM matrix

Next up is a useful article from Econsultancy on how you can use the recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) matrix to find your best customers. Categorising your customers based on an RFM matrix can help you start identifying your hero customers, and those that need perhaps need a little more attention.

What are iBeacons and why they might change marketing?

This next article explores Apple’s new technology, the iBeacon, which is set to become to next big thing in the marketing world. Taking into account the user’s context, location, behaviour and profile, iBeacon’s offer a more targeted message from marketers. This should increase the likelihood of conversion as the customer’s attention will be caught just at the right point of the journey.

Google Reviewing “Not Provided,” Withholding Keywords From Organic But Not Paid Search Clicks

When Google made the move to secure search, it was a huge blow to publishers and also opened Google up to claims of hypocrisy as advertisers were still able receive the search terms. However, earlier this week, Google stated that they were reviewing the situation and seeking a better solution. This article from Search Engine Land ponders the possibilities of what this could mean for the future of SEO.

5 Tips to Get the Best Out of Your Digital Agency

This last article touches on the subject of the client-agency dynamic and provides five very useful tips on how you can get the best out of your digital agency to maximise your return. We couldn’t agree more.

Thanks for reading…see you next week!

The Weekly Shop (10th – 14th Feb)

In the Weekly Shop this week…online sales get off to a flying start this year, how small retailers can compete against their big brand stockists and the user experience signals that Google are using to rank websites.

Online sales grow at strongest rate for five years

According to figures from the British Retail Consortium, online sales grew by almost a fifth in January as the sector turned in its strongest start-of-the-year performance for five years, demonstrating the increasing importance of online in the retail sales mix. Read more over on Internet Retailing. 

How Small Retailers Can Compete Against Big Brand Stockists

If you’re a small retailer, one issue you may be familiar with is when your online competition is actually one of your stockists. Our website optimisation manager, Suze, has written a really helpful blog post on how smaller retailers can hold their own against big brand retailers. 

Customer experience is the most exciting opportunity for marketers [infographic]

According to Econsultancy’s 2014 Digital Trends Briefing, Customer Experience represents the single most exciting opportunity for businesses this year followed very closely by mobile. They’ve produced an infographic which presents some of the key findings from Trends Briefing. 

What kind of user experience ranking signals does Google take notice of?

Here’s another interesting article from Econsultancy which looks at how user experience signals are increasingly being used by Google to rank websites. The article looks at how UX ranking factors such as site speed, mobile user experience, button sizes, readability and many more can all add up to help you optimise your website. 

We Love Google, We Love Google Not: 6 SEO-Inspired Valentine’s Day Quotes

Lastly, seeing as it’s Valentine’s Day, we felt inclined to include these 6 SEO-Inspired Valentine’s Day Quotes from Search Engine Watch. 

We’ve also rounded up a couple of our favourite Valentine’s Day inspired digital marketing campaigns over on our blog, which includes Not On The High Street, Evian and Ted Baker. Read the post here.

Happy reading!

The Weekly Shop (3rd – 7th February)

In the Weekly Shop this week…we take a look at how there has been a huge rise in overseas shoppers searching for UK retailers, how giving consumers fewer options could actually boost conversions, a bad customer experience from a well-known high street retailer and some more thoughts on SEO in 2014.

One in five US and UK consumers did all of their Christmas shopping online: stats

This won’t come as a surprise to many but findings from a new Econsultancy survey have found that 61% of people in the UK said that they completed more than half or all of their Christmas shopping online in 2013, while just 7% completed all of their shopping offline. More on the findings over on Econsultancy. Read more.

New figures reveal huge rise in overseas shoppers searching for UK retailers online

According to data from the British Retail Consortium and Google, UK retailers are also benefiting from huge rises in online searches from overseas shoppers. The figureshave revealed that  the UK is now the world’s second biggest online retail exporter. Read more.

Want more sales? Give consumers fewer options

This is an interesting article from Econsultancy which looks at how giving consumers fewer options could actually help boost conversions. Blair Keen from Adobe looks at two psychological studies which show behaviour that might help explain cart abandonment and gives his suggestions for testing this theory on your website. Read more.

How to lose friends and alienate people: Mango

When our commercial director, Ben, attempted to purchase a Christmas gift for his wife from fashion etailer Mango, the service and experience was he received was far from what he expected. You can read more about his frustrating experience over on the Econsultancy blog. Read more.

Super rich shift their thrills from luxury goods to costly experiences

According to this article from Guardian, luxury is shifting from ‘having’ to ‘being’ with consumers moving away from owning a luxury product to experiencing luxury. Figures from the Boston Consulting Group hsve shown that of the $1.8tn spent on luxuries in 2013 an estimated $1tn went on services such gourmet dining, private flights, bespoke safaris, slimming clinics and art auctions. Read more.

Now you have to do SEO, thanks to Google

There have been many debates on the right approach to SEO recently and this is an insightful article from The Drum looks at how brands really need to do SEO and how Google has made the case for this easier in recent weeks. Read more.

2014 SEO — 6 Key Pointers

Following on from the above…this last article from Clickz looks at six key things every SEO professional should be concerned about in 2014 to overcome future update issues. Read more.

Thanks for reading!

The Weekly Shop (27th – 31st January)

In the Weekly Shop this week…more search news from Matt Cutts, the importance of differentiating between content marketing and content for links, how reviews and trust signals can double your conversions and some updates on the EU Consumer Rights Directive.

How trust signals can double your conversions

As we mentioned last week, the role customer reviews are playing on the conversion landscape is increasing significantly with more and more shoppers looking for guidance on their purchasing decisions. This article from Econsultancy looks at how reviews and other trust signals can reassure your customers that they are safe when shopping with you and help to double conversions.

The EU Consumer Rights Directive: should etailers be worried?

You’ve probably heard murmurs of a new EU directive, which has implications for UK retail. It’s called the Directive on Consumer Rights and aims to improve consumer protection when shopping online. There are some good points in the directive, but also some that may concern retailers which this article from Econsultancy explores.

What’s the Difference Between Content Marketing and Content for Links? The Wrong Answer Could Cost You

This next article explores the importance of differentiating between content for links and content for customers and how the wrong answer could be costly in terms of risk, return on investment and performance.

Study: 34% Of Google Search Results Have Rich Media, 9 Organic Links & 9 Search Ads

Moving onto some search news, a new study has been released that showed that there was rich media on the search results page 34% of the time. The breakdown of rich media showed images appear on 28% of search results pages, news 9%, and shopping 1%. Head over to Search Engine Land for more details of the findings.

Google’s Matt Cutts: Don’t Try To Build Links Through Article Directories

Matt Cutts has popped up once again this week encouraging webmasters not to use article directory websites with the goal of building links. He also tweeted his thoughts on his and you can view his video answer here.

Google & Bing Agree: Past SEO Success Guarantees You Nothing Today

Matt Cutts has also released a new Google webmaster help video which addresses the topic of what an older site can do to maintain its ranking over time. Some useful tips here if you have an older website.

6 SEO predictions for 2014

And to finish off, here are six SEO predictions for 2014 from Search Engine Watch.

The Weekly Shop (20th – 24th January)

In this week’s Weekly Shop, we have four go-tos to make online reviews work for your business, figures on the UK’s online spending in 2013, an update from Google on whether Facebook and Twitter signals are part of the ranking algorithm and the last in our commercial director’s series of posts for Econsultancy on PPC payment models.

4 Go-Tos To Make Online Reviews Work For Your Business

By now, everyone knows that online reviews can have a tremendous impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions. Review prominence in search results is also rising, as they often appear just below their company website and make up the majority of the top 10 corresponding results. This article from Search Engine Land looks at how local marketers can reap the benefits of online reviews for the best local search visibility.

UK shoppers spent £91bn online in 2013 – and look set to spend £107bn in 2014

According to the IMRG-Capgemini eRetail Sales Index for December, UK shoppers spent £91bn online in 2013. The internet retailing marketing grew by 16% during the course of the year and it was capped by a final month in which online sales rose by 18%, with £11bn spent up from £9bn in December 2012. More on the figures over on Internet Retailing.

Google’s Matt Cutts: We Don’t Use Twitter Or Facebook Social Signals To Rank Pages

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, has been making search news once again this week with his answer to the question ‘Are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm?’ His short answer was ‘no,’ and he stated that currently Facebook and Twitter pages were treated like any other page due to a number of reasons that are outlined in this article from Search Engine Land.

PPC agency payment models: fixed fee

Towards the end of last year, our commercial director, Ben, started a series of posts for Econsultancy digging into the mechanics of PPC agency pricing models. His final post on the fixed fee model is now live on the Econsultancy blog and if you haven’t already, check out his overview of percentage of spend and pay on performance models.

That’s it for news this week! See you next week.