Client in focus: One Stop Sealing

by on March 28, 2013

We rarely discuss our clients online as many of them require us to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This of course is absolutely fine, and we’re happy (nay, obliged!) to honour this.

We thought, though, that it’d be nice to occasionally highlight one of our clients on our blog who we are allowed to talk about.

One Stop SealingSo, first up is One Stop Sealing. One Stop Sealing are a Hull-based business run by managing director Kevin Deakin. They advertise themselves as a one-stop shop for hosing and sealing services for a huge variety of industry groups.

However, one of their main areas of expertise is water jet cutting. They’re quite rightly at the cutting edge (get it?) of this growing area. It really is impressive to see their water jet cutting machines cut literally almost anything!

Our initial audit found that their website was suffering from a fair few technical SEO issues that required fixing. Thankfully, now all pages of the site are indexed in Google.

We then embarked on local SEO optimisation, ensuring that their Google+ Local page was properly set-up and that they had as many decent citations in as many appropriate locations online as possible.

We’re now at the stage of developing a consistent content strategy, determining the audience, topic and tone, as well as developing resources such as a blog and writers. We’ve also begun the process of ‘prospecting’ for and qualifying other non-competitive websites in related industries who might be able to help One Stop Sealing share their content. The aim: for One Stop Sealing to become THE market leader online in their service sector (and of course, to enjoy the links, shares and resulting search engine rankings that leads to).

We’ll likely be approaching the potential ‘link prospect’ websites that we find with guest post ideas in the first instance, leading up to developing more valuable content in the coming months, to really leverage the whole process.

The challenge of course is coming up with content that will have a broad enough appeal. After all, even Kevin at One Stop Sealing agrees that the subject matter appears to be of limited interest! However, there are ways of thinking laterally and ‘topic bridging’ across to related industry topics that will have a much broader appeal. It’s a challenge of the job that we absolutely love solving.

Here’s what a great content strategy looks like

by on March 28, 2013

The cornerstone of any online marketing strategy worth its salt is a solid, consistent content strategy. We know this, maybe you know this too.

Unfortunately our clients often struggle with the whole concept of content strategy. I think the difficulty comes with trying to envisage what such a strategy actually looks like, in real terms.

We have loads of examples (our own and others) to show, but this recent article—’Attract Customers to your Community with Content‘—outlines it all right there for all to see.

We love the way Mackenzie divides the type of content required into 2 broad groups: foundational content and community building content. And the best advice of all:

An ideal content strategy aligns the goals of your business with the expectations of your target audience.

Well worth a read.

F*cking SEO Tips

by on March 28, 2013

Apologies to the easily offended, but we really like this site:

F*cking SEO Tips

Before clicking through, we expected it to be a bit of a send-up of yer typical out-dated (and wholly unnecessary) SEO advice that drives developers crazy. Not so. It’s actually a collection of very sound (f*cking) SEO tips indeed!

Recommended.

Best Practice in Anchor Text Optimisation in 2012

by on April 16, 2012

The ‘anchor text’ of inbound links has been one of the key tenets of SEO for many years now. In a nutshell: the text that people use in the actual link when linking to you, is seen as an indicator of the relevance of your page for that phrase.

For example: if someone links to your page about ‘personalised baby blankets‘, and they use the words personalised baby blankets as the link itself, Google receive a strong indication that your page may actually be about that topic.

Of course, ‘savvy’ (ahem) webmasters and SEOs have abused this relevancy signal for almost as long, tending to generate very similar anchor text over and over again when building links.

Google are now very publicly tweaking their algorithm to devalue over-zealous and unnatural link anchor text, in the ongoing attempt to improve search results quality.

Check out this great post here from SEOGadget on everything you need to know about anchor text optimisation in 2012.

The Perfect Google Analytics Dashboard

by on April 15, 2012

Perfect Google Analytics dashboardIt’s easy to drown in numbers when looking at all the available data in Google Analytics. Therefore setting up a useful, usable dashboard for the key performance metrics for your business is essential.

The guys at Portent have a great post on the perfect Google Analytics dashboard. Not only info on how to set it up and what kind of data you should have in there, but also a couple of instant downloads of such dashboards, already set up and ready to use in your Google Analytics account.

Give the perfect Google Analytics dashboard a try.

We’re now on Google+

by on April 15, 2012

Google+You’ve no doubt by now heard of Google+. For the uninitiated, Google+ is Google’s foray into the world of social networking. Think of it as a Facebook competitor, though there are lots of differences between the 2 services.

We’ve been using Google+ personally since soon after its launch last year. We’ve also been using Google+ Pages (a bit like Facebook Pages for business) both for clients and for some of our own internal marketing projects. We actually really love Google+, and think (along with others) that a Google+ strategy is quickly going to be essential for everyone marketing their business on the internet.

However, it’s taken us a while to get round to setting up our own Google+ page. So drum roll please… here’s the brand new Woof Google+ page!

Relax, there isn’t a great deal to see, yet. We’ll be using the page to do what Google+ does best: sharing interesting updates, news and tips from the world of digital marketing.

Pop along and follow Woof on Google+.

Google roll out a new design for Google+

by on April 11, 2012

It looks like Google are rolling out a brand new re-design for Google+.

The new design certainly has more impact, with larger photos and a generally more engaging feel. The navigation is now customisable too.

Dare we say it looks more Facebook…?

Find out more on the Google blog. Expect to see the new design rolled out across all Google+ accounts over the next few days. We can see the new design in several of our Google+ accounts already.

The Andrew Geoghegan Facebook Ring Competition

by on March 30, 2012

Our client and friend Andrew Geoghegan has just launched a new Facebook competition.

Check out his video below. Utterly hilarious and more than slightly bonkers:

Can’t wait to see the outtakes… ;)

Fancy winning a new iPad? Head over to Andy’s Facebook page and get to it!

Rich Snippets: Search Results Enhanced

by on March 16, 2012

You’ll likely have seen ‘rich snippets’ in Google’s search results before. These are extra bits of information that Google pop into search results to provide more information about each result.

For example:

  • If the search result is an article, there might be a photo of the author, with a link to his/her Google Profile.
  • If the search result is a product, there might be a 5-star rating with an indication of how many reviews it’s had.
  • If the search result is for a local business, it might feature their location and a link to Google Maps and their Google Places listing page.

Rich snippets don’t appear without some work on the part of your developer though. In most cases extra code is required to get these rich snippets to appear.

However, it’s well worth the effort. Searchers are much more likely to click on search results that feature these extra ‘rich snippets’ of information. An article, for example, that features a photo of the author next to it stands out a great deal more than the other results without a photo. It appears to have more authority and therefore trust.

Here’s an example from a client of ours, Mike Thomas from DebtWizard:

Search result showing author profile image and link

For all you need to know about rich snippets, check out this amazing Visual Guide to Rich Snippets on SEOmoz below, created by BlueGlass Interactive.

Guide to Rich Snippets by BlueGlass Interactive on SEOmoz

Talk: Google Analytics Set-Up for Developers

by on March 13, 2012

We were kindly asked by John Polling to give a talk at the Hull Digital Developer Meetup recently.

The talk was called ‘Google Analytics: How to Set and Forget‘. We tried to convince developers that ‘Set Google Analytics up correctly‘ should be a vital part of any website build checklist.

Here at Woof, we (very) frequently take on new clients whose web developer has either not set up Analytics at all, or has set it up so poorly that the data we have available is either useless or wildly inaccurate.

This is a shame, because the data that Google Analytics provides – if set up correctly – can inform decisions that can seriously increase a business’s profits!

We firstly explained why having correct and accurate Analytics data to hand is so important, with a few ‘real-life’ (ahem) examples. We then we got stuck into the ‘how’, with step-by-step instructions.

The slides are below. I fear they won’t make a great deal of sense if you weren’t there, unfortunately. They’re a bit ‘bare bones’.

If I get time, I’ll expand a bit on it all, with a fuller step-by-step blog post. No promises.

Thanks everyone who came along, mainly for listening but also for not throwing things at us.

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