SEO Belfast

I recently received the following unwelcome and confusing email from the Google Adwords Policy team for 3rd Party Non Compliance.

My advice, don’t panic if you get the following email from the Google Adwords Policy team.

Here’s the gist of the emails:

We recently conducted a review of your website, codefixersoftware.com, and have concluded that it misrepresents your company’s relationship to Google by:

• Having language on your website that incorrectly claims a Google third-party program status, such as Google Partner
• Linking to a non-existent Google Partner profile page or a different company’s profile page
• Displaying a third-party program badge that your company is not qualified to exhibit

continue reading this post »

At the moment I’m training a small business owner and it’s one of the most satisfying aspects of the job, so in true festive spirit I’m giving away a tailored training course for any Belfast company that wants to get to grips with SEO, PPC, Google Analytics & Email Marketing in 2015.

Just pop your name in the comments below, or send me an email.

There’ll be 8 hours custom training, tailored to your market and your website.

Winner will be picked randomly, and named on the 23rd Dec 2014.
Training will be arranged at my office, 1 to 1 training, and must be completed January / February 2014.

(Just a quick update: The winner will be picked at 5 o’clock, and I’ll email them & post their name here. Still plenty of time to enter.)

Without a mobile strategy, you’ll be left behind. According to Search Engine Journal 1 in 4 searches is being made on a mobile device, though from a quick look over in analytics this varies considerably from site to site and market to market. Nevertheless, how should you capitalise on the ever increasing popularity of mobile search?

Everyone owns a mobile device nowadays, and many of you reading this will be doing so on a phone or on a tablet; for some, a tablet may be your first choice device for browsing the web, communicating, absorbing online video, reading for pleasure, or any online activity. We’ve truly gone mobile mad. Why? Convenience, practicality, and usability.

Now, 91% of everyone currently on the earth owns a mobile phone, and 72% of tablet users are making purchases online on their tablets on a regular basis (according to research by AF-Studio.pl and Super Monitoring).

Who’s doing it?

So, while mobile is booming, what is your company doing to incorporate mobile into your marketing?

If you’re still failing to integrate mobile into your marketing, you are ignoring a significant portion of the market that your competitors will be snatching up.

Almost 50% of all enterprises include defined mobile strategies as part of their marketing plan. 81% have said that mobiles have affected how they run things on a fundamental level.

Also in this study, Conducted by IBM, 90% of enterprises aim to engage with their audience, inform customers, employees, and grow their business by optimising their mobile experience as part of their overall marketing strategy.

There are no excuses to put it off any longer as there are many easy and affordable ways to optimise for mobile search, available to businesses with any marketing budget. Whether you’re already considering mobile in your strategies or not, the following tips will make sure you’re optimising effectively in the mobile environment.

Let’s go!
continue reading this post »

Below are two screenshots showing a comparison of last year compared to this year. This year for Shopping Ads it’s almost all eBay. In this market eBay is aggressively bidding on all the shopping ads and those businesses that are just running Google Adwords without an eBay strategy are getting significantly less traffic than last year.

2014

2013

What is noticeable having looked at the products on eBay, and the ones that are showing up in the Ads, is that they are much cheaper to buy (particularly as a single item, though if you buy multiple labels they may not be), and certainly of poorer quality.

With eBay swamping some Shopping Ads if you’re not selling through eBay, then it might be time to reconsider.

As part of the Google Partners program, I now have 30 or so Google Adwords Vouchers. Spend £150 in the first month and get £150 worth of credit free on a new Adwords account. Just get in contact if you would like to use one. Vouchers last until the end of February.

Google were also kind enough to send a set of earphones, that was nice of them & they’ll come in handy.

Over the last few years I haven’t really had much time to put any effort into any of my own personal sites including this one, so I’m hoping that can change over the next few months with some more content here, and some new development & design work on my other sites.

At the end of May the penguin update was rolled out and hit one of my newish clients that had a pretty poor backlink profile. When I took over the site there was a dilemma as to whether to spend time cleaning the site’s link profile as well as improving the on site over optimisation or just forging ahead with building a better site, with better content, less over optimisation and better quality links. Getting hit by Penguin 2 obviously made the decision easier.

I decided to run LinkRisk, to see if it matched what I thought were the poor links and to see how they scored the site according to their chart below.

continue reading this post »

I can across a few screenshots I had taken over the last couple of years, so I thought I’d just show a timeline of the changing nature of Google’s search and the danger of just relying on your ‘FREE’ organic traffic to keep on delivering and improving.

Nov 2011

Below you can see the organic listings, with a number of Pay Per Click ads at the top. Great if you’re top of the pile in the organic listings. There’s also shopping results just below the 2 organic listings.

continue reading this post »