Why? Because when you strip all the marketing terminology back we’re simply storytellers and Google loves a good read!

HatTrick has from day one been about embracing change; constantly looking at ways of doing delivering communications differently, through to investing in new technology to ensure everyone in the business can seamlessly deliver global brand campaigns. It’s that hunger for change that led me onto the Search and Social Media Marketing professional course at Salford University.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve I was hungry to learn more about how PR and Search have emerged and how HatTrick as an international communications agency, based in Manchester could connect the two disciplines together.

Learnings

From the course I’ve learnt that while once, many considered SEO to simply mean getting inbound links to your site to boost visibility on Google search results pages; nowadays this is no longer the case. Today, as far as Google is concerned it’s all about relevance, influence of the site and quality content. Some elements of the course were sounding very familiar and I was right to feel this way because this is exactly what PRs have been doing all along and why I believe that public relations is becoming the new SEO.

Here’s why:

As PR professionals, a key aspect of our role is analysing the client’s audience and then finding the right channel or publication to target with well-written and engaging content. The change in media landscape over the past ten years and rise in social media channels has opened up more opportunities than ever before for placement of content in order to build brand awareness and reputation.

Given that PR has always owned and managed communication channels, the responsibility of setting strategies and delivering content through social media naturally has become a daily task of a PR consultant. According to Google guidelines, having a strong Social Media presence is just as important as having an updated website.

By identifying and pushing out content to online influencers, naturally encourages them to share it with their followers. The more active a brand is in seeding out across social media channels, including Google +, Facebook and Twitter, means there is more chances to obtain higher rankings.

Everyone’s focusing on quality content

Add to the debate, Google’s recent changes to its guidelines on how websites are ranked on the search engine, also means that SEO professionals are too also now focusing more on creating quality content that people want to share, rather than just link building, in order to get its clients’ sites at the top of the search engine – exactly what PRs have been doing all along.

Do you agree? Nevertheless, regardless of whether the two disciplines are merged together in the future or that SEO may no longer be the answer to traffic-related prayers. Through storytelling content marketing tactics, brands can only now navigate their way through the treacherous SEO landscape of 2015 and beyond with support from a strong public relations campaign.

After many many years of actively using a hotmail account, I have finally come over to the ‘The Dark side’ and opened a gmail account. I have had access to gmail before, but this has been just as one of the users on a charity organisations account, so not one I could call my own.

The limited experience I had, didn’t really impress me that much and couldn’t find reason to switch from hotmail. However, things have just changed…

I always heard about this ‘make believe’ place called Google Drive and didn’t really know what it was… I’d heard people can organise meetings and send items to others, but didn’t really sound groundbreaking enough to investigate it.

Today I finally accessed the Google Drive, courtesy of @Alex Fenton, who teacher my course; SSMM… and must say I am very impressed at the ease and simplicity of this ‘make believe’ place!

Also this week I have accessed WordPress for the first time too… Not really sure what to make of it yet, so time will tell.

I now think I’ll be adding Gmail as one of my smartphone accounts… Not sure if I’m ready to ditch hotmail just yet, but time will tell!

Anyway, regards my title…. ‘The Dark side’, maybe it should read the ‘The Brighter side’?

Content marketing: Why your content isn’t being shared

We’ve all heard the phrase “Content is King,” but what does it actually mean? Most people make the mistake of thinking that content is merely written copy used to acquire backlinks and justify keyword placement, but in reality it’s much more than that. Images, videos, infographics – literally anything that’s published on the Internet – all comes under the content umbrella. We’re all publishers; and as publishers we want our work to be seen by as many people as possible, and that’s where sharing comes in.

Amassing shares on social media – aka “going viral” – can expose your content to a phenomenal amount of people; however, getting others to share your work for free is quite a challenge as you can’t just ask without doing any groundwork. It’s imperative that you understand what makes good content valuable to others and how to effectively make your approach.

As the owner of a premium search marketing agency – Distinctly – I’m constantly asked how to get content shared. The truth is, there is no guaranteed method. You can, however, significantly increase your chances by merely publishing content that’s in demand. Part of my job is to find out what others are looking for, and then devise a plan to maximise exposure; but whether or not people share it is down to two things, quality and luck.

You’re not helping anyone

So you’ve written an excellent informative article or blog post with decent images, a video and possibly even an infographic, but it’s still not getting shared. No doubt you’ve encountered this problem before. The first thing you have to ask yourself is, “Does this content actually help anyone?” If the answer is no, then you’ve already got your reason.

Good content isn’t about flawless grammar and clever wording; it’s about helping others and publishing something that’s unavailable elsewhere. Type in any keyword and you’ll probably find that 80% of the websites you visit are irrelevant, or simply rehashing the same information. If you fall into this category how will you ever expect to gain exposure? To succeed sometimes you have to just forget about promoting your business and develop content with the primary aim of helping people.

You’re failing to do any outreach

Publishing content is merely the first step. If nobody knows about that content how will you ever expect to receive shares and likes on social media? No matter how good your content is you need to tell people about it. It’s important to start the outreach before you publish the content. Contact bloggers and businesses you think it will appeal to and start trying to build relationships with them – comment on their social media pages, compliment their work, send them a friendly message, etc.

When we started working for graphic design agency The Pink Group, we began the outreach process weeks in advance, and by the time we published their content – the Social Media Cheat Sheet – we already had a collection of bloggers and businesses that were willing to share it. The result was over 12,000 social media shares in just a matter of weeks.

You’re not monitoring your activity

Monitoring your traffic and social media activity is crucial. Where is your traffic coming from? What pages of your website are people visiting? The more you know about how people are finding and using your content the better.

At Distinctly we use a tool named Share Tally to get a general overview of how well a piece of content is performing. Share Tally combines every share, tweet and like, etc., from across multiple social media platforms and gives you an overall figure. We’ve found this website to be very helpful when implementing new content marketing strategies as it allows us to measure spikes in sharing.

You’re not communicating with your audience

Interaction accounts for at least a third of the content marketing process. Social media is called “social” media for a reason, and many businesses tend to forget that it’s designed as a communication and networking tool. When somebody leaves a comment on your page, respond to them publicly; if they share your content, thank them for their support. Treat your audience with respect and they will become very loyal followers.

After we publish content our primary focus is on strengthening relationships. We often recommend that our clients spend a few minutes each morning simply taking part in the community that they’ve built. Personal communication will go a long way and people will be more inclined to share content when they know their efforts are appreciated by a person rather than a corporate entity.

Fundamentally, not every piece of content you publish will get shared and liked – it’s just the nature of the beast. But, the more quality content you publish the bigger your community of followers will become. Rinse and repeat the process and there’ll be no reason why you won’t succeed.

Got a great idea for an internet business? Plan for the year and not just the build.

Many clients contact Libero Net with a ‘great idea’ for an internet business, however few of these clients have thought about what it takes to develop this idea into an online success. Having an idea for a business is great; however it is only the start of a very long business venture.
Do you plan on hiring staff? What is your yearly budget? How will you monitor your businesses progress? How will you drive traffic to your online business? Have you thought about online techniques such as social media, guest blogging and link building? Or what about offline techniques likes door-to-door knocking and telesales? How will people find out about your great business idea?

The Business Plan

These are questions we often find ourselves asking these clients. Every business, big or small, profits greatly from having a well thought-out and structured business plan. If you haven’t thought about any of the above your business may find it difficult to succeed, or even worse fail.
Owning an online business is hard and success doesn’t come easy. Sacrifices will have to be made and you will be more stressed than ever. The harsh reality of starting a business is often something entrepreneurs don’t want to admit too, but if you believe in your business and take all avenues into consideration your business venture can succeed the competition and become a fighting success.

The Financial Plan

The starting point for your business plan is the financials. Something which we see regular is businesses blowing their entire budget on a new website design and expecting for customers to find their business website themselves. Unfortunately, the competition is tough and you need to budget advertising/ marketing for the year. You can always get that top notch website when your business when profits are up!

The Marketing & Advertising Plan

Businesses use advertising and marketing techniques to reach a wider audience and inevitably drive more sales to their website. Each company needs a different strategy from the next and pursuing the appropriate advertising tactfully is a huge part of what makes an internet business successful. If you’re not sure what your marketing strategy should be, it is recommended to speak to a design agency.

The Google Plan

Every business dreams of being on Google’s first page ranking as it is good for your brand and ultimately sends customers in your direction. Generating traffic to your website comes from a consistent effort over a long period of time with the basic understanding of marketing techniques.
Once you have a beautiful website, interesting content and active social media channels, it will be worth investing time or money into SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques such as accumulating backlinks, blogging, relevant keywords, guest content and more.

Plan Plan Plan

Make sure you spend your time and investment wisely. Plan payment throughout the year and do not blow it all at once with the website build, otherwise one day you will be high up on Google rankings and undetectable the next. Although it is not an easy road to travel but if you plan your trip, you will reap the rewards later.

This is one of the best pieces of advice we can offer when you’re starting on this exciting journey, ensure you have budgeted for the long term and have the plan in place for the marketing and driving of traffic to your fantastic new website.

We’ve had this problem for quite some time and many different experts on SEO don’t cover it.

If you were to search for one of our big brands in Google, let’s say Falke, what you’d get is our 3rd and 4th biggest competitors.

Our Falke page for example, is in position 104. we hold 9th position for the term “Falke Tights” with that same section, which is not bad, but the puzzling part is that we have a “Falke” section and a “Falke Tights” sections. You’d think the latter is going rank for that search term, but it doesn’t at all.

All of our competitors use links in the header and breadcrumbs, just like we do. Opensite Exporler shows just 2 or 3 internal links for these competitors, and more than 1600 from us.

Many of our brand sections rank worse than they should, such as Pretty Polly and Charnos, both brand that we sell, rank page 2 or 3 for their search terms.

Another example is Kunert from Germany, a brand with nobody else in the UK selling these items. Our section has been live for 8 years, but we can only reach 71st on Google, 1st on Bing.

We’re working on building some quality links, but competitors have very few low quality external links, only slightly better domain authority than us but they seem to rank 100 or more positions better than us on many of our brands, including our Wolford section, one of our most authoritative pages.

This might suggest there is something on our pages or something internal we’re currently doing wrong, but all our tools tell us that we are doing everything fine.

Keyword density is close to our competitors and we’ve reduced the number of products on the page. All pages ranked well before the Penguin update, and Bing still seems to like them.

The main consensus is that we have penalties form Google, but looking at our competitors link profiles we are only slightly worse, this to me means Google has penalties on some brand pages, but why as they have few or no external links.

Is it our internal linking and if so how do I sort it out?

This is really quite puzzling, and if any one has any ideas please drop me an email jonathan@uktights.com

Thanks

Jonathan
www.uktights.com

I run, Umega Lettings, a residential letting agency in Edinburgh. We understand that a critical source of new business is found online and that in order to secure this business we need to be found at the top of the online search rankings. Furthermore, as a business keen to push our personality to set ourselves apart from our, very-traditional, competitors, we see an opportunity to share our personality, and engage with customers, via social media.

We previously employed an SEO specialist to help us to climb the search rankings which was directly related to an increase in online new business leads. However, following google’s recent Panda and Penguin updates our google ranking fell off a cliff and consequently, our online leads dried up. Furthermore, earlier this year we launched our new website, following which our google rankings fell further which was extremely worrying (I have since learnt that it is common for rankings to drop 10-15% following website redesign).

From some online searching I found that the main message was that in order to climb back up the online search rankings, online activity must be ‘honest’ and must be written for humans. No more tricking google with irrelevant back links to get to the top of the search rankings. It became apparent that instead of hiding behind the business I would now need to act as an industry expert, sharing our expertise online, becoming involved in relevant online discussions and providing ‘value’ to users. With regards to social media, we have always struggled to engage ‘properly’ with social media. We have tried and failed to gain momentum in relation to our facebook and twitter profiles. So….in order to climb the google rankings ‘honestly’ and to learn how to engage properly with social media I enrolled in Salford University’s 10 week Search and Social Media Marketing Course, via distance learning.

The Search and social media marketing course has had a phenomenal impact on Umega Lettings. We are now confidently pushing forward with a wide number of online initiatives and, although I understand that many of these will take time to ‘bed in’ we are already seeing the benefits of these. The course is extremely practical and so learnings can be applied right away. From going through the 10 week course I am now confident I am not missing anything and I can push forward, with confidence, knowing that the hard work we’re putting in will get us where we want to be, at the top of the online search rankings and that our brand and reputation will continue to grow via social media.

It’s hard to cover all of the learnings in a short blog however a couple of key tips include;

Onsite SEO – it’s important for the content, titling and descriptions on our website to be well planned. WordPress enables us to revise all content and titling easily in order that it can be constantly reviewed to be relevant and easy for google to find.

Keywords – We’re now targeting a number of short-tail and long-tail keywords. Not only is it important to target the obvious short-tail keywords (in our case ‘letting agent edinburgh’ and ‘letting agents edinburgh’) but we should think about what people will type into search engines to ‘catch’ these users online. Phrases including ‘how to change letting agent in edinburgh’ and ‘how do I get a free rental valuation’ are the types of things that potential clients may search for.

Blogging – Blogging is a great way to provide fresh content for the website and to target these long-tail keywords. We now try to blog once a week to keep the content on our site fresh and relevant.

PPC – Facebook advertising and Google Pay per click are excellent ways to generate online leads, provided they are used correctly. As our google ranking has taken a dip over the last year, PPC is a great way to generate leads while we work hard, in the background, to push our website up the organic search rankings.

Strategy – It’s essential to have a strategy when it comes to online activity, otherwise the return on investment (financial and time investment) can be low. Furthermore, search and social media marketing does not end online. An online strategy must be incorporated with offline activities and more traditional business networking should be included in a strategy to promote link building and social media engagement with relevant businesses.

Monitoring – Every week I look forward to checking www.smallseotools.com to check our position in the google rankings. Only 3 weeks ago we were sitting 18th and 19th for our two target short tail keywords. We’re now bouncing around 9th-11th which is having a direct impact on new business leads. Looking forward to when we settle into the top 3 with a bit more work! I’m also never off google analytics as we closely monitor the impact of our PPC campaign and our organic search keyword targeting.

Online tools – there are powerful tools available to analyse the domain authority of your site and of your competitors and to investigate links that competitors are benefiting from. There are also small tools such as word clouds which can have a big impact on your business.

These are just a couple of examples of what is covered on the search and social media course and there are too many elements to cover in one short blog.

We’ve got a lot of exciting work to do. We need to keep working on pushing up the google rankings via the techniques we have already implemented and I am excited about including new aspects into our search and social media strategy including YouTube integration. We also need to work hard on building a strong community on social media and it will be interesting to run competitions during the summer, (making the most of the football World Cup and the commonwealth games) in order for people to engage with Umega lettings.

To summarise; search and social media marketing is not a dark art! It is all about honest, hard work. Business owners must now illustrate their expertise online and content must be relevant and interest. Gone are the days of taking short cuts and you now have to walk the walk if you want to beat the competition online! There is no better way of learning how to achieve this, and to give you the confidence that you are doing the right things, than participating in Salford University’s Search and Social Media Marketing course. At Umega Lettings, we know our stuff and and we do a great job for our clients. We need to continue to share what we know online in order to continue to climb the online search rankings and for our business to continue to grow.

Andrew whitmey

Umega Lettings

Www.umega.co.uk

Our Origins

The team at UK Tights has been concentrating on SEO since the first day we launched our site. Since then, we’ve run into obstacles and plenty of road blocks, but we’ve learned how to navigate these and make a success out of our website.

SEO is always going to be a difficult thing to get right. Search engines like Google make sure that not all of the requirements for a strong website are published so that people don’t engineer their sites just to get to the top of certain SERPs.

UK Tights decided that the only way to go about making a healthy website was to make small changes and wait until we saw a change in our SEO profile, measuring this using Google Analytics to see if our visitors increased and one what search terms. That way, we could effectively experiment with changes to our website and see what worked and what didn’t.

The Human Element

But really, the best indicator for finding out how a website might climb the SERPs is to look at how people react to your site when you make a change. Search engines try and make their search results as humanistic as possible, so when you make a change that people respond to positively, Google and other engines love it too. One example is bread crumbs. We added bread crumbs to UK Tights, which is a string of links that run across the top of the page so you can find your way back to larger sections when you need to.

Bread crumbs are a common feature of websites and people use them regularly to get back to where they need to go. As soon as we installed this feature, Google picked up on our change and we saw our rankings increase for those terms that were included in the bread crumbs, such as brand names that we sell.

Thinking How The Search Engine Thinks

Google have stated that they want their search engine to think as close to the way a human brain thinks as possible, so they make sure it values the same things a person would value. Write many of one keyword and Google will think you are generating spam, the same way that a person will think your article is not very enjoyable to read.

We at UK Tights found the best way to do SEO was to look at making changes that benefit our customers, especially when it comes to written content. Creating a page for a brand of items that we sold allowed people to look only at their favourite designer and the few hundred words of text at the top we used to talk about their history was something our customers loved. Search engines did too; they saw the brand page and knew we specialized in that brand and they saw that we had written about the history of the designer, so we must be an authority on the topic. This view point helped us immensely and it continues to guide the way we think. Make it easy for the customer or the reader to find what they need and you’ll be rewarded.

How We Started Out

UK Swimwear was started just over five years ago as a website for browsing, shopping and choosing all your items of beachwear and swimwear. Founded by the team at UK Tights, UK Swimwear was launched as a supplement to our summer business. UK Tights sees their busiest periods around Christmas, so to help bring in more business, we launched UK Swimwear.

One great part about launching a second site is that most of the lessons we learned around websites and SEO helped us to build a website’s profile immediately. But with UK Swimwear, we ran into more obstacles after our launch.

Where Things Went Wrong

Originally operating under the name UK Beachwear, our site had plenty of links from many different sites, but unfortuantely with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, these link were deamed junk or spam. Recovering from the Penguin and Panda algorithm changes meant learning a very important lesson about SEO and how to run a business. Quality over quantity.

Many of these links came from sites with very little content and authority and we had to concentrate on dissavowing all of these before rebuilding, but once we removed a lot of this poisonous linking, our goal was to get a handful of links from only the very best sources. We moved towards the biggest fashion blogs and even the online editions of newspapers as well as .edu sites.

How UK Swimwear Recovered

These kinds of sites have immense authority with search engines and as such, they are the place to be when it comes to building your own profile on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.

After moving to a new site and starting to build from scratch, we eventually learned how to carefully curate links back to our site by offering quality content such as blog posts to our partners and we almost immediately started out with a better position than our previous site had been at in a couple of years.

UK Swimwear is continuing to climb by using this as our key strategy. We develop our site and our content carefully and instead of asking for a whole bunch of cheap links, we carefully court and talk to the big fashion bloggers to get a good and fair exchange by sending them samples or writing articles for them. This is how UK Swimwear first begin to regrow and it’s our continued strategy for the future.

Rolls-Royce

“Take the best that exists and make it better” 

These were the words of Sir Henry Royce, one half of the Rolls-Royce auto-mobile empire. “Inside Rolls-Royce” is a new documentary on Channel Four which examines what goes on behind the scenes of this exclusive company. It reminds me of a quote from my former head teacher Mrs A.K. Agwu. “Whatever is worth doing, is worth doing well” – one that has stood me in good stead over the years. It has also helped me maintain my resolve to continuously make advancements in every facet of my life.

One of the characteristics of this company is its attention to detail. Perfection or the quest for excellence, comes at a price. Sir Henry Royce’s quote should be mirrored in our attitude to life – relationships, personal development, business and so on. We can always do better, we can always help others advance; we can always contribute positively to a cause in our community.

I write this to emphasize – not the glitz and glamour – but the passion for continuous improvement that the Rolls-Royce brand embodies; which I think is far more important. You’ll find that as you adopt this ethos of continually improving (kaizen), in manageable ‘chunks’, you’ll begin to see noticeable differences in your life. Interestingly, you may also unwittingly ‘attract’ advancement in other aspects of your life as well; areas where you may have previously overlooked.

Thinking Big  à la Rolls-Royce

At the Dubai Motor Show in 2009 – which I attended, I remember being almost in awe of the vehicles on display. China, the US and the Middle East respectively, are the company’s largest buyers. Abu Dhabi now boasts the world’s biggest dealership.

We can all dream and think big just like this duo must have done. Why settle for the sky when there are stars and galaxies to explore? It’s a little more hard work initially, but soon becomes second-nature like everything else that you soon get used to. Towards the end of the Inside Rolls-Royce documentary, a reporter interviews a potential customer about to go for a spin; “… have you driven one before?” Man: “I own 7”. The average Rolls-Royce customer already has 7 other cars, so he definitely picked the wrong guy 🙂

Form Symbiotic Partnerships Just Like Mr Charles Rolls and Sir Henry Royce Did

I now live in the city where Rolls-Royce first started and was at the Midland Hotel not too long ago, where Charles Stewart Rolls and Sir Henry Patrick Royce met 110 years ago (May 4th 1904) to form the partnership which birthed the Rolls-Royce empire two years later. A relationship that wouldn’t have lasted very long had they not needed each other’s expertise.

A visual history of Rolls-Royce can be found at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), which I visited with my family on the day this article was originally published – possibly why I decided to finally finish this blog post four weeks after its first draft; highly recommended: the visit – not my proclivity towards procrastination 🙂

“Inside Rolls-Royce” was quite revealing and is testament to our innate desire for continuous improvement. This resource  has helped me and thousands of business owners worldwide immensely; check it out and you just might end up inside a Rolls-Royce that you bought with your hard-earned money!

Till my next blog post.

Sotonye Afiesimama

To be honest I was not the biggest fan of social media, I really only used it when I had to at work, but being made redundant after more than 20 years with the same company made me really consider what I wanted to do and how I was going to do it. After going through all the emotions that come with being made redundant – shock, hurt, anger and tears – I really thought about things during the Christmas holidays and realised that actually I was quite please to not have to work for them any more, this was going to be the kick up the back side that i needed to do something different.

One thing that I was certain of was that I didn’t want to work for anyone else on a permanent basis, no more bosses for me for a while, I had decided to set up my own business.

From the beginning of 2014 I have been on so many courses, marketing, PR, procurement and business training and I have learnt so much but there was still a gap in my knowledge that I needed to fill. So while I was still employed I asked if as part of my redundancy package they would pay for me to go on the CPD Search and Social Media Course at Salford University. Luckily they agreed and feeling quite nervous, as I thought I might be out of my depth, I joined the other students to learn more about this fascinating subject.

From signing up to LinkedIn and Google+, to website optimisation, advanced keyword research and link juice, the course is very focussed on how your business can benefit from excellent search and social media marketing. It shows us how to improve our websites to try to reach the top of Google rankings and how Google analytics or moz.com can help to analyse how your website is performing against your competitors or how your media campaigns are affecting your business.

Far from being overly academic the course engages with the real world, inviting speakers from some of the top search and social media companies in the area to talk about best practice and give insights into how SSMM works for their clients. The speakers are often inspirational, are willing to answer questions and give freely of their time to help those of us who need to know more and who want to learn.

Well after ten weeks, and having just decided what to call my company, I have now signed up to LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest (love this!), I feel confident that when my new website is developed and online I will know what I am talking about with the web designer and that I will be able to maintain the site and check the analytics myself. I also know that help is available from the SSMM team at Salford University and I would recommend the course to anyone who is interested in this field.

I suppose it’s sour grapes really, but my previous employers would really have benefited if I have signed up to do this course a couple of years ago. But now I am going it alone it will be my future clients, and me of course, who will hopefully benefit from my new confidence with search and social media marketing.

Jacqueline Whitaker
May 2014