SEO – Adzooma

TikTok SEO: The Ultimate Guide to Boosting Your Profile Visibility

Adzooma — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 17:04:42 +0000

One of the hottest debates in digital marketing right now is TikTok as a search engine. Can it really tower over Google Search as the preferred method for Gen Zs? According to survey results from Her Campus Media, more than half of ‘young people’ prefer the social media platform for its personalised results.

Further research into the type of content searched for suggests that “how to” queries are favoured, with search volumes up to 10 times larger than Google’s. However it’s used, there’s no doubting the inexorable influence of TikTok – surpassing 1.5 billion users in 2024.

So, how can your brand use TikTok search to reach its target audience? Learn more about the famous algorithm and how to get more views on TikTok.

What is SEO on TikTok?

Just like search engine optimisation for Bing or Google, your TikTok SEO strategy should always have your users’ search intent in mind. Rather than the traditional SERPs (search engine results pages), TikTok videos are displayed on the ‘For You page’ (also known as FYP).

The TikTok ranking algorithm measures user interactions on these videos, including number of views and time spent watching. There are multiple ranking factors that will help to push your content in front of the right people – including trending hashtags, high-quality video content and influencer partnerships.

What counts as a TikTok view?

The fundamental difference between TikTok content views and other platforms is how it’s measured. For example, on a YouTube video, a single ‘view’ is only logged if somebody has viewed it for 30 seconds or more. On Facebook, this value is lower at just three seconds.

Appealing to the short-term nature of its content, the TikTok search engine counts all views. This means that your viewing figures will go up the second somebody lands on your content. It also means that ‘dwell time’ is not the only thing that makes your videos rank. As such, TikTok users need to think about other ways to persuade the algorithm that their videos offer relevant content.

How TikTok SEO works

The TikTok algorithm works in mysterious ways. Views in isolation won’t make your content go viral. Instead, you’ll need to consider positive user interactions such as likes, comments, shares and account follows.

Dwell time is indeed a factor – the platform will take note if your videos are watched to the end and even re-watched. It will then serve similar content on a user’s ‘FYP’. This gives your TikTok account more chance of showing up, though it could also rank your competitors.

The difference between search engine optimisation and TikTok SEO

Your marketing strategy should follow some of the same principles as traditional SEO. For example, informational search queries are more likely to return ‘how-to’ videos. You’ll need to carry out TikTok keyword research, thinking about how long-tail keywords could translate into popular hashtags.

Transactional searches, meanwhile, may be more reliant on trending topics – for example, if a key influencer has just launched a new product range.

Fundamentally, while there are overlaps between Google and TikTok, there are differences. SEO ranking factors for TikTok include:

Optimised, relevant hashtags
User interactions such as follows and shares
Audio and video quality considerations
Content length and scheduling regularity.

Why optimise content for TikTok?

Producing relevant, engaging content for TikTok will not only grow your brand; it also offers monetisation opportunities. In August 2020, the TikTok Creator Fund was launched. According to the TikTok app, the fund helps creators “realise additional earnings that help reward the care and dedication they put into creatively connecting with an audience that’s inspired by their ideas.”

In monetary terms, you can expect to make between $0.02 and $0.04 (£0.016 and £0.032) per thousand views, or CPM. With these TikTok SEO tips, you can get more eyeballs on your content and grow your brand. Monetising your content is just a bonus.

How to get more views on TikTok

The algorithm made some interesting updates in 2022, namely to its search bar features. Users can now highlight on-screen text or caption content when they see a relevant keyword. TikTok will automatically create a clickable link, taking viewers through to related topics.

This puts more emphasis on creators to use relevant keywords in their captions and content. But it’s not the only way:

Think about your audience – what’s on their ‘For You’ page?

This method follows the fundamentals of all marketing, particularly SEO. Think about exactly who your user is – let’s say they’re an avid female gym-goer in their mid-20s. Transactional keywords might be shorter, such as the products they’re buying. Use hashtags like #gymleggings #yogapants #sportsbra etc.

Then consider the questions they might ask. “How can I gain muscle?” “How often do I need to stretch?” This can inform your hashtag strategy and your video content. TikTok video series work well, keeping users engaged with a single topic and then following it up with further answers to questions.

Jump on trending TikTok hashtags

Short-term boosts in sales based on trends are not to be sniffed at. You can use the ‘Discover’ page to browse videos and identify popular topics and hashtags. Include these in your video information to help your content show up in the search bar.

Don’t forget that hashtags aren’t the only thing that can trend. Phrases like #TikTokMadeMeDoIt showcase what products, movies or celebrities are hot in popular culture. These may inform memes, which you can recreate to align with your product or service. There are also TikTok challenges – a fun, light-hearted way to jump on whatever’s got users creating, contributing and interacting.

Keep your content under 30 seconds

There’s no hard and fast rule for optimum TikTok video content length – though the upper limit has now been extended to 10 minutes. This has come a long way since the early days of the platform when clips were limited to just 15 seconds.

While you’ve got the freedom to make almost mini-movies with 10-minute content, you’re likely to see users dropping off. Between March and August 2023, the most popular TikTok videos averaged 34 seconds – suggesting that users are ready to move on long before 10 minutes.

The secret is to get your message across within this time and keep viewers hooked. How? Pique their curiosity by presenting the problem quickly. (Even better if this ties into what they’re searching for!) Use a storytelling format – problem, method, resolution – ideally with humour and trending content.

Post your content at the right times

It’s not only a case of what content you create, but when. Of course, you don’t need to hit publish as soon as you create it. You can even use scheduling tools to make content in bulk. You will find hundreds of articles on what the best times to publish on TikTok are, but the reality is more nuanced.

For example, perhaps you’re an online retailer that ships globally. (If so, it’s also wise to look at language preferences and your account settings!) Some users may interact in different time zones. Another factor to think about is your industry. If you’re in B2B, for example, are your customers more likely to buy during the 9 to 5, or if you’re in B2C, are they more likely to engage on a weekend?

You can look at your analytics dashboard to find out more. This will give you three things:

A broad overview of your general video views, profile views, follower growth and overall user interactions
Content information such as total likes, average watch time, comments and shares
Follower insights such as where your audiences are based and what time of day they interact. This one is particularly important for scheduling.

Use trending sounds and audio effects

TikTok challenges and memes are one thing, but there are also sound effects. Again, head to the ‘Discover’ page to look for trending sounds. You can add these to your video by selecting the sound from the library.

If a user likes a particular song or sound, they can click through to it on the video. This will show them other videos that are using this audio, including yours.

Capitalise on the ‘how to’ using the comment section

More and more users are turning to TikTok to find quick, accessible information on how to do things. If you’re stuck for content ideas, head to your comment section. Here, users may ask questions about your videos. You can answer their queries directly – which may prompt a follow – or you can go the extra mile.

Think about making a video that answers the user’s question. You can respond to their query right there in the comment section with a video. This will link the user through to your new content, keeping them informed and those algorithms happy. After all, TikTok rewards quality, but it also rewards quantity.

Merge your videos by ‘stitching’

‘Stitching’ video content is ideal for collaborating with others or even promoting your existing content. It involves playing two videos side by side in a split-screen fashion. You can use it to compare two of your posts or work with a partner to make fun and interactive content.

For example, some people might sing along to another clip or dub over pre-existing videos with their own dialogue. Others might use this tool to compare two products. It’s essentially twice the content in the same viewing pane – great for those time-poor users.

Cross-promote your TikTok content on other platforms

Who says your videos have to exist on one platform only? While TikTok may be separate from other social networks like Meta, its content can still be shared. You can take your TikTok content and share it again on Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. (Don’t forget, YouTube is still considered a highly influential search engine.)

It will feature the TikTok logo and your username, inviting viewers to follow you on your account. This essentially gives your videos more longevity – reaching new users on different platforms. You can even branch out into others like LinkedIn or X. Simply share a link and watch your views grow.

Partner with influencers

Influencers are ideal for keeping your ‘dwell time’ high – ensuring more users reach the end of your video. Today, TikTok influencers are stars in their own right, with high followings that encourage more users to interact and convert.

To find the right influencers, follow these steps:

Look at your current followers. Analyse their user activity and find out more about the kind of accounts they’re following. To make this faster, you can also use the influencer management platform Heepsy.
Engage with your influencers. Once you’ve found a relevant TikTok star, reach out to them. Ask them what they think of your product. If they would have bought it anyway, they’re far more likely to promote it authentically.
Negotiate achievable goals. This starts with ensuring your chosen influencer’s followers are real and not just bots. Once you’ve confirmed this, discuss how they could help. Is it a how-to video, product demo or channel takeover?

Like all marketing, there may be some trial and error with this – which it’s why it’s so important to do your research. Make sure your influencer has the same values you do and watch out for shady tactics, such as promoting unethical products.

Don’t compromise on video quality

You may feel under pressure to create often, but this should not be at the expense of quality! Modern devices mean we have more access than ever to user-friendly content creation tools. The TikTok algorithm prioritises high-quality content – that is, using good lighting and crisp audio.

You should also follow the right framing conventions. TikTok recommends video dimensions of 1080 x 1920 pixels with an aspect ratio of 9:16. Remember that most people will be viewing these portrait-mode on a mobile, so ensure there’s no way that content can be clipped or captions missing.

Speaking of captions, never scrimp on these. Keep them below 125 characters (essential for scheduling tools) and use up to three relevant hashtags, leading with the most important information first.

Get started with TikTok Advertising

While TikTok’s algorithm opens up exciting ways for brands to reach younger audiences, maximizing visibility on the platform still requires a strong strategy. That’s where Adzooma’s parent company, ClickTech, can make a difference. With industry-leading expertise, ClickTech is now a TikTok Partner, offering brands resources to leverage TikTok’s unique advertising potential. Visit our partner page to find out more and get in touch, to start your TikTok advertising journey!

This article was written for Adzooma by CTI Digitial.

The Average Cost of UK Marketing Agencies

Danielle Strouther — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 10:55:00 +0000

There’s not a set cost for an agency in the UK, which means you’re never sure what price tag to expect.

And, when you’re quoted a price it makes it harder to question if you’re overpaying for your service, or getting a bargain. It’s one that you can only really work out when the results start coming in, but even then it’s difficult knowing if you can get the same results for cheaper elsewhere.

Not knowing the price can also make it hard to factor into your budget when deciding whether or not it will be worth the cost for your business.

So, to make this easier, we’ve done the research and found the average cost of agencies in the UK, split into different services. This data was gathered from a range of freely available sources and online pricing information, as well as confidential submissions from various UK based agencies and clients.

Note: these are just averages and don’t take into account the hours or particular offerings that an agency might offer.

This is what we found (click the image for the full-sized version).

Click the arrow to reveal the full data table.

7 Steps to Increasing Your Search Visibility & Outrank Competitors

Zelst — Tue, 25 May 2021 09:41:53 +0000

For any business with an online presence, increasing search visibility and outranking your competitors are two pretty good goals to have. However, if you offer a large and varied range of products, or you specialize in a range of services, it can be difficult to know when and where to focus your attention.

That’s where targeted optimization comes in. In this blog post, we’re going to talk you through how to increase overall search visibility with this strategy which should help you attract the right customers, increase conversions, improve brand awareness and, crucially, use your time most efficiently.

We’ll take you through seven simple steps to improve your website visibility and explain it in the context of one of our most recent case studies so you can actually visualize what we’re talking about.

Essentially, we’ll explain how we achieved these results:

But first, let’s define our key terms:

Search Visibility: The percentage of clicks your website receives based on your organic rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Targeted Optimization: Optimizing your website’s content to target specific search terms that are relevant to your business and target audience.

7 steps to improve website visibility

Let’s take a look at the 7 steps you can take to improve your website visibility.

Step 1: Understand Your Business

The first and arguably the most vital step is to really understand your or your client’s business.

Are there particular services that they consider their specialism?

Are there particular products or services that they want to push at different times of year?

If you can establish a core area to focus your efforts, it will make your project more manageable and achievable.

After completing a successful site move for our client – a barristers chambers – we moved into more targeted optimization based on their chosen service areas. It’s common for barristers and solicitors to be flexible in terms of their core focus, and there are seasonal peaks for different legal services. In the early part of 2020, fraud was the legal area they requested as their focus.

Step 2: Content Audit

Once you’ve settled on an area of specialism to focus your efforts, you need to undertake a content audit to fully understand how much and what type of relevant content you have on your site.

We recommend creating a spreadsheet to keep track of your content so you can see at a glance what pages need attention and which topics need bulking out.

As part of your content audit, you should review the keywords you’re ranking for and the keywords you’re tracking. Ensure the intent of the search terms you’re ranking for align with the intent of your content, and keep an eye out for any pages that are ranking for the same keyword – ask yourself if this content would be better merged.

Review the keywords you’re tracking that relate to your focus area and assess if all of these terms are actually relevant to your business, industry, or service area. If you have doubts, plug the search term into Google and examine the top ranking pages in the SERP.

If you come across any search terms which you shouldn’t be targeting or tracking, cull them from your keyword tracking tool. This will ensure your keyword metrics are accurate and relevant.

For our client, refining our keyword list was a crucial first step. For example, we were tracking the term ‘fraud’ which, as you can see below, doesn’t pull up a SERP that a barristers chambers would naturally fit in to.

Similarly, our client’s target customers – clients needing legal assistance for fraud-related cases – are probably going to search for more focused terms, and these are the terms we’re interested in.

Step 3: Keyword Research

Now that you’ve done your content audit and reviewed your keywords, it’s time for some fresh keyword research. There are so many great tools for keyword research – our favorite is Google’s Keyword Planner which we use in conjunction with SEMRush and Mangools. These tools will help you to identify additional keywords and sub-topics that you can target.

When selecting your keywords, you need to make sure the search intent aligns with your business and the content you can create well. You also need to ensure your content could fit into the SERP query landscape. Essentially, does or can your content match what Google believes are the top search results for that query?

We also recommend paying attention to long-tail keywords. Targeting long-tail search terms can help you generate traffic to your website, especially if you’re a small business or have a weak online presence. The search volume of these terms is low, but search intent is more focused.

Hubspot defines long-tail keywords as:

“A keyword phrase that aims to capture search traffic from a specific, often 3+ word search query. Long-tail keywords are used to target niche demographics rather than mass audiences.”

For our client, we created and optimized multiple blog posts targeting terms with low search volumes, and paid attention to featured snippet opportunities amongst these terms.

For example, according to Keyword Planner, ‘advanced fee fraud examples’ has a monthly average search volume of 10, and we successfully captured the featured snippet in the SERP. This fed into our client’s overall search visibility.

Step 4: Competitor Research

If your competitors are outranking you for your core search terms, it’s time to try and understand why. Review their higher-ranking content and pick out what they’re doing better than you.

Are they answering more questions? Are their facts and statistics more up-to-date? Is their content structured in a specific way?

Of course, do not plagiarise your competitors because A. it’s wrong and B. Google won’t like it. Instead, pick out what they’re doing better than you, use it as inspiration and, most importantly, think of ideas to make your content even better.

Analyzing your competitors is another great way to uncover additional keywords you could be targeting and directly competing with them for.

Step 5: Create a Plan of Action

Once you’ve gathered all your insights and data, you should create a detailed optimization plan to start working through. If you have a wider content team to share the workload with, a Google Sheet will help you avoid any overlaps.

First, add the relevant, existing pieces of content that you identified in your audit to your spreadsheet.

Second, assign each piece of content to the terms that the page should be targeting.

Finally, add a brief explaining the steps needed to optimize the content and outrank your competition.

Top Tip: Be sure to organize the content in a priority order. For example, you may want to start with content where there’s a featured snippet opportunity to capture.

Step 6: Optimise Your Content

Now, this is where all the hard work comes together. Work through your spreadsheet and begin optimizing your content by following the brief and undertaking any additional research as you see fit. If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve listed some tips below.

How to optimize content:

Include your target keywords throughout your content without it sounding unnatural
Be sure to include your primary keyword toward the start of your opening paragraph and in your concluding paragraph
Use your primary search term in your title
Use headings to break up your content and give your page structure
Include target search terms in your headings
Check both internal and external links aren’t broken and fix or remove any that are
Add relevant internal links
Check all external links are pointing to secure sites
Update any data or statistics and add external links to source your data
Include a clear call to action at the end of your page

Step 7: Track Progress

Tracking your results is important so you can monitor if your content strategy is working. There are many tools you can use to track your site’s visibility, keyword rankings and organic traffic. We primarily use Moz, SEMRush and Google Analytics to track our clients’ performances.

Look at how your content is performing for the relevant search terms, and also examine how this feeds into your site’s overall visibility. You should also keep an eye on the performance of your core terms.

Through targeted optimization, our client saw a huge increase in rankings. Using SEO software, we could easily see that our client ranked on the first page of Google for 68 fraud-related search terms.

Our targeted optimization strategy also fed into our client’s overall visibility and helped us to capture more competitive terms and key, local terms. We ranked #1 on Google for ‘leeds barristers chambers’, and #2 for ‘barristers in leeds’ and ‘leeds barristers’ – highly relevant and competitive terms for our client.

Using Google Analytics, you can see here how our client’s organic traffic really picked up from April 2020, once started implementing the plan.

And from Moz, you can see how our rankings skyrocketed for our tracked, target terms:

So make sure your SEO tracking software is all up-to-date so you can accurately monitor your progress and your success!

We hope you now have a solid understanding of how to increase search visibility with a targeted optimization strategy. As a search marketing agency, we love helping our clients maximize their online potential and outrank the competition. If you want similar results for your business, please get in touch with our team.

PPC vs. SEO: Which Is Right For Your Business?

Mark Neale — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 10:02:01 +0000

As a business owner trying to formulate the most effective marketing strategy for your company, a question you may be asking yourself is: “Which is better: SEO or PPC?”.

In short, the answer is that it depends on factors such as your company’s content output and platforms used, the product or service you are selling, and your overall marketing and business objectives.

In many instances, PPC and SEO can actually complement each other and work together to drive traffic in their own way, which we’ll explain later on.

This article will cover the key differences between PPC and SEO, what they are and why they’re important, as well as which, if not both, might be best for your business.

What is the difference between PPC and SEO?

PPC marketing (or pay-per-click) is an online advertising model, where the advertiser pays a fee every time someone clicks on their advert. The purpose of a PPC advert is usually to drive traffic to a website or landing page that is intended to persuade the user to make a purchase or another action.

Search engine advertising – or paid search – is one of the most popular forms of PPC. Businesses bid against each other for search engines to list their website when someone searches a relevant query. Each time a user clicks on the paid search listing, the business typically pays between $1-6 in the US, depending on the industry you’re in.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, a process that is used to drive ‘organic’ traffic to a website from search engines like Google or Bing. Unlike PPC, you don’t pay for SEO traffic. Instead, businesses use SEO practices – such as optimizing the content on their website or increasing its speed – to rank higher on a search engine’s results page (SERP).

One of the key differences between PPC and SEO search listings is where they are positioned. PPC results – or paid ads – will often appear at the very top of a SERP. On most SERPs, however, a higher percentage of users click on organic results than paid listings.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but with the right organic content, you’ll generate more clicks than from a well-placed paid ad.

Getting your business to rank in organic search is no quick or easy task, and relies upon you successfully executing content and SEO strategies over time – plus a fair amount of patience. Competition for keywords can be tough – particularly for commercial search terms.

For example, you may want your business to rank when a user searches for a plumber in their local area, but it can take a while to outrank established competitors who already have a wealth of authoritative content.

Instead, it may be more effective to create content that targets less competitive search terms, while using PPC to bid on more competitive keywords, where your product or services can be seen more straight away.

Other types of PPC advertising

PPC ads aren’t exclusive to just search engines though. There are other forms of PPC ads to experiment with, depending on your audience and business type. These include:

Display advertising: These are banner, image or text ads that show on other websites which link through to your website and product. They won’t necessarily generate as high a click-through rate (CTR) as paid search ads, but are useful for building brand awareness.
Social media advertising: Social media platforms like Facebook are used by masses of potential customers. Advertising on these platforms can help increase awareness of your product or services, allowing you to target specific demographics and interests. Advertisers can also choose to pay per click (PPC) or per impression.
Affiliate marketing: This is where third-party ‘affiliates’ create PPC ads promoting your products or services and place them across search engines, price comparison sites, targeted content sites and high-traffic websites. It uses a performance-based model or Cost per Action (CPA). This method needs ongoing management and expertise, though.
Price comparison websites: These gather and display various products and offers from a number of providers in one place. The advantage is that you can access customers who are ready to buy a product or service like yours, though the disadvantage is that you’ll be up against competitors.

With PPC advertising, you can also do something called ‘retargeting,’ which uses cookies on a user’s browser to show them specific ads based on their previous online actions. For example, a user searching for plumbers in their local area could see display ads for various plumbing services.

Retargeting can be used as part of search and display advertising campaigns, as well as social media campaigns and email marketing.

What is SEO in marketing?

SEO is a specialist practice used to increase the quantity and quality of visitors to your website by driving ‘organic’ website traffic from search engines.

SEO in marketing, therefore, requires shaping and optimizing content around what your target audience is searching for online. This means researching the topics they are interested in, the words they’re using, and the type of content they want to consume.

It also means being able to deliver that content in a way that allows search engines to discover and catalog it – a process known as crawling and indexing. In developing organic SEO content as part of your marketing strategy, it’s therefore important to understand what both your audience and search engines might be looking for.

There are many pros to using an SEO-focused approach. These include:

Generating free traffic: This is probably the main benefit of doing SEO, in the sense that you don’t pay a cost per click, and traffic that is generated is earned.
Gain more visibility: When you appear in SERPs organically, it boosts both brand awareness and credibility.
Building trust: Having your site show up in the search results for a particular topic or keyword builds trust with potential customers and your target audience.
Improved click-through rate: You can generally expect to generate more clicks from a highly-placed organic listing than from a paid ad.
Reputation: Once search engines recognize your brand as an authority within your industry or niche, it’s not as easy for PPC-focused competitors to simply buy their way in.
Broadening topic scope: It’s easier to broaden the scope of your content by reoptimizing content or creating new, relevant organic content, instead of paying for all kinds of clicks on every service or product on your website.

SEO in marketing is a long game though and it can take a fair amount of time and effort to see results. While SEO-driven traffic is free, gaining that visibility will take time and money, and the quality of your content needs to be there in order to achieve it.

You need to think strategically about the kinds of keywords and search queries you’re targeting, too. If the SERPs already include highly authoritative websites like Amazon, eBay or Wikipedia, it may be very difficult to compete and gain the kind of visibility that you want for your business.

Additionally, you may need to budget for quality content assets and invest in a proper strategy for tactics like link building. These can be difficult to manage in-house, especially for smaller businesses, and may require expert support.

With all this in mind, it’s worth considering that PPC can pick up where SEO can’t, ensuring users will see your ads much more quickly, and allowing for laser-focused targeting so you can get in front of potential customers. For this reason, it’s beneficial to utilize both.

The pros and cons of PPC

PPC (pay-per-click) marketing, as mentioned, allows you to increase your traffic and gain better access to your audience by paying when someone clicks on your ad and goes onto your website.

With PPC, you can get results almost instantly, making it an ideal method for smaller businesses and start-ups. SEO is really more about playing the long game, since it takes time to populate your site with content and build brand authority naturally.

You can find out more about PPC advertising with our in-depth guide, but here are a few of the pros and cons to help you understand the difference between PPC and SEO, the factors involved, and which, if not both, might be more beneficial to your business.

PPC marketing has many pros or advantages. These include:

Quicker results: Paid search marketing is undoubtedly a much quicker and more direct way of reaching your target audience than SEO.
High position on page: The highest bidder sits at the top of the SERP, so users will always see those results first.
Better ads for your business or service: With PPC ads, you have more control over the information and messaging you can include, like price, location, callouts and so on.
Better targeting: PPC provides a laser-targeted way to get in front of potential customers, since ads can be targeted by search keywords, time of day, day of the week, geography, language, device and much more.
More efficient testing: A PPC ad campaign can allow you to test and experiment with new products, landing pages, marketing messages and call-to-action buttons, helping determine where the best results can be found.
Increased marketing intelligence: By using analytics software (like Google Analytics), with a PPC campaign, you can see which keywords convert and at what percentage and cost. These insights can then be used to inform SEO marketing and other advertising strategies to improve results all around.

There are, however, some cons to PPC, largely surrounding cost. If you’re targeting several countries or running large international campaigns, costs can soon increase dramatically.

Additionally, PPC marketing requires constant investment to keep your ads running. Costs can also increase if you’re bidding against other advertisers.

Another potential drawback is that competitors can easily notice if you’re running ad campaigns, and can replicate your ideas and messaging. This is fairly common in advertising and somewhat goes with the territory.

It’s important to remember that PPC depends upon strategic thinking and skill when it comes to managing and monitoring your campaigns. Although it requires some budget to do PPC, search engines and other platforms reward advertisers who can create relevant, targeted PPC campaigns by charging them less for clicks.

This in turn results in higher profits for your business, so it’s worth doing it right.

How PPC and SEO work together

While there are key differences between PPC and SEO, don’t think of it as PPC vs SEO. In fact, where possible, a strategy that incorporates both can bring about the best results.

Both SEO and PPC drive traffic in their own ways, but used together, you can ensure all bases are covered when it comes to increasing your traffic and bolstering your messaging overall. So if you’re wondering: “does PPC help SEO?” the answer, for the most part, is yes.

As an example, the data derived from a PPC campaign – like which keywords convert best – can be used to create SEO and content strategies. You can then focus on these high-performing keywords, optimizing them for organic SEO.

Additionally, by looking into which pages perform best from paid referrals, those insights can be used to improve SEO content in the future. You could also test your paid content against the same organic content with a view to see which performs better, and then analyze why that might be.

Taking learnings from your existing SEO content can also be helpful. You can use organic content as a testing ground to see what works before you decide to take the plunge with ad spend.

For example, if a page converts well through organic search, but you’re struggling to outrank a competitor, you can pay for a sponsored listing and improve your brand’s visibility while still retaining the page’s organic listing.

When using PPC and SEO strategies together, ensure that your brand messaging is aligned and your on-page techniques are up to scratch, giving your potential customers a positive experience of your brand.

Using a PPC tool can help your business execute its PPC and SEO strategies harmoniously. With a free Adzooma account for marketers, you can create, optimize and track your PPC ad campaigns, as well as spotting opportunities for improving and optimizing the content on your website.

You can also super-charge your campaign results by accessing insightful reports, strategic suggestions and rule-based automation features.

PPC vs. SEO – which should you choose for your business?

Although a frequently asked question, it’s not possible to give an either/or answer without taking into account an individual business’s situation. Deciding whether PPC or SEO is a better investment for your brand depends upon your short and long-term business goals. With this in mind, a clear marketing strategy is needed before you opt for one or the other.

Consider if you need leads quickly. As a small, or new business without much content or brand authority, PPC can be a way to generate instant traffic.

Is competition high in organic search? If so, PPC can help bolster your visibility, getting your website to the top of the SERPs. If your brand is very product-driven, Google Shopping is a great feature that allows you to visually showcase your products in the SERPs.

Although PPC has a cost attached, the budget is much easier to control in the sense that it’s easier to track and prove ROI. With SEO, there’s a need for patience and creativity.

Our advice? If you can, opt for an integrated marketing strategy that combines both PPC and SEO, as when managed correctly, this will achieve the optimum outcome.

To reiterate, PPC is all about fast results and (more or less) guaranteed visitors at a cost. What’s not guaranteed is that you will convert into loyal customers. While SEO traffic is free and important in your longer-term marketing strategy, you’ll need to be patient in regards to the time involved.

A combination of both PPC and SEO marketing is arguably the best approach.

Looking to begin your PPC journey today? Sign up for a free account with Adzooma for full PPC management, strategic insights and expert optimization tips.

You can also use our SEO report tool in partnership with Hike SEO, helping you to create a bespoke SEO strategy, implement recommendations and track your progress with accurate reporting.

SEO – The Better You Know!

Eloise Idoine — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 10:41:37 +0000

CWCS Managed Hosting and Adzooma have partnered! With the synergy between online marketing and web hosting, we’ve taken the opportunity to work together, share knowledge and support clients where required.

As businesses, we are both passionate about helping our clients grow online and that’s why we’ve produced this handy guide to support businesses and equip them with the right tools and services to stay ahead of the game.

This May, Google’s Page Experience update is coming into force so now seemed like the perfect time to share the ways in which we are helping companies to prepare.

So, What is Page Experience?

Google’s algorithm update is due in May 2021 and will use the following five search signals to measure Page Experience:

1. Core Web Vitals

These will look at three areas; load performance, interactivity and stability.

LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, measures loading performance and page stability. For a good user experience, the page should load within 2.5 seconds.
FID, First Input Delay, measures interactivity and suggests that pages should have less than 100 milliseconds of FID.
CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift, measures the visual stability of a page and pages should have less than 0.1 CLS for good UX.

2. Safe-browsing

Google will check for any suspicious or deceptive content on your web pages. This will include checking for social engineering, malware and other malicious content.

3. HTTPS

Previously HTTPS was a minor factor in Page Rank however, with this new update it will play a larger role. Having an SSL certificate in place will ensure data is encrypted between the server and the users web browser. This has become a defining factor of how you establish trust amongst your customers and visitors online.

4. Mobile friendly UX/UI

Assesses readable views, font sizes, click-throughs and links.

5. No Intrusive Interstitials

Ensures page content is easily accessible to users. Measuring accessibility to content, simplified mobile search results and pop-up management.

Let’s take a look at tools and services both businesses offer inline with preparing for Page Experience.

CWCS Managed Hosting

CWCS have been providing hosting solutions for the last 20 years. With a knowledgeable team behind them, they have been experts in providing an array of hosting and security solutions.

Having the right hosting plan in place will allow your business to run smoothly online, utilising the appropriate recourses and infrastructure can impact on speed, uptime/downtime which will play a part in the Page Experience signals.

Choosing the right type of hosting can impact your SEO so it’s important you choose the right type of hosting plan for your business. CWCS operate a full data center and are able to advise and support you with an array of hosting options:

Managed Web Hosting – For those that require simple, affordable managed website hosting, we offer a secure, reliable and easy-to-use service for single or multi-site hosting.
VPS – A VPS bridges the gap between Web Hosting and a Dedicated or Cloud Server, which provides you with more performance, control and flexibility at competitive prices.
Cloud Hosting – A smart choice for customers that require reliable, flexible and scalable hosting. Built on a fully redundant platform, our Supreme Cloud is built for mission-critical systems. CWCS offers both public and private cloud hosting.
Dedicated Servers – Powered by HPE Hardware and Intel Xeon Processors, a Dedicated Server will give you maximum performance and reliability when you need it most.
Colocation – From our UK ISO 27001 accredited Data Centres in Nottingham, London and Manchester, we’ll provide you the ultimate environment to protect your assets and data.

SSL Certificates

With HTTPS being one of the signals for Page Experience, CWCS can help you choose the right type of SSL Certificate for your business. They have a handy SSL Certificate Checker on their site which, upon entering your domain, will quickly show if your site is secure or not.

With a range of options for DV, OV and EV certificates, you can secure your site today!

Security Solutions

Security is paramount to how CWCS operates with Cyber Essentials, G-Cloud and ISO 27001 certification in place as well as being fully GDPR compliant, you know you are in safe hands.

To ensure your systems are fully protected from attacks, you should take advantage of the security tools available:

Managed Dedicated Firewalls – Using Cisco’s most-deployed stateful firewall combined with application control, intrusion prevention system, and advanced malware protection (AMP), have confidence that you are protected against the most sophisticated cyber-attacks.
Managed Cloud Firewalls – CWCS ArcusWall provides powerful, reliable and robust corporate-level firewall protection at an entry-level price.
Bitedefender Anti-Virus Protection – Offers protection against aggressive ransomware families with advanced threat control.
Barracuda Email Firewall – Fully integrated hardware and software solution that protects your email server from spam, viruses, spoofing, denial of service, phishing and spyware attacks.
cWatch Web Security – Includes a Web Application Firewall (WAF), Advanced DDoS Protection, provisioned over a secure Content Delivery Network (CDN). This will help prevent you from having downtime from DDos attacks on your site.

Overall, having the right hosting and security in place will give you peace of mind as well as working towards creating a good UX and Page Experience for your clients.

Adzooma

With 100K active advertisers taking advantage of Adzoomas free PPC optimization tool, the company has just launched a new feature to help you manage the mysteries of SEO.

The SEO Performance Report is designed for SME’s and businesses who are new to managing SEO. With clear and practical reports, you can now elevate your SEO and compare your performance with that of your competitors.

Alongside analyzing keyword performance and gap analysis, the SEO Performance Report will also allow you to monitor your page speed which will be crucial to Google’s Page Experience rankings.

How it works

In order to run an SEO report, you simply enter your URL, select your country and click run. If you want to compare your performance against your competitors, just add their URL as well. They’ve put together this guide on how it all works.

When you run the performance report, you will initially see an overall score. The closer you are to 100, the better optimized your website!

The report will also give you a detailed and easy to read breakdown of the primary areas impacting your SEO.

Keyword Performance

This section of the report shows where your website ranks on search engines for the keywords you selected and some other phrases we found your website appearing for.

It will also give you recommendations on how to build a stronger position. Here, you will be able to see insightful information such as where you rank in the top 3 positions, your page 1 performance, total number of keywords and monthly traffic.

This will give you a direct percentage against the business you are comparing yours to and help you to make the necessary improvements.

Keyword Gap Analysis

Keyword gap analysis is about identifying opportunities that you are missing out on. On one side, you’ll see keywords that only you are ranking for and on the other, you will see keywords that only your competitor is ranking for.

You will also be able to see the top 10 keywords that you and your competitor rank for making it easier to determine whether or not your important products and services being mentioned.

Onsite SEO

The tool is great for providing SEO optimization suggestions and looks at a number of factors as well as giving recommendations on how to improve. It will even rank the necessary actions in priority order depending on which are most impactful to SEO.

Not only can you click to view more details on “what you need to do next” but it will also tell you “why it’s important” so you can improve your knowledge along the way.

Page Speed

Page Speed will be playing a key role in the Page Experience rankings and is extremely important for SEO as it impacts the user experience. It will help you to analyze cache, slow loading files, images that need optimizing and other format improvements which all impact speed.

Again, each suggestion comes with an overview to give you a better understanding of how you can manage each area going forward.

Backlinks

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. It is, essentially, a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. When many websites are linking to your content, a search engine will generally rank that content highly for relevant search queries.

Here, you can access information on your total number of backlinks, number of linking websites and also your website authority compared with your chosen competitor.

And what’s more, this awesome tool allows you to run 3 free reports per month as well as giving you the option to upgrade to unlimited reports if you want to run more analysis over the course of the month.

Get in Touch

To learn more about how both CWCS Managed Hosting and Adzooma can help you with online growth and SEO, visit our websites and speak with a member of the teams today!

Adzooma Expands Into Digital Marketing With New SEO Report

Danielle Strouther — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:07:38 +0000

The Adzooma mission is a simple one: to make online advertising easier and accessible to all.

And it’s fair to say we’ve done that. After all, Adzooma is the best free PPC platform on the market, packed with time-saving features, one-click optimisations and the fastest and most intelligent automation system on the market.

This is just the beginning. We’re going to continue to upgrade and innovate our PPC offering and expand our horizons. Today, we’re taking our first step into the wider digital marketing world with the launch of a brand new SEO Performance Report.

Why SEO?

Let’s take a step back to basics:

PPC: Pay-per-click advertising.
SEO: Search engine optimization.

PPC and SEO are different sides of the same marketing coin. Both strategies will get your business noticed on search engines at the right moment. PPC gives an instant, paid-for results, while SEO is the slower, ‘free’ option.

But PPC and SEO aren’t in competition with each other. They work together, hand-in-hand.

If keywords are getting a lot of clicks for your PPC campaigns, it shows what users might engage with the most for your organic strategy.
Similarly, if your pages are ranking for particular keywords, you can set up PPC campaigns to capitalize on that success.
SEO optimised pages help improve your Quality Score, helping your PPC campaigns rank higher.

That’s why we’ve chosen SEO as the first report and marketing feature to be included in the Adzooma platform. It’s a massive step for us and wouldn’t have been possible without our partnership with Hike SEO.

Want to brush up your SEO knowledge? Check out this guide to SEO and how it works here.

The new SEO Performance Report

Adzooma’s SEO Performance report will analyse your website and identify immediate actions you can take to improve.

Like our PPC Performance Report, you’ll get an overall score out of 100. The closer to 100 you are, the better optimised your website is. You’ll then get a more detailed breakdown of your performance into 4 key areas.

1. Keyword performance

This section will show where your website ranks for selected keywords, as well as other phrases that you might not be aware of. It will tell you information such as:

How many keywords you rank #1 for
How many of your keywords rank in the Top 3 and Top 10
The total number of keywords your website ranks for
An estimate of your monthly traffic
The top 25 keywords that you rank for

The section is designed to be an overview of where you’re at now. It’s designed to give you an insight on what keywords are resonating with your audience – and site content that you can improve. After all, the higher you rank, the more traffic you’re likely to get.

In addition, this section might also spark some ideas for your PPC campaigns, which you can action and build straight away in Adzooma Management.

2. Onsite SEO

This is where the SEO Performance Report starts to get into the more technical side of SEO with recommendations to optimise specific pages on your website. Don’t worry though, every suggestion is fully explained with easy changes that you can action straight away.

This section will check factors such as:

Title tags, which summarise to the search engines what the page is about and entice customers to click on your link on the results page.
Meta descriptions, which is the copy that search engines use to describe your page in the results.
Redirects, which ensure that users land on the right page and don’t see 404 errors if the content has been moved or removed from your website.
Noindex tags, which tell search engines to ignore a page and prevents it from appearing in the results.
And much more.

For every recommendation, we’ll tell you exactly why it’s been suggested, what it does and how you can implement the change straight away. You don’t need to know the ins and outs of SEO to achieve results here.

Find more onsite SEO tips in this guide to improving on-page and off-page SEO.

3. Page Speed

As the name suggests, this section checks the page speed of your website. Slow website’s lower user experience, meaning that search engines will penalise your website and lower your rankings.

Page speed isn’t just important for SEO though. The longer a page takes to load, the more users you’ll lose. That means less conversions, less sales and less profit.

This section won’t just test the speed of your website, but also list actions you can take to prevent anything slowing down your website.

4. Backlinks

Backlinks are the bread and butter of the SEO world. They are links from another website to yours, which act as a vote of confidence in the eyes of search engines. If another high-quality website is linking to yours, search engines see it as a personal recommendation that your website is trustworthy, significantly impacting your rankings.

In this section, you’ll see:

The total number of backlinks your website has
The number of websites that link to your website
Your website authority, which is a score out of 10 to measure the quality & quantity of backlinks to your website

You’ll also see a list of some of your backlinks, showing what pages people are linking to. This information is an essential part of forming a backlink strategy.

Compare your performance to your competitors

The SEO Performance Report gives you the option to add a competitor’s URL to your report, allowing you to measure your performance against theirs. See areas that you’re doing well, where they might be taking the lead and identity opportunities to improve.

Our keyword gap analysis is a great competitive feature of the SEO Performance Report. Located in the Keyword Performance section, this will show you:

The keywords that you are ranking for, and your competitor’s aren’t.
The keywords you both rank for and the relative positions.
The keywords your competitors are ranking for, and you aren’t.

Use it to add keywords into your strategy that you might be missing out on, or start building PPC campaigns based on the keywords that they’re missing out on.

You might want to also look at our guide for keyword ranking for extra tips and advice.

How to get your SEO Performance Report

The basic SEO Performance Report is free to access for all Adzooma users.

Just login to your account and click Reports at the top. Then, click the SEO Performance Report from the list to get started.

To run the report, you’ll have to enter your own URL (and your competitor’s URL to run a competitors report) and click ‘Run Report’. Your results and recommendations will start loading below.

You can run a maximum of 3 reports per week, which will be shown at the top of the page. If you’re looking for more, you can upgrade this to 100 reports a week as an exclusive Adzooma add-on. Upgrading your SEO Report will also unlock:

100 keywords analysed, instead of 25.
Full historical reporting, instead of the past 30 days.
The ability to download your report as a PDF, or share to clients in a click.

All details about this add-on can be found inside the Adzooma platform. For now, try the basic version for free to get a taste of what this report can offer.

Not an Adzooma user?

You’ll need to sign up and connect your advertising accounts to access this feature. This is completely free and gives you access to a whole suite of additional reports, intelligent automation rules that run every 30 minutes, one-click optimizations and so much more.

Create your free account here.

How To Build A Powerful SEO Strategy With One Report

Danielle Strouther — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:07:18 +0000

An SEO strategy is a plan designed to improve your organic search rankings, increase your organic traffic and ultimately increase your conversions.

That’s all great. But if you have little to no SEO knowledge, it might sound like a pipe dream without investing in an in-house expert or an expensive agency to show you the way. And yeah, if you don’t have the time or inclination, you can turn to an agency or a consultant.

But, we’re here to tell you that building a powerful SEO strategy can be done alone, without the need of in-depth knowledge or expensive tools.

And to prove it, we’re going to help you create your own strategy, step-by-step, using our very own free SEO report.

Ready to get started?

First, let’s get your data

The first step to any strategy is to see where you’re at right now. You need to get a measure of what your current performance is, what your weak points are and where you have the most potential for growth.

Trying to start your strategy without this information is like starting to build a house without checking if you’re on solid ground.

Let us get a look at your data first then.

For this, you’re going to need to load up your SEO Performance Report. To access this, log into your Adzooma account, click reports at the top and select the SEO Performance report.

Then, you need to enter your URL, select your target country and click the ‘Run Report’ button.

You can also enter a competitors URL here as well to compare your performance against theirs, which is a useful tool we’ll cover later in the article.

While your SEO Report loads, you can watch this video explaining what results you’ll see in each of the sections.

1. Find content opportunity in your keywords

The first section you’ll see in your SEO report is your keyword performance. This section will show where your website ranks for selected keywords, as well as other phrases that you might not be aware of.

And there lies our opportunity to start building your SEO strategy on one of it’s most important cornerstones: content.

When we say content here, we don’t mean bland blogs with keywords stuffed into them. We mean interesting, insightful blogs, videos, pages, podcasts, etc that provide value and are interesting to your target audience.

Great content won’t just drive up your rankings, but also provide another avenue for customers to interact with your brand.

So, let’s have a look at your top performing keywords as a base.

Using Tetley Tea as an example, we can see from their SEO Performance Report that they’re already ranking for a lot of keywords about their infused flavours or ‘boost teas’.

Putting those together, we could create great content for Tetley for topics such as:

How these teas can reduce tiredness
What to eat and drink for your metabolism
Health benefits of ‘super teas’
And so on

If you’ve entered a competitor on your SEO Performance Report, you’ll also see the keywords your competitors are ranking for, as well as a keyword gap analysis.

This will show you:

The keywords that you are ranking for, and your competitor’s aren’t.
The keywords you both rank for and the relative positions.
The keywords your competitors are ranking for, and you aren’t.

In our SEO Performance Report, we added PG Tips as a competitor. This brought out these keywords that PG tips were ranking for, and Tetley Tea weren’t:

how much caffeine in pg tips tea
how is pg tips tea decaffeinated
pg tips newsletter
pg tips tea decaf
pg tips decaf tea bags
are pg tips tea bags plastic-free
what does pg stand for in pg tips
pg tips complaint
pg tips decaf tea
pg tips cup

Although most of these keywords are branded, we can see a few topics here that PG Tips are ranking for that Tetley could use for themselves, including decaf tea.

As well as becoming a part of your SEO strategy, these keywords could also influence great competitor PPC campaigns. For example, if Tetley were to target the ‘pg tips tea decaf’ or ‘pg tips decaf tea’ keywords, they could run an advert like this to gain some of their competitor’s organic traffic.

2. Build your keyword list out

Now you have your general topics, it’s time to build your keyword list out.

There are a number of tools that you can use for this part, including SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, Google Trends and Answer the Public. If you’ve not used a keyword tool before, you’ll want to see our guide to 18 of the best SEO keyword tools and tips.

When you’re picking keywords here, don’t just aim for the ones with the most traffic. Generally speaking, the more traffic they receive, the harder they’ll be to rank for. So you’ll need a good mix of low-volume keywords to target for your chosen topics.

Here’s one piece of advice to follow when building out this part of your SEO strategy:

Don’t think keywords, think search intent.

Search intent is a simple term to represent an incredibly important piece of information. Namely, when users search for something on the internet, they are doing it for a very particular reason.

In order to serve the best content, search engines like Google categorise search intent into four different categories:

Informational. This is when users are after a particular piece of information. They are often questions that ask who, what, where, when or why.
- E.g. “Can teabags be put in a compost bin?”
Navigational. This is when users are after a specific webpage or location, usually for brands or websites that they’re familiar with.
- E.g. “Tetley customer support”
Commercial. This is where users are interested in and researching a product, and are looking for reviews, comparisons or information about which one they should buy.
- E.g. “Best green tea UK”
Transactional. This is made by people who are ready to buy a product, and tend to be ultra targeted and specific searches.
- E.g. “Buy Tetley Green Tea Berry Burst”

With this in mind, you want to make sure that the keywords you’re targeting are fit for purpose. There’s no point building keywords into your strategy that don’t match up to user intent, as it doesn’t provide value to your customers and Google won’t show them.

3. Let’s get technical

Okay, here’s the part where most people get intimidated and drop out. But before you get spooked by technical SEO, let me reassure you that you don’t need to be a developer to build this into your SEO Strategy.

Technical SEO involves making sure technical aspects of your website and content are easy for users to access, and easy for search engines to index.

With your SEO Performance Report, you’ll already have the technical SEO actions you need to build into your SEO strategy. We’ve broken them down into two simple sections:

Your onsite SEO, which gives you recommendations to optimise specific pages on your website.
Your page speed, which gives you recommendations to speed up your website.

In the Onsite SEO section, you’ll get a list of actions that you need to take, why it’s important and what you need to do to implement this action.

Everything is explained for you inside your report. For example, Tetley Tea will see this as one of their Onsite SEO actions:

Your page https://www.tetley.co.uk/ doesn’t have a H1 heading, including this can help your SEO

When we click into it, we’ll find out that:

H1 headings help readers (and search engines) understand what your content is about. Using H1 tags to structure your page correlates with higher ranking, and therefore we recommend you use them. Normally, the H1 tag will give the reader a strong sense of what they are going to read. Above all else, it should be accurate!

We’ll also get information that H1 headings can also help you rank for a particular keyword and it’s recommended to include that keyword within the main H1 heading. In addition, you’ll also get an example so you can see how it’s done.

The page speed section of the SEO Performance Report also offers similar information, but for actions that affect your website speed.

They’ll also show the exact URLs, images and files that could be slowing down your website and losing you conversions, so you can go straight to fixing it.

Armed with this information, and what actions you need to take, you can quickly fill in the technical SEO details to your SEO strategy.

4. Create a solid backlink profile

Last but not least, we have backlinks.

Backlinks are a link from another website, to yours. Each link counts as a vote of confidence towards your website in the eyes of a search engine, which means that your website will start being seen as an authority figure. The more authoritative and trustworthy your website is, the better you’ll rank.

On your SEO Performance Report, the backlink section will show you:

The total number of backlinks your website has
The number of websites that link to your website
Your website authority, which is a score out of 10 to measure the quality & quantity of backlinks to your website
A list of some of your most recent backlinks and their individual quality scores.

If you entered a competitor URL, you’ll also see all of this information in comparison to your competitor, as well as a list of some of their most recent backlinks.

This section can be used to create a quality backlink profile in a number of ways.

Firstly, it gives you an overview of the authority of your website and the quality of your backlinks. If your score is low, then you need to focus on gaining backlinks from more authoritative websites.

In the backlink game, quality beats quantity here every time. 20 average backlinks could be less effective than one link from an amazing site. Think high, aim high here.

One way to check a website’s authority is by using Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) metric. Enter any URL in this tool, or install their toolbar to check DA scores on the go. Generally, websites that have a domain authority of 10 or under should be avoided and those with a score of 40 and above are your golden ticket.

Remember those topics we created earlier? Why not create some guest posts to feature on other websites. This is a great place to gain backlinks, build relationships with people in your industry and gain additional traffic to your website.

Secondly, you can use the recent backlinks list to take a look at which pieces of your content are already being shared – and any low scorers that you might want to avoid in the future. If you’ve got one really popular page, why not increase this success with more content that points to it?

This will also help you build link equity. This is a fancy SEO term that basically means certain links pass value and authority. So, if you’ve got a relevant and popular page, it’s going to have more ‘link power’ than others.

Lastly, take inspiration from your competitors. If they’re getting backlinks from websites you haven’t considered before, put them into your SEO strategy. Even better, think of similar websites that they haven’t got on their list and target them.

Plan, action & repeat

And there you have it, how to build an SEO strategy from one report.

Now the hard planning part is over, you just need to carry out the plan and then check in on your results. We can’t stress the importance of this part.

You need to make sure that what you’re doing is having an impact on your business. If there are parts of it that are working better than others, you need to know so you can improve your strategy and deliver even better results.
To keep an eye on your results, we’d recommend running your SEO Performance Report at least once a month. You’ll be able to compare your scores over time and get continuous new actions and recommendations to take your SEO efforts to the next level.

How Your Web Hosting Impacts Your SEO

Eloise Idoine — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 12:15:00 +0000

When it comes to SEO marketing, Google’s ever-evolving algorithms set the standard for what marketeers and agencies often go to great lengths to stay on top of.

With Google maintaining a market share of 92.47% as of January 2021, this search engine giant is in a position to pull the strings and are constantly updating their algorithms (PageRank) behind the scenes leaving marketeers with a continuous process of trying to adhere to these illusive rules.

This is why we often hear SEO referred to as “difficult to define’’ or a ‘’mystery’’ and it’s impossible to predict what is coming next. There are 200 ranking factors which Google consider for their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and many of these are essentially out of our control.

So, what can marketeers do to stay on top of their PageRank? Well, outside of the website itself, there are a number of elements that can be maintained and controlled and a significant part of that comes down to choosing the right web hosting solution for your business.

Key factors that hosting can have on SEO

Uptime/Downtime

Choosing the right type of hosting is essential as this greatly impacts the uptime/downtime implications for your site. Search engine spiders, or ‘’crawlers’’, are likely to visit your site several times throughout any given day and record inaccessibility due to downtime. Repeated reports of this can flag the site with Google and negatively impact page rankings.

Think about it, if your site is down for even just 1% of time over a month, that equates to 7 hours and this can have serious implications for a business, especially if you are an e-commerce site who relies on uptime for revenue.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some downtime will occur when the hosts are carrying out essential maintenance. You can ask your hosting provider how often this is likely to occur and factor that into your decision-making process as some hosts may perform maintenance more often than others.

For managed hosting, it’s worth asking your provider if they can run an RTO/RPO (Recovery Time/Point Objective) test which will ultimately give you a realistic recovery time should your server go down.

Aside from costly software, there are some useful free tools available to you online where you can check your website’s uptime/downtime such as IsItWP, all you have to do is enter your site’s URL, here.

You can always ask for advice to ensure you know where you stand when it comes to managing your site’s uptime/downtime. Ideally, you want to choose a hosting provider who can guarantee 99.9% uptime which, spread across a year, only totals 8.8 hours of downtime!

Other aspects which can impact downtime include SPOF (Single Points of Failure) and security within your network. Your hosting provider should be able to offer you security add-ons which can help prevent against DDoS, malware attacks, etc.

Speed

Standard website load time is in the region of 2 seconds and research shows that 40% of people are likely to entirely abandon your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load which could have huge implications on your overall traffic.

Google factors this into their algorithms which detect slow page loading, which in turn, has a direct effect on your SEO.

It was back in 2010 when Google decided to factor load time into their ranking algorithms. Google saw users moving away from their search engine as a result of slow loading times and this had a monetary consequence as they were making less from their ads.

Site speed has become so fundamental to how people perceive your business online and the trust they put in you. Slow load times and unresponsive sites do not instill confidence in your online customers or visitors.

Shared hosting users can feel the effects of this due to their shared resources which can have a direct impact on their site.

When choosing a hosting provider and plan, you should consider your traffic, storage and resource requirements. For faster speed and performance, VPS or dedicated servers are the best options as you have scalable RAM and bandwidth. Your hosting company should also be able to offer CDN (Content Delivery Network) which will minimize delays in loading web page content.

To check the performance of your web pages, you can use tools such as Pingdom, GT Metrix and Google’s “PSI” (PageSpeed Insights) which provides you with reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices. It will also provide suggestions on how that page may be improved.

Server Location

Where your site is hosted may also have an effect on speed and load times. When you have a shared, VPS or a dedicated server hosting plan, then your website is being hosted within your provider’s physical DC (Data Centre) meaning that the location may directly impact load speed.

Having a distant server location can look suspect to search engine algorithms and this can filter down to SEO too. The ideal is to have a data center which is geographically close to the majority of your site visitors. For example, if someone is looking for a UK-based business or site, then those that have a UK based IP address will come higher on the SERP.

This is where a CDN can come into play as it is a geographically distributed network of data centers and proxy servers and work as a layer in the internet ecosystem. Content owners essentially pay CDN operators to deliver their content whilst the CDN would pay the IPS (Internet Service Provider) for hosting its servers in their DC’s.

Google search results will depend on a server’s IP address and a native server location will result in more relevant website traffic. Ultimately, choosing a local host will make it easy to target a local audience and it will eventually improve your web store’s local search engine rankings.

Shared Hosting

There has been a reasonable amount of debate as to the effects of shared hosting on SEO, especially in relation to having a shared IP address. Whilst researching for this blog post, I came across numerous articles with conflicting information as to whether or not a shared IP can really have a substantial negative impact on a businesses marketing.

Whilst some claim that a shared IP can be impacted by other sites on the network, Google employees have refuted this and said that this isn’t necessarily a factor and may only be flagged when a large number of sites on the network are spammy or deemed troublesome.

After some extensive reading, it seems that the lines are still blurred on this topic, so instead of trying to decipher something even industry experts can’t seem to agree on, lets take a look at the elements where shared hosting can have a measurable impact on SEO.

Over time, a high bounce rate can damage your PageRanking. When using a shared hosting plan, it is worth bearing in mind that you are sharing resources amongst potentially 100’s of different websites. Alongside a shared IP address, you are also sharing bandwidth and RAM so if one of those sites has a large surge in traffic, then your site could also be negatively affected.

Shared hosting is great for smaller websites where you have less than 1000 visitors per day. If you are looking to grow your business, have multiple web pages, high traffic volumes and increasing functionality requirements, then it is time to move away from shared hosting. You will need to upgrade to either VPS, Dedicated Servers or Cloud hosting, to accommodate your business needs.

Other factors to consider when choosing your hosting provider

A good hosting provider will also be able to assist and advise on the following:

Support

Do you need managed or non-managed hosting? What IT resources do you have on site that would enable you to manage your server and systems? Taking a managed support package with your hosting provider is often recommended as you will benefit from the expertise, facilities and SLA’s that come with the support package.

Taking a managed support package frees up your time to allow you to get on with more pertinent projects and are generally a more cost-effective option for your business.

SSL

Secure Socket Layer certificates are a web protocol which authenticates and encrypts data across the internet. Depending on your industry, traffic, data security and hosting requirements, you will need to choose either a paid or free SSL certificate to ensure security for your site.

Nowadays, this is expected for any sites outside of single-page or simple blog sites.

Domain names

You can retain a domain name for up to 10 years so when it’s time to renew or change, it’s important to still retain control over the old domain. You can use 301 redirects to ensure your traffic isn’t affected when you purchase a new domain.

To check availability, register or transfer a domain here.

Additional thoughts

As Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, puts it: “Host where it makes sense for you.”

Ultimately, you want your hosting provider to be a partner to your business. They are going to be hosting and maintaining core infrastructure which impacts the day-to-day running of your operations.

To find out what the best hosting plan is for your business, get a quote or even just ask for some advice, you can find CWCS on the Adzooma Marketplace and take the step towards improving your business’s hosting!

What Makes Online Marketing Work: Cambridge Uni x Adzooma

Adzooma — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 13:55:04 +0000

That’s why, when our Head of Partnerships Sal Mohammed was contacted by the Director of Enterprise at the Cambridge University Business School to see whether Adzooma would be interested in hosting a cohort to work on a comprehensive, collaborative marketing study we leapt on the opportunity.

The results that were generated were fascinating.

There were three pillars that went into it. If you want to jump right to the analysis and the recommendations to help you get more from your PPC ads, these three articles are for you:

How To Select The Best Digital Marketing Channel For Your Business
- The University of Cambridge analysts examined a sample of data to determine whether Microsoft, Google and/or Facebook Ads is the best marketing channel for you
Why Your Content Strategy Is So Crucial To PPC Success
- The Cambridge team took a deep dive into sentimentality to help shape how you write your PPC ads
What Makes A Landing Page Convert
- Using the data, the team took a close look at how to get those extra leads and customers from your landing page

For everyone else, here’s a behind the scenes look at the process.

*Disclaimer – All campaign data provided to study participants was selected at random and anonymised.

What we did

Data analysis and science is crucial for any business in the SAAS space. Sure it’s important to have developers, marketers and business gurus to help shape the product and its direction, but without someone combing through the data on a continuous basis, it’s very easy for that direction to end up on the wrong path.

Afterall, when you create software which utilises AI and machine learning, the person shaping that machine needs to have the right information to hand. That’s why we have a number of data scientists in-house, and why we love undertaking projects like this one.

So how did this project come about? Here’s our Head of Partnerships Sal Mohammed:

“Whilst at Google, I was lucky enough to work with Cambridge Judge Business School to lead a project that was carried out by five of their graduates,” says Sal who completed his Barclays Scale Up programme at Cambridge University.
“Such was the calibre of the candidates, I’ve since been itching to work with a cohort from the university again. So earlier this year, when I was contacted by the Director of Enterprise at the business school to see if we would be interested in hosting a cohort this summer, it didn’t take long for me to say yes.”

Of course, the University of Cambridge is renowned as one of the best institutions in the world. The MBA programme itself is regarded as top 5 worldwide, so to be able to team up with such an impressive group of individuals was something we couldn’t turn down.

The individuals in question? Sunil Grewal, formerly of Amazon, Akanshaa Khare formerly of the World Health Organisation, and Srishti Warman recent MBA Star winner at the Women of the Future Awards.

Each one of the team was tasked with leveraging Adzooma’s data to identify new ways for small to medium sized businesses to maximise their ad spend when using the Adzooma platform.

“The data was not very complex, but required cleansing and adjustments to bring out meaningful business insights,” explains Akanshaa.

Then, once that was done, it was on to the task in hand.

“The aim of the deliverable was to create playbooks that will illustrate what leads to better ad conversion rates,” Srishti tells us. “The problem was viewed from different angles – the three pillars.”

“First pillar – how the content of the ads being shown to the customer yields to better customer engagement, i.e. what type of imagery was being used, what the language and tone was used in the ad copy, and how this would affect the ads’ click through rate.
Second pillar – after the customer clicks on the ad and visits the landing page of the ad, how was the website quality of the landing page impacting the click through rate, i.e. was the page easy to load, was the content on the page matching the expectations of the customer, etc.
Third pillar – if the customer were to view the ad from the same ad provider (business client owning the ad e.g. John Lewis) on different platforms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, how would it affect the ad conversion rate.”

Why we did it

Finding out answers to those three pillars of questions would be vital to improving the experience for our users.

Our platform is all about taking a user’s ads to the next level. When you first sign up to Adzooma it’s not unusual to see game changing results, as Phillip Bacon can attest to in this piece which saw him achieve 1100% ROAS using Adzooma in just a couple of months.

Then, once you’re established, it’s all about those incremental gains that keep the ads ticking over nicely and keep the cost per conversion low. From an Adzooma perspective, this is where we have to work hardest, to make sure we find as many incremental gains as possible to keep improving your ads.

If answers to the questions could be found, three crucial steps of the customer journey would be improved massively. And the knock on effect this could have for our users and the industry could be monumental.

I say industry, because Adzooma is special in the fact that we have access to thousands of accounts across three different platforms. No one else has the ability to compare such data, which makes what we’d find in this project entirely unique.

“I knew this project would have massive implications for Adzooma and the MARtech industry as a whole,” says Sal.

“Very few companies have the data and skill set to undergo such a study. Even big players like Google and Microsoft only have the data that pertains to their individual channel. The question of what makes online marketing work is one which very few have the resources to answer – yet a question that has been plaguing marketers for as long as the practice has been around.
Armed with our data and unique view across platforms, matched with the analytics skills and vast business experience of the students, it was a perfect fit to set about revealing key insights to the question.”

The results

I mean, this is the reason you’re here for, right? As mentioned above, we have written full reports of each pillar’s findings, so I’ll again direct you to those

So here I’ll just give you a little bit of a snapshot of what we saw with some words from those involved.

Ad sentiment

For Sunil who worked on the project what initially surprised him from Adzooma’s data was, “the breadth of industries and countries that Adzooma customers operate within”, which helped create such a foolproof analysis, one that was relatable for anyone in the world, not just users from a single country.

What was found was really interesting…

Those with Google and Microsoft ads accounts connected to the Adzooma platform see a much higher CTR than industry average – 6% vs 1.91% and 3.7% vs 2.83% respectively
Those advertising on Microsoft Ads with positive sentiment in their ads saw a 4.2% CTR, compared to 3.6% for neutral sentimentality and 3.3% for negative sentimentality
This was in contrast to those on Google ads who saw a 6.5% CTR for negative ads, compared to 5.7% for neutral and negative

“Based on the analysis, the users of different advertising platforms have different responses to ad copy sentiment”, says Sunil. “This is important because it can impact return on ad spend if Adzooma’s clients can refine their ads to capitalise on this.

“Adzooma users can use the findings to tweak their ads to test and learn what works for their target customers in order to maximise their return on ad spends.”

Landing pages

“We have always known that some digital ads end up getting more clicks/customer engagement than others,” says Srishti who conducted the landing page analysis.

“Even amongst the clicked ads, there are a few websites which tend to get a higher conversion rate than others.

“The task was to identify the key parameters that lead to a higher conversion e.g. faster page speed, better optimisation for mobile and web viewing, page responsiveness, etc. This analysis would eventually help understand not only which companies scale quickest within verticals, but critically, why.

“The impact of this project would deliver resounding effects, not just for existing businesses worldwide, but also shape the routes startups and fledgling businesses exercise when looking to scale.”

And some of the results were indeed resounding…

Landing page best practices have the biggest effect on conversion rate
Under Lighthouse checks, 0% of tested landing pages had a perfect score for best practices
Overall, only 5% of landing pages had a perfect score for website performance checks

“I was really surprised to know that best practices to create the landing page is the most important factor that directly impacts the conversion rate,” says Srishti. “I was expecting Performance that audits how fast the page is to open to be the most important factor in affecting conversion rates.”

Which platform is best to advertise on?

“While doing business-level data validation, I discovered that very few SMB customers use multiple channels (Facebook, Google and Microsoft),” says Akanshaa, the lead on this project.

That’s a really interesting piece of analysis, and not something that was part of the main project. But it’s something we’ve stressed the importance of a lot, how being seen across every touch point is crucial to digital advertising success.

Most people just stick to Google as that’s where they’re told to be, but that’s not always the best case for everyone’s business, as Akanshaa can attest, “The analysis pointed out that Facebook seems to be the most conducive channel for SMBs based on cost (CPM, CPC) as well as return (impressions, clicks)”.

Facebook is the most cost-effective channel on average for SMBs
Microsoft is the most responsive channel for increasing ad spend
Only 56% of advertisers are looking to acquire new customers with their online ads

As Akanshaa says, “I believe my findings will help Adzooma’s SMB users form successful digital marketing strategies by helping them to one, select the appropriate marketing channels. Two, plan their ad-budget in a more informed way. And three, know if they are lagging behind competition and seek help from Adzooma’s Marketplace accordingly.”

Improving Adzooma through data analysis

As we all know, getting access to the right data is crucial for any business’ digital success. But one of our missions at Adzooma is to take all that hard work away from you.

As Srishti says:

“Businesses that tend to manage their own ad accounts are usually with limited resources and lack digital expertise.
Adzooma as a platform is currently helping such businesses optimise their digital ads through multiple channels and increase their click through rates. This research in particular will empower them to ensure that once the ads have led the customers to the businesses’ landing page, that they have done all they can to ensure that the conversion rate increases too.
The clients who are technically capable can make such changes such as avoiding deprecated APIs, not logging browser errors to console, displaying images with correct aspect ratios, background and foreground colors to have a sufficient contrast ratio, amongst other things.
Those clients who need some technical help, can again be connected with the right talent through Adzooma Marketplace.
In short, we are providing the mantras for the businesses to improve their conversion rate. If they need help to get it done, they shall be provided support through Adzooma’s platform.”

That’s how you make your online marketing work.

One-Stop Shop or Specialist Agency?

Vine Digital — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 15:09:00 +0000

Having been in the digital marketing business for a few decades, we’ve come across this question many times. In fact, we’ve been on both sides of the equation ourselves. We’ve been employed as a specialist agency, as well as servicing multiple elements of a client’s digital needs. With the right choices and knowledge under your belt, an agency can help you reduce your workload and achieve great results.

When we’ve worked with other agencies, it’s often become a ‘too many cooks’ situation. In meetings, agencies vie for attention rather than thinking of the client’s needs. They all want to push their agenda so they can stay on the gravy train. When the meeting is done, each of the agency reps continue to undermine the others – only this time in private.

As you can imagine, this is a nightmare for the client to manage; not only are you trying to learn about SEO, PPC, CRM – you name it – you end up managing a horde of bickering children. And yes, we’ve seen this happen. While your needs are being addressed by these agencies on the surface, you can never be sure what the best course of action is. How could you? There’s no accountability. With multiple agencies, it’s easy for one to blame their poor results on another agency’s behaviours and strategies. For the client, the upshot is a loss of potential revenue and a huge bill at the end of each month.

You have to be extremely strong to manage multiple firms, and you have to know exactly what you can reasonably expect in terms of outcomes. Generally, marketing managers and directors with an agency background are able to nimble negotiate this environment. With the right resources and time to commit to multiple agencies, you can, in theory, create campaigns with stunning results.

The Cat Conundrum

Trying to gather all your advertising agencies in one room is like herding cats! We had several meetings booked with a big client who’d employed five separate agencies. On at least two occasions, for larger strategy presentations, two agencies arrived at one venue. And then another somewhere else, with the remaining agencies arriving at another venue. Each agency blamed everyone but themselves, resulting in a fair-sized headache for the client.

On a similar topic of scattered meetings, we found out that two agencies were both doing the same thing: display advertising. Both were targeting the same customers on the same sites, with the same ads – one via media buying and the other via Google Display Network. Basically, the client was paying twice for the same thing because neither agency was prepared to back down and let the other carry on.

Cringeworthy Behaviour From Adults Who Should Know Better

Multi-agency meetings always end up being a “big dick” competition. Each agency wants to be the most important, most aggressive, most impressive. As a result, they over-prioritise the importance that their channel plays in the marketing mix. It often doesn’t reflect what is best for the client.

Business owners often struggle to maintain a clear picture of their goals, as they’re pulled in many different directions. What’s even sadder is that, if you ask each agency about the goals of the client or campaign, you will get different responses – with very little knowledge of how each agency’s “slice of the pie” fits into the overall marketing objective.

Another hard-to-handle element of the multi-agency meeting is the excessive headhunting that occurs. Can you handle the heartbreak of losing your favourite marketing manager, who you have invested in and trained to know you and your brand? All of a sudden, they are pulled from your company to go and work on a bevy of other brands. If you have one in-house agency, the chance of them stealing your talent is no longer a risk.

One-Stop Flop

You might be thinking, then, that the solution is finding an agency with services across the board. If only it were that simple. Sadly, many multi-skilled agencies are great at a few things and passable at other items on their long list of services. While it’s certainly doable (we’ll explain how!), it can be tough to decipher which of these are which.

Spend time getting to the bottom of an agency’s offering. It’s a two-way street. An agency worth their salt will be doing just as much probing as you; any time your scrutiny is fobbed off or ignored, steer clear. If the agency in question has some strong core skills, stick with those. Don’t cave to the pressure of taking elements you don’t need.

Treat Them Like An Employee

It is perfectly acceptable to treat an agency like a prospective employee, by checking:

That their skills match your business’s needs.
That they fit the company culture.
Any references they can provide (meaning recent and detailed testimonials).

Pick up the phone and have a proper chat with the agency. This way, you can get a feel for how the agency works and where to set your expectations, all to determine whether they’re right for you and your business.

Digital Is An Environment

At Vine Digital, we don’t subscribe to the mainstream view of the specialist model. We believe that digital is an ecosystem – not a toolbox. You can’t employ one single element and have it work unless the other services are in sync. It stands to reason that agencies should be aware of this, so they can affect the environment on behalf of their clients, with maximum impact. When businesses are being built, a misunderstanding of the ever-changing climate will often result in a digital offering presented totally off-kilter. Here’s an example.

An entrepreneur starts a business selling widgets. He has a few clients, and so he decides that he needs a website – a place where people can find his services. With a limited budget to start with, the website is not a lot more than a landing page. Over time, the business’s offering increases and diversifies. Pages are added to the site as the reputation of the company grows. Because of this, orders start to roll in online, and a new page is added for orders. New products arrive and with it, more new pages.

Eventually, the website and digital side of things become concerns of their own because naturally, the original site couldn’t possibly deliver ROI to the same degree as a full digital strategy. There needs to be a considered approach to the creation of a specific digital ecosystem, which enables a pipeline for increased activity, returning customers, traffic to the website and at the end of the day, revenue.

When you find an agency who really looks after you, you gain the ability to achieve this. If you’ve overlooked the power and potential of digital, you’re not alone. Many do, and it takes an honest, skilful agency partner to show you the ropes. Rather than looking down our noses at those who need help, Vine Digital shows you how to navigate the digital landscape in a way that suits your business. Digital is an environment where each element affects another. Whether you opt for a specialist agency or a one-stop shop, you deserve an agency able to deliver in all areas they offer.