Doing well in search engine rankings is always a bit of a mystery to an outsider, but here are some simple things that you can take care of yourself which will help your website do better.

1. Make sure the content on your site is original to you
2. Don’t copy content, it’s known as duplicate content , whether this is on a page or across your site or both, as Google will penalise you for it
3. Do ensure that page content, the page heading and the page title tag match the search queries you want the page to do well for
4. Avoid unnatural language on a page, or overuse of a particular word or phrase in an attempt to optimise for SEO – first and foremost you want to appeal to your customers
5. If you’ve got advertisements on your website avoid a high amount of inappropriate adverts, especially high on the page, particularly when they don’t match the search queries a page does well for
6. Avoid a high percentage of boilerplate or standard content – that’s repeat content on every page, again this might be picked up as duplicate content
7. Using free tools from Google called Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools, you can look for high bounce rates on page or website (this is when a visitor enters the website and leaves without continuing to view other pages) as this can indicate irrelevant content
8. Try to avoid a low click through percentage from Google’s results pages either for page or site
9. Increase visit times to a page or website by regularly updating copy and making sure it’s interesting and relevant
10. A low percentage of users returning to a website can indicate that content isn’t updated regularly or that it’s not original
11. Get quality inbound links to a page or site, as this indicates it’s a good source of information
12. Use social media to promote pages on your site or your website, both Bing and Google have stated in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social media such as Tweets, Facebook and +1s.

Use social media to promote pages on your site or your website, both Bing and Google have stated in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social media such as Tweets, Facebook and +1s.

If you’d like a free SEO and social media audit, and for more information on how you can improve your online marketing give us a call on 01202 788333

B2B Online Marketing, Google Analytics, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation

If you’d like to refresh your brand, or want to inject new life into your marketing materials – give us a call!

Email marketing, Inspiration, LexisClick News, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Uncategorized, Web Design, design

If you’re trading in the technology sector the infographic that we came across in The Marketer (November/December 2011), will be of interest to you.

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General

More information about the producer can be found via the following link

http://blog.piajanebijkerk.com/WordPress/2011/03/18/giving-credit/

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Email marketing, Marketing General, Online Marketing, Uncategorized, Web Design

No email address is permanent. People change jobs, job titles, switch Internet providers, or abandon their accounts in an attempt to avoid spam. You need to stay ahead of these changes by conducting regular data cleansing of your email lists to ensure a low rate of bounce backs and a high rate of email deliverability.

The quality of data in your marketing database can make a big difference to the return on investment (ROI) you get from your sales and marketing campaigns. Without regular cleansing you’ll have a large database of customer email addresses, but many of those emails will be duplicates, invalid, dead, or bogus, and your bounce-rate will be high. By maximising your email deliverability and keeping a clean list you’ll improve your sender reputation and avoid being blacklisted by major ISPs.

There’s a real business case for investing in data cleansing when you consider the following example.
If you cleanse a data base with 50,000 names in it, by improving the quality of that data by 10% you’ll expose your offer to 5,000 additional prospects. With a 5% conversion rate, that translates to 250 more purchases (or downloads, or visits to your site, or whatever other activity you’re promoting).

Best practice tips
1.  Remove duplicates and process incorrect addresses. Duplicate email addresses should be automatically removed and emails with incorrect syntax flagged. Rather than removing incorrect email addresses permanently, store them as inactive records, this will allow you to access and correct them individually in future customer support inquires.

2.  Handle unsubscribe requests as soon as they’re received.

3.  Process soft and hard bounces as they happen. Repeated soft bounces should be treated as hard bounces and removed from your active lists. Hard bounces should be removed as they happen, ignoring them is a quick way to destroy your reputation.

4.   Handle email replies and complaints individually. Regardless of how clear your unsubscribe instructions are, or information on where to contact you is,  your recipients will push the ‘Reply’ button to ask you general questions, make unsubscribe requests that cannot be captured automatically, or request customer support for completely unrelated reasons.

5.   Consider sending out a questionnaire to your subscriber list, asking them to update their details and to let you know what they’d like to receive information on. You can always incentivise the survey in order to increase response rates. This way you’ll have an opted in subscriber list who are really engaged with your company.

Most of the above best practices should be handled by a reputable email provider.  If you’re processing duplicates, incomplete addresses or bounce errors manually, you’re already falling behind and missing out on those additional sales opportunities.

If you’d like help with your email marketing, or you’d just like to have a chat to see what we can do for you, go to www.lexisclick.com/email or call us on 01202 788333.

B2B Online Marketing, Email marketing, LexisClick News, Marketing General, Online Marketing

The following are 5 of our favourite top marketing stories – though there are many more…

Procter & Gamble produced and sponsored the first radio soap operas in the 1930s. When soaps switched to television most of the new serials were sponsored and produced by the company.

Structured reality TV shows are starting to rival traditional soaps and reality TV shows. The most famous UK example, The Only Way is Essex follows the lives and loves of a group of 20-somethings.

From 1968 to 2003 Milk Tray chocolates were advertised with an action man undergoing hair-raising adventures to deliver chocolates to the woman he loved.

The creation of Marlboro man promoted the appeal of American stories about lone cowboys. In the 1950s filtered cigarettes were viewed as feminine, The Marlboro man changed this perception.

And most recently BT’s soap-opera styled advertising campaign following the ups and downs of ‘Adam and Jane’s romance’ is credited with helping to make BT the leading telecommunications brand for broadband and subscription TV in the UK.

If you’ve got a good story to tell about your product or service and you’d like some help to get it out there – give us a call on 01202 788333

(Adapted from Chartered Institute of Marketing – The Marketer September/October 2011)

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing

Fast on the heels of our LinkedIn Cheat Sheet comes one for Twitter. This  includes useful tips and explanations of the most popular terms and icons. Statistics for Twitter are more difficult to track down but Twitter themselves state that they have 175 million users worldwide – though how many of these are active accounts is debateable.

Love it or hate it you shouldn’t be ignoring it!

Twitter Cheat Sheet 2

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Email reporting data is generated from you email software tool, or via a partner (such as LexisClick online marketing) that manages your campaigns for you. There’s a lot of information generated so it can be overwhelming ! But it rivals any other marketing analytical data available because it’s available immediately and can give you a historical view of your performance over time .

It’s worth taking time to get familiar with some of the key metrics as these tell you which emails bounced, why they bounced, who opened your emails, what links they clicked on, who has requested unsubscribe from your emails and who forwarded them on.

Open rates

This is one stat that many marketers get excited about – but it can be misleading. Open rates are determined by a snippet of code in HTML emails that tracks when your images show up in someone’s in box but it doesn’t  necessarily mean that someone has ‘read it’. It could have appeared in the preview pane for a moment before being deleted.

In addition the default setting on an increasing number of email programs is to block images until the user clicks to enable them, but readers can scan emails without enabling images at all. Therefore open rates may have little meaning, but open rates over time, or between two versions of the same email can be an indicator of a developing trend and therefore have more meaning.

Clicks

Total clicks refers to the number of times a subscriber clicked on a link, while unique clicks refers to how many of your readers clicked on a link.

Click –through percentage of opens

Of all the opens how many clicked on a link. This can be a useful metric but due to the inaccuracies of open rates not conclusive. However, it’s useful to know how many of those that opened the email, actually were interested enough to click on a link, and comparison with previous campaigns will indicate how effective and interesting your content was.

Bounces

These are split into hard bounces and soft bounces. Hard bounces are permanently undeliverable emails – the email account may be closed, whereas soft bounces indicate temporarily undeliverable emails, which could be due to a full mailbox, or a server being down temporarily.

Unsubscribes

It’s important to view this metric over time as high unsubscribe requests could indicate irrelevant content, too frequent emails, or it could relate to the seasonal nature of your business. It’s important to spot any trends in this area before it becomes a major issue.

These are just a few of the campaign statistics available. We can help you interpret your campaign results and benchmark them, by comparing them with typical email campaigns from a large set of companies. We can measure to see whether you’ve achieved the objectives established at the beginning of the campaign, and compare current results with previous campaigns to check for patterns or trends.

If you’re happy to manage your own email marketing, we offer access to a market leading email marketing platform. Alternatively if you’d like to hand it over to an expert email marketing team there’s a fully managed campaign option for both your emails and e-newsletters with prices starting from £19.00 per month.

Contact us on 01202 788333 or visit www.lexisclick.com/email

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General

LinkedIn has 152 million users worldwide, with approximately one million new members joining every week. Get up to speed and join in the fun with this jargon buster!

LexisClick LinkedIn Cheat Sheet 2

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Uncategorized

According to a recent study by comScore, you can expect up to 20% of your email list to be reading it on a smartphone, and if the demographic group includes professionals from the business market, that number is even higher. This also means that you stand a better chance of having your email read, as smartphone users typically check their emails more often,  and frequently in down time when they’re travelling or waiting – say for a meeting to start.

So far this is all good news, the fact that customers can now read and follow links in dynamic HTML emails, means that mobile marketing can really drive open rates and click-throughs,.  However, when designing emails, it’s important to keep in mind your smartphone users, so here are some tips from the E-marketing team at LexisClick:
•    As always it’s important to ensure the subject line is relevant and to the point

•    make sure that it’s easy to see calls-to-action without zooming  in

•    include options to add to social media, as readers are most likely to add content to social networks from their mobiles

•    if you haven’t got a mobile friendly version of your website try to ensure that when readers click through to your website it looks good on a small screen

•    Provide view-in-browser options for mobile readers

•    And lastly check on a variety of mobile devices before sending– it’s the best way to succeed

If you’re happy to manage your own email marketing, here at LexisClick we offer access to a market leading email marketing platform. Alternatively if you’d like to hand it over to someone else to look after there’s a fully managed campaign option for both your emails and e-newsletters. Prices start from only £19.00 per month.

Contact us on 01202 788333 for a chat to discuss how we can help you develop and grow your business. Or visit www.lexisclick.com

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing