Over the past 2 years I’ve been increasingly busy with larger corporate clients. When we started we took on small local businesses, nowadays we only take on larger national ones. Why? Has our process changed? No. It’s the understanding about the businesses and the ROI that we now have changed. For example: in early 2016 we took on a client that wanted to rank for a variety of keywords, and as usual didn’t know about what budget. They talked about funny keywords like card access systems and key fobs, when they really wanted to rank for the big ones. But the issue wasn’t knowledge, it was the understanding of keywords and long tail keywords.

That’ why today I’m going to talk about our card access systems client and why I personally believe they are the single reason we now make 7 figures a year in turnover. Because they helped us talk to individuals who didn’t or don’t know much about SEO, and only understand ROI (Return on Investment.)

The Importance Of Long Tail Keywords

When most clients come to us (as probably with many other digital marketing companies) they say “We’ve got these keywords we want you to rank us for.” Now that’s a great starting point, but it is only that. A starting point. Let’s take our client example above and let me talk about what and why this is the worst way to go when it comes to keyword research.

Point 1: The keywords your clients give you are usually cr*p. Let’s be honest. They are good at whatever they do. In this case it was security and access control, and they are great at that. But the keywords? They are just things they think people have searched. Instead you should ask clients if they know their most profitable keywords, highest converting traffic, best landing pages, and if they run PPC campaigns, ask for the highest converting phrases from these. This is the best way to do it rather than to simply ask what people what keywords they want your company to rank you for.

Point 2: Short tail keywords are more expensive to rank, take longer to rank, and in the end will provide the lowest ROI for your client (and hence earn yourself or your company less money) by this I mean the following – I have a client in this industry that had 21 “core” keywords they wanted to rank for. Now that’s a lot of keywords, we are also talking highly highly competitive phrases here too. Now instead of simply quoting them £5,000 a month and watching them say “this is out of budget” – I took a different approach.

I still made the large quote but it came with a secondary quote and a reason behind why this is so expensive. I also outlined how I knew this would be out of a budget and why I think it wouldn’t be the best way to go anyway. Instead I outlined that we take 5 of these key-phrases and make longer tail keywords from them. For this I would charge 1/5th of the price and they would see results faster, cheaper and not only that but would generate a higher ROI in the end too. This benefited all parties involved and they came on as a client. It was a win-win for both. These are the situations that we love.

Another Example

A few weeks ago we ran another relatively straight forward keyword research campaign for our client (http://lamborghinihire.co.uk/) they came to us looking for an analysis of the keywords they should be ranking for in Google and also bidding for in Adwords. Most of the other companies had just given them the basic large primary keywords such as “lambo hire” “lambo rental” etc etc. But we decided to dig deeper and found 20+ keywords which added another 300+ searches per month and these were also keywords that were easy to rank!

The first stage was to add variations of the terms. For example the keyword: Lamborghini hire could become hire Lamborghini. Very simple but different keyword search volume. Once this was complete we looked at the models they offered and added those with both the brand + model + hire/rental, as well as the just model + hire keywords. For example Avendator hire and Lambo avendator rental. All of this gave us some really nice keywords but nothing compared to the final 5-7 keywords we generated. To do this we used events.

So when someone hires a supercar its usually for a specific event, whether that be a trip away or a corporate event or a wedding or just to go to the countryside with your partner. People who have some additional income (but who obviously cannot afford to buy a supercar) will be very interested in renting one. And it terms out people searching “wedding Lamborghini hire” and keywords of that nature was extremely high! Not only that we found that these keywords worked incredibly well too!

Conclusion

So in conclusion – Educate the client on what is best for them, not in terms of rankings, or in terms of what will line your pocket the quickest, but instead talk about return on investment both short term (3 months) and longer term (12 months) – They can then go and make a calculated decision to what they want to look into.

It’s been a while since I posted on the blog and that’s mainly down to the fact I’ve been so busy with our seo agency. Most of the time when I have a free hour I’ll create a post for this blog, but recently we’ve been that busy that I haven’t had time. But today I wanted to take an hour out and write a pretty interesting short post on what we have been doing with a number of technology companies.

What Makes this different from normal SEO?

Well when it comes to normal SEO as you probably know you have your keywords and you optimise the site and build backlinks geared around ranking in Google for these keywords. The issue comes when these companies have created something that is relatively new, so they don’t have any search volume for them. We had this problem with Quadcopters and we have had it multiple times since.

The main issue is that there is no monthly search volume (by consumers or buyers) for products that have not yet gone to market. For example if you looked at the Hoverboard trend in late 2015 then you see a huge influx around this time, but nothing before this in terms of search volume. But once the products went to market the explosion of traffic was crazy! There was nothing like it, with thousands of people flocking online to purchase these items. Below is the screenshot from Google trends for these Hoverboards, vs quadcopters. As you can see there is a huge curve in December 2015. This is when the products began to get popular, and also the Xmas rush happened too.

This brings me nicely onto the next section of the article.

What Can You Do?

So let’s say your a tech company owner or an SEO agency owner who has a company without generic (obvious) keywords. Chances are you will be looking into what keywords to rank for and having an issue, as we mentioned above. Now I have 3 techniques for you to try, to implement the correct keywords into the site, and rank the client as quickly and early as possible. Making them (and yourself) the much profit and ROI in the long term.

Strategy 1 – Personal intuition – This involves using your brain! I know some people don’t like this but its very important. What you would do in this case is have yourself, your team and any members of the client that you can get into the same room and ask them what they think your primary keywords would be. Chances are its how you describe a new product. For example a Quadcopter might be referred to as a “flying drone” or just a drone. Other keywords might include personal flying devices, and all sorts of random stuff you might not have thought about. Once this is completed you can go onto strategy 2.

Strategy 2 – Take to the streets – If you live in a techy city this would be even better, so London, Paris, San Fran are your best options but any busy city will work well. Then you need to ask the individuals what they would call the item, if its a very complicated product then you might need to explain what it does and ask them 3 options into what they should call the item. This seems like they are giving you market research but really its keyword research!

Strategy 3 – This involves going to Google Trends and searching these keywords you have already found out. Abondon any that don’t make sense to the product or have no trend at all. Anything that has started to rise recently should be kept very near the front of your potential keyword document. Others that might not have rised yet should be kept in the middle. And that’s it! Hope you enjoyed the post.

1. When you have citations in your website it will be more accessible to a lot of customers. It will be accessible because citations do not mean that the exact link or URL of your website is present on other websites. Citations now a day are the ones where your site is listed in business listing sites like sites where you can search for a list of businesses in a particular line of business or industry. Once your information is listed there or in local SEO, or the contact information of your business, then that is already a citation, which means possible customers can immediately reach you.

2. Another reason is that you will be able to know how tight the competition already is in your industry because you will be able to search who are your top most competition, though only the ones that are using enough citations online but that would mean that those are the ones that are actively working in making their sites to be on top of search engines. The competition is actually not just to get more customers but to get on top of search engines, like Google for example. If you are someone who does a lot of research online, then you would understand how important it is for a site to be on top or even to be on the first page of search engines.

3. When you have a good number or citations in the local SEO online then it is already a great validation of your business or site. One thing that you will benefit from citations for SEO purposes is that search engines will regard you as reliable because Google for example has its way of detecting the legit sites and not. The process is actually called crawling, where Google would send some crawlers or basically it is actually kind of spiders that will be sent virtually and look for valid citations. For example if your site has a lot of valid citations then you will have a big chance to be placed or will have a nice rank post in the Google. This logic, explains why you will not be able to see the same list of websites everyday if you type a certain keyword on the search bar of Google.

4. Also, one reason why you need to have citations for local SEO is because you need to let the search engine, again Google for example that your site is legit and if it already acknowledges that it is legit and reliable, and then the search engine will categorise you to be in line with your line of business. This means that, for example, if your site is about makeup then if an internet user will type in makeup, then your site will come up in line with other websites that has makeup contents on their site.

5. And then, the most important thing about citations is that the search engines will not only read how many links of other sites that are going to your own site, it will read plain texts that has exact name, address and other information of your website and this is how it is different to other styles or procedure in getting a rank in those search engines since that is how SEO usually works. This why also that when you make citations for your site, it should be the same exact info every time no matter how small the detail is like a period, that is how important and crucial citations are.

As Tom Buckland, a local seo expert based in Cardiff says (image right) citations are the cornerstone to a successful local seo campaign. They not only are a ranking factor in themselves but are also trust signals to Google, letting Google know you are looking for additional customers and clients. This in itself a huge benefit for building our localisation authority. Many people think they need to be a huge national authority to rank, but building localisation authority is actually more important.

Thanks for reading.

If your anything like me then you know that there is nothing worse than good businesses with bad marketing, they can’t generate sales and as a result they can’t increase their marketing budget. It’s an evil evil cycle, but recently I spoke to the guys from supercarhire.co.uk and they spent me to a short video that talks more about viral marketing and how not to be boring in your marketing efforts. Tom and Jeff from supercarhire had a lot of capital tied up in stock (supercars) and as a result they weren’t able to market that much, but they used some pretty sneaky marketing techniques to get there brand in-front of buyers. 

I’ve been waiting to write this post for a long time now and have actually been writing it for about 3 days, its not long and it is a bit ranty, but there has been a lot of thought into it. Why do some businesses fail, but the very same businesses (same products, same services) succeed?

It’s the age old question in business, some people say its due to lack of motivation for the industry you are in, which is a good point. Others say its 100% down to funding, if you can’t utilise funding and sort cash-flow for your business, again this is 100% true but its not the number 1 reason why businesses fail, especially in the modern age.

Businesses fail because your customers are not “impressed” by your business.

Let me explain.

In 2015 I set-up a business called Ghost Fitness with a couple of other partners. We wrote the business plan and were all happy with it. Today this business is coming along nicely but we made 1 HUGE mistake in the start that was involved around people being un-impressed by the products and the service of “purchasing” in general.

The issue was we all had other businesses or full time jobs, which meant fulfilling orders that had come through sometimes took 2 or 3 days, adding the delivery cost on top of this meant people were looking at 7-10 days for their items. Although individuals loved the products and the response we got from them was overwhelmingly positive, the main issue was people simply didn’t get the products fast enough.

The solution? – Well it was a difficult one at first as none of us could just send all day packing orders, and the business itself wasn’t profitable enough to pay someone else to do so, instead we decided to think to the future and scale. The solution was to utilise Amazon and their FBA projects. FBA allows amazon to store, pack and deliver your item for you, they take a fee but as long as your product is over £10, the fee is usually only £3.20. This means that if it costs you below £1.80 to produce, which it did in our case, we could still make £5 profit per sale. Get up to 20 sales a day and that’s a cool £100 / day which was our short term aim.

This made customers a lot more “impressed” by the process of purchasing and hence had a knock-on effect for the business in its entirety. By this I mean people started telling others and the word of mouth knock-on effect came along nicely! Also reviews started to flow in from Amazon, most of these being extremely positive. Reviews also sell products, so these reviews led to more reviews which lead to more sales and so on! The knock on compound effect is for real! Start the ball rolling and it will keep rolling as long as you started it down the right way!

Another example of this impressive change in action is the transformation of 2 sites that I marketed on for a friend of mine, they are: http://www.ferrarihire.co.uk/ and http://www.astonmartincarhire.com/ although these businesses are a level above what most people consider feasible, they allowed me to get an ensight into what works for marketing in top level industries AKA supercar rental. Todd asked me to give him a hand and I said he had to re-build the sites, they were so freckin confusing. Model click-through options, push to call buttons, skype options, multiple clickable images, scroll options… It was built like an eCommerce store! I said this is not the way.

Simplifying the business was the best way, people could see the price list for each model and then call or email to book, that’s it! That’s all he needed! So we stripped the site and made it painfully simple to use. Then we worked on ranking him in Google itself for the keywords that got the most searches, this was a lot easier with a simple site and Google responded well with some great ranking increases. This mixed with old school marketing methods and PPC ads was enough to generate £10,000 worth of sales a month! That’s a £120,000 per year business in 5 months, not a bad return on time investment!

Strange title but I will explain in-depth why search engine optimisation for industries that are considered “ugly” or “boring” is the most effective marketing strategy and why all business owners should invest as must as possible into marketing their site on the search engines. Although SEO is the most effective long term, there is nothing wrong with using PPC for shorter term gains. I personally recommend to clients to do both, utilise ads and the organic results and you can get even more traffic, once you rank 1st or in the top 3 for your pre-selected keywords you can reduce the amount of ads you run to increase your profit margins! It’s easy except it takes a lot of money and time.

I recently finished a digital marketing campaign for garage shelving UK, as you can guess this was a site that sold garage racking, shelving, pallet racking and all of that stuff. The competition was crazy high, Amazon, B&Q, Homebase, Argos, Tufferman all on page 1. We were currently on page 2. Trying to outrank these guys was going to take some funds and some smart SEO. We knew links and great on-page would do it (like anything else) so we went to work.

The reason SEO is so much more important for boring industries, such as the garage shelving one (Yawn.) Is that people don’t bother shopping around. There is not really many styles of shelving and as long as you set-up your site well and its easy to purchase and your prices are what people “expect” to pay, they will just buy from you without really looking around for a better deal or a different product. This is the same for local industries as well, people would rather save time than money when it comes to generic or less interesting products. And as a result ranking in the top 3 results for competitive keywords, means this traffic converts extremely well!! I’m talking 10% range.

For our example we had around 10,000 per month across 4-5 primary keywords. Ranking 1st for all of these keywords would lead to around 4,000 organic searchers a month. At a 10% conversion rate that’s 400 sales a month and at an average customer check-out value of £200, that’s 400 x 200 = £80,000 a month in sales. The company was currently only doing around £5,000 in sales from some longer tail keywords and PPC and social media ads.

I explained the situation to them, that the conversion rate for this search engine traffic is worth more than what you are spending on social. As a result we completely scraped the social media campaign which opened up around £500 / month for seo. He also introduced another £500 a month for SEO. Which meant we had £1,000 per month for 6 months to work with. Although we aren’t ranking 1st (or anywhere near) at the moment, we are onto page 1 and the conversion rates are still holding around 8%. 1st would likely lead to £80k of sales!

It seems every year we hear about some huge Google change that is going to rock the SEO and digital marketing community. But people forget that even the massive Penguin updates affected about 3% of the web. That’s a very low propotion of websites, even if you were a black hat SEO, the chances are you didn’t get affected as long as you weren’t trying to game the system “too hard” as it were.

In 2016 and beyond though the emphasis is definately on content and content distribution. Creating truly awesome content is what you should be looking to do from now on, but distributing that content is equally, if not more important. For example the infographic below (on the same subject digital marketing in 2016) by Bulldog Social Media is an example of great content distributed well!

Once they’d created the infographic the company decided that simply posting it on the site would result it not a lot of traffic or social traction, so instead of simply posting it, they created a tailored blog post, optimised with some relevant keywords and got going.

Once live the team utilised their social following on twitter, Facebook and Linkedin as well as reaching out to industry experts to see if they liked it and would like to share, this is manually creating the “viral” effect, which in business industries is pretty much impossible to do automatically.

This lead to hundreds of retweets, some great traction on Facebook and a number of people embedding the infographic on their website (such as here.) All in all the post gained a huge amount of traffic and some high quality natural backlinks as a result, this is the future of digital marketing and SEO!