Monday 10 October 2016

What is todays equivalent of Yellow Pages?

What is today’s equivalent of Yellow Pages? SEO Company Bristol Explains

From almost the day it was launched in 1966, until the end of the “Noughties” the Yellow Pages was the tool that most business’s used to get leads for their business. With the decline in size, advertisers, and users many businesses may be looking for the modern day equivalent of the Yellow Pages for generating leads for their business. What is today’s equivalent of Yellow Pages?

Yellow Pages Alternatives

As the author of this article, I offer my opinion on the Yellow Pages from a base of having worked for the company for almost a decade between 2006 and 2015. When I joined the company many Sales Staff would tell me of the “glory days” where business owners would welcome you with open arms and listen to virtually any proposal put in front of them. The business owner was pleased to see the Yellow Pages representative as the product was delivering such fantastic results in terms of ‘return on investment’ for their business. In my experience, the businesses I was spending time with still, even in 2006, were getting great returns from the “yellow book”.

Is It Still Worth Advertising In The Yellow Pages?

Having left the company over a year and a half ago it is difficult for me to say. However, very rarely did I meet a stupid business owner and the decreasing number of advertisers probably indicates that they are not seeing the same business or leads generated from the Yellow Pages.

What is todays equivalent to Yellow Pages

Yellow Pages 2005/2006 Vs 2016 /2017

What is the modern day equivalent of the Yellow Pages?

What was it that made the Yellow Pages so successful? Ease of use was a significant factor. Every home and office had a Yellow Pages somewhere convenient. It was easy to find a business to supply a product or service by simply looking in the relevant section or “classification” and choosing from the 100’s of companies adverts to find a company that sold or offered exactly what you were after. Convenience, choice and ease of use.

Today, convenience is “at your fingertips”, not in a book somewhere nearby. Choice of 100’s of relevant companies in each classification is also a thing of the past.  In terms of ease of use the Yellow pages remains the same, find the book, find the classification and choose a company. The difference is the general public’s view of ‘ease of use’. Today, having to put down your phone to find and pick up a book could be considered less than convenient.

Today, the young and the old alike use  Google find the services or products of local companies. Whether it be a mobile phone, tablet or laptop people will use Google as the easy and convenient tool to find products or services. Whatever is hand, and usually one of these items is nearby and convenient.

Like a “full page” in Yellow Pages, smart businesses owners need to dominate their market on Google. This means having a website that is easy to find for those “word of mouth” referrals, but also a website that dominates the search results when a potential customer, who has not heard of your company, searches for a product or service.

But Google is Complicated, isn’t it?

Another advantage that Yellow Pages had were its sales force. Yes, many businesses owners would say, “they always want me to spend more money”. Well, to dominate a classification normally meant having a larger advert than your competitor and that meant spending more money. But Yellow Pages staff were experts in how the book worked and how to get the most from it. They could explain this in simple terms that business owners could understand. The business owner chose how much to spend, what messages to add to the advert and the rest was completed by Yellow Pages.

The difficulty with Google, and how to get the most from it, means is that the average business owner has to either spend time on it or trust an expert and those experts can often lose the average business owner with jargon.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Dominating the search results in Google can be simple and jargon free.

Making Google Easy For Business Owners

SEO Company Bristol offer a number of solutions for businesses to make sure they dominate the local market. This is done in two ways:

  1. Getting your website “Google friendly” so when searches are done on a phone or computer your website is found. This is called ‘search engine optimisation” or SEO.
  2. Like Yellow Pages, you can buy dominance of the local market. The old way was to buy a full page advert in Yellow Pages so that everyone looking in that section would see your advert. Google has adverts too, and you can buy the top positions on the Google search results and be ahead of the competition. This is called Google Adwords.

The smart business owner does both to make sure they get the best of all advertising.

If you would like to know more about the services offered by SEO Company Bristol then please telephone 0117 325 1099.



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Tuesday 14 June 2016

Is Your Website a Profit Generating Machine?

Is your business website an active tool to bring custom and revenue in to your business? Is it the best sales tool your company has? Or was it something that was built because you thought you needed a website and infrequently thought about?

Never has there been a better time for online or “bricks and mortar” businesses to get more customers from the internet. Mobile phone and mobile device searches are higher than ever and search engines, like Google, are keen to promote local businesses in their search results. However, running a business in your field of expertise does not necessarily lend itself to being an expert in online marketing.



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Thursday 14 April 2016

Re-targeting Website Visitors

Re-targeting Website Visitors To Increase Conversions

As a business owner you spend a lot of time promoting your business and your website. You may spend money on advertising with Google, search engine optimisation and social media marketing – to get potential customers to your website. If you have made that investment in time and money – make the most of it and re-target your website visitors to massively increase the conversions of website visitors to paying customers.

Types of Website Visitors

If you spend any time analysing the Google Analytics for your website you will know that it holds a lot of information regarding the interaction of website visitors with your website. It has the number of visitors, how many sessions (or how many times the number of visitors visited your website), how many pages they viewed, how long they stayed on your website and much more. However, you can categorise your visitors in to two groups:

Types of Website Visitors – Bouncers

“Bouncers” are people that visit your website and either leave straight away or stay on that one page and do not visit any other pages on your website. In essence they visited your website and “bounced” off. Google measures this and provides a percentage in your analytics as a “bounce rate”. This highlights to Google how relevant your website was to the search entered in to the search bar. The lower the bounce rate the better and if your bounce rate is above 40%, then your website is not attracting visitors for the correct search terms.

Depending on your business and how your website is structured can impact your bounce rate. If you are a taxi company and people land on your websites home page, there isn’t really much research to consider before making a decision to call you. Most website visitors will see the telephone number on the home page and make the call. This would count as a ‘bounce’. So a “no research required” business is likely to have a higher bounce rate.

If you are a business where customers are likely to make a considered purchase i.e. car dealer, cosmetic surgeon then you would expect website visitors to view more than one page on your website and hence not “bounce”.

Although almost always a good sign, a very low bounce rate can also be an indication that your website needs attention. If your bounce rate indicates that nearly every visitor visits more than one page – can they easilt find teh information they were looking for or did they have to hunt around your website for the information?

Types of Website Visitors – Voyuers

Voyeurs are people that tend to read a lot of information on a business or product before making a decision to contact or not contact you. They will often view numerous pages before making their decision. Although they will be positively impacting your bounce rate, they can still be detrimental to how Google views your website. If Google sees that they visited 5 pages of your website and then did not make contact, or even worse, left your website and went to a competitors website – this indicates to Google your website is not as relevant to the search term.

Re-targeting Website Visitors

Regardless if the visitors to your website found what they were looking for on the first page they landed or they viewed multiple pages – on average only 2% of website visitors will interact with your business in making contact or visiting a store. 98% will leave your website and you have likely lost them as a potential customer.

Re-targeting is the process of advertising to the 98% that visited your website and didn’t buy.

Retargeting website visitors Bristol

Why Re-target Website Visitors?

Consider the journey the customer took to get to your website.

  1. They had a need for a product or service
  2. They spent time searching Google for a supplier
  3. They found your website by using search terms relevant to your products or services
  4. They read your information on your website
  5. Then they left your website

Why did they leave? On a positive note they may have made a deciosion to visit you and buy the product. They may have mad the decision to telephone you about your services.

However, they could have decided that your prices were to high, they may not have been ready to buy that product or service at that time or perhaps they didn’t have the confidence to buy from you as they haven’t heard of your company before or haven’t seen your brand around the internet.

You spent good time and money to get them in front of your information and re-targeting them allows you to offer discount (if appropriate), put your product or services in front of them time and time again, catching them when they are ready to buy and also builds confidence in your brand as they start to see your company, services and products advertised wherever they look on the internet.

How to Re-target Website Visitors

Re-target to their Computer

When you are at your laptop you will often get messages appear at the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. These are normally notifications from your computer or installed software needs updating or can be latest offers.

These are notifications that get your attention.

Once a person has visited your website we can re-target them with messages that appear as notifications at the bottom right-hand corner.

This is called “push notifications” and is the latest development in website re-targeting as is hugely powerful in re-marketing to potential customers. The power to re-target them whilst at their computer.

Push Notification Demo

DEMO

Re-target to Facebook



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Thursday 17 March 2016

Ranking Local Businesses

Ranking Local Businesses with the Power of Schema Data

SEO Company Bristol, “not just  SEO, not just Bristol” offer the full digital marketing services you would expect from one of the best Internet marketing companies in the UK. We offer search engine optimisation (SEO), Google Advertising, Pay per click (PPC), video creation and marketing, social media management. We offer a local SEO service for businesses in Bristol, work with companies throughout the UK and internationally. Find out what we can do for your business by calling 0117 325 1099

Back in the day of MySpace, Bebo and Ask Jeeves, search engine optimisation was as easy as re-posting the same content over and over again hoping that the primitive software search engines like Yahoo and even Google would use to rank websites. Someone wanting to rank “Used Cars In Newport” would simply have to post a page on their site titled used cars in Newport, with complete garbage content either ripped straight from somewhere else or featuring something that had no relevance at all to the subject at hand. SEO and search engines in general have evolved and progressed much further than people can even fathom, as the complex algorithms and the hundred of hoops you have to jump through to successfully rank a website has become almost unfeasible without constant management and catered attention. This advancements made by search engines means SEO isn’t something that is cheap and easy to do. It’s a skill that requires training and careful attention to shifting changes, which are always going to happen. It’s like a figurative game of catch up as search engines like Google are always going to change their format of data collection when ranking websites.

 

Because of the huge volume of content all wanting to be ranked on the multitude of search engines, it makes it impossible for something of that scale to be manually checked and ranked. This is why software and algorithms are put in place, as it’s a sheer impossible task to manually rank these amounts of sites with a fair approach. Whilst software is advancing at a relatively fast rate, there isn’t something on the market that can actually read the validity of content outright, there are things that can check the keywords count etc. and this is an element we try to focus on when creating our content. Aspects that we know are going to be picked up on by the software search engines use are always going to be a priority to use as these are the largest steps we can take into advancing a websites ranking. If the software were to remain the same, it wouldn’t take a few months before people would manage to completely overhaul and understand every facet that the algorithms look at to rank, making the rankings void as the system would have been exploited by everyone wanting to rank their sites.

 

Because of this never-ending chase we are always going to be searching for the new element search engines are going to use once the old ones have been removed or updated. It’s this process that is important to our process as the fundamentals of search engines ranking systems are always wanting to find the most supported and linked page to place on page 1. The algorithms are always going to change, which is inevitable for search engines to remain a valid platform for sites, which makes it tricky for agencies like us to rank. We thankfully are one step ahead as we have managed to find a new facet, which Google’s algorithms use to rank websites.

 

This new element is called Schema data, which is the new component that Google especially likes to pick up on, through the coding in all webpages. What it is basically doing is thoroughly checking through a new source of code, which we are able to input a complete list of directory listings that gives sites we rank a huge advantage as search engines greatly favour sites with this Schema data. You may ask what happens if you don’t have this source of directory listings, well it isn’t a problem through our process as we create over 500 high power listings that we can combine with the Schema data to rank sites faster than ever before.

 

A simple breakdown of Schema is that it is a semantic vocabulary that search engines like Google can use to read your website. What we are effectively doing is manually inputting data that we know is effective, in a source of code that would otherwise be automatically created and formatted.

 

Schema has different associations for a huge amount of different listings, things from what we’ve found to be most effective like directory listings and content linked through sub-sites and social media, to other sources like individual listings are going to heavily refer to your site. These by themselves are going to give your site great links that is going to help the ranking process. So we are already one step ahead even if we aren’t focusing on the Schema data

 

Another great reason why Schema is such an effective tool for SEO is that more is better, which is rare with ranking as many search engines will deem overloaded content as spam, as it reads it as “too much”, which is why a gradual approach is favoured with most elements of SEO. Schema differs in the context of volume, as you can submit a mass amount in a short amount of time and the benefits wont suffer a diminishing factor through a larger volume of links. Google in specific will favour more links than fewer, so this is an element we can rush different links through.

 

For the time being, Schema data is currently still an “un-tapped” vein for SEO agencies to use. It’s surprising how little this effective tool is used for businesses as we have seen great benefits from it. We feel Schema will become the basis for many different ranking elements, so we feel validated in pursing it further, and exploring new techniques that incorporate Schema data going forward in refining our SEO process. ­­

 

For more information about advertising your business, contact Martyn at SEO Company Bristol _____________________________

 



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Tuesday 8 March 2016

Ranking Local Business

Ranking a Local Business in Search Engines

SEO Company Bristol are experts in getting local businesses ranking on search engines, such as Google. If you would like more information on getting your business, company, products or services found on search engines by potential customers please telephone 0117 325 1099.

We offer local SEO services to business owners in Bristol. We have numerous satisfied customers throughout the UK and internationally.

History of Ranking Local Businesses

Back in the day of MySpace, Bebo and Ask Jeeves, search engine optimisation was as easy as re-posting the same content over and over again hoping that the primitive software search engines like Yahoo and even (early) Google would use to rank websites. Someone wanting to rank “Used Cars In Newport” would simply have to post a page on their site titled used cars in Newport, with complete garbage content either ripped straight from somewhere else or featuring something that had no relevance at all to the subject at hand. SEO and search engines in general have evolved and progressed much further than people can even fathom, as the complex algorithms and the hundred of hoops you have to jump through to successfully rank a website has become almost unfeasible without constant management and attention. This advancements made by search engines means SEO isn’t something that is cheap and easy to do. It’s a skill that requires training and careful attention to shifting changes, which are constantly happening. It’s like a figurative game of catch-up as search engines like Google are always going to change their format of data collection when ranking websites.

Of course, they do this to provide the user, your potential customer, with a satisfactory experience. Working with search engines to provide relevant information for the search terms or keywords you want your local business to be found for is the secret to beating your competition and getting more business leads. Help the search engines and they will help you.

ranking local business

Working With Search Engines

Because of the huge volume of content, all wanting to be ranked on the multitude of search engines, it makes it impossible for something of that scale to be manually checked and ranked. This is why software and algorithms are put in place, as it’s a sheer impossible task to manually rank these amounts of sites with a fair approach. Whilst software is advancing at a relatively fast rate, there isn’t something on the market that can actually read the validity of content outright, there are things that can check the keywords count etc. and this is an element we try to focus on when creating our content. Aspects that we know are going to be picked up on by the software search engines use are always going to be a priority to use as these are the largest steps we can take into advancing a websites ranking. If the software were to remain the same, it wouldn’t take a few months before people would manage to completely overhaul and understand every facet that the algorithms look at to rank, making the rankings void as the system would have been exploited by everyone wanting to rank their sites.

We understand the principles that search engines apply to research a websites content to best place it in the results. We apply this to our customers websites to get them found on page 1.

Keeping Ahead of the Competition

Because of this never-ending chase we are always going to be searching for the new element search engines are going to use, once the old ones have been removed or updated. It’s this process that is important to our success as an SEO Company, as the fundamentals of search engines ranking systems are always wanting to find the most supported and linked page to place on page 1. The algorithms are always going to change, which is inevitable for search engines to remain a valid platform for sites, which can make it tricky for SEO agencies to rank their clients websites. We thankfully are one step ahead as we have managed to find a new approach, which Google’s algorithms is using to rank websites in 2016.

Schema Mark-Up

This new element is called Schema data, which is the new component that Google especially likes to utilise, through the coding in all webpages. What Google is basically doing is thoroughly checking eash website and webpage for a new source of code.

This source code is formatted in such a way that Google can easily understand:

  • Category (i.e. “Local Business”)
  • Company Name
  • Company Address
  • Company Telephone Number
  • Description (200 words that describe your business)
  • Associated Social Media Accounts
  • Associated Links To Your Website (Directory Listings, Trade Associations etc.)
  • Customer Reviews
  • Longitude & Latitude (for use with Google Maps)

A simple breakdown of Schema is that it is a semantic vocabulary that search engines like Google can use to read your website to understand what the message of your website is trying to convey, and where you are located. It then uses this information to position your website in the search results and the Google map listings.

What we are effectively doing is manually inputting data that we know is effective, in a source of code that would otherwise be automatically created and formatted or, in most cases, missing from your website. We have seen very positive results – we have seen a new client website rank on page 1 within a few weeks and for them to dominate the Google maps listings – another position on page 1 of Google you will want your business listed.

Schema has different associations for a huge amount of different listings, things from what we’ve found to be most effective like directory listings and content linked through sub-sites and social media, to other sources like individual listings are going to heavily refer to your site. These by themselves are going to give your site great links that is going to help the ranking process. So we are already one step ahead even if we aren’t focusing on the Schema data. If you do not have a considerable number of local directory listings for your business – we can help. Call SEO company Bristol on 0117 325 1099 to find out more about our directory listing services.

Another great reason why Schema is such an effective tool for SEO is that more is better, which is rare with ranking as many search engines will deem overloaded content as spam, as it reads it as “too much”, which is why a gradual approach is favoured with most elements of SEO. Schema differs in the context of volume, as you can submit a mass amount in a short amount of time and the benefits wont suffer a diminishing factor through a larger volume of links. Google in specific will favour more links than fewer, so this is an element which enables us to get first page rankings quickly for a client.

Ranking local business with schema mark up

For the time being, Schema data is currently still an “un-tapped” vein for SEO agencies to use. It’s surprising how little this effective tool is used for businesses, by SEO Agencies for their clients, especially as we have seen great benefits for our customer from it. Schema will become the basis for many different ranking elements, so we feel validated in pursing it further, and exploring new techniques that incorporate Schema data going forward in refining our SEO process.

SEO Company Bristol offers Schema data services as part of our standard SEO packages and as a one-off activity for websites. For more information on adding Schema to your website please telephone 0117 325 1099.



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Monday 8 February 2016

SEO Company USA

SEO Company USA

SEO Company USA

The best and fastest growing SEO company in the United Kingdom has now expanded in to the USA. If you are a company or business that has a website you would like to see at the top of search engines, such as Google, then call us now on (toll free) 855-304-1400

The post SEO Company USA appeared first on SEO Company Bristol.



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Friday 15 January 2016

test17

01173251099

The post test17 appeared first on SEO Company Bristol.



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