The Marketing Dogs Have A New BFF

the marketing dogs have a new bff

the marketing dogs have a new bff

Ni Hao humans,

We’ve been quite busy this morning in a meeting with one of our new clients, Protect and Serve.

Rob from Protect and Serve brought his 15 week old English Bulldog puppy Rocky in to come and talk to us and the humans about the companies branding, brochure, stationery and website.

We like Rocky a lot, he’s our EBBFF (English Bulldog Best Friend Forever) and he was certainly a hit with the humans, who kept stealing him for cuddles when we were trying to be really professional and talk about branding and brochure design!

Rocky’s only a pup, so George and I are looking forward to having lots of meetings with him to play with him and impart our marketing, print and creative design wisdom and knowledge so he can help Protect and Serve move forward.

If you work local to our office in the Burntwood,Lichfield or Staffordshire area, we’d love it if you brought your furry friends to the studio with you so we could meet them.

Remember that if you need assistance with your marketing or creative design, get in touch with The Marketing People. You can either call our humans direct on 01543 387 047 or drop us an email at georgeandchops@themarketingpeople.com and we’ll pass a message on.

For business cards, brochures, event stands and other printed marketing or communications material drop me an email, and for online web and digital talk to George!

Paws and licks,

Chops.

41 SEO Terms You Need To Know

41 seo terms you need to know

41 seo terms you need to know

Is one of your goals for the year ahead to learn and understand more about SEO? Or perhaps you’ve forgotten what a few acronyms or words mean.

If so, take a look at our new and improved SEO Jargon Buster!

301 Redirect

– If your website moves domains or people can access your website from various URLs, a 301 redirect is carried out to ensure that people aren’t greeted with a 301 error, they are taken to a page on the new website.

404 Error

– This message normally appears when a web page no longer exists or has moved to a different URL. The error can be resolved by using a 404 redirect which will send users to another page.

Algorithm

– This is a formula or process a search engine, program or computer follows to solve a problem and come up with a result. In SEO terms, search engines use algorithms to decide where a page should rank in search results.

Alt text

– This is used to describe an image, for example an image of a red ball would have the alt text ‘red ball’. Alt text will show up in place of an image if it can’t be viewed. Alt text can also help with SEO.

Analytics

– In SEO terms, this is a collection of data showing how users interact with a website. For example, what search terms they used to read the website, how long they spent on the website and which pages they viewed.

Anchor Text

 – This is the clickable text in a hyperlink; “Find out about our marketing consultancy services.” ‘Marketing consultancy’ is the anchor text.

Authority links

– These are links from an authoritative website, such as BBC, Gov.uk etc.

Backlink

– This is a link coming into a website from an external website. An example of this might be someone might link to your website on their blog.

Black Hat SEO

– These are SEO techniques which don’t comply with best practice guideless. Black hat SEO techniques trick search engines into giving a website a higher page ranking than it deserves, quite often these techniques can backfire and damage search rankings.

Bounce Rate –

A ‘bounce’ in website terms is when someone visits your website and leaves before visiting another page, so the bounce rate is the percentage of people who only visiting one page on your website.

Canonical URL

– This is the ‘correct’ URL for a page and is used when there are multiple ways to get to a page.

CAPTCHA – Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart

– A ‘test’ which is used to determine whether a user is a computer or a human.

You often see these when you try to create an account or leave a comment on a website. You will then be shown a box with a random selection of letters, a word or numbers. A human can fill out a CAPTCHA form (usually!), however a computer program that may be trying to spam the website would struggle.

CMS – Content Management System

– A system, such as WordPress and Concrete5, which allows website owners to manage copy and pages on their website, without the need for them to understand or know how to code a website.

Conversion

– When a user or customer does what you want them to do. If you have a call to action on your website, such as download a brochure, the conversion is when a user downloads the brochure.

CPC – Cost Per Click

– In a Pay Per Click advertising model, this is the cost to the advertiser each time someone clicks on one of their adverts.

Ecommerce

– Buying or selling products or services on the internet.

Grey Hat SEO –

There are search engine optimisation techniques which bend best practice results, rather than completely breaking them.

Hits

– This is a request for something on a web page to load, such as the page itself or an image. Hits are not a good indication of how much traffic your website has had, since each image counts as a ‘hit’. So if you had a website with 10 images and it was loaded twice, you’d see 20 hits.

HTML – HyperText Markup Language –

This is a ‘language’ used to tells browsers how a website should look and how to display it.

Link Building

– One way of improving your website’s SEO is to increase the number of links coming in to your website, so you may carry out link building. This can be done by writing guest blog posts for other websites or commenting on other websites.

Linking C-Blocks

– This refers to IP addresses and is used by search engines to determine whether websites linking to each other are related. For example, if websites on the same server are linking to each other, the links are not natural and will probably have been set up by the same person.

Long Tail Keyphrases

– Long tail keyphrases are made up of a few words. It’s much easier to try and get a higher ranking for a long tail keyphrase than it is a short tail keyphrase.

Meta Title

– Brief description of the page which shows up in search engines and at the top of browsers.

Meta Description – Tells search engines what the page is about and will show up in search results, which means it needs to be interesting and informative to get people to click on it.

Meta Keywords

– They were used to list keywords used on the page.Meta keywords are no longer used and can harm your search rankings.

Onsite SEO

– Any search engine optimisation work which is carried out on your website which will improve its SEO. This can be things such as making sure pages all have meta descriptions, using keywords in your copy and alt text.

Offsite SEO

– Any SEO work which is not carried out on your website, which will improve your website’s SEO. This can include gaining backlinks from other websites and directory listings.

Online Directory

– Like an online Yellow Pages, examples include Dmoz and Yell.com. Submitting your business and website to high quality directories, such as Dmoz and Yahoo Directory can help with SEO.

Pagerank (also known as PR)

– How relevant a search engine considers your page to be in relation to keywords searched.

Pageview – This is the number of times a page has been viewed, however this doesn’t show how many people have viewed your website as the same person could view the page more than once.

PPC – Pay Per Click

– An advertising pricing model, where the advertiser will pay for each click their advert receives, regardless of whether the person who clicks on it purchases or converts.

Reciprocal Link

– When two websites link to each other, they are using reciprocal links. This used to be a good method of link building, however it has very little benefit nowadays.

RSS Feed – Really Simple Syndication

– RSS feeds are used to ensure that anyone who subscribes to your blog or website, is sent your latest blog post or content. You can choose to send the entire blog post or just a small snippet of it to the RSS feeder, to encourage people to view it directly from your website.

SE – Search Engine

– Examples; Google, Yahoo, Bing.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

– A strategy used to improve a websites search engine rankings and making it easier to find. The better a website’s SEO is, the higher the rankings are, which can result in more traffic.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

– This is a marketing strategy which simply uses search engines to promote a business. SEM usually uses paid advertisements, such as Google AdWords.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page

– When a user types something into a search engine, they will be shown a results page which lists web pages which are relevant to the keywords used in the search.

Unique Visitor –

This is how many unique visitors your website has had. You might have had 20 visits but only 4 unique visitors. This can show you how many people have returned to your website.

URL– Uniform Resource Locator

– This is address used to find a website or document on the internet, for example www.google.com.

White Hat

– These are search engine optimisation techniques which are within best practice guides and rightfully earn a website a page ranking, rather than tricking a search engine into giving it a higher page ranking. This is the right way to go about search engine optimisation.

 

If you need help improving your search rankings or making your website more SEO friendly, we can help. Check out our SEO blogs for more useful info, or get in touch with us to find out more and let’s have a chat about your website’s SEO and what we can do for you. You can call us on 01543 387 047 or email us on contact@themarketingpeople.com

LEGO’s Excellent Example of Customer Service

LEGO

We all know how important it is to provide your customers with the best possible customer service you can. The results are well worth it and will earn you loyal customers who are more than happy to sing your praises.

LEGOWe wanted to share this brilliant example of customer service from LEGO.

LEGO received an email

From 7 year old Luka who lost one of his Ninjago Ultrasonic LEGO figurines while in a supermarket.

“Hello. My name is Luka Apps and I am seven years old.With all my money I got for Christmas I bought the Ninjago kit of the Ultrasonic Raider. The number is 9449. It is really good. My Daddy just took me to Sainsburys and told me to leave the people at home but I took them and I lost Jay ZX at the shop as it fell out of my coat. I am really upset I have lost him. Daddy said to send you a email to see if you will send me another one. I promise I won’t take him to the shop again if you can.”

Luka received a reply from Richard in LEGO’s customer service department, saying that he had spoken to Ninjago master Sensei Wu, who had told him that it was an accident and that he wouldn’t take his figurines to the supermarket again.

As a result, LEGO were going to send him a new figurine and some extras. Not only did they offer to replace his figurines, they also decided to help his Dad out by telling Luka that he should always listen to his Dad.

You can read LEGO’s lovely heart-warming reply below:

Thanks for sending us an email!

We are very sorry to hear about you losing your Jay minifigure but it sounds like your dad might have been right about leaving it at home. It sounds like you a very sad about it too.

Normally we would ask that you pay for a new one if you lose one of your minifigures and need to have it replaced.

My bosses told me I could not send you one out for free because you lost it but, I decided that I would put a call into Sensei Wu to see if he could help me.

Luka, I told Sensei Wu that losing your Jay minifigure was purely an accident and that you would never ever ever let it happen ever again.

He told me to tell you, “Luka, your father seems like a very wise man. You must always protect your Ninjago minifigures like the dragons protect the Weapons of Spinjitzu!”

Sensei Wu also told me it was okay if I sent you a new Jay and told me it would be okay if I included something extra for you because anyone that saves their Christmas money to buy the Ultrasonic Raider must be a really big Ninjago fan.

So, I hope you enjoy your Jay minifigure with all his weapons. You will actually have the only Jay minifigure that combines 3 different Jays into one! I am also going to send you a bad guy for him to fight!

Just remember, what Sensei Wu said: keep your minifigures protected like the Weapons of Spinjitzu! And of course, always listen to your dad.

You will see an envelope from LEGO within the next two weeks with your new minifigures. Please take good care of them, Luka. Remember that you promised to always leave them at home.

Happy building!

Sincerely,
Richard,
LEGO Consumer Service”

What you can take from this

Some people have raised doubts over its authenticity; whether it’s real or not this is the kind of standout customer service you need to be providing.

You don’t need to be giving things away to provide your customers with excellent customer service; just provide them with solutions to their problems and answers to their queries.

Show that you care and you want to help them however you can. If someone who is not yet a customer gets in touch with you, you’ve got an excellent opportunity to turn that enquiry into a customer.

If you do this well, you will create loyal customers who give your business, service or products glowing reviews and refer you to their friends and family.

Perhaps if your customers are as social media savvy as Luka’s Dad, your response may even go viral!

You can read more about what social media means for customer service in another of our posts.

If you business needs a hand to delight your customers, why not speak to us about a marketing strategy? Call us on 01543 495752, or go to our approach page for more details.