8 ways to increase your ranking on LinkedIn

Posted on 18th August 2015 by The Marketing People

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Did you know that LinkedIn has a ranking system? Find out what you can do to boost your LinkedIn ranking and be found by more people.

LinkedIn is a valuable tool for making initial contact with prospects, but it can be hard to make sure what you are doing is worthwhile sometimes. Here’show The Marketing People can help you increase your linkedin ranking.

One of LinkedIn’s more recent features is a ranking system, which lets you see where you rank for profile views amongst your connections. As well as creating some competition and drive to regularly use LinkedIn, it also gives you an insight into how easy it actually is to find your profile. You can read in more detail about this feature in this blog by LinkedIn themselves.

Over the last 2 weeks I have improved my personal ranking by 25%. If you don’t know how to get the best out of LinkedIn, and don’t want to pay for premium, this is how I did it for free and you can too.

Find out more about your aims and goals you’re looking to achieve through your social media. Lets see where we may be able to help.

Find out how you rank on LinkedIn

Before we get started, let’s take a look at how you’re currently ranking.

Log in to your LinkedIn account, and hover over ‘Profiles’ and click ‘Who’s Viewed Your Profile’. From that page click on the ’How you rank for profile views’ tab at the top of the page. Or if you are feeling really lazy, just click this link here to see how you rank.

You can then see how you rank amongst your connections, and see how your connections rank. If you have a free LinkedIn account, you can only see how the top 10 rank, and how you rank. If you have a Premium account, you will be able to see everything.

Now you know how you’re ranking, let’s look at 8 ways to increase your LinkedIn ranking.

Schedule posts to increase your LinkedIn ranking

Regular content is key. LinkedIn’s feed only allows a small portion of your updates to be seen. Around 20% supposedly. So the less you post, the less your connections see. The less your connections see, the less they will be inclined to click on your profile. Posting valuable and informative posts makes you a valuable connection, so consider this a priority.

Scheduling updates also means regular content that can be planned in advance. So if you don’t have the option to log in everyday you can spend a small amount of time planning ahead. Which saves you a lot of time, and hassle.

You can’t schedule updates directly from LinkedIn at the moment, but you can do it using a third-party application, such as Hootsuite or Buffer.

Re-connect with old connections

This isn’t quite the same as reconnecting with old friends on Facebook. With LinkedIn, and finding people you have previously working with, you may be able to work together collaboratively now.

Taking a look at their profile will probably mean they look back at your profile anyway. But being able to see from their profile if you are in an industry that is relevant to them now. Or even just that they have posted some great articles, or landed a new role is a great reason to reconnect.

In rankings terms, this could mean that once a notification has gone up on the feed that you two have connected, others may feel the need to view your profile too. Increasing your LinkedIn ranking has other benefits too, this could include a prospect opportunity, a referral, or just a nice catch up.

Welcome new connections

The main purpose of LinkedIn. To connect and work with others. But a lot of us are guilty of not really utilising this to the full. Or perhaps utilising this too much, and adding anyone and everyone.

New connections should be someone you know really. Continuing networking you have started in the real world, either face to face or over the phone. Make the jump to connect with them, and actually make conversation.

Again, the more people’s profiles you look at to ensure you know them, the more likely you are to receive a click back. Which in turn increases your ranking. So don’t be scared to properly view someones profile before you connect with them.

And always view as you, not as an anonymous viewer. Nobody appreciates it, and it will not help your ranking in the slightest.

Follow up from events

If you have attended an event, this is a brilliant opportunity to work with on social media in general. But especially LinkedIn.

Connect with and message those you met, or find the people they referred you to. Find those who posted about the event, or perhaps you saw their name in the networking or event list, but you didn’t get chance to meet.

You have a great opportunity to rapidly increase your rankings in a quick time due to the urgency of an event. Everyone will posts photos or register their attendance online, or will have a flurry of new connections. Get commenting, visiting profiles, and connecting with others to boost your ranking.

Interact with relevant posts

You don’t necessarily just need an event to comment on posts. There are a huge amount of opportunities on LinkedIn to interact with others.

Congratulate connections on new roles or work anniversaries. Congratulate that team who have posted that they are having a great week. Refer others if you see a post asking for help, and you know just the guy.

If you read pulse articles, take the time to write what you thought. You never know how many other people may agree with your point of view and want to connect. Or if you find a certain person’s posts are always valuable, ask to connect yourself. If they have influence, they may influence your ranking too.

If you want people to notice you, and visit your profile to increase your ranking on LinkedIn, you need to take the time to interact. Social media isn’t called social for no reason.

Talk/connect to those who view your profile

What an opportunity to network! If you have a free LinkedIn account, you can see the five most recent people to view your profile in the past 90 days. If you have LinkedIn Premium, you can see everyone who has viewed your profile in last 90 days, unless they’ve chosen to turn that function off on their account. Which as we’ve said is not an ideal move when trying to rank.

Follow up with those who look at your profile and see if there is anything you can help them with. Even if it was an accidental visit, it shows you are proactive and, once again, begins the conversation between you and a potential prospect.

It also means they will probably view your profile once more. To remind themselves of who you are, and why they visited. More visits means better ranking. And if it’s also a potential lead that’s even better.

Update your profile to boost your linkedin rankings

Keeping your profile up to date means that your profile can provide viewers with relevant and current information about what you do, and who you work for. It also updates the main feed to say you have updated. This means that others will be inclined to check out your profile to see your updates.

More visits to your profile means more rankings. However, don’t take advantage of this tactic too much. If it appears you are updating your content everyday, others may not feel as inclined to click on it, rendering it worthless for improving your ranking.

Publish articles

Publishing articles is a relatively new feature for those on basic profiles, and it is a brilliant opportunity.

Publishing articles means you can attract people who may not normally see your profile. Through searches on LinkedIn’s Pulse feature, and others sharing your article, you can attract prospect to you who are relevant and interested. This is also a good way to build up trust with slow burning prospects by showing you have knowledge in your field.

Having a wider network of people viewing your work will encourage them to view your profile too, and maybe even connect. This is a huge opportunity to improve your ranking, and your connections too.

How to publish LinkedIn articles

Go to your LinkedIn home and click ‘Publish a post’ near the top of the page. This will bring up a new page where you can write your headline, write your article, and upload an image.

Keep your headline around 46 characters long, as it will get cut off in the sidebar if it is any longer. LinkedIn also recommend your image size is 700 x 400 pixels.

It may be a good idea as well to only part publish your article if it appears on your website too. So if people want to finish the article they can click the link to read it on your site. This means you still get your rankings up, but your website doesn’t miss out on traffic.

There are a lot of other ways to increase your presence on LinkedIn and to use it effectively, and this will change for each individual. These are just a few of the basic changes I made, that enabled me to see improvement.

What do you find helps increase your reach on LinkedIn? Have you tried any of our tips? Let us know in the comments.

If you want to read more tips for your social, take a look at our other social blogs. Or if you require a little more help with your company’s social, why not give our friendly team a call on 01543 495752 and take advantage of our free marketing consultation.

What information needs to be on a business card?

Posted on 4th August 2015 by The Marketing People

Your business card may be the first impression someone gets of your business, so it’s important to make sure your business card contains the right information.

It’s amazing how many people have business cards that don’t do them, or their business, justice. You go to an event or a networking meeting, and the amount of people who have ‘forgotten’ or ‘run out of’ business cards is tremendous. This is the memory of your chance encounter that your prospects will keep, so why are you not making the most of the opportunity?

Here are 5 tips to help you make the most out of your business card, and ensure prospects remember you.

Make sure it contains your key information

First of all, do you have a business card? If you do, does it include the vital and necessary information for someone to contact you?

Who are you?
What is the best number to contact you on?
What is your email address?
Have you placed your address so that prospect you are setting up a meeting with knows how to find you?

You also need to take care to spell check your information. If you have misspelt your information, not only does it mean the prospect is less likely to be able to contact you, but they’ll be less likely to want to if you haven’t taken the time to spell check a small amount of information.

Consider how your audience want to contact you

You need to consider how people may want to contact you. Understand that shy people would rather email and have a response before they pick up the phone. Others want to pick up the phone and talk to someone directly and have an instant answer on their query.

If you only provide certain contact information on your business card, you limit who will make the first contact with you, so ensure you leave a good selection. However, be warned, you can include too much information.

If you are adding your Facebook address, Twitter handles, LinkedIn profile, Pinterest account and where to find you on Google+, you may want to scale back a little. Include your key contact information, and leave the social accounts for when people head to your website.

Encourage people to contact you using your preferred contact method

Though people do have preferred methods of contact, you can try and suggest which way is the best way to contact you.

With a business card, it can be as simple as explaining to someone, it is easier to reach you by phone, as you are on the road all day. Prospects will appreciate knowing the best time and method to get in touch, and it will help build a bond, knowing you are making it easy to be contacted.

Make it memorable

Your business card is the part of your company that others get to keep. Do you really want that represented by a flimsy piece of card with the bare minimum printed on? What would you think if you received your business card? Is your brand instantly recognisable?

Ensure your card is not only informative but eye catching. Not only does this give you a better chance of your business card being kept in a safe place, but if it does get thrown on the pile of paper at the office, it will definitely be spotted again.

Use both sides!

When you receive a business card, what is the first thing you do? You read the information on one side, and then you turn it over to look at the information on the back. You have two sides to a card, why are you wasting one?

If all of your info fits neatly on to one side, then why are you not using the other side to promote your business, represent your brand or as an opportunity to sell? Printing one sided business cards is a wasted opportunity.

Not sure what to do with that spare side of your card? Why not have a look at this case study to give you some inspiration?

Looking to update your business cards? Why not give us a call and speak to one of our friendly team, you can even pop in if you like. Or if you’re looking to read more about print, why not check out our other blogs.

I don’t know if my marketing is working

Posted on 28th July 2015 by The Marketing People

When many businesses first come to us, they often say “I don’t know if my marketing is working.” They’ve tried a few different things, but it doesn’t appear to be doing anything other than costing them money. Does that sound familiar?

It’s important that you can show the Return on Investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts. If something is working, you need to be able to show that. And if it doesn’t work, you need to be able to prove that so you don’t waste further time and money on something that doesn’t work.

When businesses come to us and say “I don’t know if my marketing is working”, we evaluate these 6 things to find out what might be the cause of the problem.

Have you set a goal? If so, what was it?

While all of these points are important, this is a huge one. If you haven’t got a goal, how can you possibly know whether your marketing is working?

When setting goals, follow the SMART method to create goals that are:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timely

How are you tracking your marketing activities?

Once you know what you’re working towards, you need a way of tracking activity produced by your marketing campaign. If you aren’t tracking what’s happening, you won’t know if your marketing activities are working or not.

Tracking and monitoring needs to be considered before you begin marketing as you may need to implement something before you campaign begins, such as setting up a dedicated phone number, or setting up goal tracking in your analytics software.

Exactly how you track your marketing campaign will depend on what you’re doing:

If you’re running a special offer, you might look at orders using the offer code in an email you sent out
If you’re getting people to call you, you would track phone calls to a dedicated number, or you could ask people where they saw your number
If you’re at an event, you might just track the number of people who put their email address down on your email marketing form

By tracking your marketing activities, you will easily be able to identify whether or not you are reaching your goal.

How strong was your campaign and call to action?

Your call to action (CTA) is the most important part of any marketing campaign because it tells your target audience what you want them to do next.

If your CTA is weak, unclear, confusing, or if you have multiple CTAs, your audience won’t know what to do. Best practice is to have one CTA that is focused on getting someone to take the next step.

Keep your CTA succinct and use verbs to encourage your target audience to take action as soon as possible.

The rest of the copy should back up the CTA and encourage your audience to take action by focusing on their pain points and telling them how your product / service can remove that pain.

What did your marketing activity look and feel like?

The way things look, and feel if they are physical things your audience can hold, is incredibly important. Especially if this is the first contact someone will ever have with your brand.

Think about the junk mail you get through your letterbox at home. I bet you’ve received a cheap and nasty looking leaflet from a local takeaway that you’ve never heard of before. It’s confusing on the eyes, there are probably lots of dark colours, bad editing, the paper feels thin, and just looking at it makes you feel like you might get food poisoning. What do you do? You throw it out.

Now, it might be that the takeaway makes delicious food, but if you judged it on that piece of marketing material alone, it certainly didn’t give you the impression of delicious, filling food.

It’s not just the first time you contact your audience that you need to make a great impression; you need to make a great impression every time you contact your audience and customers.

A great impression can remind loyal customers why they are a customer of yours, encourage them to purchase from you again, and hopefully remind them to tell their friends about you.

If that’s not enough to convince you that your marketing to existing customers needs to be high quality, this statistic might: 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your existing customers.

Is it your audience’s preferred method of communication?

This is where a thorough understand of your audience is helpful and will help you.

Where your marketing material appears is important. If your audience are 16-25 year olds who regularly use the internet, then online is the best place to target them.

If your audience are 70+ olds who don’t use the internet, then offline marketing activities will suit them better.

What’s your brand like? Is it putting people off?

The way your brand looks can play a large part in whether or not your audience pay attention to your marketing.

As a consumer, you probably understand this yourself.

If you see a brand that looks small, unprofessional, outdated, and maybe even a bit dodgy, you will probably steer clear of it. No matter how good an offer it is. You don’t want to risk being ripped off, or receiving a faulty product.

If you see a brand that looks clean and professional, it will automatically come across as much more trustworthy than a brand that looks bad. It will give you confidence that the business knows what they’re doing. That you’re likely to get a product which fulfils your needs.

If just one of the points above isn’t right it can prevent your marketing activities from being effective, which means it’s wasting your time and money.

To find out if your brand might be putting your audience off, read 4 signs you need to rebrand your business.

Not sure if your marketing activities are working? Here are 6 things to review.

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9 reasons why people are leaving your website

Posted on 21st July 2015 by The Marketing People

The goal of your website is to attract visitors and, eventually, convert them into leads and sales. It’s not straightforward, and there are many reasons why people are leaving your website.

Due to longer and more complex buyer’s journey, you won’t stop 100% of visitors leaving without converting, but there are plenty of things you can do to improve your website and give visitors the information they need.

How do I know how many people are leaving my website?

Your website’s analytics can tell you how many people are leaving your website, and where. There are two important statistics to look at:

Bounce rate
Exit pages

Bounce rate

Your bounce rate shows you the percentage of people who came to your website, viewed one page, and left before viewing any other pages.

There are many reasons why someone might ‘bounce’, but they can be roughly classified into two buckets:

They weren’t happy with what they found: this could mean your product / service was too expensive, you didn’t convince them to buy it, they’re not sure if it solves their problem, or perhaps your content didn’t answer their questions.

They found what they were looking for: this often happens if someone is looking for specific information; your website provides them with all the information they need for now, so they leave without exploring your website further.

“What’s a good bounce rate?” you might ask; well it varies depending on sector and the type of website you have.

An infographic on bounce rates put together by KissMetrics shows the following average bounce rates:

Retail websites: 20-40% bounce rate
Simple landing pages: 70-90% bounce rate
Portals (MSN, Yahoo groups, etc): 10-30% bounce rate
Service websites: 10-30% bounce rate
Content websites: 40-60% bounce rate
Lead generation: 30-50% bounce rate

Exit pages

Google Analytics also allows you to look at where people are leaving your website. It doesn’t give you a huge idea of why they’re leaving though. However, reviewing the copy might help you identify the kind of reasons someone might have exited on that page.

For example, if people are leaving your site on a product page instead of converting, it might be because:

It’s not quite what they were looking for – but your content was good and told them it’s not what they need.
They’re not sure if it’s what they need – your content isn’t clear enough or telling them whether it can do what the visitor needs it to do.
It’s too expensive
They’re just looking for now and comparing your product / service to others
It’s too expensive – but they’ve bookmarked it and will keep checking back in case the price has gone down
You haven’t got the size / colour / version they need in stock right now

As you can see, it’s not easy to identify exactly why someone left. However, there are plenty of things you can do to make sure you are providing users with all they need to make an informed decision.

Why people are leaving your website

Let’s look at 9 common reasons why people might be leaving your website and what you can do to make them stay.

Your website takes too long to load

We’re all impatient, especially online where we expect things to happen in the click of our fingers.

Studies by Akamai.com and Gomez.com found that 47% of users expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

If your website takes too long to load, users will leave and visit other websites which load faster.

What to do: Check your website’s loading speed which can help you identify what parts of your website might be slow to load.

Your website looks bad or suspicious

Appearance can have a huge effect on perception, and the look of your website can be enough to convince someone that they don’t want to spend their money with you.

When you think about a bad website or a suspicious looking website that looks as if it’s out to scam you, they might look a bit like this:

The design is poor
The layout is terrible
Too many things are fighting for attention and your eyes can’t settle and figure out what you’re supposed to do
It instantly looks confusing
The text is barely readably
Images might not load

Your website should present you as a professional, and trustworthy business, and it’s worth investing in a professional web designer to make sure your website appeals to your target audience and makes you look good.

What to do: Review your website and look at the design and navigation; is it what your target audience want to see? Is it easy to use? You could even ask your customers to fill in feedback forms to find out what they think of your website.

It’s not user-friendly

Following on from the point above, don’t make your users click more than they need to.

Users expect websites to look clean and easy to use now. Even huge ecommerce websites such as ASOS (shown above) manage to keep their website looking simple, and easy to use.

If someone has to visit seven or eight pages to find what they’re looking for, that’s poor user experience.

A few traits of a user friendly website:

It loads quickly
It’s responsive
It has a search bar
The navigation is simple
The user has no frustrations trying to complete their tasks

What to do: Make your website as easy as possible to use; reduce the number of clicks / things the user has to do to reach the information they’re looking for.

It’s not responsive

A responsive website will resize and change the layout depending on what device you view it. In the photo above, you can see the same website displaying different to suit each device.

According to globalwebindex, 50% of global internet users accessed Google using a mobile device each month in 2014. That gives you some kind of idea about how many people use mobile devices to search the internet, and how important it is that your website is responsive.

In April this year, Google made mobile-friendly a ranking factor. This means that if your website is not mobile friendly, your rankings in mobile search results may suffer.

Find out how many people visit your website on mobile devices

To find out how many people visit your website on mobile devices:

Log in to Google Analytics
Click on ‘Audience’
Click ‘Mobile’
And select ‘Overview’

You can see the number and percentage of sessions and what kind of device they came from.

Not convinced by responsive websites? Check out our blog post containing 9 reasons why you should have a responsive website.

What to do: Make sure your website is responsive.

Your brand is putting them off

We all know the saying “never judge a book by its cover”, but we all do it. If your brand looks outdated or bad, people may perceive you and your products as incompetent, or even as scammers.

Online, people are particularly wary about who they spend money with as they know how easy it is to be scammed. Scam websites often look bad and outdated, so if they perceive you as outdated or suspicious, they will buy from a competitor with a more reputable looking brand.

Another issue you may have with your brand is if it is not quite representing you effectively, and is sending out the wrong message to our clients.

At the end of last year, we rebranded a company whose brand was confusing their target audience and their staff. Their brand was pigeon-holing them because their audience, and existing customers, thought they only offered one type of service, rather than the wide range of services they actually offered.

What to do: Make sure your brand looks professional, is something that appeals to your target audience, and represents you effectively.

Your aren’t giving users enough information / you aren’t answering their question

Providing users with as much information as possible helps them to make an informed decision, which is particularly important if you have an ecommerce website.

Think about all the things your audience want to know and provide them with all of the information they need.

Include information about:

Sizes – if you’re selling clothing have a size guide with measurements on your website which you can link to
Colours
How it can be used
What it can be used for
Have a range of high-quality images of the product from different angles, and in use

If it’s not a product page, you may not be entirely answering users’ questions. Again, think about everything someone would want to know when they visit a page, and link out to other resources which they might need.

What to do: Consider what information your audience want to get from each page and think about any questions they might have and what they might want to know, and provide them with it.

You aren’t making your users feel pain

The copy on your website should identify your audience’s pain points and remind them of that. Your copy can then go on to sell the benefits of your product / service and how it can alleviate their pain.

Imagine you sell an online video that helps people to train their dogs to walk properly on the lead. Your audience may have the following pain points:

Walking my dog is stressful and sometimes embarrassing because my dog is so badly behaved on the lead and pulls
My dog has injured me in the past because of his / her pulling, so I’m hesitant to take him / her out now
I’m worried my dog will get injured by pulling into traffic
My dog is becoming overweight due to lack of exercise

Your copy should acknowledge those pain points, and you can then inform them of the remedy by selling the benefits of your dog training DVD. You might say something like:

“Our DVD will give you the skills you need to train your dog to walk correctly on the lead, preventing you both from injury. No longer will walking your dog be a stressful or embarrassing situation; you can look forward to walking a well-behaved dog and ensuring he or she gets enough exercise and stays fit and healthy.”

What to do: Write a list of the issues your target audience are facing and make sure your copy is reminding them of their pain, and how you can solve that pain for them.

They aren’t convinced your product / service will do the job

Sometimes you can give people all of the information they need, but they still hold back because they aren’t convinced. The phrase “too good to be true” might pop into their head.

Most of us try to be as careful as possible with our money, and the last thing we want is to spend our hard earned cash on something that will disappoint us by not doing the job properly.

What alleviates that worry? Proof that other people have purchased the same product / service and are satisfied with it.

Make use of reviews and testimonials to prove to your audience that you are trustworthy and show how delighted customers have been with their purchases.

Encourage our customers to leave reviews by emailing them a few days after their purchase has arrived and they’ve had chance to use it. You can find out more about how reviews help and how to get them here.

What to do: Remove as much worry as possible by using reviews and testimonials from happy customers.

They’re not ready to buy yet

The buyers’ journey isn’t as simple as it used to be. With so many products and services competing for attention, users move all over the place as they thoroughly research the best product / service for their problem.

They might leave your website with the intention of buying from you, but they’re not ready to buy just yet. Maybe they need to save up a little more, perhaps it’s a gift and they want to be sure the recipient hasn’t already got it, or maybe there’s another reason.

What to do: Encourage people to sign up to your email newsletter so that you can remind them of your business / products / services, and encourage them to come back when they’re ready. You could even offer them an incentive, such as 10% off their first order.

No matter what you do, it will be near impossible to get a bounce rate of 0%, but doing the above can help you send visitors away with a better idea of what your business offers so that hopefully remember you when they’re ready to buy.

If you do require any help or advice with your website, why not speak to the experts? All of our team are friendly, efficient, and have a passion for marketing, so what do you have to lose? Call us today on 01543 495752.

If you want to read more from our website series of blogs, just click here to see what other resources are available.

I don’t know how to follow up after an event

Posted on 14th July 2015 by The Marketing People

After a great event or exhibition, you want a great follow up to ensure you have achieved everything you can from the day.

Last week we spoke about how to choose an event that benefits your business, and hopefully that’s helped you pick out a few events that will help you attract new customers, but what about following up after an event? How do you do that? And when should you follow up? Read more I don’t know how to follow up after an event ›

What is SEO, and why is it so important?

Posted on 30th June 2015 by The Marketing People

SEO stands for search engine optimisation; it’s a method used to help your website show up higher in search results.

The reason SEO is so important is because the higher your website shows up in search results, the more visitors your website gets. And if your website works well, that will translate into more leads and sales.

A study carried out in 2014 found that on average, 71.33% of searches resulted in a click through to one of the organic search results on the first page. Additionally, the first five results account for 67.60% of all clicks.

As you can see, ranking on the first page of search results can bring you a lot of traffic that you just won’t get from search engines if you’re below page one.

SEO is not an exact science. You should run a mile from anyone who tells you that they can guarantee they’ll get you ranking first in search engines.

Depending on how much you know about SEO (but we’re going to hazard a guess that you don’t know a lot if you’re reading this). You may have heard that it is all about building links, and the more links you have the better. Well, that’s still kind of true, but not in the way it used to be.

A little history

In years gone by, you could literally buy thousands of links, and that would result in your website ranking better. It didn’t matter what kind of website was linking back to yours, or the quality of your website. If you had lots of links, your website would rank well.

But then, to the joy of internet users, search engines got wise and their algorithms improved.

It’s easy to see search engines as ‘the bad guy’, but their role is to provide users with the best possible search results. This means they have to rank websites in order of the most useful and relevant first.

If they don’t do that and show irrelevant websites on the first page of search results instead. They aren’t answering the user’s questions, and the user will switch to another search engine. That results in less users for the search engine. Which translates into less revenue from advertising because the audience is smaller.

This is why whitehat SEO is now about providing visitors to your website with the best experience you can. The better their experience on your website, the better your rankings.

What’s this “whitehat SEO” you just mentioned?

If you carry out SEO which adheres to search engine’s rules, it’s called ‘whitehat SEO’. This means you’re doing it by the book, and search engines have no issue with your practices.

As you might imagine, blackhat SEO is when you carry out spammy techniques (such as buying links, hiding content, keyword stuffing, etc). Which search engines do not approve of, and you risk being de-indexed.

Greyhat SEO is somewhere in between the two. Where you carry out some blackhat practices, or things that search engines aren’t particularly clear on.

The best thing to do, of course, is to only carry out whitehat SEO practices. Yes, there are times where you might see a website ranking above yours that is using blackhat SEO practices. But algorithms are updating all the time, and it isn’t worth carrying out blackhat techniques and risk getting de-indexed and losing visitors.

What happens if I do blackhat SEO?

As we mentioned above, blackhat SEO involves using practices which try to trick search engines into giving a website a higher ranking.

If you do this, you may end up being penalised or de-indexed. If you’re penalised, you may see your search rankings take a hit. Whereas if you’re de-indexed, you won’t show up in that search engine at all.

Either way, the result will be a loss of traffic, and potential leads and sales, from search engines.

If you clean up your act and your website, you can submit a reconsideration request. If the search engine decides you are no longer spammy. Or no longer using blackhat techniques, you will start appearing in search results again.

Be mindful that if you buy a domain which was previously owned, the previous owners actions can result in your website not being indexed.

A couple of years ago, one of our clients bought a domain. We developed a website on it, but it wasn’t indexing in Google at all. We hadn’t carried out any spammy techniques. And we’d developed the website exactly the same as the hundreds of other websites we’d developed.

In the end, it turned out that the previous domain owner must have carried out blackhat techniques. We had to submit a reconsideration request to Google. The request was processed, and the website began appearing in search results.

How do search engines crawl websites?

To crawl websites, search engines use software robots called spiders. Spiders work by ‘visiting’ a website and following every link on that site and indexing the websites it crawls.

This helps search engines to discover pages on that, the contents of the website, and the websites it links out to. This creates a big ‘web’ or an index.

Search engines then store all this information for later to create a cache. When you search for something, the search engine will search the cache, rather than live searching the web.

Submitting a sitemap to each search engine is a good way of helping the spiders find and crawl your website.

That is a brief overview of how search engines crawl the web, but if you want a detailed review, Woorank have a really simple, and in-depth explanation.

How do search engines decide what order to rank websites?

Search engines use complex algorithms, which no one other than those who work on it completely understand, to decide what order to rank websites in when you search.

What factors (called ranking factors) they take into account when deciding on ranking varies from search engine to search engine, and again, no one knows exactly what is taken into account.

That being said, we know that websites which perform well often have these traits:

Have good user experience – users don’t have any problem navigating these websites.
Contain truly useful content – users find what they’re looking for, and don’t leave immediately with their question unanswered.
Load quickly – 47% of people expect a website to load in 2 seconds, or less.
Is mobile-friendly – as of April 2015, mobile-friendly is a ranking factor; if your website does not perform well on a mobile, your rankings in mobile searches may suffer.
Have, and attract, high quality inbound links – the better your content, the more likely you are to attract links from top, authoritative websites. If your website has a lot of links from high quality websites, it’s a sign you too, are a high quality website.
Have a low bounce rate – to search engines, a high bounce rate (this is the number of people who leave your website having only visited one page) means users didn’t find what they were looking for.

How do I get my website to rank at the top of search engines?

SEO is no longer just about building links, it looks at every aspect of your website, especially user experience.

To reach the top of search rankings, you need to be providing your visitors with the best possible experience. In short, your website should be very user-friendly and contain high quality, useful content.

If your site has lots of backlinks from other reputable websites, that’s also a clear sign to search engines that your website is trustworthy.

It isn’t an exact science at all, and the best way to approach SEO, is to think about your customers, and your own experience using websites; think about how to give them the best experience you can, and your rankings will improve.

To find out how you can improve your content, read our recent blog post about how you can create the best, most useful content in search results.

But, how do search engines know if my content is useful?

It might seem like a bit of a mind bender; how does an algorithm understand whether or not content is useful?

Since they can’t understand content like we can, algorithms look at a huge amount of information, including:

What keywords content contains
Whether content has been scraped or stolen from another website
Whether or not it contains spelling or grammatical errors
If it has a very low word count – content that is very short, is not likely to be as helpful as long content
How long people spend on a particular page
The bounce rate – that’s how many people enter your website and leave before clicking through to another page
Links to it and the kind of website those links are coming from

SEO is a huge beast, which covers many aspects of your website, but the best thing to do is to create a website, and content, which gives your user’s the best experience possible.

The best thing to do is to create a website, and content, which gives your user’s the best experience possible.

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If you are struggling with SEO, or your website isn’t performing as well as hoped, get in touch to find out how we can make your website work hard for you, and improve your website. Or, you can read more about SEO in our blogs.

I don’t know where to start with marketing

Posted on 2nd June 2015 by The Marketing People

It’s a statement many businesses ask themselves when it comes to marketing.

You have a load of great ideas, but you don’t know quite how to put them into action. Your brand isn’t working for you, but you don’t want to change it for the worst and lose the customers you do have.

You are desperate to rebrand but already need another 40 hours in the day as it is. You would love to have a marketing department who could just deal with all of this, but there is no way that is plausible for your company at the moment.

Or is it?

At The Marketing People, many of our clients use us as their marketing department and let us take care of all their marketing needs.

From a full rebrand of your company, to sending letters out to your customers, we can help. That means you can continue to focus on your business.

We can also offer a full rebrand to help you expand your business in to areas that were previously unavailable to you. Have a look at the blog post from our Marketing Dogs about the rebrand we did for edo “Bonjour and Ni Hao edo” for a bit more detail on the process of rebranding.

Can’t wait to get started? Give us a call today to book in for a friendly, no obligation chat about how we might be able to help.

George and Chops say: Always start with a big fuss, it’s the best way to start any day

Click here to read more from the I Don’t Know series.

I don’t know series