Stop hurting yourself, SEO: Why the industry needs to get its house in order – quickly

Opinion Marketing is coming to terms with a new world order. Until last year, that looked like a gradual but fairly smooth transition. In 2019, two of its industries took a beating.

One was advertising. The other was SEO. While the advertising industry was being attacked, by and large, by aggressors outside its control – an increasingly fragmented media landscape, its own increasing fragmentation, budget and time pressures and a shift in the balance of power between client and...

11 March 2020 | Advertising

How marketers can stay one step ahead of the voice search trend: A guide

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably heard or seen somewhere that half of all searches this year will be conducted through voice-enabled devices, like Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. But did you know that:

30% of these searches will be done without a screen? Voice search queries include three to five keywords and are longer than text-based searches? 20% of UK consumers use voice search devices multiple times a day?

Clearly, voice search is no longer just...

22 January 2020 | Advertising

Why taking your own path for digital marketing learning is daunting – but worth it

In 2012, SEO was the major concern for any business looking to flex their digital muscle. Every pronouncement and product update from Matt Cutts, then Google head of search quality, was akin to a word from God.

But digital marketing, as any professional knows, does not stand still for long.

Tommy Griffith (left) was SEO manager at PayPal at the time, and was tasked by his superior to put together an introduction to SEO presentation for around 100 marketing employees....

11 December 2019 | Best Practice

Why voice search is where the puck is going for digital

Continually riding the wave of the next ‘big thing’ in social media is certainly a roller coaster ride, and we are now on the cusp of another major change. Voice search has been growing in popularity and is starting to have a transformational impact on the way marketers can influence people to know, like, trust, and eventually buy from a specific brand.

Today’s social media landscape is driven by text and images but this is already shifting as an increasing number of...

25 October 2019 | Advertising

How AI-enabled marketing can lower website bounce rates and improve accessibility

Marketers always strive hard to boost website traffic. A significant metric which quantifies the performance of websites is the bounce rate, indicating the percentage of users who leave without delving any further than the initial page.

In this context, it is important to understand web accessibility. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law in 1990. It prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities and provides equal opportunities for accessing the web to all...

15 October 2019 | Attribution

A whirlwind of emotions: The impact of consumer emotional states on search

Humans are not always wholly rational beings. That is not to infer that we are irrational, but simply that not every decision is based on a set of practical, logical steps. Often, our current emotional state has a huge part to play in how we behave at any given time. 

For marketers it is important to understand that many external influences can impact a potential customer’s emotional state - from the practical, like where they are in their purchase journey, to the...

11 October 2019 | Advertising

Three ways you can use Google’s tools to dominate local search

Often, when companies think about search engine optimisation, it’s largely focused on determining where their business shows up on a search results page. While this is, of course, an important part of the equation, it also assumes that all search is the same. In truth, search results are not created equal — especially when it comes to those for local businesses.

Unlike companies that operate primarily online or have locations everywhere, local businesses tend to have...

9 October 2019 | Advertising

Google says goodbye to the Average Position metric: What do marketers need to know from here?

In advertising, there are several key questions that are always bandied around: how are our ads performing? What’s the ROI like? Are we increasing brand awareness?

Marketers using Google Ads have been comfortable responding to these questions, often relying on the ‘average position’ metric but as of September 30 that metric was fully retired to make way for ‘prominence metrics’, made up of Impression Share and Impression Rate, which have been being...

2 October 2019 | Advertising

Back to life: It’s the ‘new’ New Year – and a huge opportunity digital marketers overlook

For decades, marketers have made a moment of “back to school”, setting their sights on mothers and, in more recent years, fathers.  But according to new data from Pinterest, limiting marketing to families with kids focused on back-to-school is a miss for advertisers.

On Pinterest, we see a renewed enthusiasm from people of all ages for organisation, health, positivity, activities and refreshed routines in September. It’s almost like people are hitting refresh...

3 September 2019 | Branding

The BBC’s Beeb shows why AI voice assistants are not yet ready for enterprise prime time

Opinion Last week, the BBC announced that it has begun work on a voice-enabled virtual assistant scheduled for 2020. Codenamed Beeb, the new virtual assistant is being seen as an alternative to Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, with a focus on helping users find content on the British broadcaster’s services and being able to understand British regional accents.

This last part is important, because it indicates that even as far as we have come with voice technology,...

2 September 2019 | Automation