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Traffic Online Marketing are a Leeds based online marketing agency. We are a specialised team who focus purely on online marketing. Our approach is to focus on our strengths and ensure that we deliver online marketing campaigns that meet  business goals and objectives. From experience, we know that digital marketing requires in-depth technical and marketing knowledge rather than general knowledge. That is why more leading brands are trusting Traffic Online Marketing to grow their online presence.

We are located in the centre of Leeds close to the railway station and main motorways enabling us to service our clients nationwide.

We are currently looking for an energetic and self-motivated account executive; you will join a successful team of highly skilled individuals who are dedicated to the care and development of a number of client accounts.

Based in Leeds, you will be responsible for research, planning and the day to day running of search-specific marketing campaigns.

Key Experience Required:

• Proven Track Record of managing, creating and developing PPC Marketing Campaigns
• Ability to Build Effective and Long-Standing Relationships with clients and partners alike
• An Understanding of Web Development and Design

This is a key role within the company and will require you to liaise with internal departments and clients effectively. Helping to shape and manage budgets, time-scales and campaign strategy, you will have a sound knowledge of all things search and digital.

Package:

Salary: Competitive (based on experience)
Holidays: 25 per year pro rata (excluding bank holidays, with at least 3 days to be taken at Xmas)
Full time 9 - 5:30 working hours, Mon - Fri

For more information on the company, visit www.traffic-om.co.uk

Interested applicants should send a CV and covering letter to andrew@traffic-om.co.uk

**Strictly No Agencies - any agencies who contact us regarding this role will be invoiced for our time**

Technorati have introduced a new feature to their website called Twittorati.  Twittorati is an area where people can see what Technorati’s top 100 bloggers are tweeting about.  The subjects of the blogs are on a variety of subjects and as a result the tweets are a weird and wonderful mix of opinions, stories, news items and random comments.

Twittorati allows you to see tweets in real time and they can be organized by latest tweets or by authority ranking.  Tweets can be filtered using Technorati tags and Twitter hashtags.

Personally, I feel it is a great resource to check on a morning to find latest news and developments in a variety of subjects.  Also a great place to find quality people to follow on twitter.

During the night Google announced its latest venture and it looks like it is going to be another assault on Microsoft’s market share.  This time Google have unveiled their plans to release the Google Chrome Operating System in the second half of 2010.  Google are calling it the “natural extension of Google Chrome” and they go on to say “the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web”.

Google mentions that the new operating system will initially be targeted at Netbooks.  This is where the assault on Microsoft starts; most Netbooks currently run Windows XP and due to Chromes lack of demand for high spec hardware, it looks like it will be the preferred choice of operating system for these machines.

If ever there was an example of what not to do on your social media campaign this would be it. Habitat, the major UK retailer has been engaging in some very underhand tactics through the popular social networking site Twitter.

With only a few followers on their Twitter account Habitat chose to promote their new sale in a rather unethical manner. Using the popular hash tag facility Habitat targeted keywords that had absolutely nothing to do with their current sale but are heavily searched upon within Twitter e.g. #Apple, #phone and even #Mousavi.

One thing is for sure they certainly got people tweeting about their brand but not in the way they had intended. The spammed twitter users were furious with the blatant misuse of the tags.

It would appear that Habitat have now deleted their initial attempt at promoting their discounts and instead have started engaging with followers in a more ethical way.

Although this was a tough lesson learned by Habitat I can’t help but feel they have severely damaged their brand and whilst they can try to hide the evidence, it is almost impossible to remove completely.

A fantastic blog by Karl Harvard this week on econsultancy.com talks about how SEO is evolving from just keywords and content. Off site optimisation such as blogging and contributing to other social networks.

A social media engagement strategy is now key in terms of SEO for clients. The key is getting clients to buy into this and accept this as part of an SEO strategy. With SEO, there is a distinct skill in writing optimised content and being able to code effectively for SEO. With social media marketing, its all about research and time - making sure that you put the effort in and that you are selective in where you put the effort in.

The theory of themes still runs true - if you run a site that sells gardening equipment, make sure you post on other sites within your genre. Relevant quality traffic is what you want, and building a picture of your site being a regular contributer to popular relevant content sites is key.

Social Media Marketing as we term it here, is the area we expect to grow the most over the next 12 months, and its long and short term benefits towards your overall SEO strategy should not be overlooked.

Not too sure about the goal hanger term though Karl. Where I come from it was called a “jonny liner”, presumably because a lad called Jonny was obsessed with standing on the goal line…

Traffic Online Marketing are a Leeds based online marketing agency. We are a specialised team who focus purely on online marketing. Our approach is to focus on our strengths and ensure that we deliver online marketing campaigns that meet your business goals and objectives. From experience, we know that digital marketing requires in-depth technical and marketing knowledge rather than general knowledge. That is why more leading brands are trusting Traffic Online Marketing to grow their online presence.

We are located in the centre of Leeds close to the railway station and main motorways enabling us to service our clients nationwide.

We are currently looking for an energetic and self-motivated account manager to join us. As Account Manager, you will join a successful team of highly skilled individuals who are dedicated to the care and development of a number of client accounts.

Based in Leeds, you will be responsible for project managing digital and search-specific marketing campaigns.

Key Experience Required:

* Proven Track Record of managing, creating and developing SEO and PPC Marketing Campaigns
* Ability to Build Effective and Long-Standing Relationships with clients and partners alike
* Expertise in setting up an managing social media, comparison shopping and affiliate campaigns
* An Understanding of Web Development and Design

This is a key role within the company and will require you to liaise with internal departments and clients effectively. Helping to shape and manage budgets, time-scales and campaign strategy, you will have a sound knowledge of all things search and digital.

Package:

Starting basic salary: £20,000 upward depending on experience
Holidays: 25 per year pro rata (excluding bank holidays, with at least 3 days to be taken at Xmas)
Full time 9 - 5:30 working hours, Mon - Fri

For more information on the company, visit www.traffic-om.co.uk

Interested applicants should send a CV and covering letter to steve@traffic-om.co.uk

** Strictly No Agencies - any agencies who contact us regarding this role will be invoiced for our time **

A recent post about writing content for SEO sparked a thought about generally writing website copy…

In every case with a new website, we tell clients to make sure they write compelling copy, and even look at hiring a copywriter. Most copywriters we have worked with have heard about SEO, but are not always sure how to write good optimised copy. Give them a list of keywords and phrases however, and the copy comes back keyword rich and focused on the user. This is exactly the balance everyone should aim for.

All content on the website must be interesting to humans, and as such should be written for them. Its all well and good getting web content ranking highly in search engines, only for users to visit the content and find it dull and uninspiring. This will not encourage the user to carry out the action you want, whether it be a sign up, a purchase or whatever. It’s kind of like walking into a store which you have seen a great advert for only to find the store is hard to find your way around, or the staff are unhelpful. It’s not going to inspire you to do what the advert set out to do.

We were asked to look into some variations to a client’s PPC campaign this week. After logging in to the campaign and seeing what options we had, I was impressed to notice that Google Adwords allowed me to restrict ads to be shown within a specific town or city within the UK. You could even set a radius of a certain amount of miles for your ads to be shown in, which is really helpful for advertisers who want to attract local business only.

I began to think about exactly how this could be enforced though.  It has to be through IP address I thought, so looking through Google’s help section I found the following explanantion:

When possible, we determine the user’s physical region based upon the Internet Protocol (IP) address. This applies to regionally- or custom-targeted ads and to any ads that are displayed on Google.co.uk.

Regional and custom-targeted ads: If someone searches for plumbers from a New York area IP address, we may display ads targeted to New York, even though New York was not in the search query.

Ads that show on Google.com: Unlike country-specific Google domains (such as Google.fr), we consider a user’s IP address for ads that show on Google.com. For example, if a user with an Australian IP address visits Google.com, we will display ads targeted to Australia, even though the user is not accessing Google.com.au.

All very clever. For a full explanation of how Adwords knows where to show keyword-targeted ads, see here.

I’ll take a wild guess that a lot of people don’t know about this! It’s a great way to stop unwanted clicks from areas you don’t / can’t serve, and it could drastically reduce your PPC spend, and increase your campaign effectivenesss.

All our clients on PPC are UK wide so no real savings for them, but it’s useful to know that it can be restricted so ad revenue wastage doesn’t occur as often.

A study this week highlighted how major US companies are failing to take advantage of organic search. It’s well documented that blue chip business invest heavily in paid search, but the figures this study unearths are more than enough to raise an eyebrow. A staggering $51 million is spent by Fortune 500 companies on paid search per day, on around 85,000 keywords.

Looking at how these businesses perform on organic search should make fairly depressing reading for marketing directors of these businesses. Just over 10% showed a strong visibility in organic search results, with this defined as having presence in the top 100 total organic search terms and a rank in the top 30 results.

Just imagine what these business could achieve through online marketing if 10% of their yearly paid search budget was apportioned to natural search! The old chesnut of “no one searches for our brand online” (a phrase I have heard far too many times from major UK businesses through the years) no longer applies. By actively investing in paid search, these businesses are stating their intent to attract more visitors to their website. There are contrasting opinions about how many search engine users click on paid results compared to organic results, but we have always worked on a 80:20 split in favour of organic. Does this not make this look even more appealing for these businesses?

We can only assume that this type of assessment holds true of equivalent UK businesses. If this is the case then such companies should take heed of this report. The right SEO strategy can work wonders for any business - and we have the results to prove it! Not only have we increased traffic to our clients websites via SEO, but we have also managed to reduce paid search spend, whilst increasing conversions from the same campaign! This has to be the target for any business serious about gaining an ROI via search marketing.

When I set up any PPC campaign I always put in a tracking URL so I can track the user once they have landed on the site.  This URL may look like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=adwords&utm_campaign=xxx_campaign&utm_term=blah_blah

When I read the article on Google Analytics Blog I was stunned that they recommended putting 301 redirects on these urls:

‘If this link is popular enough, then search engines will begin to index this URL. It may supplant the same version of this page without tracking parameters in the search results. Clicks on this new organic result will increment the visits number for Google(cpc) when it should really be attributed to Google(organic).’

I was always aware that the spider that indexes PPC landing pages shared data with organic search results (why duplicate processing power?). However the implication of this is that the data from PPC has a great impact on your SEO results, especially is the content on your website is inaccessible to the search engines (either flash or search queries).

I had heard that running a PPC campaign is a sure way to boost your SEO rankings……but this is proof from Google that actually is the case. Especially if the PPC landing pages are more popular than your main pages.

So what action do you need to take?

• Download a report from Google with your destination URLS, key phrases and clicks
• On the terms which have a high number of clicks you need to implement a 301 from the tracking URL to the main URL
• That way if the natural listings pick up your tracking URLS, then the traffic is being directed through the main site and any PR associated with this is transferred across too.