Ring us on 0115 948 0123 to discuss your SEO requirements.

Hallam’s SEO services can help your company to stay competitive in the fast paced and growing online market.  Our targeted advice will help your company to reach your potential customers.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a technique for making your website more visible in search engines.

With more and more businesses going online it is more important than ever to ensure that your website ranks well in search engines.  More customers finding your website more easily will, for most cases, have a real impact on your sales figures.

We don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to SEO.  We will work with you to develop an SEO strategy to suit your company’s needs and targets.  Your strategy will use a mix of tried and tested SEO techniques.

Initial Website Review

Before we can develop an effective SEO strategy for you we first need to analyse your website.  We look at the factors that may be affecting your current performance in the rankings and based on this we will describe the best way forward for you.

We can also help you to identify the words that your customers are using to find companies like yours (known as keywords).  We can then help you to optimise your website for the keywords that will deliver practical results.

At this stage we will also analyse your competitors’ websites to discover their successful SEO secrets.  This information will inform your SEO strategy and will give your company the competitive edge.

On-page SEO and Copywriting

To improve your website’s rankings for the keywords that matter to your customers we can:

• Edit existing content to make your site more search engine friendly
• Write new pages for your website that your customers will want to read
• Help you to create a blog or other social media campaign

Link Building for SEO Success

There are many different elements to a successful SEO campaign.  While well-written and keyword-rich pages are important, you also need to build links with other reputable websites for SEO to work.

We can find the most appropriate websites for you to link to and from.  We will suggest and create high quality links that will boost your rankings in the search engines.

We may submit your website to topical directories, or produce engaging articles for submission to reputable websites including links to your pages.

PPC and Organic SEO

So far we have described organic SEO methods that will increase your search engine visibility without advertising.  Yet Pay Per Click campaigns can be a highly effective way to reach your customers.

We will advise you on whether a PPC campaign will help you get the results you need.  If you decide to include paid-for advertising in your SEO strategy we can manage the campaign on your behalf.

If you use Google’s Pay-Per-Click advertising service – AdWords, you may have noticed some alert messages on your account about upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns. Google’s relentless pursuit of progress means that just as you get used to a system, Google go and change it!

What are ‘Enhanced Campaigns’ ?

An ‘across the board’ functionality change to all AdWords accounts, enabling more focused targeting of campaigns and ad groups by device, location and time of day.

 What’s the point?

Everyone knows that the use of mobile devices for search is surging forward. And many mobile searches are with high intent, by people looking for local products and services, at certain time. (One example would be a person searching for a nearby Italian restaurant, while walking around a new city in the evening).  On the other hand, we might use a desktop computer to research a holiday at lunchtime, then pick up an iPad at home to carry out further research, and maybe use our smartphone when seeking local travel agents in town.  Google calls this ‘converting across multiple devices’ and wants advertisers to stay connected to the audience they are aiming to target.

How does it affect me?

Up to now, if you wanted to target mobile as well as desktop users in AdWords, you had to set up a separate campaign. Whilst that system gave ultimate control, it could become unwieldy to manage for the average PPC marketer who has lots of other hats to wear. By introducing Enhanced Campaigns, Google now brings targeting by device, time of day and location within each campaign and claims that it will be easier, especially for smaller businesses, to target customers at the most relevant time on the the most relevant device at the most relevant location.

If you look after AdWords campaigns, you’ve probably seen the alerting messages. The AdWords system is changing and for many of us, it will be for the better. Besides, we don’t have a choice if we wish to continue using AdWords. For example, you may have noted that your older campaigns carry the ‘Legacy’ title under the All Online Campaigns table, while newly created campaigns are now titled ‘Enhanced’:

Should I be bothered?

Enhanced Campaigns are the format for newly-created AdWords campaigns and will become the new standard for all campaigns over the next few months. By default, mobile devices will be targeted in your campaigns. But you might find that mobile devices don’t deliver, or you know your business comes from other business people using desktop devices; what then?

What you will be able to do is to increase or decrease your ‘bid’ for mobile device clicks within your campaign, or even within an ad group.  You could also effectively turn the mobile targeting ‘off” by setting the bid to -100%:

You will also be able to adjust your bids for Location too.  Here’s an example of location targeting for the Leicester area, biased towards clicks from within the city. Note that next to the highlighted ‘Locations tab, there are others for ‘Ad schedule’ and ‘Devices’. This is where you will make your adjustments for Location, Time of Day and Devices within your campaign:

Do I need to do anything now?

The simple answer is ‘No’.  But the change will come, and Google will switch your campaigns over, most likely from the later part of July 2013.  So it will pay to have a note in your diary to monitor your campaigns very closely and look for otherwise-unexplained changes in the behaviour of your account, particularly any drops in Click Through Rate (CTR) for your campaigns.  You might need to look at those device settings and increase or decrease your mobile bids.

Personally, I think it worth taking a look around at your campaigns now and maybe try one or two new, small test campaigns, to get used to using the new system, and monitor where your best clicks are coming from in terms of context – place, device and time of day.  This will help you refine your campaigns, particularly with reference to the type of devices your customers use when searching for your area of expertise.  Don’t forget to have a look at mobile traffic trends in your Google Analytics account too.

Then when you feel confident about how the new AdWords Enhanced Campaigns format works, you could hit the ‘Get Started’  button to upgrade all of your campaigns.  Again, monitor them closely for drops in CTR and tweak them accordingly.

This was a brief overview of a big AdWords change. There are other areas of improvement within the Enhanced Campaigns upgrade, so if you need help with your AdWords campaigns, don’t forget we have Google AdWords Qualified team members here at Hallam.

Links to further reading on this subject:

Google Enhanced Campaigns Video

Setting Bid Adjustments in Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

They have either been notified by Google that they have links coming from bad websites, or taken the matter into their own hands.  They have decided to clean up their back link profile in order to improve their rankings in the search engines.

Having done an analysis of all their incoming links, they have decided that a link from the Hallam website is a “bad” link, and sent a removal request asking me to get rid of the link to their site.

This is a copy of the email I’m receiving:

What is wrong with this link removal request?

• They have not provided me with the specific  page URL containing the link they want removing.  Instead, they said there is simply a link somewhere on my site and expect me to hunt around and find it
• They expect me to notify them once the link has been removed. I am doing them the favour of removing the link, and have neither the time nor inclination to reply
• I have now received 5 copies of this email, and I removed the link as of the first request.  They are not recrawling or updating their link removal request database when links have been successful removed
• Repeated requests to remove links will often lead to successful removal, but they are sending the exact same message, at 3 day intervals.  Testing different messages, or escalating message content might be more successful

• They are using a one-size fits all strategy for link removal.  The Hallam website is a high quality site based on a number of trust measures that Google takes into account. A link from our site will not damage your back link profile. My guess would be that this company is getting rid of all no follow links that are a result of blog comments, which could potentially be damaging in terms of artificial anchor text.  But having found the link on our site, I found that they had left a rather harmless looking comment, with non-branded anchor text. So this link request, unfortunately is throwing the baby away with the bathwater.

3 Lessons to learn from this link removal request

1. Make absolutely sure that you are asking for appropriate links to be removed, and don’t make sweeping generalisations of links you want to get rid of which will result in losing good links
2. Make it is as easy as possible for the offending site to get rid of the bad links by providing the specific URL of the offending page with the link
3. Use appropriate tools to track and update the removal of your inbound links.  You will need this information as part of restoring your reputation with Google.

Most website owners are aware of the requirement for an about us page to exist, however it can be easy to underestimate the power of the content included within this section of a website.

Your about us page is likely to be one of the more heavily visited pages on a website, so ensuring you include the right information is essential. The content within the about us section can also be great for search engine optimisation, so in this post I give my top 10 tips for optimising a websites about us section.

1)      Company History – Informing your visitors and potential customers of how long you have been around provides reassurance that you are a professional and established outfit. Try to tell the story of your company in a concise and organised fashion, include a handful of paragraphs on when the company was founded, the reason why it was founded and how you have progressed as a business – Guttridge LTD even developed a graphical timeline and brochure to celebrate 50 years in business.

2)      Key Services – No doubt you will have a specific, well optimised pages to demonstrate your services in detail, so use your about us section to summarise your core services and activities into a couple of short paragraphs or bullet points.

3)     Meet The Team – Most people like to know who they are dealing with, so including information regarding your staff is a great way to put faces to names.  Consider providing each member of staff with their own bio page which briefly demonstrates their experience and history. Feel free to take a look at Team Hallam’s meet the team page and how we have structured this section of our website.

4)      Certifications and Accreditations – If your business has ever earned any accreditations, won any awards, or your staff member have achieved any certifications, then your about us page is perfect place to showcase these details.

5)      Testimonials and Reviews – Including testimonials and reviews on your website act as a great trust signal and can positively affect conversion rates. Testimonial and reviews are also great for SEO because it gives you a chance to provide Google with structured data, giving your content the chance to display rich snippets in the search engine results.

6)      Press and News Links – Your about us section can provide the perfect area in which to display news specific to your business separately to industry news or general blog posts, enhancing the visibility of this content and giving potential visitors the chance to read about the positive things your business has been up to.

7)      Events – Much in the same way as press exposure, why not use your about us section to create a schedule of your upcoming events? If you are attending any exhibitions, marketing events or industry conferences then include these within your about us section to raise awareness and demonstrate that you are active within your industry.

8)      Internal Linking – Visitors may visit your about us pages searching for information that may in fact be located within other areas of your site – in which case, help them out by pointing them in the right direction. It’s not uncommon to see about us pages linking to policies and important documents.

9)      Employment Opportunities – If you are on the lookout for new members of staff then let people know by advertising for free on your own website. The about us page is the perfect place for candidates to learn about your business so it makes sense to advertise your vacancies there too.

10)   Calls To Action – Once a potential customer has browsed all of the great content on your about us section and figured out just how good your company is, they may be ready to make a purchase or enquiry. Use well placed call to actions within your about us section to point people in the right direction and don’t solely rely on them going directly to your contact us page.

Summary

I hope you find this post useful, and if you have any other suggestion of things to include within the about us section of a website then please feel free to post in the comments below.  Of course, to find more out about Hallam Internet then please visit our about us page.

Susan’s favourite posts

How Should Journalists Interpret Social Data? by @JanRezab: A great essential checklist for journalist, or anyone, wishing to interpret social media analysis data correctly.

What does Google Know about you? by @SusanHallam: A post from a while ago that has proved popular again this month, an exploration of what Google knows about us and how they know it!

Mike’s favourite posts

The Disavow Tool Works! Real Sites, Real Recoveries! by @Tim_Grice: A perfect post to clear up any misconceptions associated with Google’s Disavow Tool, why you should use it and how.

The Difference between Penguin and an Unnatural Links Penalty by @MarieHaynes: A very informative and useful post to help you understand which penalty you’ve been hit with and how to revoke it.

Ben’s favourite posts

8 Reasons Why You Need to Establish Yourself as an Authority on Google+ by Jeff Sauer at @jeffalytics: A case study showing just how important Google+ can be and how to make the most out of it.

Rel=Confused? Answers to Your Rel=Canonical Questions by Dr. Pete: If you are confused by the rel=canonical tag then here are some great answers to many of the questions you may be asking yourself!

Sarah’s favourite posts

How to Get the New Facebook News Feed Look for 2013 Early by Chris Handy at @thinkhandy: Want to see what your new News Feed will look like? Find out here!

10 Interesting Digital Marketing Stats we’ve Seen this Week by @DavidMoth: Some really eye-opening stats including the key to e-commerce and how many of us are oblivious to online invasions of personal information.

Chris’ favourite posts

Universal Analytics Business Applications by the Analytics Team at @LovesData: A post and video explanation of some of the features in Google’s new Universal Analytics and some great opportunities for businesses to use the data.

Is Editorial the New E in Ecommerce? by Chris Gorell Barnes over at @CGorellBarnes: An exploration of the benefits of seamless commerce integration and the rise of mobile shopping.

Sean’s favourite posts

The Amazing “Google Now” by @DannySullivan: Some amazing examples of Google Now reading minds and how it works as well as some predictions of how Google may use it in the future.

Bing Relaunches Places for Business by Barry Schwartz at @rustybrick: Some recent information about how Bing’s new Places for Business will differ from Bing Business Portal.

Abra’s favourite posts

How to be a Prolific Writer by @MarcelaDeVivo: Some useful tips on how to write great articles about anything and everything and why reading is so important.

13 Brands Using LinkedIn Company Page Features the Right Way by Pamela Vaughan over at @pamelump: A great article showing off everything you can do to make the most of your LinkedIn Company Page.

If you’re struggling for inspiration for new content on your website, I have a quick tip for you.  There might be something relevant to your business that you haven’t heard of, or paid much attention to, yet is bringing you visitors – a little subject nugget that might not bring you thousands of visits, but might bring you some with profitable intention.

Most businesses are found on Google by variations of their brand name or the names of the brands or services they sell.  But a smaller number of visitors will arrive by other non-branded keyword phrases, which might turn out to be potentially profitable visitors, if they can find a solution to their problem.

Intrigued? Here we go then… Five steps:

1 – Go to your Google Analytics Account and set a decent date range – it’s up to you, but in this example I selected six months. If you have a fairly low number of visitors, you’ll probably want longer. If you get alot of visitors, maybe shorter.

 2. Go to your Traffic Sources report and select Organic…

3. Now filter out your brand and/or products that you are most searched for. Use the Advanced Filter and make your exclusion selections. The quickest way is to exclude keywords. You can filter out anything to do with your brand by using a Regular Expression as in the image note.  Choose the things you know you get found for to exclude:

4. Click ‘Apply’ and see the results!  You might have a few or many and you can alter the view at the bottom right of the page.

5. You can now order your results by keyword, visits, pages per visit, visit duration, New visits and Bounce rate.  You might find a few visits for very similar terms which could give you insights into areas of your website that could do with an overhaul to attract more visitors, or perhaps even to inspire new content idea …

By spending a little time delving into this data, you can extract terms which look interesting, give you good quality visits with high page views and time on site, compared to your average.  Such visits are from people interested in what you do, with a particular problem to solve. Could your content be improved, do you have a good call-to-action in place?

Is there a nugget in there which could open the door to new business?

You can take this method to the next level by creating a Non-Branded Traffic Report for your Google Analytics Dashboard.

Prior to launching a Google AdWords PPC campaign there are a variety of factors to consider. Not only is it important to develop your understanding of the AdWords system its bidding and cost per click based platform, but you should be fully aware of your end goals and expectations.

Driving traffic to your website via an AdWords campaign is the simple part. Ensuring that the traffic is targeted with visitors who are ready to buy is tough, but arguably, what is even more difficult is then ensuring that visitor expectations are met to provide you with the highest possible chance of conversion.

If you dive into an AdWords campaign unprepared then the  results can be expensive with little reward. This post aims to provide AdWords advice and takes into account some of the key steps and considerations you should make when launching an AdWords Campaign.

Consider the Campaign Structure

A well structured campaign will help you to maintain an organised approach and ensure relevancy from your keywords right through to your sites landing pages. Not only that, but it will help you to keep your bidding and click costs competitively low whilst achieving high Ad positions and healthy click through rates.

You should take the time to consider which keywords you would like bid on and conduct some in depth keyword research, including which keyword match types to use and how much you are prepared to pay for each click delivered from each keyword. You should then group these keywords into tightly themed Ad Groups.

Each Ad Group should then contain a selection of adverts that are written to include your desired keywords whilst remaining persuasive and informative. Ensure the adverts destination is set to a highly relevant and well optimised landing page.

Why Landing Pages are Important

Well optimised landing pages, both from an SEO and design perspective are vital to ensuring that your AdWords costs are competitively low and that you have the best chance of visitors converting on your website.

Before you set an AdWords campaign live you should strongly consider if the pages you intend to send traffic to provide the necessary information and signals to ensure a visitor sticks around long enough to make complete a desired action, whether it be requesting more information or making a purchase.

Ensure that your landing pages include the themes and keywords set out within your Ad groups and that your page delivers the relevant signals and prompts to the users? Our Commercial Director Mike Hallam recently wrote an informative post regarding how to get more conversions from your landing pages.

Ensure that your contact and enquiry forms trigger ‘thank you’ or ‘confirmation’ pages on a unique URL. This is important because the page will provide reassurance that the visitor’s enquiry is being handed, and also give you a unique page to track as a measurable conversion.

Decide on and Configure Conversions

Measuring conversions are an essential element of your campaign as this enables you to measure the effectiveness of your efforts and will give you an indication of how users are interacting with your website once they landed on your site.

Set up conversion tracking to monitor the number of enquiries generated via your website.  Visit the conversion tab to generate the tracking code and install this into the html of any pages which you would like to track.

A popular conversion to measure is often a contact or enquiry form. A well designed and implemented contact form is a great way to capture the essential information of your visitors and generate potential leads. You should make sure that your visitors know exactly how to contact you and make it as simple as possible for them by removing any non essential steps from the enquiry process.

Link Google Analytics to your Adwords Account

By linking your Google Analytics account to your AdWords account you are able to review and analyse how the visitors that have clicked on Adverts have moved and navigated around your website.

Google Analytics keeps a measure of all the traffic that arrives on your site and can provide valuable information relating to user activity, including where people enter and exit your website. The data provided by Analytics can help you to establish how well configured your campaign is  and how much of your converting traffic is delivered via AdWords.

In Summary

Before launching an AdWords campaign you should not only consider the structure of your campaign, but establish a set of goals and performance indicators that your website will be able to effectively deliver once you have driven relevant and targeted traffic to it.

If you would like to know more about how we can help and advise you with your Google Adwords campaign, then please head on over to our PPC services page.

If you are not familiar with Cache then this will show you the last date and time that Google indexed your site, and show you the text only version of your site the way the Google search engine sees it.

If you are logged into your Google account, the Share link will take you directly to your Google+ share dialogue box:

Barry Schwartz over at SearchEngineLand has also noticed that the Instant Previews have disappeared

I also saw this last week, and clearly Google is testing new features, if not always commenting on the tests at this point.

It’s fantastic to have people endorsing you for your personal skills and everything, but people recommending the services of your company – now that is incredible. So, now I’m going to show you how to make the most of your LinkedIn Services Page and how to get your lovely clients (and maybe even your beautiful, loyal newsletter and blog post readers) to recommend your services!

Before you start:
1) Get yourself into Internet Explorer – it may not be pretty but it seems to be one of the only browsers to allow your text to format properly.
2) Get your website open on another tab.
3) You’re ready to go.

There are so many features to take advantage of so here is how to create the perfect LinkedIn Products & Services Page.

How to Begin your LinkedIn Products & Services Page:

Ok, there are three steps here but they’re easy!
1) Are you offering products or services? You know what you offer
2) Pick a relevant category
3) Choose a name for your service/product

Think about the services or products you offer – look at your website, if you have pages dedicated to particular services or products use these! Make a product or service for each product or service you offer. Well, don’t go mental. You want enough services or products to explain what you do but you don’t want to dilute it down too much! Remember: You want recommendations! If you have 50 products or services then no one will even bother finding one they want to recommend you for, or even worse you’ll have one recommendation on each when you could have 10 recommendations on 5 core services. Your product or services page will end up looking a little something like this, so if you have too many no one will scroll through them all:

How to Insert an Image into your Products & Services Page:

Picture time!

Add an image – choose something professional looking and relevant to your company and that service or product (if you can), having a different picture for each service or product will look a lot better than the same standard picture repeated over and over.

This might be a potential client’s first impression of your business and what you offer so make it good! The picture size is 100x80pixels so finding or altering your pictures to fit those dimensions will give you a clean, professional finish.

What to Write on your LinkedIn Products & Services Page:

Get your text right.
Write a description of what you do and why you’re good at it. Below there is the option of creating a bulleted list of features – these will appear below your description, write something to attract and grab your customer, maybe some key benefits or features of what you are offering. You could also add some of your own bulleted lists in the main body of text (see our email marketing page below) – it could help make your page more striking.

How to Add Links to your Website from LinkedIn:

As I mentioned before, you may have specific pages on your website that relate to your products or services. At Hallam Internet, we have a pages dedicated to Paid Search, Social Media, Email Marketing, SEO and Marketing Strategies. We have each of our services pages linking back to the relevant webpage. Add your relevant page now. Not only can people follow this link to your website, LinkedIn also automatically provides you with lovely anchor text mimicking your service or product title.

You may be starting to wonder whether all these extras are necessary (there are a lot of them) but the answer is definitely yes. Adding all the extras LinkedIn are offering will make your page look more professional. Take a look at our email marketing page, you want to create the best impression possible – after all this could be a potential client’s first impression of your company and what you offer, so take full advantage of what is essentially a free advertising platform!

How to Add your Employees onto your LinkedIn Products & Services:

You can add three company specialists for each service or product. Your specialists’ faces will appear to the right of your company description allowing people to visit their profile page and inviting them to send messages. In any business it is important to build trust and a great way of doing that is being straight up, showing your face and attaching yourself to what you do.

How to Add a Promotion on your LinkedIn Products & Services Page:

Add a promotion – Do you have any promotions? If you do – put them here. If you don’t put something here anyway! If you do not have a promotion running try putting a link to a relevant page to your site or a recent blog post. Then use the description box to talk more about how great you are! Your title will be the anchor text to your link, so make it something good!

How to Add a Video to your LinkedIn Page:

Add a video! If you have a company video why not add this, if you have lots of videos specific to your services or products, add these! If you have one, add one. LinkedIn business profiles are free so utilise all the space you have!

How to Get More Recommendations on LinkedIn:

Get yourself some recommendations! Your clients obviously appreciate you and love what you do so ask them if they will show it by recommending your services! Maybe your loyal newsletter and blog post readers will too (you know you love us)!

So there we go. LinkedIn is such a great way to show people what you do and more importantly that you’re good at it! Updates about your recommendations will not only show people that you are doing a good job, but might even allow people to learn about services they didn’t even know you provided!

If you want to learn more about how to make the most of what LinkedIn offers, take a look at Susan’s post about LinkedIn Endorsements or LinkedIn Recommendations

In order to measure effectiveness then you need to start with your aims and objectives for your blog.   Are you looking to:

• use your blog as a search engine optimisation tool to drive new visitors to your site
• position yourself as an expert at what you do
• raise your profile
• build trust in order to gain new customers
• engage with your current customer base
• better understand what your customers want

Depending on what you are going to achieve, there are a number of ways of measuring whether you are doing a good job, and how effective your blogging is.

Social Crawlytics: measuring your most shared blogging content

Social Crawlytics (https://socialcrawlytics.com/) is a free social media measurement tool that lets you know your most shared content and the social networks your blog content is reaching.

Enter your blog web address, and you will see how well your blog is performing across the social network, for example how many people have tweeted your content or shared it on Google+ .  In the chart below you can see we have a strong sharing profile on Twitter and LinkedIn presence, but not quite as signficant on Facebook or Pinterest:

In addition to the top level measurements, we can also drill down to see which blog posts are proving to be most popular.   This report breaks down shares for each blog post by social platform.  What can we learn from this?  Perhaps how to best plan our future content, and in our case we should continue to develop our infographics:

We are a very competitive lot, and Social Crawlytics will also provide a breakdown of your most popular authors if you write a team blog.

And if you are into competitor research, you can very nicely run this analysis on your competitors’ blogs to see just how well they are doing, and the strategies that are working well for them!

Google Analytics Blog Performance Dashboard

The second of the tools you can use to measure the effectiveness of your blog is your own Google Analytics data.

We have created a Dashboard that gives us key performance indicators for our blog.

What are we measuring on this dashboard??

• our most popular posts
• how often each post has acted as a landing page from a search engine
• what channels are driving blog readers
• how many new readers we are reaching

To sum up…

I am very impressed by the Social Crawlytics data, and would recommend you give it a spin if you want another view on how well your blog is performing.

And setting up a Google Analytics Dashboard will help you to better understand the impact your blog is having, and if it is supporting your marketing objectives.