We are proud to announce that we are now working with the international children’s charity EveryChild on their PPC and social campaigns.

As their official marketing partner, we will be providing advice on the implementation of their social strategy whilst also managing their Google Pay per Click advertising campaign – all with the aim of increasing their brand reach, raising awareness of the cause and to increase the number of online donations.

Jonah Klein, who is the Digital Editor for EveryChild, said: “From improving our PPC advertising to offering expert, strategic advice on how to build our social media presence, Liberty Marketing have been a great help to our organisation. Liberty’s support will help us reach and improve the lives of more vulnerable children across the world.”

PPC Account Manager, Amy Lyddon, who is taking care of the EveryChild PPC campaign said: "It’s a pleasure having EveryChild on board. PPC is a very effective way to help raise awareness of their services, such as protecting vulnerable children and getting children back into families. PPC has helped drive relevant traffic to their website, building charity awareness and encouraging online donations. Knowing that we are helping to influence change through PPC is great."

More than 24 million children grow up without parental care; EveryChild aim to put an end to this so that these youngsters don’t grow up vulnerable and alone.  They set out to protect these children from the threat of malnutrition, violence and exploitation, and to keep families together wherever possible.

We’re thrilled to be working with such a fantastic charity to help them make a difference to the lives of vulnerable children, and we are eager to work with additional charities in the future … so watch this space …

What were you doing in May of 2008? Madonna and Justin Timberlake had hit Number 1 with 4 Minutes, the top film at the box office was Iron Man, Boris Johnson was the new Mayor of London and Britain looked forward to another wet, miserable summer. There was also something brewing in the marketing scene here in Cardiff...Liberty Marketing was born and today is our 5th birthday.

The company was started in a home office but after just a few months and a handful of happy clients, word of mouth ensured that we quickly grew and needed to move into something a bit more professional. Our first office was in Cardiff Gate Business Park, which we moved into in December 2008. That office was just big enough for two desks but by the time Kris Davies and Chris Gurner, future heads of Operations and PPC respectively, joined the team in 2010, we were a team of 7 and had taken over the room next door.

As more companies came to us for their SEO, Pay Per Click and social media campaigns, we outgrew our Cardiff Gate office and bought our current home in Llanishen Business Park in February 2011. Here, we developed ways in which we could offer more transparent and more effective services to our customers, including the Apollo project management system, which gives clients up-to-date information about what we’re doing on their projects.

A couple of years on and our 28 members of staff are spread over three different teams and span a wide range of personalities and specialities – from SEO experts and inventive copywriters to trained PPC professionals, social whizzes and much more. On a daily basis, we’re working with some interesting brands, such as Millennium Stadium, ConstructaQuote, Fiorelli, University of Hertfordshire, London Women’s Clinic, Wales Millennium Centre, Folly Farm and Visit Cymru. And we’re very proud that 12 clients from our first year of business are still using us.

We’d like to thank you for your support and custom so far – here’s to the next 5!

Our amazing cake, thanks to Lianne.

We have just discovered a lot of very dodgy links pointing at our site. It looks like, within the last few months, thousands of links have started pointing in to us from adult sites, irrelevant blog comments and low quality directory listings.

One of our local competitors has obviously had enough of us ranking well for their target keywords, so is running a negative SEO campaign to try and wipe us off Google. Classy.

Negative SEO is where someone tries to push your site down (or even out of) the Google rankings by building lots of bad links to your site. Since the Google Penguin update launched and showed us that low quality sites and over-optimised anchor-text can cause serious SEO problems, the negative SEO industry has thrived and now even has a nickname - Google Bowling. By employing these tactics, you can outrank your competitors not because you are any better than them or Google prefers the content on your site, but because you have no morals and can only do well when others fall.

We are being targeted heavily for the keyword SEO Cardiff, meaning one of our local competitors has had enough of us winning a lot of the local projects and wants to hit us here. The ironic thing is, the decent SEO projects very rarely come in off local Google searches! Almost all of our work comes as word of mouth recommendations or from events we attend, so even if this campaign works and you no longer see us in Google for local keywords, it isn't going to harm us as a business. We will continue to grow and win SEO projects because of the quality of our work and the hundreds of happy clients who regularly tell their friends.

If you are looking to engage an SEO agency within the Cardiff and South Wales area then make sure you do your homework. There are obviously some very dodgy people locally who cannot be bothered to market themselves properly, rather resorting to tactics like this.

We will be keeping an eye on the links and will speak to our contacts within Google to highlight this issue. One upside of being big enough to get targeted by competitors with this type of SEO campaign is that we are also big enough to have numerous contacts within the search engines who will help us when needed.

I’ll be seeing what tools they have to help us identify who did this and when I know, I will be publishing their details on this blog for everyone to see. What we will also do is record our activity and then blog about it. We have seen this type of work happen to a few of our clients who are in very competitive markets and it could easily happen to you too, so watch this space to see the impact of negative SEO and what we will do to take care of it.

Panda and Penguin. If you’re in any way connected to the world of SEO, these are two animals you need to know about. You’ll probably have heard about these cute, fuzzily-monikered Google algorithm updates (which change the way the search engine ranks websites) at some point. Especially since every time another algorithm update hits, online marketers everywhere descend into a frenzy. 

How new algorithms unfold can impact enormously on any online marketing you have in place. That’s why it’s important to have at least some understanding of what it all means for the SEO work connected to your business - so here’s a brief summary of what Panda and Penguin were all about, and what you need to be aware of...

About Google Panda

Panda first hit in February 2011 (US) with Panda 1.0 (also known as the ‘Farmer’s Update’) targeting websites with low quality content, in particular content farms and second rate article directories. Google had enough of these clogging up the search results so took action. It’s estimated that Panda 1.0 affected almost 12% of US search terms when it first emerged.

Following this initial rollout, Panda continued with updates every few months (we are currently on Panda version 25) , taking the update global and targeting spammy, low quality, thin content, as well as duplicate and keyword heavy content, in order to improve the experience for web users and to improve the search engine results.

Websites that were hit particularly hard were content aggregators. The way Google sees it, sites that gather and store articles from other sites don't add much value to the web, so were penalised for the heavy amount of duplicate content on them. When they launched Panda, Google said that they were: "evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content … attention has shifted to ‘content farms’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content".

Unfortunately for webmasters and online businesses the world over, there was a tonne of collateral damage. Ecommerce sites in particular, were hit too. The reason being that they often have the exact same product descriptions as other sites, often passed straight from the manufacturer and uploaded to the site. Google saw a lot of these Ecommerce sites as copying other content so they failed the Panda test and rankings plummeted.

About Google Penguin

Penguin waddled onto the scene and first caused waves in the SEO world in April 2012; Penguin made its entrance by penalising questionable SEO tactics and hitting sites that were violating Google’s Webmaster guidelines by using manipulative or ‘black hat’ SEO techniques to improve their rankings. Whereas Panda was about content and on-site SEO, Penguin zoned in on off-site SEO, in particular low quality links and over-optimised anchor text. It delivered a slap to any sites that appeared guilty, which at the time saw a large number of sites fall. 

Lots of businesses that had been outsourcing their SEO on the cheap (i.e. either by responding to one of those "We guarantee rankings. We build thousands of links for $99 a month" type emails or by using an agency that outsources to these people) got hit, even when they had been ranking well off these dodgy tactics for months or even years. The reality of Penguin is that it put many people out of business, as the rankings penalties were often so huge that sites would go from thousands of visitors a day to none.

How to stay out of trouble

If you want to stay on the right side of the Google Panda and Penguin updates and keep your site safely at the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), you need to understand what makes them tick and what they love. Adhere to their preferences and you shouldn’t have any problems.

Panda hates content thin pages, content farms, duplicate content and has set out to penalise these in order to increase the relevancy of pages and show users pages that have high quality, unique content. Therefore, you need to focus on producing strong, engaging content that is relevant and that your users will find useful. If you can ensure that your site copy is unique, of a high quality and provides useful information to your audience, then you will have one happy Panda!

Penguin is effectively a link filter and doesn’t like sites that try too hard to cheat the SERPs; it hates low quality links and too many keywords being used in the anchor text, so what makes Penguin happy? Well Penguin loves websites that appear to be naturally good without having to overdo it; it likes to see natural links based on quality, Panda-friendly content. If you are building links then you need to ensure you have a varied link profile, with hyperlinks pointing in from authoritative, relevant websites and when you have the option to choose anchor-text, make sure you vary it and don't always make it keyword focused.

Panda and Penguin check-list

Follow this quick check-list to ensure you’re not in the Panda or Penguin firing line:

• Keep content relevant and engaging - write for users, not for search engines
• Make sure your backlink profile is natural and doesn’t contain many spammy links, paid links or links from sites that Google would consider low quality
• Ensure that content is unique and not taken from other websites
• Don’t over-optimise your anchor text
• Avoid link building from rubbish websites that only exist for the purpose of manipulating search engines i.e. general directories with no quality control, article submission sites that publish any old thing, link farms, etc.

What’s coming next?

But don’t rest on your laurels: there are new updates every few months. Google changed over 500 times last year and there were many other changes on top of Panda and Penguin. The word on the web is that another major Penguin update is on the horizon; Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, revealed last month that they are working on Penguin 4, cryptically stating that the way Penguin works will be changed. So, while we all sit and wait for this next big Penguin update in anticipation, it’s worth clearing up that backlink profile, refining your content, and checking that you’re not currently stepping over the line!

We will be visiting and speaking at a number of events over the next few weeks...

BrightonSEO

Kris, Rhodri, Ben, Monique, Dean and Rachel will be attending this great event on Friday. They will be there all day sitting in on the seminars and will also be staying over, to take advantage of the after party. If you are also going to be there, make sure you join them for a beer.

Carmarthenshire Tourism Summit

On Wednesday 17th April, I will be at the event in the Parc Y Scarlets Stadium. I'll be giving a workshop on SEO and improving website performance. The synopsis is:

"Get the most out of your website: 5 search engine marketing tips

Learn the five main things you need to be doing to take advantage of search engine traffic. We will look at how to choose the right keywords to focus on, and then how to use those on your site. We will then examine the benefits of blogging and how to get other websites linking to yours. We will also look at how you can attract local visitors with Google+ Local. All of which will increase the amount of business you get from Google, Yahoo! and Bing."

Torfaen Digital Enterprise Festival

On Tuesday 23rd April, I will also be presenting two slots on SEO to the tourism and hospitality sector. The synopsis is the same as the above event. 

If you are based in South West Wales or South East Wales and fall within the tourism industry then these two events look like they will be time well spent, so it's worth you checking them out. 

Sorry that we’ve been quiet on the blog of late; 2013 so far has been a very busy one, with plenty of exciting new clients and projects to get our teeth into. 

We’re also delighted to welcome six more fresh and friendly faces to Liberty Marketing. This year, James Cavanagh, Rosella Pollard, Cher Cheung, Laura Mackenzie, Pooja Parab and Monique Allin joined us – while we’ve even more joining over the forthcoming weeks.

James and Monique are both joining us as SEO Account Co-ordinators, and will be helping a number of different clients with their day-to-day online strategies. James is a recent digital graduate, with experience in web development and digital animation, while Monique’s social media background has seen her work with The AA, the National Trust and the fashion brand Internacionale.   

Having graduated from Newport University with a degree in Business & Marketing, Cher has worked for charities and public sector clients across England and Wales, and joins our PPC team as a PPC Account Executive. And Pembrokeshire-born Laura, who’ll be joining us as an SEO Specialist, has worked in web development, online marketing and database analysis for a number of clients since graduating with a Business & IT degree in 2006. 

Rosella, our new SEO Copywriter, is an English and Creative Writing graduate who has written for More Magazine, NME and a digital agency in Prague, and keeps herself busy by reviewing gigs and festivals in her spare time. Last but not least is Pooja, who comes to us as our new Social Media & PR specialist with content marketing experience in the entertainment industry in her native India. 

Are you interested in working for one of Britain’s fast-growing agencies? We’re always looking for talented marketers with a passion for digital. For more information about working at Liberty Marketing, visit our careers page today.

The Pay Per Clickers amongst you will be delighted to hear that there are a whole host of PPC updates coming to a computer near you, as well as some which were rolled out towards the back end of 2012. With the PPC sphere constantly changing, here’s a helpful guide to the 5 main areas we think that Pay Per Click advertisers should be on top of this year.

Mobile

As the years go by the reach of mobile technology grows and grows. This year the stranglehold will grow stronger than ever, with 2013 set to become the year more people access the internet on a mobile device than through their computer. For many of us the smartphone is the first thing we pick up in the morning and the last thing we put down at night. If you are still not harnessing the power of PPC for mobiles then the potential market you are missing out on is enormous. The time for being able to justify ignoring the mobile market has been and gone, so we recommend that you test out specific mobile campaigns and make sure that your site and landing pages work on mobile devices.

If your site is ecommerce then you may find that people research more with their mobile but are more likely to make the actual purchase later on a desktop or laptop. Bear this in mind when choosing the keywords to put into your mobile campaigns, as the ones used at the start of the user journey may work better for you. Check the Assisted Conversions data within Analytics to see if it is the case that these PPC campaigns are influencing more online purchases.

Product Listing Ads

Product Listing ads allow retailers to promote their products on Google Shopping, with each ad displaying the product price, image, business name and more to users. Setting up a campaign is easy and can be done either directly from the Merchant Centre or by using your existing AdWords account. Once the account has been created Google will automatically display your products which are most relevant to a particular search query.

We did a lot of testing of Product Targets within AdWords in 2012 and found that in the majority of cases, the click-through-rates and conversion-rates grew significantly for ecommerce websites that take advantage of this feature.

Remarketing

There has been plenty of debate over the effectiveness of Google Remarketing with many users finding the adverts a bit annoying and invasive. Remarketing ads are those from a particular site which follow you about wherever your online activity takes you (so long as the websites you visit allow Google AdSense placements). The beauty of this strategy is the customers being targeted are those who have already visited your site and performed a certain action, ensuring an underlying interest in the products or services you offer. By spending money on prequalified traffic it is possible for a Google Remarketing campaign to play an important part in improving overall ROI, as you get a second chance with visitors.

Remarketing isn’t just for attracting new business. We have run campaigns for clients in the financial services and training markets, where the adverts are used to remind people to complete the sign-up process or up-sell them to a different package. In each case, we saw success and will be further testing out Remarketing campaigns this year.

Attribution Modelling

An attribution model allows marketers to take a broader view of the journey a customer goes on before a sale or conversion is made. Traditionally conversions were credited to the last ad clicked or viewed, whilst an attribution model gives credit to each ‘touch point’ the user interacts with along the way. 

The benefit of attribution modelling is it allows marketers to obtain an understanding of the bigger picture, in terms of the part each marketing channel is playing in a customer’s journey. By analysing multiple touch points users can gain new insights into their campaigns giving them a more accurate representation of the worth each marketing channel presents. 2012 saw attribution modelling become mainstream, with most of the industry events holding topics based on the subject, and we think 2013 will be the year that all advertisers start taking it seriously, especially as the attribution modelling toolkit for Google Analytics Premium users will be filtered down to all basic level accounts at some point this year.

Tag Manager Tracking

With marketing budgets increasingly under the spotlight, tracking, which helps you understand how your customers convert is becoming an increasingly important tool. There are plenty of tracking options available to you, but if you’re worried about how to implement the correct code or how long it will take to get through your IT development backlog, Google’s Tag Manager could be the solution for you.

Google Tag Manager allows optimisation tags to be changed quickly and easily without the need for your development team to go behind the scenes and start playing around with the site code. The system uses a simple and intuitive interface which allows users to edit their website’s tags. This can help to increase the speed campaigns go live, reduce developer costs and allow you to identify errors before they occur.

With so much new to the world of PPC advertising, the year ahead looks to be a busy and exciting one for search engine marketers. If you want to discuss these points further then please give us a ring.

2012 has been a very interesting year. Lots of great new projects came on board, many new talented marketers joined the team and we saw a lot of changes in the SEO, Pay Per Click and social media markets.

We want to thank everyone who made it such a special year and wish you a merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous new year.

Our offices are shut from 6 pm this Friday (the 21st) and will re-open at 8 am on Wednesday 2nd. We look forward to seeing you in 2013.

So you don't forget who we are in the meantime, here's a snap from our office Christmas party:

And for good measure, here's an instagrammed picture of our Christmas trees, courtesy of Rachel:

Since the Google Penguin update hit earlier this year, online marketers have been faced with a simple choice: go ethical, go high-quality, or go home. 

Black-hat techniques such as keyword stuffing, duplicated content and link bombing were heavily penalised by Panda and Penguin – with many search queries affected. What this means today is that it’s more important than ever for a website to feature good quality, regularly-updated content and links from reputable, relevant sources.

These algorithm updates have seen guest blogging – once the time-consuming, rarely used side of link building – become a key feature of campaigns as SEOs realise they must chase quality over quantity. 

But how exactly can guest blogging help a brand?

Backlinks

At the very basic level, guest blogging opportunities will provide you with a relevant link or two back to your website. What’s more, the blog on which you’re guesting on is likely to enjoy a higher page rank than standard article sites, which will give your link much greater weight. However, limit your backlinks to around 2 per article; any more than that and your great quality blog may start to look spammy to search engine spiders and, more importantly, to anyone reading it.

New, relevant traffic

When writing a guest blog, you’re also introducing your website and its services to a new, receptive audience of hundreds, maybe thousands of people – generating traffic for your website and potential customers for your business. This is about more than links. This is about people.

Authority

What’s more, by talking about aspects of your business in an authoritative way, you’re establishing your brand as an expert voice in the industry: a trusted, familiar face amongst the faceless millions of the internet!

Social media-savvy bloggers

Recent Google algorithm updates have given greater authority than ever before to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These social factors are now crucial in determining a website’s popularity and its competitiveness, and bloggers are some of the most active groups on social media. By submitting a guest blog, you’re building a relationship with users who could retweet, share and blog about you now and in the future. 

But be careful…

However, it’s important to be wary. Many blog owners are seeking to capitalise on the popularity of guest blogging and their blog’s respectable page rank by charging for links from guest blogs. This black-hat process can’t be condoned; while it may result in a short-term boost up the rankings, if Google finds out (and they often do) your site could be heavily penalised. 

And unfortunately, as the practice becomes more popular, the fact is that your competitors may step up their guest blogging activities – making it harder to find truly valuable, unique guest blogs. Expertslink builders will still find traction in the area, but you’ll need truly innovative, well-written and interesting articles to get featured.

Should your online marketing campaign be focusing on local SEO? Here, Liberty’s new recruit Ben Magee offers some helpful hints and tips.

With so many facets of online marketing out there, it can be hard to know whether to use local, organic or PPC optimisation to bring traffic to your website. Ultimately the importance of local SEO depends on the size and type of your business, but it’s hard to dispute that it has a huge role to play in any optimisation campaign and is dangerous to overlook given the recent trend of Google updates.

Venice update – A move towards universal results

The Venice Update that was rolled out back in March targeted local search results and had a huge impact on all local business owners. Unlike previous Google updates, Venice made local search results more relevant. Presuming you are allowing Google access to your location, the Venice update serves up the results it deems most relevant to your query and where you are.

Prior to this update, searches that involved place names would return a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) full of organic results. Post-Venice searches for services now return a first page dominated by Google Places listings. What this ultimately means is that, when a Google search is performed, the user will receive results based on their location rather than general results about the industry.

So what can I do to rank better locally?

In his annual compilation of the opinions of the leading minds of Local SEO, David Mihm set out what are currently accepted to be the major dos and don’ts of ranking well on a SERP that is dominated by local results.

The top 5 most important factors based on this survey are –

1. Having a physical address in city of search
2. Proper category associations
3. Proximity of address to centroid (the central point of a city as allocated by Google, not a Terminator robot…)
4. Domain authority of website
5. Quantity of structured citations (Internet Yellow Pages, data aggregators)

While these points may seem fairly self-explanatory, points 1 and 3 have the potential to cause problems if they’re not considered before embarking on a Local SEO campaign. For example, a business that provides services across all of South Wales but is based in Caerphilly will need a well-structured local SEO campaign to also rank well in Cardiff, Swansea and Newport.

In this instance, the company website will need to have references to the areas served, either on their contact page or preferably on unique, keyword rich pages devoted to each separate area.

Potential pitfalls of local SEO

In the same article, the most important negative ranking factors were also collated, and the two most common mistakes were multiple place pages and inconsistencies of name, address and postcode (NAP) across the internet.

Duplicate business listings are a problem as they can result in Google overlooking both entries entirely when retrieving localised results. To avoid this, ensure that your business only has one listing, and that all the information contained on it is correct.

When verifying a local page, Google seeks to corroborate the submitted contact information by crawling external websites to determine both the validity and importance of a page. Inconsistent citations across the web confuse the Google spiders and will be detrimental to a local SEO campaign. While this may sound obvious, it is important to remember that each instance of an NAP must be identical, for example ‘st’ is different to street, and ‘ave’ is not the same as avenue. Before starting out, be sure to settle on an NAP and keep it consistent across the internet.

So what does it all mean?

When deciding whether or not to focus your efforts on optimising for local results it depends on your target market and which keywords have been chosen. If your keywords involve a location, you need to seriously think about whether your Google Places page is optimised to draw traffic from any and all areas that you believe to be relevant.

In short, post-Venice, if you’re not doing an AdWords campaign or vying for positions in the local market, you could find yourself fighting for one of two organic slots above the fold on a Google search results page and could really struggle to make an impact on highly competitive local markets. That’s why local matters and where Liberty can help. To learn more submit an enquiry or have a chat to a member of our knowledgeable team today on 029 2076 6467.