Branded3

Powerful PR: Destigmatizing periods and Burger King beat the bullies

Kristina Semonella — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 10:24:26 +0000

We’ve picked a real mix of campaigns for this week’s PR round up.

From inspiring and purposeful campaigns that raise awareness over two major societal issues, to exciting new pop-ups and free doughnuts! We’ve even got a spooky spin thanks to our first favourite Halloween campaign of 2017, too.

Burger King reveal an uncomfortable truth

Burger King have released a powerful new ad campaign in collaboration with nobully.org, to raise awareness around daily bullying, and open our eyes to the importance of stepping in when we see it happening.

The brand set up two scenarios within one of their stores: they arranged for actors to create a scene where one child was being bullied, and another scene showing a member of staff delivering ‘bullied’ burgers to customers.

The sad reality was revealed to be that the majority of customers did nothing about the child being bullied, yet the majority complained to staff about their burger. You can watch it here:

We think the key message that comes across clearly in this video is that the majority of us are more willing to speak up about something if it directly affects us – and Burger King have been successful in highlighting this.

Plan International UK – #WeAllBleed

11^th October marked International Day of the Girl, which aims to highlight and address the challenges girls face, while promoting girls’ empowerment.

Plan International UK jumped on this international day to launch an influential campaign called #WeAllBleed, which aims to destigmatize menstruation and emphasize the normalcy of periods.

The children’s charity introduced miniature sanitary pads called ‘Plaster Pads’ that are worn like plasters, and sent them to celebrities and influencers to get on-board with the campaign. One simple search of the hashtag on Twitter shows how impactful this campaign has been:

I’m sticking it to period shame with @planuk this #dayofthegirl. Stand with me. https://t.co/kWeZIBQbn4 #Weallbleed pic.twitter.com/hAQBzZEioC

— lena headey (@IAMLenaHeadey) October 11, 2017

Tanya Barron, Plan International UK CEO, said: “Girls are telling us that they are embarrassed, confused and ashamed about periods, a completely natural biological process which happens to half the global population.

“As a society, we obsessively euphemise, belittle and silence menstruation; we need to address the impact this is having on girls.”

Beanz Meanz Heinz

The well-known slogan ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’ has been around for 50 years. To mark the occasion, Heinz have created a Bus Café that’s touring the country.

On board the bus, customers will be given the chance to dine on a variety of different toppings, and they’ll also have the opportunity to create their own personalised can label. It’s a fun idea that’s sure to be a hit with the public.

Check out a sneaky peak of the bus in the video below:

Hole-y moley! Doughnut Time are launching in the UK

Iconic Australian brand Doughnut Time are launching in the UK… and what better way to celebrate than free doughnuts?!

Their mouth-watering doughnuts look pretty remarkable, and they’re sure to draw in a crowd and create a buzz when they’re giving out some freebies. If you fancy nabbing one for yourself, make your way to Shaftesbury Avenue, London, on Friday 27th October.

But be quick, they’re only going to be giving them out free for two hours between 12:30-14:30.

DOUGHNUT LOVERS UNITE! ???????? Londoners drop your tea and get yourselves on the tube to Shaftesbury Avenue on Friday 27th October! FREE doughnuts will be handed out between 12:30PM-2:30PM. See you there babes!

A post shared by Doughnut Time UK (@doughnuttime_uk) on Oct 18, 2017 at 6:10am PDT

King of Fears Halloween Shop

As Halloween’s just around the corner, it only seems fitting to start the ball rolling on the PR front. So, we’re kicking off first with Budweiser’s Halloween plans.

In the run up to Halloween, Budweiser are creating ‘The King of Fears’ pop-up shop on Old Street, which sounds like it’ll be somewhere between a fancy dress shop and a haunted house. There will be haunted clothes rails and mirror tricks… along with free Bud with every purchase, of course.

Sascha Cordes, senior brand manager at Budweiser UK, said: “Our King of Fears Halloween shop is a UK-first, so we’re extremely excited to be opening our doors to Londoners – who can pop in on their way to our epic Nightmare Circus Halloween Party.

“The shop will feature an array of surprises, as well as items you can only normally find online – and all done in a way only Budweiser can.”

Last week our favourite PR campaigns were from the likes of IKEA, Made.com and Topman.

Ask a client anything: When Provident agreed to a Branded3 Q&A

Sophie Gilrain — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 10:06:22 +0000

At Branded3, our execution teams collectively aid the success of the campaigns we produce for our clients.

However, more often than not, it tends to be only those who are client facing who reap the satisfaction of delivering good news, or who spend enough time with clients to understand their pain points and how we can help to resolve them.

This gave us an idea: why not hold an agency-wide Q&A session with an actual living, breathing client, and give the whole business the opportunity to ‘ask a client anything’? What could possibly go wrong, we hear you ask?!

On this occasion, Jennie Green from Provident – one of our longest standing clients – very kindly agreed to jump in the hot seat. Here are a few of the highlights from the session:

How big of a role does Branded3 play in your overall marketing strategy?

Had you have asked me this two years ago, I would have said SEO was quite a small element of our marketing strategy. However, the shift in focus in the last 12 months has been phenomenal.

SEO is a difficult subject. It’s not as cut and dried as other campaigning, but together we have worked hard on educating the stakeholders of the importance of this channel, to develop SEO in to a high performing, sustainable channel with a prominent focus in the business.

Since the start of our relationship, we have seen substantial increases in organic search traffic due to a combination of link building campaigns, improved on-site content, and ongoing technical reviews. This has given us more flexibility with paid campaigns, allowing our overall strategy to become more cost efficient. So, to answer your question, Branded3 isn’t just a supplier, they’re our partner.

How are we different to other agencies you’ve worked with?

Simple. You listen. My pet hate is when agencies cut you off mid-sentence during a briefing, eager to show they’ve understood, only to make assumptions and deliver something completely off-piste come the agreed deadline.

Listening and understanding is key – even if you ask ten times over, it saves time in the long run, and shows care and consideration for your work.

I think it’s important for agencies to remember to challenge. Remember that as an agency you are the experts. If the client isn’t getting something, it’s likely that you just haven’t found the best way of explaining it.

What is important to them? For us, it’s the ultimate value, so knowing that you think an activity will drive extra visits over a year, and at conversion that means extra new customers, profit, etc. It helps sell it in at board level, and I don’t think many clients will be wildly different.

What do you think makes the client/agency relationship so successful?

Learn about your client. How do they like to be contacted? What format do they like to receive documents in? How much knowledge do they have? What else does their job involve (i.e. are they channel specific or cover a lot of areas)? And share all this information with the entire Account Management team.

In meetings, don’t underestimate the knowledge of a client. If you’re not sure, then ask. By all means include the detail in a deck, but ask the client if they want to go through it, or if they’re comfortable skipping it to read in their own time.

And, although it might sound slightly cheeky, we love that Branded3 never underestimate the power of client hospitality. It is really appreciated. It’s a great way to break down barriers and helps clients feel more relaxed with agencies, which ultimately leads to a better relationship. Going for drinks or food after a meeting can genuinely work wonders.

What’s your favourite campaign Branded3 have delivered for Provident and why?

It has to be Unbroken Britain. The success of this campaign has delivered over 70 quality links and over 40 separate pieces of coverage across sites which include my all-time-favourite – Ladbible!

As a result, it’s delivered a 91% increase in visibility following Penguin 4.0 rollout. Provident now ranks 2nd for “doorstep loans”, and holds 51% market share within the “doorstep loans” sector. We re-run it bi-annually, and it’s now something even the board get excited about in the run-up to release!

So, that rounds up a successful session with Jennie, who gave up her own time to spend with us. These roundups are invaluable to us as an agency, and as such, we will be running them on a regular basis with the spotlight on a different client each quarter.

As so many individuals from the wider business are non-client facing, sessions like these give everyone the opportunity to engage with the brands we work with on a more personal, one-to-one level. This ultimately helps to close the gap between agency and client and strengthen our partnerships in doing so – as the cliched old saying goes, one team, one dream!

Breadcrumbs schema mark-up: The benefits and how to implement

Matthew Ford — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 11:02:28 +0000

Similar to making the perfect scotch egg, getting breadcrumbs to stick in Google search results can be tricky at first and if you do succeed – is it even worth it?

There has been a long-standing argument over the true SEO value of breadcrumbs. Some people argue that the benefits are detracted by the effort required to implement them, whereas others believe that the fact that they aid the user is an important enough reason alone.

I believe that if your website has a large amount of content with defined categories and not a single-level website, breadcrumbs are absolutely the way to go.

Not convinced? Let me explain some of the benefits of using breadcrumbs in more detail.

Primarily, breadcrumbs are beneficial as they show the user the exact location of the product they are looking at and present an easy path to finding other products. Users can also get an insight into what to expect on a website.

This is particularly handy when setting up an account, as it makes the user aware of the entire process. Furthermore, it makes websites more navigable for users – now you don’t have to constantly hit the back button.

Moving on to breadcrumbs from a search engine’s POV, to put it simply, Google loves them. Search engines are always looking for ways to figure out how a website is structured. If Google displays the breadcrumbs for your website in search results, you’ll enjoy more links in each search listing and an increase in click-through rate.

After all, the fact that some of the most successful global websites are using them means you should probably take them seriously.

So, now you know why you should utilise breadcrumbs for your site, you naturally want to know how to do it.

How to use breadcrumbs

Firstly, forget the classic ways of writing structured data using RFDa and Microdata.

Thanks to JSON-LD, the task of adding structured data to your website has become significantly less daunting. However, one downside must be noted – certain search engines are slow to adopt it, such as Bing.

I suggest reading the following, for starters: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/breadcrumbs.

Moving swiftly on, below you will find a code example that needs to be placed in the section of each page. This example is for a page with only 3 “levels” within the breadcrumb navigation. However, the more levels a breadcrumb navigation has, the more “ListItem” types need adding. Both the “@id” and “name” attribute need to be dynamically populated with the breadcrumb navigation, which is on the pages of the website.

You can use this example as a template to add schema mark-up to enhance your website’s breadcrumb navigation in search results:

What if pet cant use allen key? RT @paulwiggins: RT @samwdowning: Ikea cat furniture http://t.co/5FVd7HjMmy (!!!!!!) pic.twitter.com/M4zLN5glj6

— AshGhebranious (@AshGhebranious) June 1, 2014

Soil association reveal the UNHEALTHIEST children’s restaurant menus

The “Out To Lunch” campaign by Soil Association has been hitting headlines across national media this week, with their research into the healthiest and unhealthiest places to take your child for lunch.

The huge research campaign compares 25 popular restaurants in the UK including Nandos, Prezzo, and Mcdonalds, revealing the best places to eat, while naming and shaming the worst, too.

By highlighting shocking results such as Prezzo being less healthy than a McDonalds, the charity has managed to gain media’s attention and share their message that we need to be doing more to tackle the issue of childhood obesity.

We sent secret diner parents to review the UK’s restaurant chain – this is what they found #OutToLunchUK https://t.co/MDaIkCLLxU pic.twitter.com/NgDa4syHB8

— Soil Association (@SoilAssociation) October 13, 2017

Made.com bring children’s drawings of dream homes alive

Image source

Made.com are also making headlines this week with their latest “Homes Of The Future” project. The furniture brand asked children to draw their dream homes, and then bringing these drawings to life using architectural design software. The images show what our homes would look like if left to the imagination and creativity of a child.

Appealing to parents, creatives, and interior fans, the campaigns gained coverage on some big name sites such as Ideal Home, making use of the image gallery which hosts all of the designs.

Homes of the Future by Made.com

Love Island’s Chris Hughes sheds a tear and makes headline press

Love island’s Chris Hughes has been in the press a lot recently. From arguments with Katie Price to releasing a single, Chris has had a lot of media attention since leaving the villa. However, this week he caused a bit of a stir by promoting a range of water bottles infused with his own tears.

I know what you’re thinking: it’s another attempt to cash in as quickly as possible. But this time, he partnered with Topman and charity CALM as part of a mental health campaign to encourage men to show their emotions and #DontBottleItUp. However, it turns out this was all part of a bigger stunt for charity CALM.

The campaign was perfectly timed and executed alongside World Mental Health Day, and has received praise from thousands of people, opening up the conversation around men’s mental health issues.

This got people talking didn’t it! Amazing message and a brilliant campaign. Well done all involved ???????? #DontBottleItUp ???? https://t.co/dGNU5poebd

— Alana???? (@X_ajc) October 10, 2017

Last week our favourite PR campaigns included free tickets to Legoland, Tinder reactions and Audrey’s tiger bread from asda.

5 tips for building long lasting client relationships

Nick Le Chat — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 09:59:29 +0000

The success of any agency is heavily reliant on the continual development and growth of its client base, and it’s no different here at Branded3. For the Client Services team, developing client relationships that stand the test of time is a crucial aspect of our role.

Building long lasting business relationships requires considerable time and effort. That said, all this time is worth the effort as developing and harnessing these relationships can lead to successful projects, increased sales, further connections, and word-of-mouth referrals.

By following the tips below, you’ll be well on your way to forging long-lasting relationships with all your existing and future clients.

Be trustworthy

Tell the truth. They say romantic relationships don’t survive when there’s a lack of trust, and business relationships are no different.

Long-lasting business relationships only occur when clients have complete trust in the suggestions you make, in everything you promise, and in everything you say.

Most people can spot a liar, and clients are no different. Even if they don’t think they’re being lied to at first, they’ll eventually figure it out and you’ll soon find yourself reeling in the consequences.

Show integrity, tell the truth, and be open and honest, even in the face of adversity. Your clients will appreciate it.

Deliver on time

If you say you’re going to deliver something at a certain time, make sure you deliver on time, or (even better) ahead of time. If you say you’re going to send something to the client, they will usually take that as absolute verbatim.

If you’re unsure of hitting a deadline, either tell your client as soon as you can that you’re going to need to push it back, or simply don’t promise it in the first place.

Committing to a deadline means leaving your client safe in the knowledge that they’ll have what they need when they need it. If you don’t deliver, how can they trust you? And, as we know from our previous rule, a relationship without trust doesn’t last.

Be indispensable

Making sure your client is reliant on your input and expertise is a sure-fire way to develop a long-lasting relationship.

The more value you can offer, the more your client will seek your expertise. Share relevant information, be on hand to offer advice, even if it doesn’t directly benefit you or your agency’s back pocket. Be that person they can rely on and you can be sure it’ll pay off in the long run.

Know their company and industry like it’s your own

Knowledge is power. As highlighted in our guide on the 3 questions you need to ask yourself to become a successful account manager, knowing your client’s company shows that you know and care about them and the services they provide. Knowing what’s going on in your client’s industry provides further reinforcement that the client can trust you and can rely on you to know what’s best for them.

You don’t need to be an expert, but being aware of your client’s challenges before even they know about them demonstrates your indispensability and can only strengthen your relationship as someone they need.

I mean, you wouldn’t enter, let alone stay in a relationship if you didn’t know anything about each other, would you?

Don’t hide behind an email address

Keeping in contact via emails is a completely normal and valuable practice, but there is significant value in picking up the phone and arranging good old face-to-face communications.

With emails, there is always the possibility of something being misconstrued or miscommunicated, especially when multiple people are included. Face-to-face and (to a lesser extent) phone calls negate any possible miscommunications as both non-verbal and verbal cues can be read, helping bring clarity to any potentially unclear communications.

Face-to-face communication can help boost efficiency, enabling you to get something which could take a whole day emailing about done in one fowl swoop.

Communications away from email also allows you to add a “personal touch”, allowing you to demonstrate personality, then likely reciprocated by your client, helping to develop a more personal, substantial relationship with the ability to last.

Excel for Search: How to analyse keyword fluctuations

Sean Longthorpe — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 08:52:39 +0000

Excel is a much more powerful tool than we often give it credit for. In fact, with the tools and reporting that can be made with Excel, I think its uses far exceed its initial purpose.

So, how can we use Excel within Search? We’ve already shown one method in a previous post that showcases how we can utilise simple(!) stats to show whether rankings have increased, but what else can we do with Excel?

Investigate rankings within niches

Retrieve your keyword rankings for any two given days into an Excel workbook. Put each day’s rankings into a different sheet to be organised. Now, in a master sheet, have your master keyword list formatted as a table. Formatting as a table allows you to filter your table to investigate keyword categories, providing that you have categorised those keywords.

Add new columns to your table for the rankings. We can do this by simply inserting a new column to the right of the final column. Now transfer your rankings into the table using the VLOOKUP function. This function matches strings between tables so that we can link data together. In this case, we are matching keywords with their rankings. Your VLOOKUP function should look something like this:

=VLOOKUP([Keyword], [Table number], [Table Column Number], FALSE)

If you’re still having issues, ExcelJet is a good source of information for all the functions of Excel. This is the VLOOKUP example.

Add a new column to the table so you can calculate the differences in the rankings, or even traffic. Hopefully you’ve categorised those keywords, so you can investigate each niche. What we have now is a data source to analyse: use a PIVOT table! Insert your PIVOT table, using Insert > Pivot Table.

Click on the whole table to choose as the Pivot table source.

Drag Keyword Category into the Row box.

Drag your Change column into the Values box. Make sure you have this value as a Sum.

And there you have it, a handy table that shows which keyword categories have increased or decreased the most in rankings or traffic, or whatever change your looking for. A valuable, easy, and quick analysis we can all do in Excel. Category 5 giving us the greatest increases here!

Advanced Excel

If your keywords have secondary or multiple categories, or you have loads of data, you can be as granular as you want to be. Drag as many variables into the columns and rows for a more detailed comparison across as many niches as you are investigating!

Summary

Putting your data into a table means it can be filtered and referenced easier.
The VLOOKUP function makes linking data much easier.
Pivot tables make analysis of the data simpler and easier to gain insight.

Click here for more information on how we can help with your insights and analytics, and put more useful tools, including Excel functions like these, into practice.

Keyword Not Provided: What does it mean, and what can I do?

Emma Barnes — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 09:34:13 +0000

In October 2011, Google announced that they were beginning to encrypt search queries for users who were logged into Google. This meant that from an analytical perspective, if you visited your keyword report in Google Analytics (or any other reporting platform), you would see (not provided) at the top of your organic keyword list instead of the actual organic keywords. This only applies to organic keywords and not to paid keywords.

Back in the day, SEOs liked to report on these things: where do you rank for a keyword, how many visits did it bring, and how much money did it make? Knowing this kind of data was useful in SEO strategies so that SEOs knew what keyword groups were best to continue to optimise for, and which ones brought in most financial value.

In those days, SEO practises tended towards improving rankings for specific keywords, rather than improving organic search performance overall. As such, seeing keyword data disappear made SEO Managers confused and slightly angry, as it was more difficult for them to prove the worth of their campaigns to clients.

Above is a graph of the percentage of Not Provided keywords that Branded3 has seen since 2008. In November 2011, after Google announced they’d be encrypting searches, Not Provided keywords immediately became 7% of the organic traffic.

Only 8 months later, this became 50%. In June 2014, we hit 90%, two years and eight months following the announcement. Last month, Branded3’s organic traffic was at 97% Not Provided.

This will never reach 100%, because there are plenty of unencrypted search engines that will happily send organic keyword data to analytics platform. Yahoo and Bing both moved onto the Not Provided bandwagon alongside Google, although they didn’t make the move until 2014 and 2015, respectively.

In 2017, some of the only unencrypted search engines are Ask, AOL, Lycos, Dogpile, and those malicious toolbars that find their way onto your parent’s computer. In the future, I imagine some of those will become encrypted and send “not provided” data to Google Analytics, but others may never bother.

What can I do about Not Provided Keywords?

If you’re still concerned about retrieving information from your keywords, you can use Google Search Console to get information about clicks and impressions for your website. You can find this in the Search Traffic > Search Analytics section.

Google Search Console

Search Console data only goes back to the past 90 days, so if you want to record how you’re performing, you’ll need to export the data (use the Download button at the bottom of the page) and keep it.

PROTIP: Use the API or a software like Supermetrics to get much more data than the 999 rows that is served within Search Console.

By using this data, you can split your keywords into Brand, Non-Brand, and whatever else you consider useful (e.g. Long Tail and Head terms). You can create your own Click-Through Rate model and apply this to your keyword rankings, or use a brand/non-brand to analyse your current traffic. Be aware that although you can get a rough traffic split, it’s still difficult to infer if specific keywords converted higher than other keywords.

However, the above data is only collected from Google Search Console, so applying it to “all organic traffic” may be presumptuous as all search engine users behave differently. You can also use Bing’s Webmaster tools (Reports and Data > Search Keywords) to get information about how your website performs in Bing and Yahoo.

Yandex and Baidu also have webmaster tools if the majority of your traffic comes from those search engines. It’s worth noting that Baidu’s webmaster tools are exclusively in Chinese. Here is a really good guide to Baidu’s webmaster tools.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Baidu Webmaster Tools courtesy of Dragon Metrics

Yandex Webmaster courtesy of Russian Search Tips

If you don’t want to build your own model for keywords, tools like Keyword Hero are able to connect your Search Console data (and transform the data using magic) to your Google Analytics account to import keywords directly into your Google Analytics organic keyword report instead of “not provided”.

If you’re concerned about Not Provided and want to understand how to best report on your SEO efforts, contact us and we can help.

The latest PR campaigns featuring Lego, Tinder and Audrey’s tiger bread

Audrey Maffre — Fri, 06 Oct 2017 13:37:02 +0000

Can you believe it is October already? September has flown by and summer clothes are out of sight till next year, pumpkins are at the ready and Mariah Carey has already trimmed the Christmas tree. And, for the first week of October, Lego, Tinder and the BMB agency have been full of creativity.

Because we’re all big kids at the end of the day

Lego are giving away free Legoland tickets to anyone (yes, parents as well) with the same name as the main characters of their new movie Lego Ninjango movie from October 13th to 30th.

To claim the free entry, Lego will ask for a proof of ID stating your name really is Lloyd, Kai, Jay, Nya, Zane, or Cole. And, the spelling needs to be the same, non-negotiable.

The campaign has gained a lot of coverage by nationals, so has turned out to be an ingenious idea by Legoland. We already knew they were a fun brand, but we sadly wished our parents had been a bit more creative with our names.

Tinder reacts

If you’re familiar with the online dating scene, you will know that you can find wonderful people to talk with, but also some quite rude individuals as well. For both cases, Tinder has just launched the Tinder Reactions which consist of animations including clapping hands for the gentlemen and thrown Martinis to uncivilized lads.

For this, Tinder have partnered with comedian Whitney Cummings on a video titled The Menprovement Initiative, which is part of a wider campaign to improve the community and service of the online dating app, by use of a better messaging experience and easier way to report nuisance users.

Coverage for this new feature included Mashable, Daily Mail and The Verge.

Audrey’s Tiger Bread

Lo and behold, a loaf of bread now has my name, and what an honour that is!

No, of course I won’t take all the glory because the credit is in fact due to an 85-year-old loyal customer named Audrey. Because she’s been giving tips to her local Asda baker Gary on how to make the perfect Tiger Bread (her favourite), Asda has decided to reward her by giving the loaf her name. The former Tiger Bread is now known as Audrey’s Tiger Bread.

Apart from the cuteness of this story, we are touched by how Asda is interacting with their customers, showing we don’t always need social media to make an impact.

Ending loneliness

Talking about social media, how would you feel if you were deprived of your phone for a week and left by yourself without any external contacts?

Probably the same as this guy…

Beattie McGuinness Bungay (BMB) agency has created the above video to raise awareness on loneliness. In a world where we are all connect to each other via phones, internet and social media, it is hard to understand how some people can be totally alone.

The project has been a huge success, and talked about by scores of marketing sites.

Last week our favourite PR campaigns came from Domino’s, Ikea, The Post Office and Hurts Donuts, read about why these campaigns caught our eye here.

Should you implement AMP?

Ben Lawrance — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 10:14:09 +0000

Nearly 2 years ago, Google announced the AMP project with the aim to create a faster mobile web. There are certainly benefits to AMP, but it’s not suitable for every site, which is why I’ve written this guide to help you determine whether you should be implementing AMP on your site.

What is AMP?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP is built using AMP HTML, which speeds up the rendering process, making load times faster than those for pages built using standard HTML. In fact, according to Google’s own Gary Illyes, the median load time for AMP pages is 1 second, which is 4 times faster than the average standard HTML page.

What are the benefits of AMP?

Pages built using AMP HTML will load faster, creating a better user experience.
Mobile rankings will increase due to faster load speeds. This will become an increasingly important factor when Google releases its mobile first index some time in the near future. There are also some suggestions that AMP could become a ranking factor in the future.
Less strain on your servers as Google serves these pages from its cache.
An opportunity to feature in Google’s AMP carousel (for relevant pages).
Google appears to be favouring AMP content for its featured snippets when searching on mobile devices.
A recent piece of research investigating the impact of AMP for product pages on ecommerce sites has shown significant increases in conversion rates and a decrease in bounce rates.

Are there any disadvantages to AMP?

Because Google serves a cached version of AMP pages to users rather than accessing your servers, Google Analytics won’t track visits from users unless you make some configurations to Google Analytics and apply a separate tracking code to your AMP pages. This is a fairly straightforward process if you’re using Google Tag Manager – a guide for how to do this can be found here.
Depending on your approach, developing pages in AMP can create additional work, as the same page may need to be built both for desktop and AMP. If you choose to only use AMP versions of pages, effort may be required to replace existing pages. However, the process of creating pages in AMP is relatively quick. The AMP Project provides tutorials to help users build AMP pages. You can also find a helpful guide on how to implement AMP on our blog.
Because AMP focuses on keeping load speeds fast, the HTML is stripped down, meaning that certain designs built using standard HTML are not possible in AMP and there can be differences between the desktop and mobile versions of a page.

Should I use AMP?

Whether or not you should use AMP depends on your site. Because AMP is a stripped-down form of standard HTML, many functions cannot be implemented in AMP. This means certain types of pages cannot be built, particularly if they contain large amounts of javascript, such as a page containing an interactive map or products that can be rotated manually.

AMP is most useful for news articles and blog posts as these are typically fairly light on javascript and can feature in Google’s AMP carousel. AMP can be used for other pages but it can depend on what javascript is implemented on these pages and whether it’s supported by AMP HTML. Some of these other pages include:

PPC landing pages (Google just announced that they’ll be giving AdWords advertisers the ability to use AMP landing pages for search text ads this month)
Product pages
Category pages
Forms

While we’d expect AMP pages to perform better in Google and for users in most cases, these benefits need to be weighed up against the effort and time required to transition to AMP and the potential end results.

As an example, the advantage of AMP is to increase load times and improve the user’s experience through quicker load times. Applying AMP to a page that isn’t a landing page for organic traffic may not be the best use of time (as these pages won’t benefit from a rankings boost), especially if this page already loads reasonably quickly. Many forms might fall under this category, making AMP less valuable for such pages.

Google continues to improve AMP and increase the benefits it provides, meaning the advantages are only likely to grow (since I started writing this article, 2 new announcements were made regarding AMP). Ultimately, the decision to implement AMP rests on 2 factors:

Is it possible to implement AMP on my site?
Do the benefits outweigh the time and effort required to implement AMP on my site?

My last post on anchor text

Rob May — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 09:37:11 +0000

It’s 2017 and, believe it or not, I’m writing about anchor text. It might seem like a Throwback Thursday topic, but as an industry, we’re still being challenged about ‘why links don’t have anchor text’ and ‘what our anchor text strategy is’.

This post will outline my thoughts on anchor text, why it’s time to let it go, and why some SEOs still cling onto it. To get started, we need to take a walk down memory lane…

Let’s start in 2004

The mid-2000s was when I became involved in SEO, and things were much simpler. Simply put, an SEO needed to make sure the website was accessible, throw some content on the page, optimise the title tags, and build as many exact match anchor text links as possible.

You could rank any term, and if you were careful with the domains and mixed up the anchor text variations, it was a fairly stable strategy. This is the technique I used to personally enter the top five on Google for ‘SEO’ within six months of launching a blog.

What’s changed?

The landscape started changing in 2011 with the introduction of Google’s Panda algorithm, but the real bombshells came in 2012 when sites of all shapes and sizes were being hit with manual actions, wiping out rankings for their most valuable terms to devastating effect.

Then, Google launched Penguin: an algorithm designed to wipe out your manipulated link profile and rankings.

On top of all of this, they also took out some pretty big link and blog networks, and actively penalised websites selling advertorials for the purposes of embedding links.

It was a blood bath, so surely that should have been the end of manipulative techniques?

Not exactly. This was four years ago, and while Google has refreshed Penguin several times, no manual actions have been sent; a few networks have been taken out, and the last Penguin update was 18 months ago.

All of this has allowed manipulated results to make a return to the SERPs, and Google appears unbothered.

We all have short memories

There is another issue: because we don’t know the detailed workings of Google’s algorithms, we have to make educated guesses based on testing and measuring correlation (yes, correlation; SEOs love correlation, myself included).

So, what happens? We pull the link profiles of high-ranking websites, and discover that they have a ton of exact match and other commercial anchor text. This must be the reason they’re winning, right? Maybe, but you have to read between the lines.

As an agency, we get asked about this a lot, and here is why the industry absolutely has to let exact and commercial anchor text go.

SEOs are keeping it alive

The only reason Google had to clamp down on anchor text heavy links is because SEOs massively overused them. We all found a strong signal and did it to death: it was cheap, scalable, worked in a silo, and produced great margins.

Think about it: agencies could charge to get clients results from SEO without needing to improve the website, work with internal teams, understand the business or produce quality content. On top of all that, it only cost a few hundred dollars, which meant the margins were insane.

The only people interested in ensuring anchor text remains a strong signal are the SEOs who rely on it as part of their business model.

Admittedly, it did work, and you could fly below the radar five years ago, but following this strategy now will turn your website into a ticking time bomb.

Ultimately, if you’re paying an agency or ‘expert’ to do your SEO, and anchor text is the key strategy, it is only there to support the business model of your agency and not your business. Google will update Penguin and you will lose your rankings.

Disavowing means you’re blind

Six months after Google manually penalised thousands of websites for manipulative links, it launched the disavow tool. This was simply a text file you filled with all the links you felt were unnatural and responsible for your penalty.

You uploaded the file and requested a reconsideration, hoping you had found enough bad links to remove the penalty.

Businesses are still actively doing this to prevent action from Google in the future, and here is the problem: you have no way of knowing if a competitor has disavowed links or not.

You can analyse as many link profiles as you like, and they could have 100% links using exact match or partial match anchor text, but for all you know they are disavowed, which means you shouldn’t count them.

The disavow tool has almost made analysing link profiles redundant, although admittedly, there is still real benefit in understanding where fresh links are coming from. But looking at historic profiles and anchor text splits really doesn’t tell us anything.

It’s a trap

I came across this article about SEO experiments (it’s a good one, you should read it), and it discussed how exact match anchor text can influence rankings, and how powerful they were.

Although there is no specific advice given, suggestions like this can lead people to think this is an important part of an SEO strategy, when it’s actually a dangerous one.

There is no debate that anchor text is a powerful signal, as it still does work to increase rankings. However, it’s also a trap, and commonly agreed to be one of the key elements that Google looks at when penalising websites for manipulative links.

In the short term, you might be able to see some quick wins using these techniques, but in the long term you are putting your SEO traffic and revenue at serious risk.

Are you a publisher?

Have you ever published on the web? Written a blog? Posted on social media? Contributed to a forum? Not for SEO purposes, but to genuinely contribute?

If you have, then in all honesty, do you even bother considering the anchor text you use?

I have and continue to write occasionally, and even as an SEO, I give no consideration to anchor text. It’s just not a natural way to write, unless your business is the commercial anchor text such as hotels.com.

People who are going to naturally link to your business are not going to use anchor text. Unless, of course, it’s your SEO agency using their blog network.

Log into Google Analytics or your platform of choice and take a look at your organic traffic from Google and the revenue/leads it drives. Could your business honestly survive if that was to disappear overnight? That is the stark reality of focussing your strategy on anchor text.

The industry has come a long way since 2004, but it still hasn’t fully matured, in my opinion. The commercial reality of a successful SEO strategy is very real, yet the budgets that businesses invest in SEO are still very low.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t help to encourage in-house teams and agencies to do better work and rely on more than quick-win tactics.

I’ve actively worked with businesses for whom SEO has driven over 50% of their revenue, but accounts for 5% of their marketing spend. It’s time to get serious about Search, and invest in doing the right things.

Anchor text post Penguin 4.0

When Google rolled out its ‘real-time’ Penguin 4.0 algorithm in September 2016 and announced that penguin is now part of it’s core algorithm, many saw ranking fluctuations, both good and bad. Historically, Penguin algorithm updates were designed to eliminate web spam by attempting to identify unnatural offsite SEO signals. In relation to this blog post, the distribution of anchor text should be natural, and the quality of links going to your website should be high.

Penguin is now more granular, so by sending spam signals by using unnatural, keyword targeting anchor text will negatively affect your rankings. Penguin 4.0 has helped develop this topic by increasing the risk real-time to businesses who focus their SEO efforts purely around an anchor text based strategy, and likewise, to SEOs who continue to place such importance on anchor text based strategies.

The bottom line is, anchor text can be a powerful ranking factor when done properly. Naturally earnt links should in turn bring with it a link profile consisting of natural anchor text distribution. Focus less on anchor text and more on the quality of the backlink.

6 ways to get recommendations implemented

Adam Thornton — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 09:25:12 +0000

A common challenge we face as an agency is having our recommendations actioned, a challenge I know is shared internally with some of the clients we work with.

The deck is slightly stacked against us due to the nature of this industry. Most of our recommendations won’t provide immediate, tangible results. In some instances, they may not provide any noticeable performance improvements at all. This can make the case for getting things pushed through difficult.

So, what can be done to get things moving?

Explain the benefits

Different stakeholders will have different SEO knowledge levels, and won’t always automatically understand the importance of H1 tags, removing unnecessary redirects, updating hreflangs, and so on.

A good agency will explain why a client should implement the recommendation. This can include descriptions of the task, benefits they can expect and, ideally, case studies showing where these recommendations have been successful in the past.

“Here’s what you need to do…”

While a simple guide can be helpful, exceptional service appreciates that different teams are needed to implement different tasks.

Some technical updates will need input from the development team, content improvements might need support from copy writers, and UX improvements could need input from a designer.

It’s important to go beyond explaining the process, and take the time to talk clients through every step and teams who’ll be involved.

“Your competitors have already done it…”

Most – if not all – brands are competing with someone else. We’ve had success getting tasks implemented by highlighting how client sites are falling behind and losing out to the competition.

Most brands like to be first movers in their market place, so even if they haven’t fallen behind, presenting an opportunity to get ahead will help win people over.

Present the best-case scenario

You can ramp up the benefits of tasks by reminding everyone of the best-case scenario or goal you’re aiming for with your recommendations.

Often, we can all get stuck focusing on the smaller aspects of an overall strategy, and tied-up in the detail of implementing individual tasks.

By reminding clients that it all works towards more sessions and revenue it can often kick start people into action.

Present the worst-case scenario

When ‘best case’ hasn’t worked, try doing the opposite.

If after some gentle nudging your client or stakeholder hasn’t made any progress, show them what could happen if they continue to neglect the advice.

By using case studies, projections, and analytics, you can paint a picture of what inaction will bring.

If executed well, people tend to respond well to this approach when all else has failed.

“How else can we help?”

Once the recommendation has been made, there’s one more way that you can make the process of implementation much more straight forward: execute the work for them.

To give the best service, sit in their office and show the client how to carry out the work. This can help reduce the size of the task next time around, and free up time for you all to focus on other things.

Click here for more information on each of our services, finding out how we can support your brand and how we put all of this into practice.