About the Head of Digital job

We’re looking for a Head of Digital to join our office based team. The scope of the role includes managing digital marketing strategies for current and potential clients, continuous improvement and development of our digital services, act as our digital authority in consultancy work, share your experience and knowledge through coaching and developing your team, attend / speak at networking & industry events, acting as the company’s digital authority. 

About Zen Web Solutions

We’re part of the UK’s largest independent ISP, Zen Internet, providing broadband, fibre broadband, web hosting and domain names. We essentially operate as a separate entity – a digital marketing agency offering a full range of services.

You’ll enjoy working with us because…

We’re easy to reach, based in Greater Manchester at Sandbrook Park, just off the M62 near Rochdale to be exact. Our office is within in a large, open plan building owned by us – you can see pictures and details below (and more here http://www.sandbrookhouse.co.uk/)

Zen Web Solutions is based in the west wing of the building, occupying a spacious portion of the second floor. Our team is made up of developers, designers, sales consultants and digital consultants (SEOs). We’re close (maybe too close!) to the coffee lounge which offers hot and cold drinks, a selection of sandwiches as well as pastries and chocolates.

The digital marketing team works in a relaxed yet professional environment, utilising cloud project management tools at dual monitor workstations. We attend industry events including the Distilled/SEOmoz SearchLove series and blog or tweet regularly about SEO/social topics.

We venture out into Manchester and the local area for nights out, meals and drinks – the company holds Summer and Christmas parties for staff and their families too.

The perks list

• Free tea, filter coffee and fresh orange juice
• A selection of free fruit delivered daily
• Games room featuring ping pong, pool, table foosball and old school arcades
• Subsidised meals in our restaurant
• Free fibre broadband account (where available)
• Casual dress code
• Free massages
• 22 days holiday (rising by one day per year to a max of 28)
• Discounts from many local businesses
• Discounted Zen products and services
• Free secure car parking
• Performance and salary review every 6 months
• Starting salary £40k to £45k depending upon experience

The right person for the job…

So if you’re an experienced and enthusiastic senior digital leader, passionate about all things digital and wish to continue your career at a successful north-west based digital agency - we want to hear from you.

It’s a great opportunity to join one of the best places to work in IT.

Some of the brands we’ve worked with are below, you’ll have the opportunity to work on exciting projects like these both individually and as part of a team.

Sounds like something you’re interested in?

If you’re interested in the Head of Digital role and would like to apply, please send your CV to hr@zen.co.uk or view the job description on the Zen Internet website (we’re a division of Zen Internet).

For more info about Zen Web Solutions have a browse around our site, find us on Twitter or read more of the blog.

(Remember it’s essential that you’re eligible to work in the UK – you will be required to provide evidence of your eligibility to work during the selection process.)

Head of Digital Job – Greater Manchester Digital Agency was created by Zen Web Solutions, a Digital Marketing Agency

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The website itself is called CT Online and is a community transport search tool that allows members of the general public to find their local community transport service in any area of England.

As well as a search facility, the site also links to the CTA’s own internal systems so acts as a portal for community transport operators to manage their own information online.

Read the full press release here

Click here to view the site

New Website Launch for UK Charity Community Transport Association was created by Zen Web Solutions, a Digital Marketing Agency

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Car Parts and Accessories supply parts for all makes of cars, vans and light commercial vehicles via their website and through their network of branches across Sussex and Surrey.

They were formed in 1995 and now supply parts and accessories to the whole of the Sussex and Surrey areas. They employ over 100 staff, have excess of 60 delivery vehicles and have an annual turnover of £10 million.

This site is a truly bespoke ecommerce site, and one of the challenges the team faced was integrating the large parts system (with over 200,000 parts) to make sure that when visitors search for car parts for their specific model, the correct parts are matched.

Click here to view the website

Ecommerce Website Launch for Car Parts & Accessories (CPA) was created by Zen Web Solutions, a Digital Marketing Agency

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The Armitt group of companies provide expert logistics support to customers in both the UK and overseas, and are proud to be one of the UK’s leading privately owned shipping and logistics companies.

As well as logistics services, the Armitt Group has several other divisions including: Steel Logistics & Distribution; Automotive Steel Logistics and Mersey Bunkering.

What we’re doing

As well as delivering the new website, we are also running a comprehensive search campaign to help drive traffic to their site.

The team are really proud of the design on the site and were especially pleased to hear that the client is “extremely happy with the website” too.

Click here to view the site

Launch of new website for Frank Armitt & Son was created by Zen Web Solutions, a Digital Marketing Agency

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Based in Croydon with a growing national client base, their services include emergency cleaning for flood or fire damage, specialist hazardous waste clean-up and more conventional restaurant and kitchen cleaning.

As well as delivering their website we’re also working with them on search marketing, social media and paid search campaigns and are looking forward to delivering some strong results for them.

Click here to view the website and learn more about them.

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Bright Books are a leading book provider, supplying interesting and affordable books to libraries, prisons and schools through a worldwide network of suppliers.

And like us, they’re Rochdale based.

As well as supplying individual books, Bright Books also provide book collections to schools tailored to meet specific needs e.g. ages and curriculum.

We’re pleased to have delivered such a great platform for Bright Books to help them grow their business, and we’re looking forward to working with them in the future.

Click here to view their new site

New ecommerce site launch for Bright Books was created by Zen Web Solutions, a Digital Marketing Agency

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We’re pleased to be able to announce that we’ve been appointed by US business, A M Castle & Co to deliver a blend of digital solutions.

As part of the contract win we’ll be delivering three new websites and a comprehensive search marketing campaign – aiming to replicate the success achieved with Castle Metals UK.

The work already completed for Castle Metals UK made us an obvious choice to work with A M Castle supporting their digital marketing and deliver substantial additions to their bottom line. Refer to our previous blog to see the work we’ve completed and the results achieved.

This marks our first US client for Zen Web Solutions, so as a business we’re looking forward to the challenge.

To read the full press release, click here

Existing client relationship brings international business win was created by Zen Web Solutions, a Digital Marketing Agency

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Using Yasiv.com to find potential guest post opportunities

This great tool by Andrei Kashcha uses the Amazon API to pull the ‘people who bought X also bought Y’ data and makes it searchable. The tool displays this in a huge linked spider diagram, you can zoom, click to see more about the product and view it on Amazon.

Start by finding a product on Amazon and then search for it in the Yasiv search box. Make sure to select your country from the footer – I’ve selected UK and chosen a rather fetching ‘titanium spork’ as my example product. The resulting diagram gives me a nice selection of related products, in fact they aren’t just simply ‘related’ – these are products people buy when buying the spork.

We’ve also found related purchases for the related purchases – excellent! Some of these products are made by the same company who make the spork, so we can instantly discount those (mousing over the products shows you their name).

Importantly I’ve spotted some products related to the spork that might offer a guest post opportunity. It’s just a matter of finding the manufacturers’ website and checking to see if they have a blog. I’ve chosen a Pocket Trowel, made by Sea To Summit – they manufacture a number of products listed as being related to the spork, so they seem like a good fit.

Qualifying the opportunity

After a quick Google search I see they have a website and a blog – and they’ve also accepted guest posts before. Perfect.

Taking a look at what sort of content they feature on their blog, it seems like a ‘guide’ style of post relating to some element of hiking, climbing or camping would fit well. The next step would obviously be to come up with a few good content ideas and contact the blog owner to see if they’d accept a guest post.

How’s this better than just searching the web for sites to guest post on?

Hopefully you should have an easier time introducing your company, explaining that your products are often purchased by the same people on Amazon is a nice way of breaking the ice.

Remember that any blog is likely to get its fair share of emails asking for guest posts, many of these are likely to be poorly thought out or automated. This unique element might help you to stand out. It could also turn into a relationship beyond the blog post. Think about the possible cross promotional opportunities, joint competitions and the shared contacts that might also follow. Which stores other than Amazon stock their products? Could you products be carried in these stores too? Being able to show retailers that your products sell well together could be a real benefit in those scenarios.

What if the blog doesn’t have any guest posts yet?

Even if the blog hasn’t ever featured a guest post, don’t be discouraged – this link between your products could help them to see the benefit of accepting your content. Obviously be ready to reciprocate with a guest post offer on your blog too. If they have no blog, or worse no site, then you’re pretty stuck. Back to the tool to see which other products might be a good fit.

You could do this at scale if you access the Amazon API directly, skipped the visual element and just output all the products to an excel file. Maybe outsource the manual checking of the file, get someone to find the company website, grab some domain metrics, check for a blog and check for previous guest blog posts. You’d end up with a good target list.

But, for those less fond of API wrestling, give this method a try and let us know how you get on in the comments.

Guest post prospecting using Amazon related purchases was created by Zen Web Solutions, a Digital Marketing Agency

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7 Record Breaking Elevators

We produced this infographic for Gartec who specialise in platform lifts for home or commercial environments. It is a quirky peice of content looking at how elevators have been used in extraordinary ways and broken records.

100 Years of Iconic Stainless Steel Structures

Our client Castle Metals are currently celebrating the stainless steel centenary with this infographic we published showing how stainless steel has been used in many iconic buildings and structure around the world.

Globalisation of Virtual Water Flows

The client ATi UK specialises in water monitoring equipment and have many partnerships with water companies. Here we show the flow of water in and out of a country in relation to trade and the top net importers of virtual water.

History of Metals

A Rochdale based client called Makin Metal Powders supply copper powder amongst other metal powders. This infographic counts through the history of mankind to understand when each of the metals were discovered.

Keep track of our latest infographics on our Pinterest board or our Visual.ly account.

Roundup of Recent Client Infographics was created by Zen Web Solutions, a Digital Marketing Agency

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Click the image to see the full screenshot of the new homepage

About Castle Metals

Azerbaijan Flame Fountain built using stainless steel

Originally called Metals UK, after merging into the metals group of companies, they were purchased by a US company called AM Castle & Co. After the increased investment by their US partners, it was decided the merger would be completed by a rebrand – the whole company would now be called Castle Metals and would run under one central system using Oracle.

Castle Metals are a stockholder of stainless steel grades, nickel alloys, super duplex stainless steel, as well as duplex plate, sheet, and specialising with huge stock of stainless steel bar. Their current facility holds metal alloys in stock which they’ve distributed to over 50 countries. The facility includes on-site cutting with their water-jet, plasma, laser, and stainless steel cutting machines into various forms such as sheet, plate, and round bar.

They supplied 316L stainless steel and mild steel ranging between six and twenty millimetres in thickness for the Azerbaijan Flame Fountain, a stunning thirty metre tall sculpture opened on December 30^th 2011 in Baku.

Digital Marketing with Zen

Castle Metals came to Zen under the name Metals UK needing a website that represented their various metal companies whilst also representing the new branding.

We provided their first website during 2010. Since then, we’ve helped with their email marketing newsletters, blogging, increasing leads from organic search, as well as creating a social presence.

Working more closely with Castle, watching the growth of new stock and new cutting machines, it was decided the current website would be upgraded into a CMS and redesigned to provide a more modern appearance, better usability, and represent the company better at it’s current state.

New Website Design

There were some key aspects we worked on with the new website:

• Build within the WordPress CMS so content can be easily edited by Castle’s employees
• Represent the products, services, and quality specifications in a clear manner
• Improve the individual alloy landing pages and include better call to actions

Landing page for Stainless Steel 321

Cutting Overview page on Castle Metals

Search Engine Optimisation

When Castle came to us in 2010, they hadn’t done SEO before or have a presence on social media but wanted to explore any opportunity from search. Once we created the content and optimised the website, we started to increase relevant visits and contact conversions rapidly.

Visitor numbers have been removed!

Here is a small selection of their current rankings (w/c 29th October) in Google UK:

• Super Duplex Bar – 1st
• Stainless Steel Sheet – 4th
• Stainless Steel Plate – 6th
• Laser Cutting – 19th
• Plasma Cutting – 4th
• Alloy 400 – 2nd
• Stainless Steel 31254 – 1st

Email Marketing

We help create email marketing campaigns which mostly consists of quarterly newsletters and the odd email, keeping Castle Metals in touch with their customers.

Client Perspective

“We are delighted with the look and feel of the new website and have really enjoyed working with Zen to get it live, the quality of leads we receive through the site is converting into some real valuable business for us with an excellent ROI.”

Ellie Foy, Marketing Executive, Castle Metals (UK)

We look forward to continuing our work with Castle Metals, you can catch them on Twitter @CastleMetalsUK, like them on Facebook, or alternatively keep up with their company and stainless steel information on their blog.

Client Focus & New Website for Castle Metals (UK) was created by Zen Web Solutions, a Digital Marketing Agency

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