Whether it's PPC marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing or natural search driving traffic to your website, your landing page is critical to the campaign performance - and it's your big opportunity to engage with a potential customer. So why do so many sites get it so wrong, and what are the most important things to remember? What's wrong with my landing page you ask? Well firstly, you have to realise everyone uses the internet differently - so don't try to pigeon hole all users in the same place.  Some users scan a whole page within a few seconds of landing on a site, while others focus on a block of text and read carefully - it all depends on the visitor. With this in mind there are 6 things worth considering to ensure your landing page is optimised to its full potential: Read the rest of this entry...

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Whether your search marketing campaigns are managed in-house or outsourced to a specialist agency, there are many useful tools you should be aware of, some of which I will be exploring in this post. Keyword research is the most important element to get right in your search strategy, way before looking at website architecture, internal linking or URL structure. Keywords are the foundation of your paid search campaign and key to natural search. Below is a list of some keyword research tools you should be considering. Keyword research tools Google UK keyword research tool Useful for determining the traffic volume for your target keywords, helping you decide which keywords to target. It also gives approximate search volumes for broad, phrase and exact match searches, volume trends and advertiser competition. Read the rest of this entry...

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Five ways to influence the minds of your potential customers - with web copy. Ok, so you've got a super-slick design for your website and your marketing campaigns are sending a nice number of potential customers to browse its attractive pages - but what happens once they've arrived? Just like a sales person in a shop can employ verbal sales techniques to convince someone to whip out their credit card, the words on your site (or web copy) can act in the same way, all year round - and you don't have to pay them a salary! Apart from applying some basic principles, such as good grammar (!), interesting and informative content and the inclusion of keywords, there are five clever, mind-bending tricks you can employ to tap into the minds of your potential customers and influence what they do on your site. Read the rest of this entry...

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