FireCask blog

Why Data Integrity Is The New Technical SEO

Alex Moss — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:30:34 GMT

First published by Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-data-integrity-is-the-new-technical-seo-from-crawling-to-trust/582189/

In the past two years, Google has dropped support for 9 ItemTypes from its rich result search gallery. This has happened not too long after ChatGPT’s launch and where mass adoption began:

Rich result types supported by Google Search, 2009 to 2026

The question remains on whether this decline will continue, but the most recent removal (FAQ/FAQPage) has since caused some debate over the role of schema.org within the future of Search.

Schema is dead, right?

Whilst some perform tests and experiments to understand if schema really makes a positive impact on being cited within platform responses, Gianluca Fiorelli notably observed that we may be performing these tests within limited datasets. With that in mind, let’s remind ourselves of the wording of the deprecation message for FAQ rich results:

“…We will be dropping the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and support in the Rich results test in June 2026.”

Notice here what they did not mention, which is that the use of FAQ schema is no longer required. This is because the deprecation is that of rich results only, a display feature. Schema itself is a comprehension layer: identifying entities and the relationships between them. Is schema dead? In my opinion, it is far from it. Whilst some properties deprecate, others, such as Product, are extended.

That being said, I’m also aware that adding schema isn’t a magic bullet that contributes towards citation growth. However, that growth goes beyond the metrics we’ve been accustomed to rely on such as citations, impressions etc. Suganthan Mohanadasan wrote a great piece about how schema has 3 “lives”:

Google’s index pipeline
LLM pretraining (indirect)
LLM runtime retrieval

SEOs have been historically focused on number 1 as something that can positively contribute towards success metrics. But schema goes beyond what we’re used to, or accurately, report on. Schema isn’t dying; one display feature it benefitted from is diminishing instead.

An SEO’s biggest threat: ambiguity

Schema is an ontology that, as a web standard, can contribute towards data integrity. The risk to data integrity is ambiguity. Ambiguity leads to hallucinations. Hallucinations snowball. Eventually the result compounds, which could lead to inaccurate results or even incorrect LLM pre-training which could have longer-lasting effects.

If an agent can misread you, at some point it will. LLMs can then risk travelling in “semantic drift” detracted from the facts and in favour of narrative. This was explored within a piece entitled “Sangue e Grafi: Teaching a Small Model to Read the Bloodline” by Andrea Volpini and Chiara Carrozza where frontier models tended to fall for narrative over facts, while a small model given knowledge-graph tools drew level with them.

Sangue e Grafi, by WordLift

5 layers of data integrity

All this corroborates my belief that an SEO’s role is to maximise data integrity, of which schema plays a role. Below I illustrate 5 layers of what data integrity can include:

The five layers of data integrity. Schema.org spans the top four.

Layer	What it covers	What lives there
Entities	What exists, and which thing it is	schema.org Thing / Organization / Person, Wikidata Q-IDs, GS1 / GTIN, ISNI, ORCID
Relationships	How those things connect	schema.org @id / sameAs, RDF, OWL, Knowledge graphs, EntityMap relations
Format	How structure is serialised and served	JSON-LD, RDFa, Microdata, Markdown, llms.txt
Actions	What can be done, declared to agents	schema.org Actions (BuyAction…), WebMCP, ACP, UCP
Perception		RAG grounding, AI Overviews, agent reasoning

From Schema’s Second Life, Search ’n Stuff London 2026.

Entities: what exists, and what that thing is. Thing, Organization and Person, stabilised with @ids and tied out to Wikidata, GS1, ISNI or ORCID so an agent knows your “Apple” from the fruit.
Relationships: how those things connect. @id and sameAs, RDF. Yoast SEO’s schema aggregation feature and EntityMap by Dixon Jones.
Format: how structure is serialised and served. JSON-LD, RDFa and Microdata. Markdown too, (encompassing llms.txt, agents.md, OKF) and endpoints (content negotiation, ARD, MCP)
Actions: what can be done, declared to agents. schema.org Actions such as BuyAction, plus the newer WebMCP, ACP and UCP.
Perception: grounding, third party perception, sentiment etc.

Aggregation, guidance and consumption

In a post I wrote in October last year, I said “SEOs will have to consider both sides of the web and how to serve both”. The emerging protocols (all of which were launched in the past 2 years) show this to be true, where a new “agentic grounding stack” generally adopts one of three goals:

Protocol	Goal	What it does
sitemap.xml	Aggregation	Every canonical URL into a single XML index
llms.txt	Aggregation	Summary of a site’s content with important information and links to further reading
Yoast Schema Aggregation	Aggregation	Page-level JSON-LD into one connected site-wide graph
EntityMap	Aggregation	A site’s entity declarations into one explicit map
Knowledge Catalog	Aggregation	Structured, unstructured and SaaS data into a governed context engine
OKF	Aggregation	Site knowledge into a markdown bundle at /okf/
ARD · ai-catalog.json	Aggregation	A domain’s tools and agents into a catalog; registries federate above it
OpenKB	Aggregation	Source documents compiled into a markdown wiki
Schema.org	Guidance	The shared vocabulary that tells machines what things mean
agents.md	Guidance	How agents should represent and interact with you
Markdown for Agents	Consumption	Same URL served as clean markdown via content negotiation
Markdown alternate output	Consumption	A separate .md version linked with rel=alternate
/crawl endpoint	Consumption	Renders a page, or entire site, as clean markdown on demand
WebMCP	Consumption	Exposes a site’s actions as tools an agent can invoke
NLWeb	Consumption	Ingests schema, feeds and sitemaps to answer natural-language queries
ACP	Consumption	Agent checkout inside ChatGPT against merchant product data
UCP	Consumption	A common language for agent commerce actions across surfaces

These three goals help reduce the number of requests whilst increasing token efficiency. Some of the above protocols have been covered in more detail within SEJ including my own on ACP and UCP and Emina Demiri-Watson’s thorough article on OKF, ARD and others earlier this month.

But there’s something none of these protocols have…

There is no consensus or agreed standard

Schema.org was born out of consensus between Google, Microsoft/Bing and Yahoo! (Yandex joining later) who launched it under joint governance. The same happened 5 years earlier with the XML sitemap. When the search engines needed a standard, they simply sat down and created one, together.

Nothing like this is happening now, and it comes at the detriment of SEOs who genuinely want clarity on what to implement and what not to implement for sites they work on. Even basic facts about consumption are contested, where the debate over markdown is a great example of this.

While these debates continue, there’s no room where platforms are convening and agreeing to one universal standard. The ecosystem has changed so dramatically where these companies are not in the business of Search and the good of the web, but must now navigate how their businesses affect jobs, economies, livelihoods and the future of humanity as a whole. As such, I just don’t believe questions posed by SEOs are at the top of their priorities.

What can you do about it now?

Looking back at the 5 layers of data integrity, the four you have control over can be illustrated below when looking at what an agentic grounding stack can look like:

The agentic grounding stack

There’s a lot to consider, and all have different goals and technical debt. Decide which are most applicable to you as well as adopting anything that should not require too much technical debt.

If I had to pick an order, it would be this.

Stabilise your @ids and add sameAs links out to Wikidata and the other authorities first, because everything else stands on it.
Then test how you’re actually interpreted, with NLWeb, rather than assuming the graph reads the way you intended.
If you’re in ecommerce, audit the product feed before touching anything shiny, and look at BuyAction while you’re there: only ReadAction and SearchAction are deployed at any real scale today, so the field is genuinely open. Look into the recent news about what has been added to Product schema.
Attempt to implement WebMCP. It can be done on any website, doesn’t need to be ecommerce.
Markdown serving and content negotiation can wait until you have engineering capacity to spare (unless you can use Cloudflare’s Markdown for Agents).
Look into OKF and ARD. When Google launch new protocols I always take notice, especially when it comes to how an agent or LLM understands a site as a whole.

None of this is a bet on a specific protocol. Implementing any of these reduces risk that an LLM has to go “the long way round” to form the answer it wants to respond with. By hedging bets to welcome any agent from any platform, this will also help you think more about exactly how your site may be interpreted by them, and how this improves when these protocols are adopted.

Even if you want to make small experiments away from larger sites, it’s worth exploring not only to see if there are positive results from it, but also to understand how they all work in practice. This is exactly what I have done recently where I have rebuilt my personal website which has several “agentic ready” protocols running, including content negotiation, markdown alternate, llms.txt and WebMCP.

Don’t chase the protocol, own the layers underneath

Right now, it seems there is no single “winner” that will progress from a proposal or protocol to a web standard. There’s no consortium to repeat what was done with the XML sitemap and Schema.

The stack is now big, but there’s one thing they all share. Whether it aggregates, guides or consumes, each one is fed by the same substrate: accurate entities, explicit relationships, and content a machine can read without guessing or researching further.

Rankings were the success metrics of the old web. Trust, integrity, accuracy and validity. Earning this is still the role of an SEO.

Agentic Commerce Optimisation: Prepare For Google's UCP

Alex Moss — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:00:45 GMT

First published by Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/agentic-commerce-optimization-a-technical-guide-to-prepare-for-googles-ucp/566969/

In January, I wrote about the birth of agentic commerce through both ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) and UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol); and how this could impact us all as consumers, business owners and SEOs. As we still sit on waitlists for both, this doesn’t mean that we can’t prepare for it.

UCP fixes a real-life problem for many: minimising the fragmented commerce journey. Instead of building separate integrations for every agent platform as we have been mostly doing in the past, you can now [theoretically] integrate once and will integrate seamlessly with other tools and platforms.

But note here that, as opposed to ACP that focuses more so on the checkout → fulfilment → payment journey, UCP goes beyond this with six capabilities covering the entire commerce lifecycle.

This of course will impact an SEO’s ambit. As we shift from optimising for clicks to optimising for selection, we also need to ensure that it’s you/your client that is selected through data integrity, product signals, and AI-readable commerce capabilities. Structured data has always served an important role for the Internet as a whole and will continue to be the driving force on how you can serve agents, crawlers and humans in the best way possible.

I alluded to the new acronym of “ACO” (Agentic Commerce Optimisation) and the following could be considered the closest we can get to guidelines on how we undertake it.

UCP Isn’t Coming, It’s Here

UCP was only announced in January, but there’s already confirmation that its capabilities are rolling out. On Feb. 11, 2026, Vidhya Srinivasan (VP/GM of Advertising & Commerce at Google) announced that Wayfair and Etsy now use UCP so that you can purchase directly within AI Mode, and was observed the next day by Brodie Clark.

UCP’s Six Layered Capabilities

On the day UCP was released, it explained its methodology.

Image credit: Google

Within this are the 6 core capabilities:

Product Discovery: how agents find and surface your inventory during research
Cart Management: multi-item baskets, dynamic pricing, complex basket rules
Identity Linking: OAuth 2.0 authorisation for personalised experiences and loyalty
Checkout: session creation, tax calculation, payment handling
Order Management: webhook-based lifecycle and logistical updates
Vertical Capabilities: extensible modules for specialised use cases like travel booking windows or subscription schedules

UCP’s schema authoring guide shows how capabilities are defined through versioned JSON schemas which act as the foundation of the protocol. When it comes to considering this as an SEO, properties such as offers, aggregateRating, and shippingDetails aren’t just for surfacing rich snippets, etc. for product discovery, they’re now what agents query during the entire process.

Schema is, and will continue to be, essential

UCP’s technical specification uses its own JSON schema-based vocabulary. Whilst it doesn’t build on schema.org directly, it remains critical in the broader ecosystem. As Pascal Fleury said at Google Search Central Live in December, “schema is the glue that binds all these ontologies together”. UCP handles the transaction; schema.org helps agents decide who to transact with.

Ensure you’re on top of and populate product schema as much as you can. It may seem like SEO-101. Regardless, audit all of this now to ensure you’re not missing anything when UCP really rolls out.

This includes checks on:

Product schema (with complete coverage): All core fields: name, description, SKU, GTIN, brand, related images and offers.
- Offers must include: price, priceCurrency, availability, url, seller. Add aggregateRating and review to ensure you have positive third-party perspective.
- Ensure all product variants output correctly.
- Include shippingDetails with delivery estimates.
Organization and Brand: assists with “Merchant of Record” verification. If you’re not an Organization, then fallback to Person.
Designated FAQPage: Ensure you have an FAQpage as these can be incorporated alongside product-level FAQs and used as part of its decision-making.

Prepare Your Merchant Center feed

UCP will utilise your existing Merchant Center feed as the discovery layer. This means that beyond the normal onsite schema you provide, Merchant Center itself requires more details that you can populate within its platform.

Return policies (required to be a Merchant of Record): Complete all return costs, return windows, and policy links. These will be used not just within the checkout and transactional areas but again a consideration for selection at all. Advanced accounts need policies at each sub-account level.
Customer support information: not only would initial information be offered to the customer, but there will be ways in which entry-level customer support queries can be completely managed, thus increasing customer satisfaction whilst minimising customer support agent capacity.
Agentic checkout eligibility: Add the native_commerce attribute to your feed as products are only eligible here if this is set up.
Product identifiers: each product must have an ID, and correlate to the product ID when using the checkout API.
Product consumer warnings: any product warning should assert the consumer_notice attribute.

Google recommends that this is done through a supplemental data source in Merchant Center rather than modifying your primary feed, which would prevent incorrect formatting or other invalidation.

Lastly, double check if the products you’re selling aren’t included within its product restrictions list as there are several that if you do offer those things, you should consider how to manage alongside the abilities of UCP.

Optimising conversational commerce attributes

Within the UCP blog post announcement, Srinivasan introduced a way for more clarity with conversational commerce attributes:

“…we’re announcing dozens of new data attributes in Merchant Center designed for easy discovery in the conversational commerce era, on surfaces like AI Mode, Gemini and Business Agent. These new attributes complement retailers’ existing data feeds and go beyond traditional keywords to include things like answers to common product questions, compatible accessories or substitutes.”

These provide further clarity (and therefore minimise hallucinations) during the discovery process in order to be selected or ruled out.

Not only would this incorporate product and brand-related FAQs but take this a step further to also consider:

Compatibility: potential up-sell opportunities
Substitution: an opportunity for dealing with out-of-stock items
Related products: great for cross-sell opportunities

Furthermore, this can be used to become even more specific, moving beyond basic attributes to agent-parseable details. Now, if a product is “purple” on a basic level, “dark purple” or even something unobvious such as “Wolf” (real example below) may be more appropriate for finer detail whilst still falling under “purple”. The same can be considered for sizes, materials (or a mixture of materials), etc.

When executed well, optimising for conversational commerce attributes will increase the possibility of selection within fan-out query results. When considering some of these attributes, it is worth looking at tools such as WordLift’s Visual Fan-Out simulator which illustrates how a single image decomposes into multiple search intents, revealing which attributes agents may prioritise when performing query fan-out. But how would this look? As an example, I used one product image and browsed downward 3 horizons. Thanks to On Running for approval to use their product here, so I aptly chose Cloudsurfer Max in the colour “Wolf” in homage to their SEO Team Lead Max Woelfe:

Image credit: On

Using just one product image, this is what is presented on the surface:

Screenshot from WordLift’s Visual Fan-Out simulator, February 2026

It noticed immediately that the product was On Running, and specifically from the Cloudsurfer range. Great start! Now let’s see what it sees over the horizon:

Screenshot from WordLift’s Visual Fan-Out simulator, February 2026

Here you can draw inspiration or direction on how best to place yourself for potential and likely fan-out queries. With this example, I found it interesting that horizon 2 mentions performance running gear as a large category, then when performing fan-out on that showed the related products around gear in general. This shows how wide LLMs consider selection and how you can present attributes to attract selection.

UCP’s roadmap is expanding into multi-verticals

UCP is already planning to go beyond one single purchase but expand beyond retail into travel, services, and other verticals. Its roadmap details several priorities over the coming year, including:

Multi-item carts and complex baskets: moving beyond single-item checkout to native multi-item carts, bundling, promotions, tax/shipping logic, and more realistic fulfilment handling.
Loyalty and account linking: standardised loyalty programme management and account linking so agents can apply points, member pricing, and benefits across merchants.
Post-purchase support: support for order tracking, returns, and customer-service handoff so agents can manage customer support post-sale.
Personalisation signals: richer signals for cross-sell/upsell, wishlists, history, and context-based recommendations.
New verticals: expansion beyond retail into travel, services, digital goods, and food/restaurant use cases via extensions to the protocol.

Each of the points above are worth further reading and consideration if this is something your brand may offer. Furthermore, its plans to expand beyond retail into travel, services, digital goods, and hospitality means that, if you’re working within any of these verticals, you need to be even more prepared to ensure eligibility.

Regardless of how well you may optimise on-site to prepare for UCP, all this data integrity still needs to be validated by trusted third party sources.

Third party platforms such as Trustpilot and G2 remain extremely trusted amongst most of the LLMs so I’d still advise that you continue to collect those positive brand and product reviews in order to satisfy consensus, resulting in more opportunities to be selected during product discovery.

TLDR: prepare now

If you own or manage any form of ecommerce site, now is the time to ensure you’re preparing for UCP’s rollout as soon as possible. It’s only a matter of time before this is initially rolled out and with AI mode spreading into default experiences, so getting ahead of the roll out is essential.

Join the UCP waitlist
Prepare Merchant Center: return policies, native_commerce attribute
Ensure your developers research and understand the UCP documentation
Populate conversational attributes: question-answers, compatibility, substitutes
Audit and improve any schema where applicable

This is moving faster than most previous commerce shifts, and brands that wait for full rollout signals will already be behind. This isn’t a short-term LLM gimmick but is part of the largest change in the ecommerce space.

Agentic Commerce: What SEOs Need To Consider (ACP & UCP)

Alex Moss — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:30:48 GMT

First published by Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/agentic-commerce-what-seos-need-to-consider-acp-ucp/563503/

In my last post, I referenced how there is now a growing split between the “human” web and the “agentic” web, where AI agents are becoming an additional audience/profile alongside the “traditional” human visitors we have been optimising for for years.

This shift is now becoming more aggressive, especially when it comes to the transactional web in the form of agentic commerce. 2026 will see the accelerated adoption of this method, where store owners will now have to cater and optimise for both the human and agentic visitor concurrently.

The recent launch of Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) from Google underlines the push towards this integration of AI and ecommerce experiences.

What is Agentic Commerce?

Agentic commerce is when agents complete purchases autonomously on behalf of users. Now a human can engage with an LLM platform, where the agent will browse and purchase from a site on behalf (and with approval) of the human. Not only is the agent now acting as the gatekeeper for information gain and influencing decisions; they are now also acting as the gatekeeper for the transaction itself.

This is now a step beyond delegating an LLM to act as a recommendation agent or a method of validation but now transfers authority to actually transact.

Enter ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)

Less than 3 months ago (29th Sept 2025) OpenAI and Stripe announced their partnership and within this launched ACP, an open standard that defines how AI agents, merchants, and payment providers interact to complete agentic and programmatic purchases.

On the same day, OpenAI detailed platforms that were immediately able to benefit from agentic commerce including Shopify and Etsy, with others following suit using the protocol including Walmart and Instacart.

From a CMS point of view, Shopify hit the ground running by enabling ACP for over 1m merchants from the day of the announcement. WooCommerce has followed suit more recently by announcing they will be part of Stripe’s launch of Agentic Commerce Suite which will allow even more merchants the ability to sell products through various AI-based platforms.

But ACP was launched three months ago, and as we now know, things move fast…

UCP: Google’s Answer To The Immersive Agentic Commerce Experience

Google just announced the launch of Universal Commerce Protocol, which widens some boundaries applied by ACP by tackling a broader problem, providing any AI surface (like Search AI Mode or Gemini) a common language to discover merchants, understand their capabilities, and orchestrate full journeys from discovery through order management, as well as engagement beyond a purchase (also made seamless using Google Pay). This is also done by integrating with other existing standards, including APIs, Agent2Agent (A2A), and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Aspect	ACP (OpenAI)	UCP (Google)
Primary focus	Agent-led commerce in ChatGPT and ACP-aware agents.	Unified rail for many agents/surfaces talking to merchants.
Journey Coverage	Product feed, checkout, fulfilment, delegated payment.	Discovery, checkout, discounts, fulfilment, order management, payments.
Driver	OpenAI + Stripe & ecosystem partners.	Google + retailers/platforms (Shopify, Etsy, Walmart, etc.).

Here, Google adds to the possibilities of the commerce experience, where SEOs can adopt both ACP and UCP in order to accommodate both platforms and ecosystems.

This will only become more immersive as 2026 progresses. Google has a great advantage of knowing a lot about individual users, and features such as AI features inside Gmail illustrate Google can utilise and understand much more context about individuals in order to provide an even more frictionless experience.

Why This Matters for SEOs

As SEOs, we’ve spent over a generation optimising for humans, albeit for various personas or ICPs. Whilst we are still required to do this, we must now include the agent as an additional consideration. This does pose another challenge: that AI agents don’t browse pages but instead query APIs, parse product feeds, and evaluate structured data.

As such we need to optimise for this. Maybe I can give it a name…

ACO: Agentic Commerce Optimisation

I don’t want to trigger you by introducing yet another acronym to what seems to be the year of new acronyms, but for the sake of this post let’s pretend that ACO is something you’ve been told to now do as well as SEO even though this is still SEO.

What would I need to consider and optimise for for successful ACO?

Crawlability: agents still follow links, take journeys and understand IA.
Format: content needs to be concise with less fluff, but enough to ensure unique value has been added, and that it provides consistency throughout the site as a whole.
Structured data: agents will become more reliant on existing standards, especially if they’re open source.
Brand authority and sentiment: populating your products well is of course paramount, but without positive brand sentiment you have the challenge of convincing the agent to cite you as part of that discovery, then have to convince the human who will have that feedback presented to them. Third party perspectives will become a larger contribution towards some of the agents’ grounding procedure before any agentic commerce begins.

Sounds familiar, right? Whilst ACP is a connector between your site and the platforms that allow agents to use it and CMSs are out there to make that connection as seamless as possible, this isn’t just a switch where, when switched on, is automatically optimised.

ACO = SEO.

schema.org is the Glue

Image Credit: Alex Moss, January 2026

Earlier this month at Google Search Central Live in Zurich, Pascal Fleury went into detail about structured data for Shopping, where we can see that whilst “schema.org is the glue that holds [structured data] together” there are still other industry standards such as GS1 that will add even more granular detail to products that will not only help inform agents on really specific details but also understand that you’re a great source of information to continue ingest from.

Product schema, pricing, availability, reviews, FAQs, shipping options and other logistics, loyalty schemes, all of this structured data will need close optimisation. If it’s missing or incorrect, you’re invisible to agent-mediated discovery.

Test the Agents

Even before your store is ACP-enabled, test how agents perceive your products. Ask platforms about products in your category. Do they surface your brand? How do they describe your products and complementary offerings? What information are they presenting, from both first party and third party perspectives? And more importantly, what is missing that you expected to be present?

Then, enable. What are the differences? Compare the results.

What can I do about it now?

ACP

For WooCommerce and Wix you will unfortunately need to join Stripe’s waitlist for ACS. Shopify users also have to join their own waitlist too. Until then, we will have to wait until full rollout but expect this to accelerate in Q1 of 2026.

If you work with a site where you have to integrate ACP directly into your CMS, any early adopters will perhaps benefit from early discovery whilst the other CMSs catch up and competition is lower. So here, whilst this will require more resources you will be able to take advantage of what ACP has to offer while most wait for their CMS platform to create the solution for them.

UCP

This is extremely fresh information, but I suggest that some time to understand it in detail, as well as experiment where possible using their documentation and GitHub repo, I know that’s how a lot of my time will be spent in the next few weeks.

Evolving Your SEO Strategy for AI Discovery

Alex Moss — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 11:30:45 GMT

First published by Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-same-but-different-evolving-your-strategy-for-ai-driven-discovery/558619/

The web (and the way in which humans interact with it) has definitely changed since the early days of SEO and the emergence of search engines in the early to mid 90s. In that time, we’ve witnessed the Internet turn from something that nobody understood to something most of the world cannot operate without. This interview between Bill Gates and David Letterman puts this 30-year phenomenon into perspective:

The attitude 30 years ago was that the Internet was not understood at all and nor was its potential influence. Today, the concept of AI entering into our daily lives is taken much more seriously to the point that it is something that many look upon with fear, perhaps now because we [think] we have an accurate outlook on how this may progress.

This transformation isn’t so much about the skills we’ve developed over time, but rather about the evolution of the technology and channels that surround them. Those technologies and channels are evolving at a fast pace and causing some to panic over whether their inherent technological skills will still apply within today’s Search ecosystem.

The Technological Rat Race

Right now, it may feel like there’s something new to learn or a new product to experiment with every day and can be difficult to decide where to focus your attention and priorities. This is unfortunately a phase that I believe will continue for a good couple of years as the dust settles over this wild west of change.

Because these changes are impacting nearly everything an SEO would be responsible for as part of organic visibility it may feel overwhelming to digest all these things, all while we seemingly take on the challenge of communicating these changes to our clients or stakeholders/board members.

But change does not equal the end of days. This “change” relates to the technology around what we’ve been doing for over a generation, and not the foundation of the discipline itself.

Old Hat is New Hat

The major search engines have been actively telling you including Google and Bing that core SEO principles should still be at the forefront of what we do moving forward. Danny Sullivan, former Search Liaison at Google, also made this clear during his recent keynote at WordCamp USA:

The consistent messages are clear:

Produce well-optimised sites that perform well
Populate solid structured data and entity knowledge graphs
Re-enforce brand sentiment and perspective
Offer unique valuable content for people.

The problem some may have is that the content we produce is moreso for agents than for people and if this is true, what impact does this make?

The Web is Splitting into Two

The open web has been disrupted most of all, with some business models being uprooted by taking solved knowledge and serving it within their platform, appropriating the human visitor which they rely on for income.

This has created a split from a complete open web into two: the “human” web and the “agentic” web, where these two audiences are both major considerations and will differ from site to site. SEOs will have to consider both sides of the web and how to serve both, which is where an SEO’s skillset becomes more valuable than it was before.

One example can be seen in the way that agents now take charge of Ecommerce transactions where OpenAI announced “Buy it in ChatGPT”, where the buying experience is even more seamless with instant checkouts. They also open sourced the technology behind it, ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol), and is already being adopted by CMS’ including Shopify. This split between agentic and human engagement will still require optimisation in order to ensure maximum discoverability.

When it comes to content, ensure everything is concise and avoid fluff, what I refer to as “tokenisation spam”. Content isn’t just crawled: it’s processed, chunked, and tokenised. Agents will take preference to well structured and formatted text.

“Short term wins” sounds like Black Hat.

Of course, during any technological shift there will be some bad actors who may tell you about a brand-new tactic that is guaranteed to work to help you “rank in AI”. Remember that the dust has not yet settled when it comes to the maturity of these assistance engines, and you should compare this to the pre-Panda/Penguin era of SEO where black hat SEO techniques were easier to achieve.

These algorithm updates closed those loopholes and the same will happen again as these platforms improve, with increased speed as agents understand what is truly honest with increased precision.

Success metrics will change, not the execution to influence them

In reality, core SEO Principles and foundations are still the same and have been throughout most changes in the past, including “the end of desktop” when mobiles became more dominant; and “the end of typing” when voice search started to grow with products such as Alexa, Google Home and even Google Glass.

Is the emergence of AI going to render what I do as an SEO obsolete? No.

Technical SEO remains the same, and the attributes that agents look at are not dissimilar to what we would be optimising if LLMs weren’t around. Brand marketing remains the same. Whilst the term “brand sentiment” is a term used more widely nowadays, it is something that should have always been a part of our online marketing strategies when it comes to authority, relevance and perspective.

That being said, our native metrics have been devalued within two years, and those metrics will continue to shift alongside the changes that are yet to come as these platforms deliver more stability. This has already skewed YoY data and will continue to skew for the year ahead as more LLMs evolve. This, however, could be compared to events such as replacing granular organic keyword data with one (not provided) metric within Google Analytics, the deprecation of Yahoo! Site Explorer, or devaluation of benchmark data such as Alexa Rank and Google PageRank.

Revise your Success Metric Considerations

Success metrics now have to go beyond the SERP into visibility and discoverability as a whole, through multiple channels. There are now several tools and platforms available that can analyse and report on AI-focussed visibility metrics, such as Yoast AI Brand Insights, that can provide better insight into how your brand is interpreted by LLMs.

If you’re more technical, make use of MCPs (Model Context Protocol) to understand data more via natural language dialogues. MCP is an open-source standard that lets AI applications connect to external systems like databases, tools, or workflows (you can visualise this as a USB-C port for AI) so they can access information and perform tasks using a simple, unified connection. There are several MCPs you can work with already including:

You can take this a step further by coupling this with a vibe coding tool such as Claude Code, where you can use it to create a reporting app that uses a combination of the above MCP servers in order to extract the best data and create visuals and interactive charts for you and your clients/stakeholders.

Same Same but Different… but Still Same

While the divergence between human and agentic experiences is increasing, the methods by which we, as an SEO, would optimise for them are not too dissimilar. Leverage both within your strategy, just as you did when mobile gained traction in the same way.

What CMOs Should Ask About Their WordPress Stack

Alex Moss — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 12:30:55 GMT

First published by Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-cmos-need-to-ask-about-their-wordpress-stack/553191/

WordPress is still the most popular open-source CMS, by far, powering 43-point-something-percent of all websites on the web, and still in my opinion the most adaptable CMS to work with. However, WordPress isn’t just a “plug and play” CMS. If you’re in the marketing team or the CMO, you may find yourself inheriting and using a WordPress site that will most likely have a less-than-ideal stack setup.

Don’t accept that this is just the setup you have. If your tech stack isn’t aligned correctly, it could directly hinder some of your own goals. Whilst it may seem that you should delegate all technical decisions to the development/IT team, these decisions may overrule wider business goals.

As such, it may be time to audit your installation and setup in order to break free of these stack limitations. If you’re a CMO, this post will cover the different considerations when thinking of the optimal WordPress tech stack that also aligns with your own goals.

What a Tech Stack Includes

From a top level, the WordPress tech stack involves the following:

Server infrastructure
Hosting infrastructure
Performance & caching
Security
Dev tools
WordPress layer
Monitoring and analytics
Backup and recovery

This can be seen in more detail from this diagram:

There’s a lot to consider. With that, let’s delve into what you as a CMO should be asking yourself, and others, to ensure this stack is at its best.

The Invisible Cost of Cheap Hosting

Shared hosting might seem cost-effective, but it’s often the most expensive choice in the long term. When your site shares resources with hundreds of others, performance becomes unpredictable. This can affect many things from general speed and performance but also how search engines and LLMs crawl/discover your site as well as how a human may experience the site itself.

Dedicated servers or managed WordPress hosting may be a larger investment but in turn reduces technical overheads whilst providing the infrastructure needed for growth and scale. For the level up from this, WordPress-based Cloud hosting is the most robust solution but would require more technical expertise to manage.

What CMOs should ask:

Are we on shared hosting or dedicated infrastructure? If the former, why?
Are all server resources such as PHP up to date?
What happens to site performance during traffic spikes?
Who is responsible for server-level maintenance, optimisations and security?
For potential traffic spikes, are there solutions and safeguards in place such as load balancers?
Can we grow and scale with our current solution?

Performance: The Business Metric Disguised as a Tech Metric

Developers and technical SEOs alike will obsess over PageSpeed/Lighthouse scores, but things such as Core Web Vitals aren’t just technical benchmarks but also conversion metrics in disguise.

A one-second delay in mobile load times can impact mobile conversions by up to 20%. If LCP exceeds 2.5 seconds, then your next sale is at high risk before there’s a chance to convert them.

Performance optimisation in WordPress isn’t straightforward when looking forensically. Many “solutions” can create new problems. Even well-intentioned optimisations can cause conflicts or other knock-on effects, creating the classic “Frankenstein” setup that becomes expensive to unravel and is more common than you think.

What CMOs should ask:

How does our site perform on PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix and YSlow? What can be improved? How do we perform against competitors?
Is caching properly set up? Are we considering all levels (server, object, page, CDN etc etc).
Do we have all minification tools set up correctly?
Is our database architecture the best it can be? How can this be improved?
What and how often is our database cleaned? Does this include revisions?
How are our images performing? Have they been optimised? Are we using more modern formats such as WebP?
Who owns the performance metric?

This isn’t about chasing perfect scores. It’s about ensuring your technical foundation supports rather than potentially sabotaging your marketing objectives.

Deciding on a Theme should be Long Term

There are thousands of WordPress themes out there.

In a perfect scenario, the theme itself would be custom-built as well as using WordPress’ own Gutenberg block editor as it’s part of core. As well as this, full site editing functionality makes this process even easier.

If your budgets can’t stretch to custom-built theme development, it’s then extremely important to choose the right theme. Ensure that you research into the theme properly, making an informed choice that is performance-led to complement the stack, not convenience-led for editors.

But remember, your choice of theme is more long term than installing a plugin you find you don’t need a month/year later. Because of this, themes should have a more considered and informed approach.

Bonus Consideration: Page Builders

Generally, the people who end up using WordPress on a day-to-day basis are not the same people who developed it or set it up. Because of this, there can sometimes be clashes when it comes to what someone in your marketing team wants versus what should be implemented with technical best practice.

Page builders such as Elementor and Divi do offer a lot more freedom and flexibility for page creation and design but come with the downside of potential code bloat and resource allocation. Ensure that your decisions are not influenced too much by this request, because that is what it is, a request.

What CMOs should ask:

How does our current theme/builder choice impact site performance?
Is our current theme built for purpose? Is it a theme that caters for the masses or is it developed specifically for me or my niche?
Are we locked into a specific page builder? What does the builder offer that Gutenberg and FSE don’t? What are the migration implications?
Are our choices forming a good balance between design flexibility with technical performance?
Do we have the development resources to support our chosen approach?
Are there conflicts between the page builder and other resources/assets?

Plugin-ception

“There’s a plugin for that.”

This is a phrase we’ve all heard or said before, myself included. There will be a plugin for that, yes, but it shouldn’t be the answer every time you want to extend functionality.

Whilst I do have a select number of “core” plugins that I confidently choose to use on any site (which I covered in part within my brightonSEO talk last year), this does not mean that I would choose to install a plugin because it solved one problem that may not be enough to substantiate installing if it warrants the technical debt the plugin will add.

The average WordPress site runs 20-30 plugins with many serving overlapping functions or creating conflicts.

Bonus: Some Plugins Require Attention Post-Installation

There are some plugins that have a simple “plug and play” approach. But whenever I install anything, I always delve further into its setup, configuration and how this can impact the performance of a site. One thing to know is that in general, you should not approach any plugin with an “install and ignore” mindset.

Check the settings. Go through FTC (first time configuration). Audit the configuration.

Furthermore, plugins not only provide valuable under-the-hood optimisations and enhancements, but also present an opportunity for the site to evolve alongside your business and marketing activities. Actively using these plugins means your stack continues to benefit from the latest features, innovations, and improvements.

What CMOs should ask:

How many plugins are currently active on our site?
When was our last plugin audit?
What plugins are we dependent on for our core business functions?
Have all plugins been configured correctly?
Are the plugins that require ongoing work being used?
Are there conflicts with other plugins?
Are there any incumbent plugins stopping the development of the site as a whole?
(More aggressive) What will happen to the wider business goals if [Plugin X] is no longer used?

The more plugins that are installed the higher the risk of incompatibility, conflicts and security vulnerabilities.

Security: Be Proactive, not Reactive

One would think that security is always the top priority to ensure the safe operation of any website. Incorrect.

Breaches can devastate not just the site, but in turn your brand reputation whilst also incurring large immediate costs and most likely some loss of earnings in the future as a result. Whilst on the more extreme end of the scale, earlier this year some hackers breached a number of large UK retailers including Marks and Spencer, causing £300m in lost profits with no real measurement on how this has affected them since.

It doesn’t take long or cost much (in some cases the solutions are free) to add some layers of security to your stack. Whether it’s adding rules within Cloudflare or installing Sucuri or Wordfence, don’t just leave your site unprotected while you ‘sit tight and assess’. Take proactive steps to secure your stack.

What CMOs should ask:

What security measures do we currently have for the site?
Are any and all vulnerabilities monitored?
Is everything up to date? This includes not just WordPress core, themes and plugins; but also on a server level such as PHP.

Maintenance: Forgotten until Required

WordPress maintenance often gets treated as a technical afterthought, but I consider this to be a critical marketing function. Outdated plugins not only create conflicts that have knock-on effects on both the frontend and backend of the site but also expose you to security vulnerabilities that I just covered above.

The choice between manual and automatic updates reflects deeper strategic priorities. Manual updates provide more control but require dedicated resources and staging environments for testing prior to deployment. Automatic updates may reduce maintenance overhead but there is always a risk of conflicts during critical business periods.

What CMOs should ask:

Who is responsible for WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates? Do they have all the required access in case of disaster scenarios?
Who is responsible for legal, compliance and privacy on the site?
Is everything up to date? If not, is there a reason for this?
Do we have staging environments for testing changes before anything is deployed to a production environment?
What’s our rollback plan if an update breaks critical functionality?
How do we balance security needs with stability requirements?

“Frankenstein” Sites only get you So Far for So Long…

If you have a theme that is now years old, perhaps 5 or more, it’s likely that over time the theme (unless extremely well maintained) will eventually cause issues and conflicts, more so when you want to grow and scale.

Optimising the site over time is obviously suggested, but after a prolonged amount of time this becomes more challenging and less possible without conflicts arising.

What CMOs should ask:

When was the last time a theme was chosen?
When was it last audited? Is the theme still fit for purpose today?
Is a theme update causing conflicts with other resources and plugins?
Are there legacy plugins or other functionality that prevent essential updates to WordPress or PHP, forcing the site to remain on outdated versions (therefore limiting access to new features, improved security, or better performance)?
Are ad hoc maintenance costs and “patchwork” over 2-3 years costing more than a potential rebuild (i.e. is it a “write-off”)?

Key Takeaways

Below is a high-priority checklist that you can act on now:

Priority	Action Item	Stakeholder(s)
Critical	Audit current hosting environment and audit invisible costs	CMO, Tech Lead, Finance
Critical	Review plugin presence and usage: configuration, conflicts, necessity	Tech, SEO, Product, Marketing
Critical	Implement and verify up-to-date security layers (e.g., Sucuri, WAF)	CTO, IT
High	Define clear responsibilities for updates, rollback, and compliance	Product, Legal, Marketing
High	Schedule routine theme and plugin audits	Dev/Project Manager
High	Set up or review staging/testing environments for changes	Tech Lead/DevOps
Medium	Plan for a long-term theme or potential rebuild if “Frankenstein”	CMO, CTO
Medium	Calculate ongoing maintenance costs vs possible site overhaul	Finance, CMO, CTO

Your WordPress stack should never be considered as “set and forget.” Don’t wait for something to break, because when something does, it will most likely cause more loss than any proactive investment to ensure there isn’t one.

From Search To Discovery: Why SEO Must Evolve Beyond The SERP

Alex Moss — Mon, 19 May 2025 11:00:56 GMT

First published by Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/from-search-to-discovery-why-seo-must-evolve-beyond-the-serp/546406/

The Search landscape is witnessing its biggest shift in a generation. If you’ve been in SEO long enough to remember the glory days of the all-organic SERP, you’ll know how much of this real estate has been gradually taken over by paid ads, other first party products, rich snippets, and now the most aggressive transition of the SERP: AI Overviews (as well as search-based LLM platforms). At BrightonSEO last month, I explored how this evolution is forcing us to rethink what SEO means and why discoverability, not just ranking, is the new north star.

The “Dawn” of the Zero-Click is over: it’s now assumed

We’ve been reading about the rise of zero-click searches for some time now, but this “takeover” has been much more noticeable over the past 12 months. I recently searched “how to teach my child to tell the time,” and after scrolling through a parade of paid product ads, Google-owned assets, and the AI Overview summaries, I scrolled a good three pages down the SERP.

Google and other search and discovery platforms want to keep users in their ecosystems. For SEOs, this means traditional metrics such as CTR are becoming less valuable by the day.

From Answer Engines to Assistant Engines

LLMs have changed not just the way a result is displayed to the user but also the traditional search flow born within the browser into a multi-step flow that the native SERP simply cannot support in the same way. The research process is collapsing into a single, seamless exchange.

Image used with permission from Alain Schlesser, May 2025

But as technology accelerates, our own curiosity and research skills are at risk of declining or disappearing completely as the evolution of technology exponentially grows.

Assistant engines and wider LLMs are the new gatekeepers between our content and the person discovering that content, our potential “new audience.” They parse, consume, understand, and then synthesise content, which is the deciding factor in what it mentions to who/what it interacts with. Structured data is still crucial, as context, transparency, and sentiment matter more than ever.

Personal LLM agent flow diagram by Alain Schlesser, used with permission, May 2025

Challenges are Different, but also the Same

As an SEO, our challenges with this new behaviour affects the way we do (and report on) our jobs. In reality, many are just old headaches in shiny new wrappers:

Attribution is a mess: With AI Overviews and LLMs synthesising content, it’s harder than ever to see where your traffic comes from, or if you’re getting any at all. There are some tools out there that do monitor, but we’re in the early days to see a standard. Even Google said they have no plans on adding insights on AIO within Search Console.
Traffic is fragmenting (again): We saw this with social media platforms at the beginning, where discovery happened outside the organic SERPs. Discovery is now happening everywhere, all at once. With attribution also harder to ascertain, this is a bigger challenge today.
Budgets are under scrutiny from FUD: The native SERP is changing too much, so some may assume there’s less (or no) value in doing SEO much anymore (untrue!)

The Shift of Success Metrics

The days of our current success metrics are dwindling. The days of vanity-led metrics are coming to an end. Similar to how our challenges are the same but different, this also applies to how we redefine success metrics:

Old Hat	New Hat
Content	Context + sentiment
Keywords	Intent
Brand	Brand + sentiment
Rankings	Mentions
Links from external sources	Citations across various channels
SERP monopoly	Share of voice
E-E-A-T	E-E-A-T
Structured data	Entities, knowledge graph & vector embeds
Answering	Assisting

What can you do about it?

Information can be aggregated, personality can’t. This is why it’s still our responsibility to help “assist the assistant” to consider and include you as part of that aggregated information and synthesised answer.

Stick to the fundamentals: never neglect SEO 101
Third party perspective is increasingly important, so ensure that this is maintained and managed well to ensure positive brand sentiment.
Embrace structured data: Even if some say it’s becoming less crucial for LLMs to understand entities, structured data is being used right now inside major LLMs to output structured data within responses, giving them an established and standardised way to understand your content.
Educate stakeholders: Shift the conversation from rankings and clicks to discoverability and brand presence. The days of the branded unlinked mention suddenly has more value than “acquiring X followed non-branded anchor text links pcm”.
Experiment with your content: Try new ways to produce and market your content beyond the traditional word. Here, video is useful not only for humans but also for LLMs, who are now “watching” and understanding them to aid their response.
Create helpful, unique content: To add to the above, don’t produce for the sake of production.

LLMs.txt: the potential to be the new standard

Keep an eye on emerging standards proposals such as llms.txt is one way some are adapting and contributing to how LLMs ingest our content beyond our traditional approaches offered with robots.txt and XML sitemaps. Whilst some are sceptical about this standard, I believe it is still something worth implementing. There is (virtually) non-existent risk in implementing something that doesn’t take too much time or resource to produce.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t dead. It’s expanding, but at a rate we haven’t experienced before. Discoverability is the new go-to success metric, but it’s not without flaws, especially as the way we search continues to change. This is no longer about “ranking well” anymore. This is now about being understood, surfaced, trusted and discovered across every platform and assistant that matters. Embrace and adapt to the changes, as it’s going to continue for some time.

WordPress Robots.txt: What Should You Include?

Alex Moss — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:30:58 GMT

First published by Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/robots-txt-wordpress/544255/

The humble robots.txt file often sits quietly in the background of a WordPress site, but the default is somewhat basic out-of-the-box and of course doesn’t contribute towards any customised directives you may want to adopt. No more intro needed. Let’s dive right into what else you can include to improve it 🙂

A small note to add: this post is only useful for WordPress installations on a root directory of a domain or subdomain only, eg domain.com or example.domain.com.

Where exactly is the WordPress robots.txt file?

By default, WordPress generates a virtual robots.txt file. You can see it by visiting /robots.txt of your install, for example:

https://yoursite.com/robots.txt

This default file exists only in memory and isn’t represented by a file on your server. If you want to use a custom robots.txt file all you have to do is upload one to the root folder of the install. You can do this either by using an FTP application or using a plugin such as Yoast SEO (SEO → Tools → File Editor) that includes a robots.txt editor that you can access within the WordPress admin area.

The Default WordPress robots.txt (And Why It’s Not Enough)

If you don’t manually create a robots.txt file, WordPress’ default output looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

While this is safe, it’s not optimal. Let’s go further…

Always Include: Your XML Sitemap(s)

Make sure that all XML sitemaps are explicitly listed as this helps search engines discover all relevant URLs.

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap2.xml

First: Some things not to Block

There are now-dated suggestions to disallow some core WordPress directories like /wp-includes/, /wp-content/plugins/, or even /wp-content/uploads/. Don’t!

Here’s why you shouldn’t block them:

Google is smart enough to ignore irrelevant files. Blocking CSS and JS can hurt renderability and cause indexing issues.
You may unintentionally block valuable images/videos/other media, especially those loaded from /wp-content/uploads/, which contains all uploaded media that you definitely want crawled.

Instead, let crawlers fetch the CSS, JS, and images they need for proper rendering.

Managing Staging Sites

It’s advisable to ensure that staging sites are not crawled for both SEO and general security purposes. I always advise to disallow the entire site. You should still use the noindex meta tag but to ensure another layer is covered it’s still advisable to do both. If you navigate to Settings → Reading you can tick the option “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” which does the following in the robots.txt file (or you can add this in yourself):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Google may still index pages if it discovers links elsewhere (usually caused by calls to staging from production when migration isn’t perfect).

NB: when you move to production, ensure you double check this setting again to ensure that you revert any disallowing or noindexing!

Clean Up some Non-Essential Core WordPress Paths

Not everything should be blocked, but many default paths add no SEO value such as the below:

Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: */embed/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /wp-json/

Disallow Specific Query Parameters

Sometimes, you’ll want to stop search engines from crawling URLs with known low-value query parameters, like tracking parameters, comment responses or print versions.

Here’s an example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?replytocom=
Disallow: /*?print=

You can use Google Search Console’s URL Parameters tool to monitor parameter-driven indexing patterns and decide if additional disallows are worthy of adding.

Disallowing Low-Value Taxonomies and SERPs

If your WordPress site includes tag archives or internal search results pages that offer no added value, you can block them too:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /?s=

As always, weigh this against your specific content strategy. If you use tag taxonomy pages as part of content you want indexed and crawled then do ignore this but generally they don’t add any benefits. Also, make sure your internal linking structure supports your decision and minimise any internal linking to areas you have no intention of indexing or crawling.

Monitor on Crawl Stats

Once your robots.txt is in place, monitor crawl stats via Google Search Console:

Look at Crawl Stats under Settings to see if bots are wasting resources.
Use the URL Inspection Tool to confirm if a blocked URL is indexed or not.
Check Sitemaps and make sure they only reference pages you actually want crawled and indexed.

As well as this, some server management tools such as Plesk, cPanel and Cloudflare can provide extremely detailed crawl statistics beyond Google.

Lastly, use Screaming Frog’s configuration override to simulate changes and revisit Yoast SEO’s crawl optimisation features, some of which solves the above.

Final Thought

Whilst WordPress is a great CMS, it isn’t set up with the most ideal default robots.txt, and isn’t set up with crawl optimisation in mind. Just a few lines of code and less than 30 minutes of your time can save you thousands of these unnecessary crawl requests to your site that aren’t worthy of being identified at all, as well as securing a potential scaling issue in the future.

How To Improve Speed And Performance For A WordPress Site

Alex Moss — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:00:18 GMT

First published by Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/improve-wordpress-performance/539328/

I love WordPress, but it isn’t perfect out-of-the-box at all. Themes and plugin choices are more important than ever, where some can hamper the site’s performance. You can do many things to improve any WordPress site and this post will cover just some of these optimisations that you can (hopefully) take action on immediately.

Choose a reputable web hosting company

Choosing a bad host can be harmful to a site’s performance. Whilst hosting on a shared server may seem the most cost-effective, it definitely comes with its issues of sharing that server with other (potentially) troublesome sites that can monopolise shared resources to the detriment of your own. Hosting doesn’t cost the earth. I would always advise that you choose a web host that not only has great hardware specifications (on a dedicated server if budgets allow), but also understand both WordPress as well as offering strong technical support. And look for hosts with server-level caching.

Whether your site resides on a managed WordPress hosting platform, a LiteSpeed server or scalable cloud hosting, it’s always worth doing your own research and comparing a few companies before deciding. Also consider how SEO-friendly that host is. WordPress also has a hosting page with a handful of recommended companies.

Server optimisations and CDNs

Once the site is hosted on the server, there are further optimisations you can apply at server-level. Newer protocols like HTTP/3 and QUIC reduce latency, especially on mobile devices. Cloudflare and LiteSpeed support this out of the box but it is still worth checking with your server settings as well.

There are also several CDNs available, but my recommendation has always been to use Cloudflare. Their free plan offers many optimisations, including image polishing, caching and compression (enable tiered caching to further optimise those requests). I also recommend their APO (automatic platform optimization) offering costing $5 per site, or free with any of their paid plans.

Within Cloudflare, I recommend to cache everything except wp-admin and dynamic content, serve stale content while revalidating cache in the background as well as using their WAF (Web Application Firewall) services that help block attacks and limit crawlers.

Security & Performance Tweaks

There are several optimisations to remove and limit resources that are enabled by default in WordPress core. Two good recommendations here would be to disable XML-RPC if it is not required as well as limit Rest API access if not in use:

Disable XML-RPC

add_filter('xmlrpc_enabled', '__return_false');

Limit REST API Access

add_filter('rest_authentication_errors', function( $result ) {
    if( !is_user_logged_in() ) {
        return new WP_Error('rest_forbidden', 'REST API restricted', ['status' => 403]);
    }
    return $result;
});

There are more resources that I’d recommend you remove or limit, all of which can be done within the advanced settings of Yoast SEO Premium.

Caching & Compression Techniques

In addition to server optimisations, you can implement further performance enhancements by adding caching and compression elements directly.

Using object caching such as Varnish or Redis can provide great results, as well as setting proper cache-control headers within .htaccess (Apache) or nginx.conf:

<FilesMatch "\.(css|js|jpg|png|gif|woff2|ttf|svg|ico)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=31536000, public"
</FilesMatch>

Optimise Asset Loading

Now some caching and compression is in place, you can then take further steps to defer JavaScript, for example:

<script src="script.js" defer></script>

Also, try to have any scripts load asynchronously so that they don’t degrade initial page load times.

When it comes to CSS, it’s always good to remove any unused styles where possible although I wouldn’t say this is the biggest priority compared to other recommendations in this post. Also try to preload and preconnect fonts and other external resources where possible. Here is an example of how this can be done:

<link rel="preload" as="font" href="fonts/myfont.woff2" type="font/woff2" crossorigin="anonymous">

Closing other holes

If you’re a perfectionist like me, there’s always room for more optimisations!

Enable lazy loading for images where possible and replace YouTube embeds with static image previews.
Use Screaming Frog to detect unnecessary redirects.
Close redirect loops and chains, which are reported within Semrush site audits. Update internal links to point directly to the final destination URL.
Reduce third-party requests where possible. For example, load Google Analytics or Google Fonts locally instead of via external scripts.
Disable unused social media widgets and embeds

Theme & plugin considerations

OK, so you have your hosting account set up and your WordPress site installed. However, the abundance of choice you have when it comes to themes and plugins makes it hard to make informed decisions and choose trusted developers. This is a challenge that has always been present, and I have been writing about it since 2013 at least.

When choosing both themes and plugins, consider the following when doing so:

Is the theme compatible with the most recent versions of WordPress?
Does it adhere to WordPress best practices for theme and plugin development. You can check this using the Theme Check plugin for themes, and the Plugin Check for plugins.
Does the author of the theme have developer E-E-A-T? Can you trust them?
Ensure there isn’t too much code bloat. The more a theme is generalised to the masses (eg “all-in-one themes for any business”) the more will have to be developed to accommodate the widest of audiences. The more bespoke the theme, (presumably) the less of a chance of code bloat.
Read reviews and investigate support offerings. For themes and plugins offered within WordPress’s own repo, there are reviews and ratings that are always helpful to inform your decisions.

Most themes offer live previews, so it’s worth running those URLs through speed testing tools such as PageSpeed Insights, Web Page Test and Chrome DevTools.

Some WordPress-specific optimisations

Still not done with my perfectionism! Here are some recommendations on WordPress. The WP Heartbeat API can create unnecessary AJAX requests. Reduce its frequency or disable it:

add_action( 'init', function() {
    wp_deregister_script('heartbeat');
});

You can also limit post revisions and revision time intervals in wp-config.php:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5);
define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300); // 5 minutes

Disabling unused Gutenberg block CSS is also recommended if not needed:

add_filter('use_block_editor_for_post', '__return_false');

Recommended plugins

There are so many plugins available today that it seems daunting to know which ones are the best and most trusted. Of course, “it depends” comes into play again, but generally, I advise that you use as few plugins as possible. If you can solve some issues away from a plugin (e.g., server-level), then do that first. Depending on what optimisations you may have set up elsewhere, some of these plugins may be unnecessary to install, but if not, it’s always good to know preferable options.

Caching and compression: Autoptimize, W3 Total Cache or Jetpack alongside WP Super Cache and Jetpack Boost.
Preloading: instant.page is a great recommendation here. Uses one line of code that you can implement or they offer a WordPress plugin that does the same.
Script deferring: some plugins above offer this, but I personally use WP Meteor.
Image optimisation: TinyPNG or Smush for image compression, WebP express for serving WebP images over PNG/JPG/EPS. For further optimisation use Edge Images for utilising edge transformation services to <img> markup.
SEO: while not directly connected to improving speed, Yoast SEO optimises a site’s visibility performance [disclosure, I work for Yoast]. Most of these features provided in the free version help with this, but things such as IndexNow are included within Premium. However, if you want to enable IndexNow without Premium, then Bing offers its own plugin.

When installing any plugin, it’s always good to look at all settings properly and disable anything that is not required to save more processing time and reduce code bloat. To take this to the next level, you may also want to install Plugin Organizer where you can set conditions for plugins to load only within relevant pages/areas of the site.

Server Monitoring

Lastly, it’s always good to have a good monitoring system such as New Relic on the server. This system allows you to diagnose and fix any issues that may be hampering the site or server’s performance, as well as reduce further unnecessary server load by disabling non-essential PHP modules.

You can also set up logging for slow queries in MySQL:

SET GLOBAL slow_query_log = 'ON';
SET GLOBAL long_query_time = 1;

I also recommend the Query Monitor plugin. Or, installing Blackfire to pick up inefficient code snippets which cause slow server response time. It is a paid tool, but highly recommended for enterprise level.

Error logs are always your friend, too in order to diagnose other issues. WordPress also offers debug mode, which is extremely useful for diagnosing potential problems by adding the following in wp-config.php:

Note, this should never be enabled on a live production site as it may expose sensitive information. Use on staging only.

// Enable WP_DEBUG mode
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );

// Enable Debug logging to the /wp-content/debug.log file
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );

Conclusion

As you can see, there is a lot one can do to improve a WordPress site, and it’s important to do so from multiple angles. Do as much as you can above, ensuring the site functions as it should. Test everything first to ensure everything you need is correctly implemented and doesn’t hamper other things on the site (e.g., sometimes caching or compressing JS can create irregularities or stop some site elements from working) or create other conflicts. And then deploy!

Should You Still Use WordPress?

Alex Moss — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:00:51 GMT

First published by Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/should-you-still-use-wordpress/534399/

2024 has been an interesting year within the WordPress ecosystem, one could argue it was the most eventful yet. September saw the beginning of a dispute between Automattic/WordPress/Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which has had ripple effects not only within the community as a whole but also reached a point where people outside the ecosystem are doubting the sustainability of WordPress in the longer term and considering migrating to another CMS.

When this happens, some may think about exploring alternative solutions in case there’s a larger risk to the platform itself. But if you ask further questions about this risk, they don’t come close to outweighing the platform’s strength as a product.

My clients, “normal” business owners, aren’t as invested in the CMS as I am. Should they be worried about their site being powered by WordPress? Spoiler alert: WordPress isn’t going anywhere. It will continue to thrive and remain the most versatile CMS available for years. But why?

The first version of WordPress was released on May 27, 2003. Its unique architecture, combined with it being open source, saw a surge in popularity, now dominating (as of December 2024) 43.7% of the CMS market share (although I’d consider Joost de Valk’s market share report of 35.45% to be more accurate). This growth has also been steady despite the emergence of other CMSs including Shopify, Wix and Squarespace. But none of these are open-source.

Not “just another” CMS

WordPress’ unique architecture, which allows plugin and theme extendibility, combined with the power of open-source, means it can scale far beyond the blogging platform it was originally. This means themes could be built for end-users without them having to necessarily understand HTML or CSS and plugins made by third-party developers that could extend and scale the core platform in limitless ways.

Over the years, I’ve built so much with WordPress, including forums, job boards, educational and learning-based portals, ecommerce sites, communities, comparison engines, and scaled themes. Our clients have ranged from people performing small side hustles and launching startups to managing hundreds of installs on a custom-built server for scaling sites for different global regions and building custom APIs using WordPress to scale activity. No other CMS provides this flexibility, with these alternatives only doing so with a huge cost and technical debt.

Extendibility [mostly] without limits

While I’ve been involved in building many things with WordPress, the concept of third-party plugins paved the way for trusted extendability within the CMS. The emergence of free and premium plugins in the WordPress ecosystem has created its own niche, with over 59,000 free plugins available within the official directory, and this does not include the thousands of plugins available away from the repo.

When I discovered WordPress in 2009, I realised it wasn’t just a blogging platform, and, more importantly, it was the most cooperative to SEO best standards (of course, adding Yoast into the equation). I published my first of numerous plugins in October 2010. In 2013, I co-founded an agency with WordPress development as one of its core offerings where we have worked on thousands of WordPress sites. Whenever we received an enquiry or pitched for anything to build, WordPress was always the CMS that provided the best solution.

It’s also so easy to get started with WordPress, and advise anyone who wants to extend their knowledge to do so through experimentation (I talked about it at BrightonSEO a couple of months ago)

A truly passionate community

Another reason I loved WordPress was when I discovered that the community’s massive support helped the CMS progress. Like the SEO community, the WordPress community is extremely engaging and supportive, not just to help solve issues and help develop the CMS overall but also there’s a lot of support for people’s professional and personal development.

Away from the extensive resources that WordPress provides through its documentation and forums, the WordPress community thrives all year round through its WordCamp meetups worldwide and participates in other communities, including WordPress chat and PostStatus. There are also numerous podcast series to follow, including Do the Woo, WP Product Talk and WP Builds.

This community is extremely supportive and resilient to changes, which in turn helps the development of WordPress core, which has been instrumental in shaping the future of website creation, production, and improvement.

The community also gives back in ways I haven’t seen in other verticals.

You own your own site and data

You’d think this would be obvious, but it isn’t. Remember, WordPress is open source. Not only does this mean that the core product is completely free and supported by the community, as already mentioned, but it is also your property. To now compare this to Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace, these other CMS platforms own your site!

While people may believe there are inherent risks with WordPress, I’d ask you what would happen to your site if, for example, Shopify were to close business tomorrow. The answer is simple: your site would cease to exist. Then what? If WordPress were to stop development forever from today, you’d still be in the same position and still have your website, content, and data, all of it. What do the other CMSs offer?

As another layer of freedom and risk mitigation, the choice of using WordPress as a CMS is also independent of where you choose to host it. If for whatever reason you want to migrate your site from one host to another you have the freedom to do so whereas closed source platforms not only own the website you produce with them, but also the server where it resides.

Does the Automattic and WP Engine dispute present a risk?

TLDR: no. This is a legal dispute over trademark usage between two companies. Whatever your thoughts or opinions of the dispute, it doesn’t change the fact that WordPress as a CMS is completely safe to use, and isn’t going anywhere. While the issues may seem polarising for some, the impact on the CMS itself will not be damaged in the long term whereby you should be asking yourself whether to switch to another CMS. You don’t.

The dispute and the CMS are separate. Treat them as such.

Other options?

Still sceptical about WordPress? OK, what are your other options? While other CMS platforms can perhaps be a good alternative to a “standard informational site”, or a site that has no customisation requirements at all from the normal out-of-the-box functionality (which eventually happens for every site that starts to scale in any way), you have to make very informed decisions about whether it’s actually worth it, and what the problem is that you believe you’re solving. Some questions I’d ask myself:

Is the CMS open source? If not, what do I own?
Is there a strong form of community and support?
Does it play nicely with third-party connections and APIs you intend to use?
Can you scale the site in the way you want?
Can you truly control output on the front end?
Does it adhere to SEO best practices?

If any of the answers above are a “no” then you need to understand the risks of those issues before considering any migration, as you may find that the risks of the alternative outweigh anything that WordPress would.

A couple of months ago, I decided to research several open-source CMSs to see if any other platform could compete with WordPress and its capabilities. Unsurprisingly, nothing came close.

TLDR

WordPress is here to stay and is still the CMS I’d advise in 99% of cases. It’s safe, supported, robust, future-proof, and open source. Whilst other CMS platforms can offer some solutions to smaller or simpler sites, I am yet to be truly convinced that they pose any considerable risk to their future or their role in the future of websites.

Helpful Content Update: What SMEs Need To Know

Cat Crawford — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 16:01:03 GMT

In September 2023 we saw a big Google update roll out. This ‘Helpful Content Update’ was designed to crack down on SEO-only content - content that puts search engines before the needs of the users.

Search results need to offer the most relevant information to its users and too often, SEO-focused content is more about writing for Google bots than real human beings. This update takes steps to once again make the users of search engines the priority.

Google’s Helpful Content Update

Google’s business goal is to be the go-to search engine for users and it can only hold that title if it puts the needs of its users first. This means serving them the content they are looking for in the fastest and easiest way possible.

With the new Google Helpful Content Update, the parameters for how to achieve that top spot have shifted.

Content that has only been written to squeeze in keywords and rank highly in search engine results often forgets about the user’s needs. However, with a gradual shift towards user intent and ‘helpful’ content, it’s more important than ever to ensure the content you publish on your website is aimed directly at your website users’ requirements.

How Has The Helpful Content Update Impacted Visibility?

The more your website is seen in search engine results, the more traffic you will get to your website. That’s why the first page of Google results is such a coveted spot for any business.

With the new Google Helpful Content Update, the parameters for how to achieve that top spot have shifted. It’s no longer about how many keywords and phrases you can get into your content. Now it’s all about whether the user finds what they were looking on Google for, on your website.

For SMEs, a great content marketing strategy can not only help them overtake larger competitors, but it can also help to nurture existing users and build a loyal audience.

This also means that there is a new checklist for those writing content for a web page or blog. Now, we need to ensure that the copy we write has a clear intention to provide information to its users. The more ‘helpful’ Google deems your content, the more likely your web pages will appear in the top results.

Many businesses that have used content marketing as a simple ranking strategy have seen big hits with this new update. Those that have managed a good balance between content for SEO and content for users have seen less of an impact and any drop in visibility online has recovered much quicker.

SME Digital Marketing & Creating ‘Helpful Content’

As we move forward from the helpful content update, it’s worth focusing on how content marketing strategies need to change.

For SMEs, a great content marketing strategy can not only help them overtake larger competitors, but it can also help to nurture existing users and build a loyal audience. Both of which can have a positive impact on conversions and leads.

From now on:

Focus on writing blog content that answers highly searched-for queries. Mining your FAQs is ideal for this as it tells you exactly what information your audience needs the most.
Start with your website user’s needs and work backwards. Think about what they need from you and the best ways you can provide it.
Focus on user intent when doing keyword research. Most keyword research tools will offer information about what the most common user intent is for different keywords.

What is ‘user intent’?

User intent is a way to categorise your website users based on why they are searching for a certain keyword on search engines, or on a website. The following are the types of user intents you will see listed on most keyword research tools.

Informational - A user is looking for information or an answer
Navigational - A user is looking for a specific website, page or online tool. These keywords tend to be branded, service-specific or tools like calculators and comparison sites.
Commercial - The user is looking for a service or product from a brand or website e.g. jobs, agencies, courses.
Transactional - Most often seen on keywords related to e-commerce websites, these users want to complete some sort of transaction.

Tips From The Team:

This shift towards ‘helpful content’ is all about putting the user back into the driver’s seat. Instead of carefully SEO-designed content taking up the top search results, we’ll now see much more relevant and user-focused content gracing the top positions.

Not only does this help users and the search engines themselves, but it also benefits your marketing long-term. The more helpful you are to your audience, the more trust you build and the greater the chance of those users turning into paying customers.

To find out how FireCask can help you with creating helpful content for your audience, get in touch with our team.

Meet the Founders of FireCask Ltd

Kirsty Rigg — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 11:08:12 GMT

Behind every great brand is a great mind - or two! Meet Anna and Alex Moss, the Manchester couple who are responsible for the launch and growth of FireCask Ltd. From the early days starting out as a duo, to now, with a full team of creatives all working with a variety of national and global brands - it’s been quite a ride.

But rather than giving you reams of history, we’ve put together a snappy little Q&A with our beloved directors.

We told them to be honest. Hold onto your hats!

Summarise what’s needed for business success…

Anna: “People - a great team. Keep adapting, changing and learning. Drive - it can get really hard running your own business and if you don’t have the drive and want to push it forward then it can fail.”

Alex: “Learning when to say no.”

What is the biggest life lesson you’ve learned?

Anna: “To use my instincts and not to automatically trust everyone. A valuable lesson.”

Alex: “I’d say more on this that one should always take others with a pinch of salt, especially when it comes to business. Remember to look after yourself, as generally, the other person will put themselves before you.”

Greatest quote of all time?

Anna: “I’d much rather eat pasta and drink wine than be a size 0.” We have a villa in Italy which we take the FireCask team to once a year, so I think we’d all agree on this one.

Alex: “Honesty is an expensive gift. Do not expect it from cheap people.” - Warren Buffett

“Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.” Bill Gates

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by FireCask (@firecaskmcr) on Oct 16, 2019 at 1:49am PDT

One thing you couldn’t live without?

Anna: “Henry, my dog. He is like my little therapist, he keeps me calm and just wants love all the time.”

Alex: “Time to myself. This helps me reset, think more logically, and digitally disconnect.”

Most annoying quirk?

Anna: “Making lists…constantly! I am such a control freak.”

Alex: “I pace around the room a lot when I’m on the phone. I can do hundreds of laps around my desk during a conversation.”

What websites do you visit most often?

Anna: “Google Drive, Facebook for the B+L page, and Linkedin.”

Alex: “I live in Gmail and Google Drive, using a couple of Chrome Extensions including Streak and Clearbit. Other sites I visit nearly-daily are Linkedin, Teamwork and Trello but I also use apps including Slack, Evernote and Skitch.

What takes up too much of your time?

Anna: “ADMIN.”

Alex: “Working in the business, not on the business.”

What matters more in business, strategy or risk-taking?

Anna: “I think both are equally important. I don’t think I would be where I am today without taking risks but they were almost strategic risks so they were thought out - the risk was just going for it.”

Alex: “There needs to be a balance, but you cannot rely solely on one. It’s interesting as Warren Buffett says “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing” so it’s odd that strategy comes hand in hand with risk. Strategy needs to involve risk, otherwise, it will be unlikely to prosper.”

How do you spend the average Saturday?

Anna: “Wake up and answer emails in bed with the dog, go for a minimum of a one hour walk with the dog and then either go out with friends locally/neighbours come over for drinks and nibbles or sit on the couch and binge-watch tv. The evening usually involves food, wine with Alex or with a bunch of friends at ours.”

Alex: “All the admins - work admin (email catchup), house admin (cleaning, sorting the garden out), mind admin (going for an offline walk), and body admin (gym/soak), social admin (go to the bar, or have friends over).”

What did you want to be when you were younger?

Anna: “A farmer but then I grew up and realised I don’t really like nature!”

Alex: “A policeman. I would have been terrible.”

Want to meet the rest of the team? You can laugh at their photos here.

FireCask Team Celebrates a Huge Response to Christmas Charity Project

Kirsty Rigg — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 12:12:58 GMT

If there’s ever a time of year to go a little hands on with charity work, it’s Christmas. So that’s what we did! And what a success it was.

At the start of the month, we launched our very own reverse advent calendar at our new offices in Prestwich. The idea, as you can imagine, is that it’s an advent calendar “in reverse”, so instead of receiving something every day, we give something to a good cause instead. Genius! Not entirely our idea, as much as we’d like to take credit, but still a good way for us to motivate people to get involved.

After a long discussion over what would be a particularly good cause (especially at Christmas time), we settled on the local Salford Foodbank as our chosen charity, and began making daily donations to a hamper that we kept in the office.

Here’s the amazing part. Having turned our offices in Prestwich into a drop off point and announcing our project on social media, we invited everyone in the village to come and take part.

_The donations came flooding in! Our very own Anna Moss from Basil & Lily sent some supplies, followed by the owner of Prestwich’s Bargain Booze, and even some of the local residents who wanted to participate.

Before we knew it, there was an absolute mountain of stuff in the FireCask meeting room, from babies’ nappies to shower gel, gloves, hats and all types of food items, all waiting to go to those that need it most this Christmas.

Project Manager, Max Gruber, said “It just goes to show how well people come together for a good cause when they get the opportunity.” He added: “We didn’t expect such a response.

“But before we knew it, we had tons of stuff that was donated from local businesses and local people from around the village. It has been a brilliant success. We’re over the moon.”

Mark Whittington, Salford Foodbank Manager said: “We are very grateful for local businesses like FireCask donating over the Christmas period.

“So far in 2019 we have given out over 5,000 emergency food parcels to local people in crisis which is a 20% increase compared to the same period last year. Donations given by FireCask will help ensure we can continue supporting families and individuals who are struggling to afford to put food on their table”

See press coverage for the reverse advent calendar here.

What the Font is This About? Why Fonts Matter for Marketing Success and how they help shape your Brand

Kirsty Rigg — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 10:59:02 GMT

Fonts have been around long before our digital world even existed, but they’ve since become increasingly more important for brands looking to stand out. Why is this? We’re here to help you get to the bottom of the importance of font - and why your brand should be taking its seriously.

The importance of font

With any designs you produce, whether it be for branding or advertising purposes, a consistent and distinguished font can go a long way. Here’s why.

Determine mood and perception

First impressions are everything and the font you choose can create a certain perception and mood around your brand. For example, a children’s brand might opt for a fun and somewhat silly font, whereas a luxury car brand might require a more classic font that creates this impression.

Deliver your message

If you have a great message but nobody can read it, what’s the point in putting it out there? Before you spend time thinking of a fun and witty message your customers will love, you need to ensure your font has readability. The last thing you want is to downplay your message.

Reinforce consistency

Once you have a font, it’s important to keep it consistent throughout. Whether it’s on your website, your logo or on your social media channels, keeping a consistent font helps to build your brand.

Increase brand recognition

It’s hardly surprising that a distinguished font can help customers remember your brand. Think about some of the world’s biggest brands and the fonts they use - you can probably visualise them all. Take adidas, for example. Their use of the ‘Avant Garde Gothic Demi’ font has helped cement their branding - and it’s now recognisable all over the world. Every brand wants to stand out from the crowd and your font is the first step to helping you do just that.

How to choose the right font for your brand

Don’t worry if you’re having a hard time choosing a font for your brand. Here’s a quick guide to help you out.

Serif fonts

Serif fonts are great for traditional, authoritative and reliable brands such as Hugo Boss, Volvo and Canon. If you think Serif fonts might be a great fit for your brand, try out different fonts like Verona, Times New Roman or Baskerville.

Sans-serif fonts

Fonts that fall into the sans-serif category include Verdana, News Gothic and Avant Garde. These fonts are often used by modern, clean and contemporary brands such as Samsung, Netflix and Levi’s.

Script fonts

Script fonts are similar to handwriting fonts and portray an elegant, feminine and playful nature. Brands that use script fonts include H&M, Cadbury and Instagram.

The psychology of fonts

It’s pretty logical to assume fonts convey styles and formalities (as well as informalities) - but is there more to it? A little bit like different types of art, different people will have varying opinions on them, and what they “feel” like to them. We perceive fonts and subconsciously decide what they mean to us (creative, fun, formal…), and learning which ones are likely to get which response is very useful when marketing.

Rounded fonts are said to convey femininity and even comfort, whereas complex fonts give an impression of uniqueness. Whatever your marketing goals, don’t overlook the importance of using fonts, the shape of your words can be as important as the meaning of them!

What’s Your Take on Bring Your Dog to Work Day? Here's Ours

Kirsty Rigg — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 10:51:29 GMT

The idea of bringing your beloved pets into the workplace is one that sparks lively debate. Is it inappropriate to bring animals to work? Or is it an absolute dream come true to have a four-legged cuddle buddy in the office?

Here at FireCask HQ - every day is bring your dog to work day, because we have Henry the Whippet as an integral part of the team! As our Senior Wellness Whippet Executive, he’s in charge of hugs, looking cute in meetings, and alerting us when the postman arrives. Tiring work, but someone has to do it.

Henry the Whippet

As it’s national Bring Your Dog to Work Day (21 June), we thought we would celebrate the wonderful benefits of having pets around at work. Here are just some of the reasons we fully support the idea, and why we think employers everywhere would benefit from taking part!

FireCask director Anna Moss said: “We nicknamed Henry as the “Wellbeing Whippet” and joke about him having his own role within the FireCask team, but there is a lot of truth in that name.

“I believe dogs do improve your mental health and wellbeing, they bring the mood up when they are around, and make people feel good. It’s great for Henry too, because everyone loves him to pieces and he gets lots of hugs and playtime.”

FireCask is a proud official sponsor of Bring Your Dog to Work Day

12 months of Wellness for Vitabiotics

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 13:43:21 GMT

Twelve months ago today, we flicked the ‘live’ switch on the Vitabiotics Wellness Score interactive quiz.

Designed to promote the Vitabiotics Wellman and Wellwoman multivitamin range, the Wellness Score invites users to answer 12 questions about their lifestyle and habits, completely anonymously. Using this information, the Wellness Score matrix generates a unique ‘Wellness Score’, ranging from 1-100.

Link Acquisition and Digital PR

The Wellness Score was designed to be an evergreen piece of content, meaning that with our targeted ideation and feature pitching to a wide variety of high-quality publications, the FireCask campaign team were able to squeeze as much value from the Wellness Score as possible.

The results

Following our ongoing outreach, digital PR and link acquisition work, we’ve secured more than 25 pieces of high quality linked, external content, pointing back to various pages on the Vitabiotics website.

Targeted onsite content strategy to complement the campaign

Not only was the Wellness Score a vital part of our link acquisition strategy for Vitabiotics, we were able to weave this into our onsite content strategy to deliver engaging blog content, designed to resonate with Vitabiotics’ target audience and drive traffic from long tail search queries. A small sample below:

Six tips for a better sleep schedule - http://blog.vitabiotics.com/blog/six-tips-better-sleep-schedule/
Making the most of your visit to the GP - http://blog.vitabiotics.com/blog/making-visit-gp/
10 easy ways to drink more water - http://blog.vitabiotics.com/blog/wellness-score/10-easy-ways-drink-water/
A guide to healthy snacking - http://blog.vitabiotics.com/blog/guide-to-healthy-snacking-wellness-score/

The Wellness Score - Vital Statistics

Over the last 12 months:

Over 50,000 unique completions of the Wellness Score quiz
Overall traffic to the Wellness Score quiz represented 8% of the total traffic to Vitabiotics.com
Organic traffic to the wellness score made up 3% of the total
Exposed Vitabiotics to more than 200,000 new users over 12 months
On average, users spent 6 minutes on the Wellness Score
Wellness Score mailers resulted in an extra 778Wellness Score completions

The next steps…even more content!

As we have collected 12 months worth of anonymised data from the Wellness Score which has resulted in over 50,000 unique data points for us to analyse. The next campaign strategy will be to develop content themes based on these data points and use this for another link acquisition and digital PR campaign.

Digital PR and Outreach from FireCask

The content marketing campaign team run campaigns for a range of clients, across various verticals and sectors. Check out our case studies and results here.

Whatever your objective, we can design a creative campaign to deliver results like the Wellness Score. Find out more about the content marketing and link acquisition services from FireCask, here.

The Top 15 Essential Free Chrome Extensions for SEO

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 08:52:14 GMT

There’s a Google Chrome extension for almost everything out there, which is a blessing when it comes to optimising your website properly. Whether you’re conducting keyword research or you’re looking into different sites’ metadata - you can almost guarantee that there will be a Chrome extension that streamlines the task, making your job that little bit easier.

To save you endless hours of searching through the Chrome web store, we’ve compiled a list of the top 20 free Chrome extensions for SEO that you can utilise on a day-to-day basis. Read on to discover FireCask’s favourites!

1. Web developer

The web developer extension provides you with an overview of everything, from page structure to JavaScript page load elements. Once installed, you’ll see an additional toolbar on your browser with new developer tools available. This allows you to view a webpage in detail without the need for additional software.

2. SEO meta in 1 click

This extension is an excellent tool for viewing meta titles and descriptions, as well as existing canonical pages, header tags and small optimisation tags like header images.

With this tool, the clue is in the name: ‘SEO Meta in 1 Click’. All you need to do is click on the add-on to you’ll be able to uncover the main SEO information for any site.

3. Ayima redirect

Ayima redirect lets you know if pages are redirecting, where to and what type of redirect they are. It will flag up 301, 302, 404 and 500 HTTP status codes, as well as showing Meta and Javascript redirects. This can help you to uncover and resolve issues with client’s sites quickly and promptly.

4. Ayima page insights

This plugin allows you to see on page SEO errors, as well as HTML and tagging errors on URLs and gives insight into where they’re placed and recommendations for fixing errors that are found. This can help to expose any SEO errors and technical issues that could be harming your site.

5. Tag assistant

This is a useful tool that helps you to distinguish what tracking is present on websites and identify tracking issues. The tags that are checked with Tag Assistant include:

Adwords conversion tracking
Google tag manager
Google analytics

This add-on will also suggest improvements so that you can remedy any problems you find.

6. Keywords everywhere

Keywords everywhere is one of the best free Chrome extensions out there, and it is essential for any individual or business carrying out SEO.

With the tool, you can see accurate search volume, CPC & competition data right in front of your eyes on the SERP, without having to open a separate keyword research tool. This can save you a lot of time if you want to find the search volume of something quickly, and it’s great for both short tail and long tail keyword research.

Not only that, but it also hooks up with Google search, Google search console, Youtube, Amazon, eBay, Search console, Ubersuggest, Answer the Public & more.

7. Wayback machine

The Wayback Machine add-on can show you older versions of a website. This helps you to keep track of website changes made by clients or competitors, as well as helping you to retrieve any lost backlinks.

8. Wappalyzer

With the click of a button, wappalyzer can tell you what technologies a website is using. Again, this is great for looking at competitor sites to identify what CMS they are using, and finding information on their server, framework or analytics tools.

9. DeepCrawl indexability checker

Simply put, the DeepCrawl Indexability Checker informs you whether the page you’re accessing is indexable or not. The page you’re visiting will go into one of five categories:

Non-200
Noindex
Canonicalised
Paginated
Indexable

To can find out what each of these categories means, click here.

10. GTM sonar

The GTM sonar chrome extension essentially measures clicks through from Google Tag Manager, and allows you to see clicks firing and which elements on the page are performing well and which aren’t.

11. Lighthouse

This handy little tool can help with audits from a mobile perspective. It can give helpful load speed insights as well as usability tips, all of which can help you to improve the mobile version of your site.

12. Google PageSpeed insights

In summary, the Google PageSpeed insights extension shows you a load speed indicator without going into the specifics. This can give a quick indication on what needs improving and where. It gives you an easy to read colour code on what is good, okay and bad about the page, so you can easily see what needs improvement.

13. Majestic backlink analyser

The Majestic backlink analyser is one of the best SEO tools for chrome that you can get. With one quick click, you can see the trust flow and citation flow of a web page, as well as information on the number of external backlinks and referring domains for both the URL and the root domain. This provides a lot of useful SEO information in just one click.

14. SEO tools for Chrome

With the SEO tools extension, you get a wealth of handy SEO tools in one - making it ideal for anyone who doesn’t want to mess around with a number of different tools. Some of its main features include:

Keyword position checker
Meta tags analyser
Plagiarism checker
Page speed checker

15. Hunter

If you’re looking to build links and increase your website’s online presence, the Hunter extension is SEO chrome tool for you. This allows you to ‘hunt’ out different email addresses for the site that you’re on, as well as their job role, social media page and name. This can help you find the contacts you need with ease, and help you with outreach and link-building tasks.

If you’re new to the world of SEO, why don’t you let us do the hard work for you? Our expert team ofSEO specialists in Manchestercan help you to achieve your business goals, no matter how big or small!Get in touchwith us today to see how we could help your organisation.

Essential WordPress Plugins for Your Site

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 11:44:28 GMT

Whether you’ve just started your own blog, or you’re the proud owner of a fully-fledged e-commerce site, there are a wide range of essential WordPress plugins out there that can make running your website that little bit easier.

As one of the top web development companies in Manchester, it can be said that we’re well versed with the world of WordPress (if we do say so ourselves). That’s why we’re offering up our suggestions for the WordPress plugins you need for your website.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is probably the most well-known SEO plugin on WordPress and one of the best free WordPress plugins you can get. This gives you the opportunity to improve your site’s SEO without the need for a detailed knowledge of SEO and coding, making it a great WordPress plugin for blogs.

Once the plugin is installed, your content and posts will be assessed for readability and SEO and given a score. The scores include ‘good’ (green), ‘OK’ (orange) and ‘needs improvement’ (red).

In the example above, the content was given an ‘OK’ score for readability and a ‘good’ score for SEO based on the focus keyword that was entered. However, the great thing about the Yoast SEO plugin is that you will also get suggestions on how to improve the SEO of your website posts. For example:

Even if you have little to no knowledge of SEO, the Yoast plugin is set out simply and effectively making it easy for those of all abilities to use.

2. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is a no-nonsense plugin that allows you to add a number of contact forms to your site. Once the plugin is installed and set up, you’ll be able to manage, customise and edit your forms with ease.

For this plugin, you’ll require a tiny bit of coding knowledge, however, if you’re new to this, there’s an easy guide you can follow to install and setup your Contact Form 7 plugin here.

3. Broken Link Checker

It’s a good idea to check your links every so often as having a lot of broken links on your domain can have a negative impact on your site’s SEO.

The Broken Link Checker plugin will help you to see all of the broken links on your blog, as well as helping you spot any redirects that are in place. Once you’ve found all of your broken links, there are a range of actions that you can take using the plugin. This helpful guide for the Broken Link Checker plugin goes through all the features of the tool.

4. MailChimp for WordPress

This plugin allows you to connect your MailChimp account to your site so that your website visitors can sign up to your mailing list with ease.

MailChimp for WordPress comes with a whole host of useful features, however, some of the best ones include:

Creating ‘sign up’ forms
Integration with WooCommerce
Customising your forms
Viewing your reports and results

Whilst there is a free version of the plugin available, the Premium version comes with a range of additional features that would be ideal for businesses and e-commerce sites.

5. Smush

If you want to save time resizing your high-quality website photos, the Smush image compression and optimisation plugin can help you to do just that.

With this, you can resize, compress and strip-down your images without sacrificing quality. This can help you to improve page load time, thus enhancing the UX and SEO of your site.

6. Akismet

There’s nothing worse than spam. Whether it’s in your emails or on your website, it can be a nuisance keeping on top of spam and making sure it doesn’t harm your reputation. That’s where the Akismet plugin comes in.

This clever tool checks and filters all spam comments, shows comments ‘status history’ and blocks the worst spam so you don’t have to worry about repeat offenders.

Best of all, the plugin is free for personal blogs, making it an easy and affordable way to keep your website clean and spam-free.

7. Insert Headers and Footers

Simply put, this plugin lets you put code into your headers and footers. This includes custom CSS, HTML and Javascript code, Google Analytics code and Facebook Pixel code, to name a few.

No matter what the theme, with the Insert Headers and Footers plugin you can add code to your headers and footers with ease!

8. BackWPup

Regularly backing up your site gives you peace of mind that should anything go wrong, your site and files are protected. The BackWPup plugin can help you save your whole site installation and back it up to your chosen server so that your information is safe and secure.

These are just a few of the FireCask team’s recommendations for the essential WordPress plugins for your site. Think we’ve missed any? Leave us a comment below! And of course, get in touch with us today if you’re in need of expert WordPress development services in Manchester.

FireCask go to Search Leeds!

Sat, 16 Jun 2018 11:35:18 GMT

Every year Branded 3 hold one of the biggest SEO conferences in the North of England, Search Leeds. Agencies and SEO professionals from all over the country flocked to the First Direct Arena in Leeds to learn about everything SEO, PPC and Content Marketing and meet fellow digital marketers from around the UK.

We took our SEO and content teams for a full day of learning and networking, to help keep up to date with the biggest changes and the most innovative developments in the world of SEO and content marketing.

Visiting Search Leeds

With 3 different stages and some of the brightest minds in the industry, we were spoilt for choice as to who to see.

Some of our favourites were:

Track Campaigns Like a Bloodhound: How to make your marketing work harder by Jill Quick
Content Marketing Tips that Won’t Break the Bank by Kirsty Hulse
Supercharging Google Shopping by Chris Rowett
What’s new in PPC by Holly Ellwood

Everyone gave us something to walk away with and use within our own practices and even build on to create new and fresh ways of working!

What did we learn from Search Leeds

We learned a fair bit from attending the amazing seminars on the day, from delving deeper into PPC and getting even better results from paid campaigns, to creating truly amazing content that is shareable, viral and evergreen.

The key theme from the day was tracking, making sure every single tiny thing put out into the world is able to be tracked with precision and knowing exactly where your traffic and conversions are coming from, to a granular level.

We got so many amazing ideas about how we can shake up our campaigns and adapt them to the upcoming changes in the world of PPC, SEO and content. All of these points will help us create even better campaigns for our clients and allow us to deliver an even more thorough and personal service!

To find out more about FireCask and how we can help with your SEO and content marketing needs, simply use the contact form below and we’ll be in touch!

[gravityform id=“1” title=“true” description=“true”]

Branding: Which Colours Work Best for Your Business Type?

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 14:52:22 GMT

Some of the most iconic international brands are not just recognisable by their name, it’s also their branding colours and logos that separate them from the competition. From Coca-Cola’s striking red hue to IBM’s mesmerising stripey blue logo, the colours and brands that these big businesses have chosen make them easily recognisable by all.

But why did Coca-Cola choose red and IBM, blue? The choices made by these iconic brands beg the question - do certain industries lend themselves well to certain colours? In this article, we explore this theory to see which are the best colours for business’ branding.

The psychology behind colours

In the past, we’ve briefly touched on the psychology behind colours and why certain tones and words convert, but how does this relate to your branding strategy? Different colours evoke different emotions, therefore, by choosing the right colour scheme for your branding you can make your target customers feel a certain way when they see your site or logo.

No matter whether you want to portray your brand as being safe and trustworthy or exciting and daring, the colours that you choose for your brand can have an impact on how others see your business and can help you to portray your organisation in the best possible light.

Choosing brand colours

Choosing the right colours for brands can be a difficult task as you want to make sure that your organisation stands out, whilst avoiding colours that are so garish that they are off-putting to consumers.

If you’re unsure of which colours suit your business type best, there are some hues that you can take inspiration from as they are synonymous with different industries and business sectors. Read on to learn more.

Financial colour schemes

You may find that many businesses in the financial sector opt for the colours blue and green for their branding and promotional materials. But why is this the case?

Blue can help to invoke feelings of calmness, security and trust, and for consumers it’s important for financial companies to feel trustworthy and secure as they often handle most of our funds and personal details.

Colours for food businesses

A range of tones are used for food brands and marketing, however, some of the main colours that are used in the food industry include red and yellow.

Red has been shown to stimulate taste buds and appetite, therefore, it can be inferred that this colour can be used to evoke feelings of hunger, which is why some foods brands may lean towards red for their branding.

Yellow, on the other hand, is known for increasing awareness and attracting attention, therefore, this can be used to make your food brand stand out against competitors’ on the shop shelves.

Best colours for healthcare businesses

Blue and green hues are popular with businesses in the healthcare industry, and it’s easy to see why.

As mentioned earlier blue is seen as trustworthy and secure, which is a common theme amongst the values of healthcare brands in the industry. Green symbolises growth, nature and relaxation, which is why it is popular with health and wellness brands.

The key to choosing brand colours for your business

There are a number of different aspects that go into creating a strong and memorable brand, and selecting the right colour palette is a crucial aspect of this process.

Perfecting your branding from the start can help you to catch the eye of your target audience and give you an edge over the competition. Fortunately, FireCask can help you to do just that!

Our creative digital agency in Manchester has all the tools and resources to help you create a brand from the ground up and successfully market it to your target audience. Find out more about what we do here.

Agency vs In-house Marketing Teams:
Which is Best for Your Business?

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 15:08:03 GMT

If you’re looking to step-up your marketing activities, it’s likely that you’ve considered hiring a dedicated marketing team for your business. This gives you more time and freedom to focus on other aspects of your business, whilst the marketing side of things is being taken care of by your new team. However, first you must decide: in-house or agency?

In this post, we explore the benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency, compared to the benefits of creating an in-house marketing team so that you can decide on the right option for your business.

Why hire a digital marketing agency?

Hiring a marketing agency means that you outsource your marketing activities to an agency outside of your organisation. There are any number of reasons why some organisations choose to do this, including:

Lack of relevant skills
Lack of relevant resources
Restricted budgets

Below, we’ve taken a look at some of the advantages you could experience by taking on a digital marketing agency.

Cut costs

The costs of hiring a digital marketing agency are much lower than the costs of hiring a full-time marketing executive or team. This is due to the costs of factors such as salary, benefits, training and recruitment which come with hiring a dedicated marketing executive. In contrast to this, hiring an agency involves far fewer expenses.

As a result, hiring an agency can help you to keep control of your costs and leave you with more time and resources to spend on other business activities.

Take advantage of a wider skill set

Marketing agencies often have staff that have accrued a wide range of skills and experience over a number of years. With expertise in areas such as SEO and content marketing, digital marketing agencies are usually well equipped to work on your campaign and help you achieve your desired goals.

This differs from an in-house marketing team because it means that you can take advantage of a broad skill set and specific experience that can help you to reach your desired audience.

The benefits of in-house marketing teams

Whilst hiring a digital marketing agency might sound attractive (if we do say so ourselves), there are also a number of benefits to hiring an in-house marketing team that you should consider before making that all-important decision. Read on to learn what these are.

Controlled quality

As with outsourcing any business activities, you lose an element of control and therefore risk harming the quality of the product you produce. The same goes for digital marketing.

With an in-house marketing team you can oversee all activities, making sure your marketing aligns with your business’ ethos and values. Whereas, with an outside marketing agency you must give up some of your control so that most of your business’ marketing activities are out of your hands.

Better understanding of a brand’s values and beliefs

Your in-house marketing agency or executive will be dealing with your brand and your brand only. This allows them to gain a deeper understanding of your organisation, thus helping you to promote more relevant material.

Which option is best for your organisation?

The option that you choose will largely depend on the time, money and resources that you have available. For example, many large multinational corporations have their own internal marketing teams because they have the funds to pay and retain a team, whereas, smaller organisations usually don’t have much money to spare, so are more likely to benefit from ad-hoc work from a marketing agency.

If you want to learn more about what it’s like working with an experienced, digital marketing agency. Visit our case studies page to discover some of our previous work, or get in touch below to discuss your exact needs.

The Colours and Words That Will Convert

Tue, 08 May 2018 11:35:03 GMT

Did you know that certain colours and words can evoke different emotions? If you did, don’t click off this post just yet! In this article, we’ll give you a greater insight into the colours and language that can drive conversions, and show how you can use this to your advantage in your marketing activities.

What is conversion copywriting?

Conversion copywriting is writing content and bending words to elicit a certain response or action from the reader. The end result doesn’t necessarily need to involve a sale or transaction, instead, you can use conversion copywriting to encourage simple actions such as:

Signing up to an email marketing list
Adding an item to the shopping basket
Clicking through to social media pages
Increasing the average time spent on the site

Conversion copywriting encompasses everything we know about human behaviour, psychology and language, and combines both scientific evidence and creativity to create tailored messages for the audience you want to target.

Copywriting hacks to trigger conversions

You can use conversion copywriting in your website content and social media marketing to evoke a certain emotion or trigger an action from your target audience.

Once you know which action you want to encourage, you need to select the right language, tone and sentence structure that will achieve the intended response.

Power words for headlines

If you want to write headlines that will draw readers in, there are certain ‘power words’ that you can use to evoke an emotional response, and thus, gain more clicks, shares and likes for your content.

Your headline is the first part of your content that potential customers will see, therefore, working on the best title to draw readers in, is just as important as perfecting the rest of your copy.

Some of the power words and phrases you could use for your headlines include:

Essential
Proven
Sexy
Guarantee
Major
Key
Latest

In reality there are a countless number of power words that you could include in your headlines. However, it’s crucial that you remember the SEO aspect too. Write your SEO-friendly headline first, and then see if you can fit any suitable power words within it. This will help you to maximise the amount of people that will see your headline and (hopefully) click through to your content.

Are you in need ofwebsite copywriting servicesthat will drive conversions? Contact the FireCask team below to see how we could help.

Which colours drive conversions?

Colour is another key aspect of your branding and marketing communications. Different colours can evoke different emotions, therefore, this will need careful consideration when deciding on the right colours for your brand.

Blue

Blue is a colour that is seen as inviting and trustworthy, which is why it is a popular choice for financial services brands and banks. It has also been proven to have a calming effect, although, brighter shades of blue can also make you feel more energised.

Blue would work well for CTA buttons because of its inviting nature. However, it’s also important that colours that you choose are in keeping with your brand’s colours.

Whilst blue is a colour that is appropriate for most types of business, it shouldn’t be used for food brands. This is because studies have shown that blue can act as an appetite suppressant, and blue foods are uncommon in the wild, therefore, this can cause an ‘off-putting’ effect when the colour blue is associated with food.

Red

Red is considered to be a dominating colour and it evokes strong feelings of excitement, passion and aggression. It also stimulates feelings of power, which is why it is often used for stop signs and CTA buttons.

It’s important that this colour is used judiciously, because the more it is used the more it suppresses relaxation and this can evoke an unpleasant feeling for the viewer. To avoid this, use red sparingly or opt for different shades of red for a more positive impact.

Yellow

Yellow is a stimulating colour, and it is often linked to feelings of happiness. However, it has been proven to activate the part of the brain associated with anxiety, therefore, it can also have a negative effect depending on how it is used. This is the reason why bright yellow is used for warning and hazard signs, as it stimulates the brain and notifies the viewer of potential danger.

On the other hand, lighter shades of yellow can remind users of summer, sunshine and light, all of which have positive connotations. Therefore, this is a good option to go for if you want an easily-recognisable, vibrant colour for your brand.

Whilst colours and words can have a significant impact on your potential customers, there are a whole host of additional aspects to consider if you want to maximise your online presence and make the most of your site.

Online marketing uses a wide range of tools to increase your site’s potential and drive conversions. With this, plus the tips above you’ll have the right resources in place to take your site to the next level.

How to Develop your Brand’s Tone of Voice

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 10:53:30 GMT

Building a brand from the ground up is a challenging but rewarding experience. There are a lot of things that you will need to think about when developing your brand, one of which is its ‘tone of voice’. This encompasses your brand’s ‘personality’ and it will help you to set yourself apart from the competition, making it a crucial part of the branding process.

In this post, we’re offering up our branding tips and tricks to help you develop an effective set of brand voice guidelines that are unique to your business.

What is brand voice?

Brand voice, sometimes referred to as ‘tone of voice’, is the character or personality of your business that is displayed through both your written and verbal communications. It’s not just whatyou say, but howyou say it, too.

Thinking about your brand as a person and not a business can help you to pinpoint your brand voice. What would they dress like? How would they carry themselves? Where would they live? Once you’ve built up an idea of what your brand might ‘look’ like, it’s then easier to establish what it might ‘sound’ like.

We’ve handpicked some unique brand voice examples that you may already be familiar with:

MailChimp

Missguided

BrewDog

Why is brand voice important?

Your brand voice is a reflection of your business’ ethos and values and it helps you to connect with your customers and clients. Regardless of whether you’re communicating with customers on social media or distributing offers through email marketing, maintaining a clear and consistent brand voice will help you to distinguish your business and, more importantly, make it memorable.

If that wasn’t enough to convince you, here are a few more reasons why getting your brand voice right is so important:

It helps to build trust
It can increase your virality
It helps to communicate your values
It can be used to influence others

Developing your tone of voice brand guidelines

As mentioned earlier, it helps to think of your brand as a person when trying to develop your tone of voice. This helps you to picture what they may ‘sound’ like, and what image you’d like to portray to potential customers and clients.

In addition to this, you’ll need to think about your business’ values. It helps to ask yourself and the members of your company questions, such as:

What was your motivation for setting up the business?
How do you work differently to other organisations?
What can you offer your customers besides your product or service?

This can help you to identify shared themes and concepts within your organisation, and these can form the basis of your values and tone of voice.

Language and writing style

Once you’ve established your brand’s values, you’ll need about which language and writing styles best express your values.

Formal vs informal

Formal language can make your brand seem more professional and authoritative, whereas informal language can make your brand appear casual, friendly and approachable. Whilst your brand language doesn’t need to be strictly formal or informal, this is a good place to start when establishing the tone of your communications.

Example:

Formal- Thank you for signing up to our email list.

Informal- Thanks for signing up! We’re super excited to have you on board.

Technical language and jargon

The amount of technical language that you use in your communications will largely depend on your industry, and whether your organisation is B2C or B2B.

Too much technical language or jargon can alienate consumers, however, in some cases it’s impossible to avoid it. In this case, simply use everyday language where possible so that the majority of your audience will understand it.

Your customer’s language

Your customers should be one of your first ports of call when developing your brand voice. You could conduct a focus group to determine what people think of your brand and its services, or you could use social media to find out how people communicate with your business.

Whichever method you choose, you’ll obtain an invaluable insight that can help you to tailor your communications to suit your audience.

Brand development in Manchester

If you’re in need of a total brand redesign or you need assistance with brand development in Manchester, look no further! Our experienced team can help you with all of the above, as well as all other aspects of branding process, so you can set your organisation apart from the rest.

Contact the FireCask team below for more information on our services.

A Guide to Local SEO

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 13:13:17 GMT

Due to an increase in smartphone usage and better Wi-Fi and connectivity in outdoor spaces and public areas, more people have the ability to search for local businesses whilst they’re out and about. Local SEO is all about increasing your online visibility to people searching for businesses like yours in the local area, thus helping you to attract a stream of new customers.

If you’re a brick and mortar business looking for new ways to attract customers and increase your footfall, read on to learn more about local SEO and how to use it to your advantage.

What is local SEO marketing?

In summary, the definition of local SEO is:

“Using ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ techniques to promote brick and mortar businesses to customers in the local area.”

The local SEO definition differs from the definition oforganic SEO, because organic SEO involves optimising your website so that it ranks for relevant keywords. The key difference is that with local SEO you’re focusing on driving people to your physical business, whereas organic SEO revolves around increasing your website’s online visibility.

Example:

A Google search for the ‘best french restaurant’ brings up the following results:

This shows local SEO in action as the search brings up results from the local area (Manchester), rather than results from other parts of the country or world. Making sure your website or establishment appears in these searches can help you to attract customers that are looking for businesses like yours whilst they’re actually in the area, giving you a better chance of securing new customers.

Why is local SEO important?

Research has found that 97% of people looked online for local businesses in 2017, and 12% look for a local business every single day. Local SEO is important because it helps you to tap into this demand and satisfy the needs of customers that are nearby.

The benefits of local SEO

There are a range of benefits of local SEO, including:

Attracting new customers - Local SEO helps you to increase your online visibility to those in the local area, thus helping you to attract new customers and clients.
Minimising wasted time and resources - Targeting locals is more productive than targeting non-locals if you’re a brick and mortar business, therefore you can minimise waste by using local SEO techniques.
ROI can be easily calculated - Regardless of whether you enlist the help of a local SEO agency or you choose to go it alone, your marketing spend can be compared with your business growth and you can easily see the return on your investment and how local SEO has contributed to your business’ success.

Organic SEO vs local SEO

Despite having different aims and techniques, there are some similarities between organic and local SEO. For example, they’re both concerned with increasing your business’ online visibility and attracting new customers.

There are also some key differences to be mindful of. With organic SEO you must have a website to optimise, whereas with local SEO you don’t have to have a standalone site but you do have to be listed on online directories such as Google My Business and Yelp, so that customers can find you.

In addition to this, with organic SEO you don’t have to have a physical business to promote, you simply need a website. With local SEO you must have a physical business location.

How to do local SEO

To get you started, we’re providing our exclusive local SEO tips so that you can maximise your online visibility and get new customers for your business.

Create and optimise your Google My Business page

If you’ve got a physical store and you’re not on Google My Business, what are you waiting for! This is essential for local SEO as it can help you to increase your chances of showing up on Google Maps and organic search results on the whole.

Once you’ve claimed your free listing on the Google My Business website, you can optimise it by completing tasks such as: filling in all of the information possible, adding a booking button feature and adding ‘posts’, to name a few.

Optimise your meta titles and descriptions

If you have a website, you’ll need to make sure that the metadata is fully optimised to increase your sites online visibility. This involves updating your meta titles and meta descriptions with relevant location-based keywords. This will make your website more search engine friendly, and increase your chances of ranking for local search results.

Example:

Utilise online business directories

As mentioned earlier, you don’t need a standalone website for local SEO. Instead, you can utilise online business directories such as Yelp, Yell and Thomson Local. Make sure the local directories that you choose are reputable, well-established and trusted to give yourself the best chance of attracting new customers.

Looking for help with digital marketing and local SEO in Manchester?

If you’re new to SEO in general, it can be a daunting task trying to figure out how it all works and how you can use it to your advantage. But not to worry, we’re here to help! Hit the button below to contact our digital marketing and SEO company in Manchester, and let us help you to successfully market your business online.

WooCommerce for Beginners

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 14:01:14 GMT

If you want to sell your products online without building a totally new site, or you’re exploring the different e-commerce options for WordPress, look no further. WooCommerce is the perfect solution to help you build a fully-functional online shop with ease.

****In this guide, we’ll go over the key WooCommerce features you need to know, as well as, how to make the most of the plugin so that you can maximise your site’s selling potential!

What is WooCommerce?

In summary, WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce WordPress plugin that allows you to transform your existing WordPress site into an e-commerce platform. The plugin has been installed over 39 million times and 42% of all online e-commerce sites use it, making it more popular than both Magento and Shopify.

With the plugin, you can sell both physical and digital products, ship your products globally, accept different types of payments and customize your shop even further with WooCommerce themes and extensions.

This is a great option for those who are looking to take their products online for the first time, as well as existing online shop owners, as it’s simple to use and customise so you can make your shop your own.

How much is the WooCommerce plugin?

One of the best things about the WooCommerce plugin is that it’s completely free! You won’t be charged for the main plugin, however, they also sell hundreds of extensions that you add to your site to customise it even further.

WooCommerce features

Regardless of whether you’re a solopreneur with a modest product offering, or a large corporation with an extensive product portfolio, you can use WooCommerce to create an online store that will work for you and your customer’s needs! Below, are some of the main features that you can take advantage of:

A range of themes to choose from

WooCommerce have their own official ‘Storefront’ theme, which you can use to create your online shop and can customise even further with additional extensions. However, you don’t have to opt for this theme alone.

WooCommerce is built to work seamlessly with existing WordPress themes, therefore you won’t have trouble finding a theme that you love that’s also compatible with the plugin.

List an unlimited number of products

If you’re wondering ‘how many products can WooCommerce handle?’, the answer is unlimited! There’s no ceiling on the number of products you can add to your site, therefore you won’t have to restrict your product offering.

There’s also no limit to the number of variations that you can have for each product, allowing you to give your customers more choice.

Easy store management

Once you’ve built your shop, you’ll need to keep on top of elements such as orders, shipping and customer accounts, and with WooCommerce you can do all of this and much more!

You can give your members of staff the permissions to manage orders without giving them full admin access, giving you the freedom to delegate tasks with ease. Alternatively, you handle store management yourself and add extensions to make order fulfilment quick and easy.

WooCommerce alternatives for WordPress

If you’re looking to explore other options to WooCommerce, there are a range of other plugins that you could use to build your e-commerce site, including:

MarketPress
WP eCommerce
Cart66
JigoShop

The plugin you go for will largely depend on your experience with WordPress, your budget and the nature of the products that you want to sell.

Let us do the hard work for you!

Regardless of whether you want to take your current e-commerce shop to the next level, or you’re completely new to the world of WordPress and web design, we’ll work closely with you to help you build your ideal selling platform.

Learn more about or WordPress Web Development or contact us today to see how we could help you!

A Guide To The Gutenberg WordPress Editor

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 15:32:21 GMT

Last year, WordPress teased us with ‘a new way to WordPress’, also known as Gutenberg; a new editor due to replace the traditional publisher in Spring 2018.

Gutenberg aims to revolutionise and demystify the way we publish content through WordPress, so that people of all technical abilities can build beautiful sites and blogs with ease.

Gutenberg is currently available as a WordPress plugin, however, the new editor will replace the old one later this year. That’s why we’ve put together this handy introductory guide, to help you (and us!) get to know Gutenberg and its fantastic new features.

Content blocks

Current WordPress Editor

New WordPress Editor - (Codename Gutenberg)

Content blocks are one of the biggest changes introduced in the new Gutenberg editor, and they make editing and adding different mediums of content a whole lot easier!

The image above shows the content split into 3 blocks, and each of these individual blocks can be formatted independently. For example, block 1 is in H2 formatting, block 2 is in bullet points and the text in block 3 is aligned to the right. As well as this, blocks can be copied, pasted, and moved around to different points of the page, to make customising your content easy and stress free.

By clicking the small dots next to the block, you’ll also be able to view more options to edit your content, including the option to ‘edit as HTML’. This has taken over from the original ‘text’ tab that many WordPress users will be familiar with.

Previously, text and content could only be separated by spaces. The nature of the the old editor made it difficult for those with basic programming knowledge, to make posts stand out and look more visually pleasing for the reader. However, Gutenberg makes making posts look visually appealing really simple!

Content blocks continued…

In Gutenberg, blocks don’t have to be made up of just text, they come in a range of different formats. The screenshot above shows a few of the types of blocks that you can currently add to your pages and posts, however there are a many more options that make editing easier.

Text columns

You can now add the ‘text column’ block to split your content into different columns, and you can have up to four columns in a block. Each column can be edited independently, meaning you no longer have to code in your columns, which proved to be an issue for many beginner WordPress users.

CTA Buttons

The ‘buttons’ block lets you add CTA buttons anywhere within your content. You can edit the text on the button and link it to any webpage.

Previously, you would have to either code your CTA buttons into your WordPress site, download a button plugin or use an image with a hyperlink in order to have custom CTA buttons. This change means it will be even easier to create strong and beneficial CTAs on your pages and blog posts!

Gallery

Current WordPress Editor

Gutenberg

Similarly to the old WordPress, you can choose the number of image columns that you would like, however, Gutenberg arranges your photos in a more user-friendly and visually pleasing format.

Tables

Easily add tables within your content with the ‘tables’ block. You also have the option to increase the table’s size and add rows and columns as you would in Google Docs or Microsoft Word.

Cover images

You now have more options when it comes to cover images. You can make attractive post header images within WordPress by adding text to your image. As well as this, you can use the URL function to link your header to another webpage, and change the alignment of the text on the image.

HTML

Rather than having to edit your whole blog post in HTML, you can now edit individual blocks. This means you no longer have to scroll through endless amounts of HTML code in order to find what you’re looking for. Simply select the block you’d like to edit and click ‘Edit as HTML’.

These are the main new features to play around with in Gutenberg. There are a range of other blocks to try out and this list is likely to expand in the future, so keep your eyes peeled for new additions!

Embedding

There are now a whole host of embedding options to take advantage of, so adding external content is now easier than ever! Simply choose a site and enter the URL, or add the embed code to a block.

Aside from the options in the image above, other sites you can embed content from include:

Tumblr
TED
Slideshare
Reddit
Kickstarter
Dailymotion
Hulu

And the list doesn’t end there! There are already a wealth of embedding options in Gutenberg, however, if your preferred site isn’t on this list, it’s worth waiting to see if it will be in the full version of the editor.

Plugins

Major plugins such as Yoast work with the current version of Gutenberg. It may take some time before all plugins are fully compatible with the new interface, but the majority of the most popular and widely used plugins are working to create updates ready for the launch.

What will happen to the old WordPress Editor?

For those who are used to the current editor, Gutenberg may seem like an alien concept. But not to worry, the old WordPress editor isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

Right now, you can install the new Classic Editor plugin onto your WordPress site. This will mean that even after Gutenberg launches (expected Spring 2018) you will still be able to use the classic editor.

Whilst it is a huge change to the editor we all know and love, it’s certainly a step in the right direction in making the platform both easily accessible and easy to use. What are your thoughts? Leave us a comment below or get in touch via our contact form to see how we could help you!

Changes to Facebook’s Algorithm in 2018

Lauren Mallett — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 16:20:46 GMT

By Lauren Mallett - Head of Social Media

Just as marketers everywhere were quietly settling back into business as usual, Mark Zuckerberg has decided to shake things up by announcing some changes to Facebook’s news feed algorithm.

The change that has been proving worrisome to publishers and brands since its announcement, is that the news feed will now prioritise content from friends, family, and groups.

“You’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media,” Zuckerberg wrote. “And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard, it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

In basic terms, news feeds will now show less Buzzfeed quizzes that determine which Game of Thrones character you are and more pictures of your old classmates new baby. However, it’s not to be taken lightly! These changes come into effect over the next few months, and businesses are likely to notice a significant decrease in organic reach.

How can you keep reaching customers on Facebook?

Since the change is yet to roll out, nobody can be entirely sure of the scale of the upset it will have on organic reach. However, there are a few things you can do to make sure your social media strategy works with the new algorithm to avoid the negative impact that many publishers are predicting.

Post quality content that’s engaging and generates comments

According to Zuckerberg, “Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.”

What can we take from this? Well, essentially brands should be creating quality content that generates engagement and sparks conversion. Think topical, trending or relatable content that evokes some kind of emotion or opinion. Something that you don’t want to do though, is ask people to comment on the post, in true spam master form! An example of this would be, ‘comment on this post if you don’t like Mondays’. Facebook calls this engagement bait, and your content will suffer if you use this tactic.

Encourage users to follow your Facebook Page

Nothing is changing in regard to users seeing content from the Facebook Pages that they follow and chose to ‘see first’ in their news feed preferences. Brands and businesses should be making every effort to grow their follower base on Facebook, and build a community of users who are interested in the content that they have to share. Don’t be shy about promoting your page, and remind your loyal followers about the “See First” option.

Create a paid advertising strategy

It’s no secret that organic reach has been steadily on the decline on social media. If you haven’t already got a paid advertising strategy in place, then you need to create one as it’s now more important than ever. If you do have an ad budget, the chances are you need to consider increasing it. With the changes to Facebook’s new news feed algorithm, businesses need to know how to target relevant audiences to make sure they’re getting the most out of their ad spend.

If you need some help with your paid social media advertising, get in touch and we will be happy to advise.

Dedicate time to Facebook Groups

Dedicating time to Facebook Groups will serve you well once the new changes come into effect. Groups on Facebook are extremely versatile, and bring together a community of people who are actively engaged in one shared interest.

While he hasn’t given too much away, Zuckerberg has explicitly stated that Groups will be one of the things that get prioritised when the new news feed algorithm changes are rolled out. With this in mind, it would serve you well to start thinking about how you can use Facebook Groups to generate engagement for your business.

Incorporate videos into your strategy

Have you started incorporating videos into your social media strategy? If so, that’s great, because videos will continue to be prioritised with the new algorithm. Something that will be even more important though, is Facebook Live. According to Zuckerberg himself “live videos often lead to discussion among viewers on Facebook. In fact, live videos on average get six times as many interactions as regular videos.”

Facebook Live videos are one of the few definite forms of content that have been confirmed to perform well under the new algorithm, so it goes without saying that it should make the cut in your social media strategy.

If you would like support implementing a social media strategy that caters to the new algorithm, get in touch and our social media team will give you tailored recommendations to help you meet your objectives.

[gravityform id=“1” title=“true” description=“true”]

A Quick Start Guide To YouTube Video Marketing

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 09:59:24 GMT

Since its launch back in 2005, YouTube has rapidly grown to become the go-to place for video content. Now, with its parent company Google, it is the second biggest search engine and attracts around 15 billion visitors every month.

An increasing amount of businesses are discovering the beauty of both video content and video ads, with businesses using video seeing around 41% more organic web traffic than those who don’t do video marketing. These companies also experience revenue growth 49% faster year-on-year.

When making the big decision to invest in video marketing, it’s important to have somewhere to host the content. YouTube is the perfect place to both boost brand awareness and help to drive more traffic to your site. If you can be clever and research thoroughly the most popular search terms in your industry, you are sure to be able to create video content that engages and creates loyal, returning customers.

Much like regular search engines, there is a certain amount of SEO that needs to be put into practice in order for your videos to show up in both Google and YouTube SERPs.

Optimising YouTube Titles, Tags and Descriptions

Optimising YouTube videos is very much like optimising normal on-site and off-site content. Keywords still play a huge part in YouTube’s algorithm, so it’s always the best place to start.

Choosing 2-3 main keywords you want both your videos and your channel to rank for. These keywords should then appear in the title of your video, its description and its tags.

Title- Keep the title as short as possible with your keywords taking precedence.

Description- Include your keywords within the first 2 lines of your description, this is what YouTube takes the most notice in when crawling the video. You should then look to include it 2-3 more times in the rest of the copy. 150 words max is more than enough for a description.

Tags- Always include your keywords in your tags, as well as your brand name. You can then tag any words that you think people may type into YouTube to find your video and adding competitor brand names can also help you appear in the ‘recommended’ sidebar, when users are watching their videos.

The Hidden Value of Subtitles

Those of us that don’t regularly use subtitles will always turn them off the videos we’re viewing. But subtitles are not only for the hard of hearing, they are also crawled by Google and YouTube search.

Actual dialogue spoken in a video can not be indexed, however, if you make sure that your dialogue is correctly transcribed into subtitles, it could help you rank that little bit higher.

When creating your video content, keep your keywords in mind and if possible, squeeze them into the narration or dialogue. That way, when you come around to inputting your subtitles, your keywords will be included in the text.

Appearing For Competitor Videos

Have you ever been watching a video on YouTube and you get a whole list of videos along the right-hand side? These videos appear here for a few different reasons, some are the most watched videos with your searched for keywords, some are targeting the channel you are watching in their video tags.

For example, the popular YouTube channel for James Corden’s Late Late Show, often targets competing late night talk show hosts in their video tags, in order to appear in the recommended videos for their channels.

The other major factor in ranking highly on YouTube is likes, views and shares. Like Google, YouTube takes user behaviours into consideration when deciding what is the most quality content for its users.

Videos with a lot of likes, views and shares will always rank higher over newer, less interacted with videos. This is where social media becomes extremely important. Without social, all of your favourite, viral YouTube videos would never have been seen and shared across the globe.

Like written content, a video should aim to solve a problem or entertain. Promotional videos can be helpful when using video for paid advertising, however, for general YouTube channel content, it can fall flat.

Your videos should either answer the questions your customers are searching for, solve their problems or entertain them. Once you start using your video content with your customers in mind, you’ll start to see why so many companies are turning to video marketing to boost revenue, brand awareness and on-site conversions.

Mustard Tree Charity Dinner with a Twist

Anna Moss — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 13:16:06 GMT

For over 20 years Mustard Tree has been a Greater Manchester based charity committed to combatting poverty and preventing homelessness. Their involvement begins with the provision of life support such as providing emergency food, clothing and furniture and quickly progresses to sustainable solutions which is offered through their work readiness and life skills programme, the Freedom Project. In 2015/16 they handed out 3,626 food parcels to people in need and provided 49,763 meals through their various food operations all within a very tight budget and with the support of sporadic food donations from the public and businesses using mainly long life, tinned or dried food. So, we set the wonderful chefs at The Albert Square Chop House a challenge…to create a menu based on the products used by Mustard Tree with a fine dining twist. To say that Development Chef, Jack, has excelled himself is an understatement and we cannot wait to share his menu with you all.

The evening will of course be hosted in the Memorial Hall at the Chop House overlooking The Albert Square. After welcome bubbles, we will ask everyone to take their seats where Adrian Nottingham, CEO of Mustard Tree and Anna Moss, Director of FireCask Ltd, will welcome everyone. Then the main event will begin and dinner will be served! Throughout the meal we will hear from some of the people who have been impacted by Mustard Tree and whose lives have been changed for the better as a result of their work.

Graham Hudson, Creative Programmes Manager, will be creating a bespoke mural for the event which we are opening up to all of you to get involved. For a £5 donation, you can make your mark on this one-of-a-kind piece of art that we will auction off at the end of the night.

When: Thursday 29th September

Where: The Albert Square Chop House

Timings: Champagne arrival at 7pm. Carriages at 12am.

Cost: £75pp or £750 for a table of 10 (to include a three course meal, arrival drink and wine over dinner)

[gallery ids=“9702,9703,9705”]

Booking Form

[gravityform id=“24” title=“false” description=“false” ajax=“true” tabindex=“141”]

Remote Working in Italy:A Perspective on Investments

Alex Moss — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 12:29:00 GMT

A few weeks ago Anna and I took the FireCask team to a small village in the heart of Tuscany, to work remotely as a group. We’ve never done this before and what originally started off as an experiment, turned out to be a brilliant trip for the whole team. Now we’re back in the office suffering from a small bout of holiday blues, I thought I’d share my reflections on the trip, for any readers who may be considering a work trip away for their team.

Why Did We Do It?

There’s a couple of concepts we’ve noticed startups implementing that often greatly benefit their team. We’re seeing an increase in the number of startups shunning the traditional physical office and becoming completely remote when it comes to the day-to-day operations of their venture.

Coupled with the traditional concept of a Christmas Do taking place towards the end of the year offering the team a chance to get together, bond and let their hair down before the Christmas break begins.

What we wanted to do was merge these two concepts by having the whole team work from a different location than the office in central Manchester.

Why did we choose Italy for a working location?

In October 2014, Anna and I purchased an apartment in a small village called Bagni di Lucca. Located in the heart of Tuscany, the village has a handful of restaurants and bars, yet it is so remote in terms of amenities.

This beautifully quaint and peaceful area wasn’t just a place to have a holiday, but also a place to work, away from the normality of life in the UK. In Bagni di Lucca, life is slower and much more relaxed. There isn’t a startup scene or any fancy metropolitan bars - just the bare essentials one needs to have a more relaxing way of life. Because of this, we’ve found over time that our work done out there was just as good, whilst our way of life improved. We found that even within a “more relaxed” environment, we still managed high outputs of work.

From this, we wanted to see if this would be the same if the whole team worked there too. So how exactly did we go about it?

Preparation

Organising the week as a whole is key to ensuring everything runs smoothly. No event manager is needed when Anna is organising. Other than the usual travel and accommodation arrangements, our main focus was to ensure we had a few locations to work from and enough places to eat without shutting down work for too long.

Locations

We hoped to work from a different place each day, be it within hotels, restaurants, the local bar and our own apartment.

The apartment just about fit all 12 of us in. Split between the living room and the balcony, the set up felt natural and allowed us all to be working together in the same way we do, day to day.

My view whilst I work this morning ???????????????? A photo posted by Zara Bennett (@zaragozamohawk) on May 26, 2016 at 2:11am PDT

We also worked from one of the amazing restaurants of the village, Ristorante Circolo dei Forestieri, where we worked outside in the courtyard before using the restaurant itself to eat our lunch.

Aims and Benefits

Waking up Happier

Even though we were in a holiday setting, work was still at the forefront of our minds - even first thing in the morning. Maybe it was down to the great coffee, the fresh air or the morning view which overlooked the Lima river and one of the first casinos to open in Europe.

Morning…..

A photo posted by Rhys Wynne (@rhysieboy84) on May 25, 2016 at 12:28am PDT

Team Bonding

As well as the fact that we were working in a lovely part of the world, it felt surprisingly beneficial to spend such a long time together, away from hustle and bustle of everyday life in Manchester. Being together practically 24/7 for 5 days should have been draining, but it was actually refreshing. We’d be able to work the whole day, followed by a short rest, before meeting up to go out together at night.

First family dinner in Italy A photo posted by Anna Moss (@5ftlong) on May 23, 2016 at 11:31am PDT

We’d eat fantastic food, drink well and stay up late but we were all ready to rock again in the morning.

Different Mindset & Improved Productivity

Working in a different location brings different thoughts. Sometimes running a company is best evaluated from afar, and positive change comes from somewhere other than the confines of the office.

Because we were working in more improvised situations in a completely different location, the team’s productivity was not only on the same level but came with a different mindset which brought different elements of creativity. We might have adopted the longer mediterranean lunch style but we still had the same high level of productivity. We were able to take longer lunches and use that time spent away from our usual desks which really helped keep productivity higher than usual in the afternoon.

Comparing with Other Investments

I remember the days when I would have to justify a few hundred pounds to my line managers, in order to do certain things that would benefit the company as a whole. Hosting a party or networking event at the office, speaking or exhibiting at a conference and entering an awards ceremony are just a few ways to improve business prospects. Yet while there were obvious ROIs in these cases, taking the team away would provide a different kind of return on investment. Let’s use a few examples with average figures:

Hosting a Party at your Office

Food = £240
Drink = £150
Making staff network with prospects in exchange for 2 or 3 drinks = £0

Total price = £390

1 Person Attending/Speaking at a Conference

Ticket price = £250
Travel = £150
1 room for the night = £90
Other meals and expenses = £150

Total price = £600

Entering an Awards Ceremony with 3 attendees

Entering 2 categories = £160
Tickets = £300
Travel = £180
2 rooms for the night = £240
Other meals and expenses = £120

Total price = £860

Exhibiting at a Conference for 2 days with 3 attendees

Exhibition stand = £4,000
Supplies for exhibition = £400
Travel = £300
2 rooms for 2 nights = £500
Other meals and expenses = £500

Total price = £5,700

The above costs can add up over a year. Let’s say for example that you attend 3 conferences, 1 award ceremony and exhibit once within a 12 month period you will have to invest £7,160. This doesn’t even cover any additional remedial expenses, as well as the fact that during this time, you and your team members will be out of the office which is even more costly to the company. Adding another £1,500 or so is a good estimate to this.

Grand Total = £8,660

With the above information, your company may have invested around £8,660 which needs to be returned. Out of the 3 examples above, exhibiting at a conference takes over 50% of the total investment but is the most likely to see a return and will most probably happen with the quickest turnaround. Attending/speaking at conferences and entering award ceremonies is a smaller investment but the ROI is not as clear to prove, and can take a long time to see a return. As an example, I still hear from old contacts who saw me speak over a year ago and only now have started a dialog with me about services we offer.

Cost & Conclusion

Whilst the investments above are still sound, they all had a more direct element to returning that investment via new business. The investment we chose has no real direct return on investment that one can calculate by saying, “this trip won us that work”.

Instead, investing in the team trip to Italy meant that we invested in our people, through improving work ethic, team building and happiness. As a self-funded startup, every major investment requires consideration that can affect the workings of the agency itself. It sounds really “startup-y”, but investing in happiness is just as important as buying the equipment to carry out a job. But how much did all this cost? Was the investment worth it?

Below is a breakdown of costs for 12 people to stay in Tuscany for 4 nights and 5 days. We paid for everything except 2 dinners and a few rounds of drinks:

Flights = £1,347.80
Accomodation = £857.53
Taxis = £350
Car hire & petrol = £55
Food & Drink = £562

Grand Total = £3,172.33

We predicted a spend of £4,000, so came in surprisingly under budget. It is proportionately cheaper than the 3 comparisons made above, and the morale it provides for a team over one week is well worth the investment itself.

Last week was an experiment, an experiment that passed with flying colours and something we will being doing on at least an annual basis in the future. Taking your team away to work remotely is definitely an investment that more companies should look into if they are able to do so. Lastly, we also want to thank our team so much for all the support and patience when a router went down, and for being wonderful in general :)

Until 2017!

Mustard Tree Food Drive

Anna Moss — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 10:14:23 GMT

FireCask are asking for your help for one of the lovely charities we support. Mustard Tree are in need of various food and personal items.

We are asking that you, your friends, colleagues and anyone else you know bring in one item each from the food list (below) during the month of June/July so that we can help to build the Mustard Tree’s food store back up. FireCask are opening their offices as a collection point, and we’re also offering to come and collect your donated food items and take some photos of all of your hard work in the process!

Please help us support this amazing charity and the wonderful work they do in our city. Please do not think that any collection is too small, even one food donation can really help us to get the food store back to where it needs to be. Seriously, every little helps.

For more information or if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email anna@firecask.com or call our office on 0161 222 8655. Thank you!

Dried	Tinned (ring pulls preferred)
Fruit	Meats; corn beef, ham, chicken
Nuts	Ready meals
Milk	Cream (milk)
Eggs	All day breakfast
Cereal; porridge, muesli	Vegetables
Vegetables (including mash)	Sardines and others
Mash
	Personal Items
Packets/Cartons	Liquid soap
Rice	Soap flakes
Pasta	Deodorant
Noodles snacks	Body wash and/or wipes
Flour	Mouth wash
UHT milk	Soft drinks
Sugar	Shampoo sachets
Breakfast bars	Ladies sanitary items
Cereal	Shaving cream and lotions

Our last food drive was so successful with companies from Leeds and as far as Switzerland contributing and we want this one to be even bigger and better!

Giving up a Night in Bed

Anna Moss — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 11:09:03 GMT

On May 16th I will be giving up a night in bed to sleep on the pitch of the Lancashire County Cricket Club in Old Trafford as part of the CEO Sleepout Manchester event. Donate Now!

So far, this event has been carried out across the UK with over 400 executives taking part and raising over £680,000 and now it is our fine city’s turn! The money raised will be split between some amazing organisation who help to fight homelessness and poverty such as Booth Centre and Mustard Tree.

Having worked with charities such as Mustard Tree over the last few years it has become so clear to me that the work they do is so necessary and important. They not only help those who are currently homeless but also help to prevent more from finding themselves in the same situation as well as giving people vital skills and tools to help benefit their lives.

Please help me to reach my fundraising goal by donating what you can to my JustGiving page, all contributions will be hugely appreciated. Make sure you follow me on Twitter @AnnaMMoss because I’ll be posting pics on the night of the event so you can see what is going on…keep your fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain!

Donate Now!

Social Media Masterclass

Anna Moss — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 11:35:27 GMT

Following the success of our Introduction to Content Marketing event in January, we’re hosting another half day seminar. Due to many requests we will be running a Social Media Masterclass.

We want to help you get creative and think about your social media management for 2016, how to run your campaigns whether you are a small or large business and how to tie this in with your content strategy. At the close of event, we’ll be putting on drinks to give you the chance to mingle and network with other attendees so keep your evening free!

The topics that will be covered include:

Why social media is important for your business - The benefits it can have if done correctly
Common misconceptions
How to plan your social media use
The tools you need to ensure you are maximising your time
What you shouldn’t do when building your brand on social
Social advertising
Idea generation - How to use a creative brief (including an in-depth example)
How your ideas can be implemented
What content can be beneficial for your social media success
Social and Analytics
Q&A

We will be hosting complimentary drinks following so that you can mingle with other attendees, network and ask us more so keep your evening free!

**When:**Thursday 19th May

**Where:**Albert Square Chop House, 14 Albert Square, Manchester, M2 5PF

The FireCask 2015 Review

Tue, 29 Dec 2015 12:49:40 GMT

We have all been a busy bunch this year, with so many events happening it is sometimes hard to keep up. We have created an infographic to explain just what we have been up to throughout the months and what is to come in 2016.

You can also sign up to our FREE Content Marketing event in January just by clicking here.

The FireCask 2015 Digital Marketing Review

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 11:15:32 GMT

As 2015 starts to draw to a close we are once again reaching that time of year when we can look back and assess exactly what has happened in the past twelve months, and start to speculate about what next year might bring. In a year full of unforeseen political shocks, a selection of scandals, and hoverboards that didn’t quite hover, the world of digital marketing has certainly had a lot of content to present and trends to follow, but just what has 2015 offered, and how is 2016 shaping up?

Mobile Equality

The continued rise of mobile devices has had an incredible impact upon digital marketing in 2015. During 2014 mobile data usage increased by 80% (KPCB 2014 Internet Report) and this heavily impacted digital marketing in 2015. Companies began to direct more advertising to mobile users through apps and mobile sites with very clear effects including portrait style advertising breaking free from the confines of bus stops and web banners. Mobile devices can no longer be considered subordinate to computers when it comes to marketing, especially considering that more searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in at least 10 countries. This was reflected by Mobilegeddon; Google’s algorithm update that gave priority to sites that display well on mobile and smart devices, giving mobile and desktop traffic equal value. Equally, Google have been indexing apps for some time meaning mobile presence also contributes to SEO, and 2016 will see them placing more importance on deep links in apps as well. Mobile-optimisation is more important than ever and it is unlikely that this change will slow down in 2016 as consumers become increasingly connected and desktop-only sites fall behind their competitors.

Digital Consumption

Are you a Laura, Luke, Lucy, or a Liam? If you’re not quite sure how to answer that question then it may be best to take a look at Deloitte’s study from this year (http://www.deloitte.co.uk/mediaconsumer/) that identified four key personas that can be attributed to consumers. Arguably, the most important findings of this study relate to a graded scale that corresponds to the age of consumers. If you are between 16-24 then it is likely that you’re in the 92% of people in this age range with access to smartphones who check their messages before they even get out of bed. However, Deloitte’s study shows that the older people get, the less they use technology. Mobile phone usage is decreasing for everyone over 55 while books and magazines are the preference over their digital counterparts. The results of this study indicate just how important digital marketing is to people under 40 as they consume so much of their media through technology. In 2016 the increasing availability of wearable technology is set to alter the four key personas Deloitte found, however, wearable tech is expected to increase mobile consumption and the frequency of use, including increasingly targeted advertising.

Consumer Becomes Creator

Technology is an essential part of people’s existence and while there is a shift from smartphones to tablets as soon as people are over 24, they are still spending a lot of time using touch screens. The increasing use of interactive technologies also indicates another important aspect of marketing in 2015; the shift from consumer to co-creator. Interaction is higher than ever before with over 50% of the population checking social media daily. However, people don’t simply look at social media, they also comment, tweet, share photos, and create all sorts of aditional content. The growing prevalence of websites such as Reddit and Imgur shows just how much people want to interact with content. Reddit’s AMAs (Ask Me Anything) serve as a prime example of this interaction. People no longer want to read an interview, they want to ask the questions as well. In relation to marketing people are no longer just following trends, they directly influence it more than ever. The duality of consumer and co-creator in one person doesn’t quite constitute the death of the author as content creators can still decide how they want to target their brands and sell their products, but they don’t get to choose everything that happens. 2015 has shown the direction content creation is taking, where the internet no longer simply fills with images and words selected by brands. Instead they have to compete with memes, blogs, and videos, that can say whatever they want to an enormous audience.

The Webcam is Mightier than the Keyboard

The role of the consumer as co-creator online has developed significantly in 2015, however one specific area of creation has grown more than any other; video. While websites that focus on the written word appear to be in decline, for example Twitter’s reduction in active users after peaking in August 2014, sites that focus on video have continued to grow. While YouTube has begun to see significant competition, it has still continued to grow, and it appears that consumers want more video than ever. The continued rise of apps such as Snapchat and Vine throughout 2015 and the increased popularity of streaming sites such as Twitch has been a key indicator of just how important video is becoming and how marketing through video is more important than ever. 2016 is set to see even more growth from these companies, but Google may be the true visual catalyst that firmly establishes video over text as they are currently experimenting with video adverts in search results. If a brand doesn’t have video content it is likely that in the near future they will be falling behind their competition.

Digital Personal Assistants

There was a time when having a digital personal assistant was simply an aspect of science fiction, however with increasingly effective speech recognition and artificial intelligence most people have easy access to a friendly voice they can ask questions to via their devices. The development of programs such as Siri, Cortana, and Google Now has resulted in search engines receiving increasing amounts of search requests from intelligent digital PAs. The effect of this speech to text type of searching means that sites that offer more casual and colloquial language within their searches are likely to be more successful on search engines when people can ask more conversational questions to their phones. Facebook’s Graph Search developed in 2013 was an early example of a search system that was supposed to respond to natural language queries, and can be considered as technology that may become more prevalent as digital PAs become more evolved and more present in everyday life. Once again, the increase of wearable technology in the near future will also influence this as touch keyboards are replaced by voice controls.

Everything Everywhere Anytime

The development of wearable technology in 2015 has been indicative of a number of trends, with a significant one being the increased frequency of technological interaction. People no longer want to wait for content, and they want everything in one place more than ever. 2015 has seen significant advances in streamlined content, and while apps have continued to develop ways of selecting very specific information to send directly to consumers, technology such as Moments by Twitter that indexes vast amounts of content is being developed for 2016 indicates that the trend of streamlined simple to consume information will continue and getting a daily roundup of the most important content will be easier for consumers than ever. With this in mind, the space for advertising is clearly shifting as consumers want very specific things at very specific times. This is why the development of programmatic advertising in 2015 has been significant as it aligns with this consumption shift. Through apps such as Shazam users can interact with the media they are consuming on another screen directly while not pausing their original media of consumption. This involvement facilitates direct interaction between the consumer and the product even when the consumer has very specifically streamlined what they consume. As people gradually use more technology in their daily lives they can consume streamlined content while still consuming advertising content simultaneously.

It’s clear that 2015 has brought a lot of change. The influence of hardware and software has been wide reaching and the demographic divides between consumers means it is almost impossible to target everyone through only one form of advertising anymore. The shifts in content toward video and streamlined feeds has aligned closely with the prevalence of mobile and wearable technology, altering the way digital marketing has occurred throughout 2015. However, it is likely that these changes won’t slow down in to 2016, and while certain changes may still only be in their infancy throughout 2016, their impact will be clear. So, whether you’re a Laura, Luke, Lucy, or a Liam, things are changing, and those who don’t keep up will be stuck in 2015!

Introduction to Content Marketing Event

Anna Moss — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 11:39:19 GMT

Following the success of our Introduction to Content Marketing business breakfast in September, we’re hosting a half day seminar to expand on the themes we discussed during the session.

We want to help you get creative and think about your content marketing strategy for 2016. At the close of event, we’ll be putting on drinks to give you the chance to mingle and network with other attendees so keep your evening free!

The topics that will be covered include:

What is Content Marketing? The different types of content that can be used, tips and hints to follow and how to think creatively no matter what sector you are in.
Methods of creativity. We will discuss some methods of how to think creatively and put one into practice to show you how it can work.
Content Marketing and Social Media. How your content marketing strategy ties in to social media campaigns. We will look into how and when to post your content, what works on which platform and the voice you should use.
A focus on your industries. We will gather information from your registration to choose the main industry sectors to discuss.
Q&A. Your chance to ask us any questions and pick our brains!

Date: Thursday 28th January Time: 3pm - 5pm followed by networking drinks Venue: Freeths LLP, 5 New York Street, Manchester, M1 4JB

It's a New Dawn, It's a New Day

Paul Delaney — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 10:21:44 GMT

Hello, I’m Paul Delaney, new Head of Search at FireCask!

A little bit about me, I’ve worked in the SEO industry for over 8 years and worked for 3 large agencies, dealt with a variety of businesses from small to large in fashion, retail, finance, gaming and travel to name a few.

I’ve spoken at the SMX conference in Stockholm as well as guest speaker at Salford University as part of the Search and Social Marketing course, been quoted in The Guardian as well as industry related Q&A’s.

So you may be asking “why would you join a start-up agency?”

Well, the decision to move to FireCask was quite easy. Having known Alex & Anna for a number of years, I’ve watched with a close eye on how their business has grown and transformed over the past few years and when the opportunity arose to join I didn’t hesitate in saying yes.

The challenge to help grow a business and be part of something really excites me and I’m looking forward to the working in a small family environment

So as the Nina Simone song goes, “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me” and I’m “feeling good” and excited to be joining the FireCask family!

SAScon 2015: Actionable Bulletpoints

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 14:10:53 GMT

While the rest of Manchester were enjoying the two days of summer; the Search, Analytics and Social media lovers among us were shut away inside Manchester Metropolitan University’s Business School learning all about the state of the industry from some of the best in the business at SAScon 2015.

This was my first time at a ‘main’ SAScon, having attended the Beta event in December last year, and it was great to have the opportunity to meet some of the people I had only previously engaged with over social media or having read blog posts online.

It goes without saying that there were plenty of insightful presentations and panel discussions which brought plenty of engagement from those sat inside the lecture theatres.

Unfortunately, despite the developments in technology like wearables which were commented on frequently across the two days, it’s not yet possible to transport myself into all three rooms at once so choosing which talks to attend was difficult (my apologies to those reading this review whose presentations I didn’t attend - it’s not personal!)

For those whose talks I did get to, it was certainly worthwhile and I would suggest that anyone who thought about going this year and then thought “maybe next time”, gets themselves on the list next year - you learn shedloads from some of the best in the business. I did my best to scribble down everything I could so I’ll do my best to do the talks justice in bullet point form.

This year’s event kicked off with Aleyda Solis, founder of Orainti, jetting in to talk to a packed lecture theatre about how SMBs can win in competitive SEO sectors.

https://twitter.com/alexmoss/status/608923393749082112

Authority plays a vital role in rankings, but it isn’t just about rankings anymore. Results pages (SERPs) have evolved from a list of results to a page full of snippets, apps, maps, knowledge graph and now multidevice results
The big players might have advantages over small rivals, but the smaller companies can leverage the challenges faced by larger businesses
Larger companies might have the authority and resources, but smaller businesses are often faster, more flexible and more targeted meaning they can capitalise. If you have lower authority, be strategic: less competition + more visibility. Localise your presence, be lean and be fast
Identify the SEO competition and visibility opportunities in your industry; and compare your domains to identify the unique and common keywords. Check for additional permutations and identify the devices used. Verify the volume, competition and trend and find out which SERP can earn more visibility along with the content type to achieve that
Use tools such as Buzzsumo to identify the most popular local or industry-related content and influencers; and LinkRisk to get data from sites to outreach

Next for me was a discussion on the industry according to experts Paul Frampton, CEO of Havas Media and Tom Cull, MD of iProspect Manchester. The pair were asked a series of questions about the history of the industry, where it is now, where it’s going and the biggest challenges they’re faced with.

Paul: “One of the biggest challenges is finding T-shaped talent and expertise”, the kind of people who aren’t just specialists in one area, but skilled in areas that will benefit the business as a whole
Tom: “Consumers, clients and customers want instant gratification, and more complex user behaviour makes our task more complex”
Paul: “We need to be more focussed on solutions” rather than just strategies
Tom: “Data can be used to inform content, the data obtained from that content can then be used to inform the next piece and so on”
Paul: “We have the tools to deliver more and better content and experiences, but we’re failing. It’s about bringing value back to people”
Tom: “If you make a brand useful with user engagement then there is still life in SEO”
Paul: “Paid social will become more data driven, helping us to do much more with the platforms than many of us already do”
Paul: “Data is the lifeblood of digital marketing. Without it we compromise the whole user experience”

After after a quick coffee, there was a talk on paid search, making the move from keywords to audience, given by Wes Emmison, PPC group head at MediaCom and Matt Wright, the Director of Paid Media at iProspect Manchester.

Wes: Audience targeting is based on the information we have about users, that is interpreted to help us to deliver the right message at the right time
As user behaviour continues to vary across more devices, we can gather more information to ultimately boost our return on investment (ROI)
Audience targeting has evolved over time, giving us more options than ever before. Long-standing methods include time of day and the day of the week, the location of a user and the device they’re using. The new methods include specific demographic (age and gender) targeting, along with RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads)
Considerations for an effective strategy: device, age, gender, interests, motivation to buy, when are they active
User behaviour varies day to day, hour to hour
Location data can highlight a business’ strengths and weaknesses in a particular sector
Keywords are not dead. PPC (pay per click) has evolved and we must adapt, increasing our efficiency
Matt: Consumer behaviour is driving rapid change. Technology and convergence has put the consumers in control
Use the data that is available to feed into the audience and to power the strategy
Searches without data are ambiguous. Data gives it that clarity
Combine data sets to target activity - audience, product, messaging, exposure
There is no easy path to the next level, but you can prepare yourselves to help you to get there. All data is useful data

After lunch there was a keynote speech by Larry Kim, the founder of WordStream, on the future of PPC marketing right now, and where it’s going

Search CPCs (cost per click) keep dropping overall. However, overall paid search CPCs have reached an all-time high
There are fewer ad spots on mobile, which makes up 50% of searches in 2015 and is only likely to grow
Winning at paid search in 2015 means being more picky than ever before and targeting fewer, high quality, more expensive clicks rather than more, average quality, less expensive clicks
RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads) gives you the opportunity to customize search ads specifically to people who recently visited your site. On average, RLSA doubles CTR (click-through rates), raises your quality score and cuts CPC in half
Your audience spends 95% of its time on the web reading and engaging with news pages, blogs, social networking sites, email etc.
Display ads have a much higher inventory, lower CPCs and convert well, providing decent ROI and scale
The evolution of display ad targeting options: identity (names and contact details), remarketing (people who visited the ‘buy’ section of the site), interests and market segments, keyword targeting, website targeting
Email targeting is coming to AdWords
Identity-based marketing opens up new advertising use cases and you can target specific influencers, increasing the chance of getting noticed
You need interesting content and influential people to pick up your content in order for it to go viral
Be a unicorn among a sea of donkeys - do something special to stand out, not just what everyone else is doing
Social platforms are killing off organic reach
Content remarketing is the future - amplify/promote your content to the right audience and you will dramatically increase your brand recall, generating sales and qualified leads. It combines all the assets of SEO, PPC, social media marketing and content marketing
How content remarketing works - produce content and share on social; selectively promote your top content on social media; build your remarketing audience by tagging visitors with a site cookie; apply behavioural and demographic filters on the audience; target the audience with display and social media ads; capture qualified leads or sales

My next talk was given by Paddy Moogan, the Co-Founder of Aira from Milton Keynes. This was one of the most popular talks I attended and there were plenty of insights to be gained on the future for marketers.

https://twitter.com/alexmoss/status/608992928950833152

“Google doesn’t want to be the middle-man anymore, (not for free anyway!)” They will keep getting better at spam detection
It’s still all about search. If it isn’t about search, it’s certainly about you and user data
Our industry will change through artificial intelligence (AI)
AI is at the heart of the future of this industry. It is doing, and will continue to do two things for us as marketers: (1) filtering what we want to see. Content needs to get past these filters and we now need multiple traffic sources. Loyalty is the ultimate goal. (2) Predicting what we want to see. AI learns real signals from us and this will make spam much harder in the future
Mobile is not about mobile as a whole, it is about the context in which we use our mobile devices
Content discovery is now mobile first. It isn’t all about making a piece of viral content
45% of all mobile searches help us to make decisions, meaning you need to communicate the message in the right context
The future is unpredictable and having a T-shaped marketer is good, but not the answer. You need to be able to combine creativity, strategy and technology
We need to get better at measurement, and to find out what our customer lifetime value (LTV) is so that we can build up a loyal audience
Create a paid and organic content promotion strategy as both are valuable
Content needs to be beautiful
Keep one eye on the future, and the other on the here and now, delivering what people want now, not just what they might want down the line
Knowing what makes a good idea is crucial. You can then build on these over and over
Design content for mobile first with more and more using their mobile devices over desktop

Our own Alex Mossgave a presentation on the various tools out there to help you to improve your internal productivity

All companies deal with ‘pollution’ or clutter.
The likes of Feedly allow you to organise your reading materials into one dashboard, making it easy for you to learn at your convenience
Recruit’em helps you to find and organise your leads, making it much easier than searching through social networks and Google for contact details, job roles etc
There are numerous tools within Google Labs that allow you to organise your emails without mistakes - especially Undo Send
Organise your inbox to help you to prioritise and filter your emails, and remember to reply later with further detail (the Remember the Milk platform is good here)
Streak is good for sending emails later (ideal when emailing someone on the other side of the world). Plus, you can see if and when the recipient has opened your email
Instant messaging is good for internal and external communication. Skype is great for conference and video calling plus non-cloud file transfers; while Slack is a great in-house platform and can be organised into groups (such as accounts, content or in-house banter)
Trello is a great tool for project management, allowing you to organise projects into individual boards - such as SEO, content, social, next month, etc (also available as a mobile app)
Wrike is a brilliant project and time management tool, allowing you to see how long you spend on individual and collaborative tasks, as well as statistical data on progress
LastPass is a really useful for managing passwords and sharing them with your colleagues
Buzzstream and LinkRisk are excellent outreach tools for organising and finding contacts

Teddie Cowell, the Director of SEO at MediaCom; James English, the Head of SEO at BBC Sport and Radek Kowalskifrom iProspect Manchester then joined up for a panel discussion about the ongoing battle between technical and content headed by Tecmark Director Rob Weatherhead.

**Radek:**The content being produced might be great and really effective, but with a few technical edits it could be even better
**James:**It’s a competitive space, meaning that you can’t get complacent even if you have the help of Domain Authority and a brand name
**Radek:**It’s a pipedream to think that everything will be ideal, there are always things that can be improved or that will need editing
**Radek:**For small sites, WordPress is the ideal platform as it does 80% of the technical work for you
**Teddie:**Look for consistency in the URLs, H1s and other technical aspects of the content or page you’re looking at
**James:**You should always start out small. If you want to scale later on, it’s essential that you have your house in order early on
**Teddie:**Content is anything that connects a brand to its audience, whether it’s an article, a radio advertisement or an image on the television
**James:**With breaking news it’s important to sometimes get a headline and a page out there so it can start ranking and being found. You can always edit the content as you get it or where more news comes in
**Rob:**In one word, which is more important, technical or content? **Teddie:**Technical. **James:**Technical. **Radek:**Technical

Day two began with another keynote speech, this time from Martin Macdonald, the Head of SEO at Orbitz Worldwide. Martin’s talk was on the evolution of SEO, and SEOs - and was a real hit with the audience (almost as big a hit as Alex’s entrance 10 minutes in!)

https://twitter.com/alexmoss/status/609286177989001216

Predicting where we’re going requires an understanding of where we’ve come from
2001-2007: the “spamming with impurity” years
2008-2012: the “ok, you want to stop doing spam” years. This era was famous for the likes of BMW being penalised for their link building and made the news websites, showing that the mainstream press were aware of Google’s presence and influence, as well as the importance of rankings
2013-today: the “stop punishing us” years, emphasised by the Interflora and Expedia penalties
We have moved from a time when Google was naive and would release one update each month, to a time when they are all-powerful and “hell-bent on domination.” You would have to be crazy to try anything blackhat these days. The context and ‘game’ we’re playing has completely changed
Rankings can’t exist without technical SEO, but they won’t be good enough with marketing
SEO will never die, it’s just being split in two - technical SEO and marketing
“SEO touches every department…branding, content, social media, SEO is involved in it all
By creating a sprawling giant, Google have raised a generation of powerful marketers
Specialise in one area of your industry, then learn how to do everything else!

Following on from Martin was Stacey MacNaught, Search Director at Tecmark, who delivered an expletive-filled guide to creating quality content on scale.

Content marketing, despite being an industry buzzword for the last few years, is not new. It’s been around for more than a hundred years with Michelin producing a 400-page piece of content reviewing restaurants. There are now more than 3 million indexed results for “Michelin guide”
The market is now becoming incredibly competitive, so teams have to produce high quality content to succeed
Quality is not one single thing, it is subjective and varies according to your own and the audience’s objectives
It doesn’t have to be pretty, provided that it gives the reader something new or a hook and speaks to them
There are five key steps to creating high quality content:
audience research. The people you’re trying to reach and what they like, want, etc
competitor research. Understanding what other businesses are producing well and badly
ideation. Generating creative ideas that can be the difference between success and failure
content production. Turning those ideas into a piece of content
content promotion. Getting that content in front of not only the web, but your target audience

When it comes to ideation, it’s a case of survival of the fittest. It needs to be something new, useful and importantly feasible. Score each section out of 10 and aim for a score of 20+ before going ahead on anything
Use polls and surveys to gather unique and original information
Turn your single piece of content into much more. Your survey could become a blog post, infographic, even an ebook
Always remember to think multi-screen, it’s not just about desktop anymore
Build it and they will come is rubbish. You need to put as much into content promotion as you do into content production

**Yossi Erdman,**the head of brand and social media from AO, delivered the final keynote of this year’s event, telling us all about how to make social media useful, measurable and fun at the same time

Social media allows brands to produce content quickly and in real-time. It also allows us to engage with customers for immediate feedback
It is a great platform to try new ideas, and because of the low budgets involved it requires much less approval to get ideas out there
Social media is an essential part of a brand mixture, with a combination of articles, videos and images helping us to sell products and services
Social media can impact externally (with customers) and internally (allowing us to show our culture and to run and learn about customer service)
Try to entertain your customers, not just to sell to them. Video on Facebook is taking over, with high reach, lots of views and high engagement
Getting customers to contribute content is a great way to build engagement and loyalty; and also provides ideas for new content to be built internally
Facebook activity has a big impact on brand searches and branded traffic. AO branded traffic grew by 154% over twelve months, with branded sales up 128% and repeated customers up 20%
You can use social media as part of your customer service. AO received comments on the drivers and deliveries and turned these into a fortnightly driver feedback book, which is delivered to the home of those mentioned so that partners etc can see how their partners are performing at work. Drivers now ask customers for feedback and performances have improved

The final presentation for me was a four-person panel discussing data driven digital and how we can interpret and use data to inform our content, social, PPC and SEO strategies. This was from Amnet Director Rob Smith, Ben Harper, the co-founder of Datify, digital media strategist at Amaze Paul O’Connor, and Ann Stanley, the co-founder and MD of Anicca Digital.

Robstarted the presentation with a talk on leveraging first, second and third party data in online campaigns.
3 steps in creating a strategy using first party data: identification of customers, collection of data, and segmentation. This will help to ensure efficient media campaigns because you know who you’re targeting, what is working and how to target people specifically
second party data is scalable, allowing us to find bespoke and transparent partnerships
third party data is openly available, but is often costly. While it may be highly useful information, it is dependent on your budget and doesn’t always provide you with something to make a great piece of content
Benwas next to take the stand, talking about data driven content marketing
86% of marketers use content marketing in their strategy. 70% of businesses create more content than they did this time a year ago. Yet only 35% have a documented strategy in place, shared between their team and their clients
a 7-step content process can be highly effective in building your strategy from the data you have available: data collection, audience insight, strategy creation, campaign creation, distribution, optimisation, reporting
Run a content campaign like you would a paid campaign. You wouldn’t throw all of your money into PPC from the word go, you would start small and build up once you’ve experimented and worked out what works, opportunities, etc
Paulwas next, talking about search and first party data, with emphasis on RLSA
Consumers in the digital world are free to move around and we can’t control where they go. We can, however, track where they go and use the data to inform our strategies to keep them on or direct them to our own sites
Data itself is ubiquitous and needs to be interpreted properly to be useful
RLSA allows you to specifically target past customers and site visitors, and also to leverage new keyword opportunities
You can then deliver compelling, targeted messages to your customers
First-party data is owned by us and is highly useful, including behavioural activity, interests etc
You can start with what is available in Google Analytics, but you need 1,000 cookies in a list in order for RLSA to work but the opportunities are wide-ranging once you have that data

Annwas the last one up, talking about SEO analytics and forecasting. This presentation gave a case study of a client in a competitive industry and how a data-driven approach can help ‘smaller’ clients to compete with their ‘bigger’ rivals
You don’t need to have a huge budget with national television ad campaigns to compete
Tools such as SEO Monitor can give “not provided” data which can be used to help us to target opportunities
Be sure to track the keywords of your competitors to find gaps and opportunities

So that’s it. SAScon 2015 has now been and gone and I hope that you’ve found this summary as interesting as I found my two days. There was a lot to take in and I’m sure I’ll be revisiting this post and my notes several times to make sure I understand it all.

The best thing is, however, that all of the speakers seemed more than happy to discuss the topics with the audience so be sure to send them an email or a message on Twitter if it’s all still a bit hazy!

If you’ve got anything from any of the presentations above that you think should be listed, comment below and I’ll add it in.

Being a Graduate in Today's Economic Climate

Jordan Kopman — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 14:54:15 GMT

I graduated University with high hopes of things to come, but little did I know of the troubles that lay ahead. Unsure of what career to really pursue I decided to start applying for some finance jobs, the most related field to my degree. However I ran into a hurdle from the start. I found that I actually got bored filling in the application forms for such jobs so much so that I rarely even finished them.

’“What about finance Motivates you?”

“Describe a time when you have been a leader in a difficult situation?”

It’s questions like these that just made me lose the will to live, and reconsider my enthusiasm of being a graduate taking the first step in a career. Firstly, I’d be hard pushed to be convinced that someone can really be motivated for working in Finance. And secondly, what do companies expect graduates to have to talk about leadership wise? I’ve just spent 3 years studying a subject, not heading a business that was going under. Without lying and embellishing some mundane university story, most would just be left with describing a group coursework fiasco that had gone awry.

Reevaluating my life a few months later after a fair share of unsurprising rejections, I went travelling for a year in Australia before crash landing back home to reality circa 2015.

Having the experience of a lifetime while I was away, I was now back where I left off before travelling, only a year none the wiser and now with no money to my name. After working long hours at Asda to gain some money back, I finally found a career path that could combine my interest in writing and my analytical thinking which had led me to an economics degree. This was digital marketing. An Oasis of untapped potential and new career prospects sprouting everyday.

Naturally, I then started to apply for some jobs in the area to see where I could get to with the skills I had. The answer: not so far. It seemed to be the usual case of needing ‘experience to gain experience’ cycle, a curiously common case in todays world that many new job seekers are finding. It’s a paradox that companies and recruiters seem to swear by. But why shouldn’t they? There are so many people looking for work that they have every right to then expect the person they’re hiring to have good experience in the market. Its supply and demand (economics throwback). It just means that some graduates with no experience are getting left out of the loop.

FireCask

Fast forward a couple of hard months, and I’m thankfully given the opportunity to gain valuable experience and knowledge at a award winning start up called FireCask as a Junior SEO Consultant. During my first month here I’ve been learning and living digital marketing, getting the chance to see how all the different cogs in the company work. From Outreach to Link building and Content Creation I’ve been taken under the safe wings of the amazing FireCask workforce, who have been welcoming from the first day I arrived. Working here has only furthered my belief that I’ve finally found a career path that I can be excited about.

Digital Marketing seems to still be in the infancy of its life, with new techniques and ideas arriving constantly, making it a stimulating place to be at the moment. It’s comforting to know that everyday when I come in to FireCask I’m going to learn something new, contributing to tasks that are actually interesting and gaining that ever elusive experience I’ve heard so many people talk about.

Maybe it’s the coincidental rise in vitamin D intake I’ve been getting from the sun finally coming out for the first time in months, but things are once again starting to look up :)

The Five E's of Content Marketing

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 11:54:00 GMT

The content marketing industry is difficult enough to describe to a prospective client, a friend or a family member without the ever-changing rules and methods we are faced with. When you then factor in all of the updates we have to deal with and the demands we face from clients in terms of what they want, what they don’t want and what they expect; the industry as a whole gets even more confusing - and we’re on the inside, supposedly “in the know.”

When Matt Cutts made his infamous guest posting is dead quote, many experienced content marketers were forced to take not just one but several steps back to re-evaluate their whole strategy. Content creators panicked, SEOs panicked and nobody really had the answers as to how it was going to affect the way they worked and achieved their clients’ goals in both the long and the short term.

Except, in a way, the answer was there all along. Content creators have the ability to show their ingenuity, talents and personality in what they were producing and that, at the end of the day, is how to create content anyway!

Google’s Panda update sought to rid the web, or at least the influential search results, of spammy, poor quality content - the kind of thing that we don’t want to read as we get no value from it whatsoever. If you’re going to write something or spend your budget creating a piece of amazing content, you should be giving it your all - like an important essay or a client proposal. If you want someone to take the time to read and share your article, the very least you can do is put some time and effort into creating it! (That’s my theory anyway).

In essence, the strategies and the algorithms may have changed, but our approach to high quality content creation should have been as passionate as day one trying to do the very best we can for our clients - and our own reputations, it’s our name on the work at the end of the day.

I’ve been working in content marketing in its various guises for five years now and I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in a strategy which has been created for the long term which hasn’t been modified to some extent based on either algorithm updates, client requests or a sudden burst of creative inspiration - they’re quite nice moments, I like them a lot and it would be great if there were a few more of them!

To help me to deal with the ever-changing industry and the various different plans we have to work with, I’ve tried to stick to some form of structure even when the ideas themselves veer off somewhat. I call these the five E’s of content marketing, an idea that came from my University days when I learned about the five W’s of journalism - who, what, where, why, when.

Ethics

If you are going to create a successful piece of content, you need to do it ethically. Nobody likes spammy posts that don’t really do or say anything, and nobody likes having their own content ripped-off and re-worded (especially when they use their own significantly greater audience to get more likes, shares and comments than the original author!)

A high quality piece of content is something that is original, entertaining and made with a purpose other than just acquiring links. You need to show something off. Not in a bragging “look how good I am” kind of way, but you need to show off your talent, your abilities, your creativity and you’ll then reap the benefits that come your way.

Stay true to yourself, your passion for creating great content and your own beliefs in terms of what constitutes a great piece of unique content by creating something based on your own experiences, knowledge and opinion. Don’t just “sell out” to acquire quick links and social shares - the big, more beneficial ones are out there for those who deserve them.

Your content, whether it’s as part of a content marketing strategy designed to get links for clients, an article for your own company blog like this one or a feature on a highly reputable industry publication, should focus on providing the audience with something useful.

We recently produced an article for one of the North West’s biggest business websites in collaboration with one of our own clients which consisted of purely no-follow links. If you want to show the search engines that you are serious about creating great content designed to provide value to the reader, then giving no-follow links a try (even if it is only now and again) should be in your content strategy. If nothing else it will help the site’s backlink profile by mixing up the ratio of dofollow and nofollow links. if they’re all one or the other, it’s going to set the alarm bells ringing.

Expertise

When you create a piece of content, you want to make sure that you are showing the audience something valuable and also that you know what you’re talking about. Anybody could blag an article which incorporates information they’ve found on the web, but if you can talk freely and easily about something you know you are confident on then you’re on the right track.

The best way to test yourself before hitting the publish button or sending your content to an editor is to ask yourself “would I be able to stand up and talk about this?” You don’t have to be confident enough to stand in front of a conference with hundreds of industry professionals, but if you can’t even talk about it with your mates in the pub then you’re probably not creating anything with any real substance and you risk the whole piece being overlooked, skimmed or even rejected by the author rather than going viral as you might hope.

Before creating any substantial piece of content, whether it’s a dissertation for your University course, an article on behalf of a client, a press release, a video or any other form of content; take the time to research the subject to such an extent that you can get to that point where you’re happy to talk about it.

By having a level of expertise in a subject you find that you write more passionately about it and the whole article flows perfectly from start to finish and your audience view you (or your brand, depending on who you write for), as an authority. You never know, you might even become someone whose content they enjoy reading and will look for in the future.

Entertainment

This one is possibly the most obvious of “the five E’s” but it’s one that you just have to get right if you want your content marketing campaign to really flourish. Entertaining your audience sounds easy on paper (even easier in your own head), but actually making them smile, laugh and feel as though they’ve spent their time reading, looking at or watching your content wisely is more difficult.

Brainstorming sessions can create some incredible content ideas (and some truly catastrophic ones that result in nothing more than facepalms), but not everyone shares your own sense of humour…what now? Try, try and try, that’s what. You don’t need to make all of the people laugh all of the time - you just need to give them something of value, something that encourages them to either share your content on social media, to buy a product, to visit a website or - at the very least - something that makes them think your content was worth their valuable time (we’ve all read articles or watched videos and thought “well I wish I hadn’t bothered, that was dull).

It’s easy to see when you’ve tried too hard to entertain people, it’s a bit like that one friend we all have who is desperate to tell jokes and they just result in tumbleweed and awkward silences. It’s the same with content marketing.

We’ve heard so much about the importance of entertaining people that we fall into a trap of trying too hard to make it funny that we don’t provide any value. Not every client wants to be seen as a funny brand - some just don’t suit it depending on the niche. Sure you can brighten up an article with a GIF or a video but make sure you do it in the right place at the right time - don’t force it, nobody likes forced fun!

Engagement

Getting your audience to click on, look at and share your content is the only way of achieving your goal. With every piece of content you create, whether it’s an article, infographic or video, you want the audience to do something - share it on Facebook, buy a product, make an enquiry, visit your website… the list goes on. They aren’t going to do this if it doesn’t speak to them in some way.

I’m not trying to say that you fill your content with calls-to-action, telling people to buy this product or making your article seem more like a television advert; but you do need to ensure that you take your target audience into account and show a human side to separate you from all of the other faceless brands in the industry.

Some people respond better to videos while others respond better to in-depth articles with quotes from industry professionals to give it that extra substance to convince them that a certain brand, product or service is the one for them. Yes, budgets and in-house time and abilities dictate what we’re able to do in some cases, but it’s a case of making the best out of what you can do.

Content creation is about being creative, using your imagination and speaking to people just like you - in whatever way you choose. You can’t force people to like your article to an extent that they share it on Twitter but a thumbs up or a comment on the end of the content itself is just as good (whether it’s positive or negative because you can use that feedback to inform your next piece).

Experiment

Finally, you need to try different things! This industry is evolving all the time, and not just when Google releases an algorithm update or when someone says “guest posting is dead”. There are only so many times you can write a “top five ways to…” piece, and there are only so many infographics you can do on a certain topic before the audience starts to feel that they’ve seen it all before and you’re just a part of the crowd.

Mix up your campaigns from time to time. You might do a certain number of feature articles one month accompanied by an infographic, a survey and a YouTube video for example; and then the next month you might decide to do solely articles or one infographic that links back to a series of guides or a range of products on your website.

Just because one campaign provides instant results doesn’t mean that is the surefire way to success. Yes you may see almost instant results in terms of an increase in rankings for specific keywords or traffic to your website, perhaps you’ll see a boost in social media followers and fans but you won’t always get that kind of success. Some amazing pieces of content haven’t had the kind of success we might have hoped for when we initially published them, so one thing you could try is to revisit that specific piece to see if you can repurpose it with some fresh content, maybe a new video or a quote from somebody with serious authority that could help it to get picked up this time round and receive the traction it deserves.

Keep being creative and trying new things, you never know, you might just like it.

Thoughts on Winning Manchester Champion

Anna Moss — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 08:08:00 GMT

For four years, I have worked with several charities to provide them with marketing and fundraising advice and assistance as well as helping to increase awareness within the Manchester community and beyond. I work closely with four small to medium charities; Mustard Tree, The Factory Youth Zone, Bury Hospice and Grace’s Place Children’s Hospice.

I first got involved with charity work when I met the CEO of Bury Hospice, Jacqui Comber, at a business lunch. After speaking to her, one of the aspects she needed the most amount of help with was a well thought out marketing plan as well as being able to implement it. In many small to medium sized charities, from my experience, members of the team have a thousand and one jobs to do and so marketing and updating blogs, raising awareness and so on get left or shared amongst a number of people meaning whoever has a free five minutes will pick it up.

On Thursday 5th February, I won Manchester Champion in the Made In Manchester Awards 2015. The category was aimed at someone who has volunteered or helped to make real improvements in Manchester. I was overwhelmed and so proud to have even made it as a finalist let alone winning the award. I was interviewed for Manchester Champion by Tim Grogan, Paul McGlone and Nick Rose whilst suffering from Christmas lurgy (which had turned into a super strain after getting off a Ryanair flight the night before) and so I was a little less composed than I wanted to be!

Anna Moss of FireCask was awarded Manchester Champion for developing the profile for a number of charities. Judges praised Moss’ commitment to dedicating large amounts of her own personal time to help support fundraising activities.

I’d like to say thank you to the judges for choosing me as the winner and I would like to dedicate my award to the amazing charities I work with. My work over the last few years has provided me with some of the most awe-inspiring, emotional, challenging and rewarding moments of my life and I would encourage anyone who can to help and assist a small to medium sized charity; it is hard work but so rewarding.

If anyone would like to help with any of the charities I support please get in touch. As well as co-owning FireCask and mentoring young people, my charity work is so important to me and if people could sacrifice even a small amount of time a week I believe we can do some great things for these sized charities across the country.

Over the next few months, together with another local businesswoman Kelly Harris, I am working on Challenge Manchester; four challenges for four Manchester charities. It is going to be a fantastic event held throughout June and July and is the first of its kind! We are looking for sponsors as well as teams to take part and more details will be released soon so keep your eyes peeled.

If you would like to become a sponsor, take part in or volunteer for Challenge Manchester, please fill out the form below.

[gravityform id=“11” name=“Sponsor Interest” title=“false” description=“false” ajax=“true”]

Content Marketing: Think Outside the Box

Alex Moss — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 12:55:57 GMT

I may be new to content marketing, but after many months of content creation and outreach I have learned a few valuable lessons.

Content marketing is more than just writing guest posts. In order to utilise content marketing to its fullest potential for your clients, you need create interesting and engaging content that people want to both read and share. Below I have outlined a few of the different types of content that I enjoy creating, and that yield the best results in terms of both outreach and engagement.

Delicious data

Many content marketers are still in the habit of regurgitating existing content. If you search for the subject of any noteworthy news article, you will find a succession of articles featuring the same topic but with slight variations of copy. These types of articles are unnecessary and don’t add any value to a reader’s experience. If you want to avoid creating a blog post of a blog post, find something that no one else has written about. One of the best ways to do this is by generating data. Surveys and studies provide you with valuable new data. The questions you ask are almost as important as the responses you get. This data can provide you with insights into your client’s industry sector, as well as opinions and trends of your client’s target customer base. This data can then be used as the basis for a whole host of content, from articles, whitepapers, interactive infographics, to case studies.

If you’re looking to conduct a survey, I would suggest using the services of OnePoll and Toluna. OnePoll is the best choice if you have clients with a bigger budget. It’s expensive but it’s worth it! You have the option of paying for the survey, or the survey along with outreach (OnePoll have some great press contacts). However, if you are looking to get a survey with a limited budget, Toluna is the option for you. The prices of Toluna surveys depend on the number of questions you ask as well as the number of responses you want. In each of these cases, you will be provided with the raw data that’s broken down by age, gender, location and so on.

Create relevant content

If you do decide to go down the guest editorial route, make sure that you are contributing new and relevant content. A way of doing this, whilst also benefiting the perception of your client’s brand, is to enabling your client to become a thought leader. No one is going to know their industry sector as well as your client does, so why not use that expertise to provide valuable insights to the wider community. You can either find opportunities for your client to write for relevant websites and trade journals, offer interviews, or include quotes from your client in an article.

If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to finding business communities in your sector, start by taking a look at Guardian Networks like the Small Business Network. Here you will find insights and advice for and from SMEs. Alternatively, sign up to Help A Reporter Out and receive requests for quotes from journalists directly to your inbox.****

Tap into existing resources

As well as creating data and using your client’s industry knowledge, find out whether your client has any untapped resources that can be used to create content. These resources can take many forms from research they have undertaken, guides and whitepapers they have produced, to captured customer data that reveals new market trends. Each of these examples can be used to create something new that will pique the interest of both editors and industry professionals alike.

If you are working with a new or small business who hasn’t had the time or resource available to create their own content, the next best place to look is the Office of National Statistics. The ONS is the largest independent producer of official statistics in the UK and is a great resource for finding free data on a whole host of topics.

Crowdsourcing and ego bait

Don’t just focus on creating content that your target audience will want to read, get them involved! If you are writing about how an event is affecting a particular demographic, get their opinion and include it in your content. As well as crowdsourcing quotes, get opinions from influencers in your industry, such as bloggers and journalists. By including quotes from these individuals you can tap into their existing audience and social followers.

As well using Twitter to find trending hashtags, you can also use it to source quotes. You can use the hashtags #bloggerrequest, #journorequest and #prrequest in order to connect with bloggers, journalists and PRs.****

Celebrate business successes

If you are struggling to find ways of promoting your client’s brand, look to their business activities. If there are positive developments happening within the organisation, from hiring new staff to raising money for local charities, get those off-page successes on-page. This can be publicised on the client’s blog and social media profiles, and where applicable this can be used for outreach to local newspapers and business websites.

[caption id=“attachment_8150” align=“aligncenter” width=“229”]

If we can do it, so can you! Read our coverage in MEN[/caption]

Although it doesn’t feel like it at the end of the month, content marketing isn’t just about building links. It’s about finding new and creative ways to create brand buzz and customer engagement. Content needs to act as a resource, whether that is to entertain or inform. Always endeavour to create content that attracts and engages, and results in them sharing that content with others.

5 Key Takeaways From the SAScon Beta Speakers

Chris White — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 15:11:37 GMT

As someone who has never been to a SAScon event, I had no idea what to expect when I arrived at The Comedy Store at Manchester’s Deansgate Locks for SAScon Beta 2014; but I certainly came away feeling as though I’d learned a thing or two about a number of search, social and analytical aspects of this industry.

For anyone who hasn’t been to a main SAScon event, they take place in Manchester over three days around May and June each year and has been running for six years now, with the aim to “showcase innovative, cutting edge practice and thinking in the digital market” according to the site.

The Beta version of the main conference aims to make the event “accessible to all who wish to attend” and “to create a wholly immersive experience unlike any other conference currently in the industry,” and I can honestly say that it ticked all of those boxes from the very first keynote speech until the end of the day.

While I couldn’t be in both rooms at all times, I did my best to scribble down some notes from those I could attend (to those which I missed out on, please don’t take it personally!!) Rather than recapping the whole presentations, I thought it would be best to summarise the event with five key takeaways, not from the event as a whole - there were far too many - but from those speakers who I, like many in the audience, sat listening to trying to absorb as much information as possible.

The event started out with a welcome from Kristal Ireland, head of social at twentysix in Leeds, and a word from Darren of DeepCrawl, one of the event sponsors, who then handed over to the first keynote speaker of the day:

Jeff Coghlan ofMatmi, a mobile, social, gaming and digital production agency from Macclesfield here in the North West, whose talk was titled “Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should.”

The first major point was something we should all remember - technology should be fun. We take ourselves too seriously sometimes and we need technology to lighten things up
However, just because we have the ability to create something doesn’t mean we should - there is a lot of pointless technology on the market today which we either waste our money on, or just leave on the shelves
We then saw a flashback to the early days of the web, including Apple’s first website, and the development of banner ads - or more importantly, the lack of. Jeff revealed a statistic that showed “we are more likely to survive a plane crash than you are to click on a banner ad”
You shouldn’t take yourself too seriously, especially as a creative
Go platform neutral. Don’t go in looking to create something for one platform, when people are likely to try and access it on multiple formats, you risk alienating part of your audience

Follow Jeff on Twitter @JeffCoghlan

Next up for me was Richard Falconer, Head of Search atDigitas LBIwith his presentation titled “Optimise for the Future, Not Just for Today.”

Richard’s first point was that we should all “think like a search engine, not about how to trick one”
You should use the words that matter most to customers in links, titles and body content to inform and inspire them to take action. The text used in titles should make it easy to understand the topic of the page or article quickly, ideally in the first few words
Don’t overlook demographic information when performing keyword research. Monitoring the terms being searched for by men and women separately can open up new opportunities to drive your content strategy
Unless you set KPI targets, you can’t tell if something is working or faltering. You should also judge a campaign by how it compares to the business objectives - NOT by changes in rankings or the number of links you can acquire.
Domain Authority and similar metrics aren’t as valuable as many believe and we should look at the publishers we build relationships with in terms of their reach

Follow Richard on Twitter @rich_falconer

Following on from Richard’s presentation was a really interesting look at “SGO: Social Good Optimisation” by Matt Haworth ofReason Digital, another Manchester-based agency specialising in websites and digital campaigns for charities and public sector organisations.

The main thing I enjoyed from this presentation was it focussed on “measuring what matters in life, not just analytical data, as Morrissey once sang” when it comes to gauging success
You should set a target, and measure it over a long period of time to get the maximum impact for your clients, but what you measure can affect both behaviour and the outcome of the campaign, such as purchases, clicks or downloads
Matt talked through a number of campaigns that Reason Digital have worked on in the community, such as public safety apps, which enable people to share information regarding incidents in the wider world and the effectiveness of these apps is just as important as the number of downloads
Social good optimisation is as important as search engine optimisation, just in a different way
“We have the technologies to help communities”

You can follow Matt on Twitter @acrim

After a quick coffee break it was over to Kev Strong, Head of Search atMediaworksin Newcastle who spoke about “Online Reputation Management for Search.”

Vanity searches are no longer egotistical, they’re big business. “If you had graffiti on a wall, you’d clear it off as soon as possible. It should be the same online”
Google doesn’t care about positive or negative researches relating to people or brands, they just focus on providing the best results for users making online reputation management so important
Negative comments and articles from people with some knowledge of SEO can massively affect brands and individuals, just look at the HMV example on Twitter relating to the staff dismissals
A positive brand culture can filter down from the top to the bottom. CEOs, MDs and management should ensure that all corporate posts online are positive
You can’t plan for the unexpected. Look at the Gregg’s logo error on Google for a prime example. Sometimes it can be dealt with quickly and relatively easily, but in other instances it can take much longer to resolve or remove from SERPs - and also AutoSuggest

Kev’s on Twitter @KevStrong

The final talk before lunch was given by Laura Thomas, Head of Social atReturn On Digital, who gave a GIF-fuelled talk on “How to Write and Measure Converting Content.”

Don’t create content and then look for the audience. Investigate what they’re reading and sharing - and why. Find the happy medium between what you want to give them, and what they want
Define what a conversion is for your campaign and what your goals are, then monitor them using Insights and Analytics to see what is working and what needs to be amended
Taking your data, you can then experiment with posting your content shortly before peak activity
Try something new - evolve and adapt. One example used was the same post on Twitter, one featuring a GIF and one without. The post with the link performed far better
Keep your posts short and clickable, giving them what they want to see and what you want them to do

You can follow Laura on Twitter @_eltee

After lunch we had the second keynote presentation from James Murray, Search Advertising Lead of Microsoft UK who gave a talk on “Unlocking the Potential of Search” and also revealed a major contender to Apple’s Siri which definitely impressed the whole audience.

Search data can unveil incredible data relating to behaviour and gives us the ability to predict the future through the results. For example, Bing correctly predicted 15 out of the 16 FIFA World Cup knockout round results, which is more than Opta. (The one incorrect game was the 3rd/4th place play-off “which nobody cared about anyway”)
“We’re stifling what is possible by a lack of imagination… Search engines are still just a glorified version of the Yellow Pages”
Three things guide us in search: we want it to be personalised, intuitive and to help us to be more productive
Content is important, but context is vital. Emotional, environmental, social and external (trends) contexts affect our decisions; like whether to go to the nearest or our favourite coffee shop
Artificial intelligence is becoming more human, giving us the information we want without us having to search for it. Microsoft and Bing have created Cortana for Windows Phone - a rival for Apple’s Siri and Google Now

James is on Twitter at @james3murray

It was then over to Rakhi Sinha fromEventbritewho gave a presentation on 5 Event Marketing Upgrades.

Modernise email marketing. Have a call-to-action, know your audience accordingly, offer them value, be specific, set goals and include images
Treasure the data you have access to and use it wisely
Maximise your event content. A picture doesn’t just say 1,000 words - it improves click-throughs by 42%
Build a community of partners
Create a consistent and unmistakable brand identity and presence

Follow Rakhi on Twitter at @Rakhi_Sinha

Kristal Ireland then returned to the stage and gave a visual presentation on “The Internet of Things.”

Focus on the data captured, processed and communicated; often in real-time
We’re presented with a series of questions - “Is the Internet of Things making our lives better?” “Could we live without these ‘smart’ items?” and “are health apps like the FitBit actually helping?”
When data is collected using smart devices, what does it mean for us? There is the slippery-slope argument over where you draw the line on what is captured
Driverless cars are an example of the Internet of Things being used for good purposes - helping blind and disabled people to get around for instance; but will it make us lazy?
“Why does my fridge need Twitter?” - A VERY VALID QUESTION!

Kristal is on twitter at @kristalsmile

After a final coffee break it was back to the presentations, and next up for me was Gisele Navarro, the Head of Outreach from NeoMam Studios, who gave a talk titled “72% of Internet Users Don’t Speak English - International Outreach.”

You’ve won 50% of the outreach battle already if you’ve written and placed an article in English, but there are much greater opportunities
Managers may put up resistance to the idea of international outreach for various reasons, but if you can get the go-ahead you need to be prepared to make mistakes - and to learn from them, before you get it right
The first problem with international outreach is often in the translation of the copy. Hiring an interpreter to read through your content will help to overcome any errors or problems with ‘awkward’ copy. The next issue relates to the tone and it becoming robotic in your approach to outreach, especially if you outsource it. Connect person-to-person. Finally, a generic strategy won’t work. You should ensure that it is specific to the sites or journalists you’re approaching, and that you take your time to do your research
A problem you may encounter from overseas journalists and bloggers is “what’s in it for me?” They may be behind the times with their strategies, but in the case of an infographic you could either offer a scaled down version with a call-to-action to see more; or offer them your research, information about the design and the marketing objectives to be clear and upfront with them. Human interaction helps to create long-term relationships
There are four main takeaways - ( 1 ) outreach to foreign journalists and editors in English; ( 2 ) be confident with what you have to offer; ( 3 ) start with your best English content; and ( 4 ) be flexible with your outreach. If you don’t do it, someone else will

You can follow Gisele on Twitter @ichbinGisele

My final presentation for the day was given by Karyn Fleeting, the Head of Content atMediaCom iLab, who spoke about “New Methods for Idea Generation.”

Ideation methods haven’t changed that much over the years, we still sit in team meetings scribbling down ideas
Draw upon any unusual assets you may have to help you come up with a great content idea that you may otherwise never think of
Keep meetings to the morning when you’re at your freshest, and with as few people as is necessary - normally five or six is plenty - and definitely no laptops, they provide distractions
MediaCom iLab use four models for idea generation: (1 ) the sieve, getting as many ideas as possible and filtering down to the best one; ( 2 ) the flow, lose yourself in what you’re doing, getting in “the zone”; ( 3 ) the sonnet, keep a structure to allow productivity and creativity to shine; and ( 4 ) the survivorship bias, don’t just analyse what has survived or worked well, take a look at what didn’t work or what you didn’t select previously and adapt it until it works
Use reverse engineering, putting the content ideas last on your list, establishing the objectives, URLs and budget beforehand to save time; helping you to understand the ideas you can create based on those parameters

You can follow Karyn on Twitter @KarynFleeting

Barry Adams, who I didn’t manage to see, gave a presentation which received rave reviews on Twitter and around the venue, titled “Silicon Prison: How Technology is Building a Sanitised Society”, and the slides are available here. There was also a presentation by Jim Haysom of Jim Haysom Consulting.

There were other talks given by Lexi Mills of Dynamo PR, Matt Hunt of Apadmi, Dom Hodgson from LinkRisk, and if (or when) the slides become available I’ll be updating this post to share those with you.

The final section of the day was a panel debate on the invasive nature of personal data gathering for marketing, government and alien conquest; featuring Tom Cheesewright, Julian Tait and Barry Adams, before drinks kindly provided by The Candidate and some live comedy.

For anyone thinking about going to events like this one, you should definitely dip your toe into the water with Beta, or smaller spin-off conferences like this one. Sometimes the three-day events are too expensive or fall at the wrong time to attend, but credit to the organisers for putting on a great one-day event, and to The Comedy Store Manchester for hosting.

Maybe see you all at SAScon 2015!

It's FireCask's First Birthday!

Anna Moss — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 12:11:32 GMT

Today is our 1st birthday and it has been an exciting, busy and brilliant 365 days!

Team Update

Our team is now seven people strong and since we opened our doors, we have welcomed Chris White and Patrick Brown to our family. Chris is our resident journalist and leads our high quality outreach campaigns for clients. Outside of work he is a keen sportsman and captains his local hometown cricket team Wakerley and Barrowden. Patrick is our new content and outreach strategist and is working across all of our client base to gain relevant backlinks and write great content in the process! He’s not too bad at social media either!

Our Work

We have done some exciting work this year with some brilliant companies from Expedia to 123Reg! We would also like to say a huge thank you to all of our existing clients who are a pleasure to work with and have made our growth possible.

Our Charity Work & Mentoring

Over the last year we have taken on 6 interns, Anna has mentored 2 college students and we have offered work experience placements and experience to young people of all ages.

Our charity work has grown and we are proud to say that we support some incredible organisations such as The Factory Youth Zone, the Mustard Tree, Bury Hospice and Grace’s Place Children’s Hospice. We look to continue our work with them and more in the coming year and it is extremely rewarding and something all of the team enjoys getting involved with.

Our Awards & Nominations

We won the “highly commended” award at the Northern Marketing awards with the judges stating;

“The judges felt this agency had an interesting story which offered some great insight into the company.

This agency is impressive and surprising and was able to convey a clear business plan which focused on their niche market.

The judges felt they have produced outstanding results given their size and deserved to be acknowledged for this. They also felt the entry was the most ‘down to earth’ entry the judges have ever seen and liked its honesty.”

We have also been nominated or shortlisted for the following awards (both company and individual awards);

UK Search Awards - Best low Budget Campaign (still pending)
Talk of Manchester - Awaiting results (best small agency)
MYTA2014 awards:
Alex Moss - Digital, Media or Creative Professional of The Year
Anna Moss - Digital, Media or Creative Professional of The Year
Ben Barker - Most Promising Young Person in Manchester
FireCask - Team of The Year

FireCask have had an incredible year and we are looking forward to what the next 365 days has in store for us. Alex and I would like to thank our incredible team who work tirelessly for clients, provide us with many laughs and giggles throughout the day and who have helped to make FireCask what it is today.

This Isn't An Ice Bucket Challenge...

Anna Moss — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 09:47:45 GMT

Grace’s Place Children’s Hospice is one of the charities I support and it will provide much needed palliative and end-of-life care to children in the North West. This will be the 50th children’s hospice in the UK and the contractors have worked tirelessly to renovate the old Bury Hospice building.

DONATE NOW!

Grace Tinarwo is 3 years old and suffers from a serious condition called Patau Syndrome. She is the inspiration behind this incredible hospice which will give children in Bury, Rochdale, Middleton, Oldham and Heywood the essential care and support they need.

The hospice needs £1,000,000 in order to open its doors and so Shalom, Grace’s sister, made a video to ask for your help. This isn’t like the ice bucket challenge or the no make-up selfie, this is simply a 12 year old girl asking you to help her little sister. Please watch the video and donate here or text SHAL01 followed by £3/£4/£5/£10 (e.g. SHAL01 £5) to 70070 and please share this with family and friends so we can get this children’s hospice open!

DONATE NOW!

11 SEO Tools & Tricks I Use (Almost) Every Day

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 13:32:44 GMT

Disclaimer: this is not necessarily a post for experienced SEOs or anyone interested in black hat techniques; rather it’s for people who are just cutting their teeth in the world of search with a couple of more advanced points.

I’m fairly new to SEO. But thanks to the mentorship of one Ben Barker, I’ve come quite far in the nine months (give or take) with FireCask as a search consultant. In the beginning I worked my way through Distilled U, reading up on things like keyword research and search operators; digested blog post after blog post from Moz to QuickSprout; and started working with various tools, some easy-to-use and some complex.

No matter our level of expertise, we all need tools to make life a little easier and tasks a little bit faster and I thought it’d be worth sharing ones that help me out most days. From a semi-naive perspective, mind you. Don’t expect exhaustive details, but hopefully you’ll find something new and interesting!

These days I’m sorting out sites who’ve been negatively affected by Google’s algorithm updates, doing in-depth link analysis, and improving my on-page stuff day by day.

Screaming Frog

Every time I look at a client’s site, I run it through Screaming Frog almost immediately. It’s pretty much second nature now. Prospects and competitors get the treatment too because the data is always interesting in some respect. The free version lets you crawl 500 URLs but the paid version (which we have in the office) is much more powerful and a must if you’re working on large sites. I use it to get a quick overview, particularly in terms of META data, canonicals, and response codes. Sorting by page level enables you to get the most important pages to the top, then you can work on optimising the titles, H1’s and META descriptions. Tip: sorting by word count is good for finding pages with thin content. Creating sitemaps and using the list mode to upload and analyse only certain URLs are both invaluable too.

SEO Quake Chrome Extension

Another great way to get an overview of a site’s health, this time directly from your browser. Install the extension then bring up the homepage of the site you want to look at and click the little SEO quake icon. Click ‘Diagnosis…’ and you’ll get a whole load of info, from whether there is a robots.txt file or sitemap present to a Google Analytics code check and text to html ratios. It can save a lot of time when you need to point out problems quickly for a prospective client.

Panguin Tool

A very useful tool from Barracuda Digital for ascertaining whether a site has been affected by Google’s algorithm updates. Panguin is a portmanteau of Penguin and Panda, Google’s troublesome twosome that - I’m generalising a little here - punish bad links and low-quality content. You can also see changes to local search too (good if the recent Pigeon update has messed up any rankings). Should you see your organic traffic and rankings tank very soon after an update, it’s worth investigating. Depending on the update that’s done the damage, you might want to audit backlinks, weed out duplicate content, look at optimising for local search, and so forth.

.csv combine in Command Prompt

I use this every time I look at backlinks and download multiple .csv files e.g. from Majestic, OSE and Webmaster Tools. This is especially useful if you are taking a look at competitors’ backlink profiles and have, say, 10 reports that you need to combine. I found that Excel sometimes gives errors when copying and pasting large amounts of data so if you have several files this method ends up being much quicker anyway. First, put all your files in one folder - I use the path C:\backlinks\clientname because it’s convenient and easy to remember. Bring up command prompt (I type cmd in the Windows search bar, but this depends on your OS), and bring up the folder where your CSV files are by typing CD, a space, then the location of the files on your hard drive e.g. C:\backlinks\firecask. Then type “copy *.csv [newfilename].csv” which selects all the .csv files in the folder and converts them into one .csv with whichever file name you choose. See below:

Accuranker

Of course, we need to keep an eye on those all-important rankings. Accuranker is a nice piece of software for doing just that. I tend to look at the dashboard every day, where you’ll see any rank changes by each client and a tiny graph showing a longer duration. As well as tracking keyword performance you can integrate Google Analytics and see how rankings influence organic traffic, goals and revenue for e-commerce sites. As soon as your rankings drop you’ll be able to see it and take swift action!

SEOMofo SERP Snippet

This is a nice little tool for gauging what your meta data will look like in Google’s SERPs. Input your title, description and URL, and you’ll get a preview like the one below. You’ll get a character count and it’ll show you as soon as you go over the allocated space; and it’s a great method for judging the impact of a title. Try out different titles and descriptions to see what works best. Yoast’s SEO plugin does much the same thing on WordPress but this is for times when you can’t use that.

Pagespeed Insights

Think a site is slow? Well, see what Google thinks. Pagespeed Insights lets you type in a URL and gives you its speed ranking out of 100 (higher is better in this case) for desktop and smartphone along with recommendations on how to fix what’s slowing things down. It might tell you to leverage browser caching, minify the CSS or enable compression. These are usually beyond my remit but developers should be able to handle them. Yahoo’s YSlow extension is worth checking out as well.

Ayima Redirect Path

Another fantastic extension for Chrome that shows you any redirects that a page has gone through. Great for spotting faulty redirects; I like to keep an eye on this when I’m checking for multiple homepages to see if 301s are being used and always make a note of any 302s, which I quite often find are incorrectly used.

Siteliner

If you think you have a site with duplicate content issues, you can run it through Siteliner. This application will tell you what percentage of your content is duplicated and give you some easily-digestible pie charts. You can drill down further into this data and look at the pages with the most match words, match percentage, and how much “page power” these pages have. Target duplicate pages with more “power” first and create unique content for them. Siteliner also gives you a list of broken links if you need them.

What’s My I.P. Address

It can be easy to forget to eliminate your own visits (and internal traffic from a company) to a site from Google Analytics. If you have a site that only gets a small amount of visits per month, your visits can skew the data unless you stop tracking them. To do that you need to find your I.P. Address and filter it out in Analytics. That’s where whatsmyip.org comes in. Just go to the site and it’ll automatically tell you your public I.P. address. There are other useful tools but they’re beyond the realms of this post.

Check My Links

Yet another extension for Chrome and this time it’s one for links. Check My Links is a pure example of ‘does what it says on the tin’. It’ll crawl a webpage and find any broken links. This is great to test on a homepage or any page that has a large amount of links, and particularly useful for those SEOs who dabble in outreach. Use it to find a broken link on a site you’d a link from and you might have a nice way to approach the webmaster…

SEOktoberfest: The Power of a Powerful Conference that also Gives Back...

Alex Moss — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 10:39:07 GMT

I’ve attended a lot of conferences over the years. I’ve met many people and learned many things. However, one conference I’ve wanted to attend the most is the hardest to get into… SEOktoberfest

Raising awareness about a conference as valuable as this is something that I find necessary as whoever can afford to go should go and anyone who can’t should attend the Charity BBQ. Marcus and his team have created the Charity BBQ not only to help more people network with the attendees but also helps to raise LOTS of money for charities AMAZONICA and Münchner Tafel

Their marketing hasn’t converted me. Their attendees and subject matter have converted my interest in attending myself. Knowing a couple quite well and having long chats about it with both Martin MacDonald and Marcus Tandler himself, it’s definitely one of the few conferences that I know I’ll learn the most from. The fact that the conference itself is tied via an unwritten NDA is also important to me. Yes it’s great when conference speakers share things that are immediately public knowledge, but there’s the balance too that when a speaker knows this that some of their strategies and tactics will be limited.

The reason that I’ve always wanted to attend SEOktoberfest isn’t because I want to hang out with the elite of our industry (which I’m sure is nice), or drink lots of beer - it’s the conference itself. The price tag is large, but everyone I’ve spoken to who attends tells me that they’ve made their return on investment within 8 weeks of returning to their desks.

When you have been in the industry a long time you tend to learn less and less as your knowledge grows and grows. This is a conference where you can be at the top of your game and still come out with actionable notes to take back to your office. By the time my slot opens up in the waiting list I may not be alive :P

Cake, Yaya Toure and 2,000 Retweets

Thu, 12 Jun 2014 08:55:57 GMT

For my sins, I grew up a fan of Colwyn Bay Football Club, the local football club in the town I grew up in. Shunning the mid 90’s and early 00’s Premier League, I spent my Saturday afternoons in the Shed End of Llanelian Road, watching the beloved Seagulls be distinctly average in the Northern Premier League.

University came, and whilst I went away for 3 years, I returned to my home town, and continued to watch The Seagulls. I even started going away, to glamorous locations such as Cammell Laird, Mossley, Belper and North Ferriby. Occasionally we play big teams like Chester and Stockport County but it’s the small teams and the home games I enjoy most. The point of all this is that if you cut me in half I’d bleed claret and blue.

Over the years, I took over various projects, helping launch a more effective social media presence (changing from a personal profile entitled Colwyn Bay FC to a Facebook Page), and helping grow the Colwyn Bay FC twitter account. I also switched the site to a WordPress based solution, which has helped the site grow, all without having a huge amount of impact on my time, as the site now runs itself by and large.

The Tweet

Fast forward to last Tuesday. My association with the football club at the moment is a bit lax, with me being in Manchester, I usually just maintain the social accounts and post occasional stories, and the occasional “humourous” tweet. It was on Tuesday where I thought that I’d respond to the news that Yaya Toure would be out of the door following Agent reports that his birthday had been forgotten in a couple of tweets.

https://twitter.com/ColwynBayFC/status/468658129123966976

https://twitter.com/ColwynBayFC/status/468658239329292288

I posted it, but didn’t think anything more of it.

The Growth

Something about the tweet though did capture a few people’s imagination, and the first big breakthrough was that Paddy Power’s Twitter Account retweeted it. About 45 minutes later, an article appeared on the Metro (though I _always_object to the word “Minnows”). It was retweeted by a bunch of popular accounts:-

https://twitter.com/MailSport/status/468703839840108544

https://twitter.com/BBCSporf/status/468688436455825408

https://twitter.com/TSBible/status/468691759133126656

And trended in the UK….

https://twitter.com/TrendsUK/status/468683886247936000

Eventually made it’s way into local newspapers the Daily Post, Manchester Evening News & Western Gazette (when Yeovil Town upped our bid with a birthday cake).

The Result

In short, 4 days after the tweet, I received the following:-

2788 Retweets (994 1^st Tweet, 1,794 2^nd Tweet)
982 Favourites (294 1^st Tweet, 688 2^nd Tweet)
41 Replies (3 1^st Tweet, 38 2^nd Tweet)

Traffic wise to the site there was a small increase on the Tuesday, but not a massive spike.

Nevertheless, a pretty good return for somebody prefers to deal with code and numbers than social media.

The Lesson

I’m not one of those social media thought leaders, so I don’t know if there’s a lesson behind it, but I think here’s what I’ve learned:-

Build Up Your Connections First, The Bay’s follower list is quite a mish mash of fans, rival clubs, authorities and journalists, so I wasn’t starting completely from scratch. Even our most self promoting of tweets get a few retweets, so I was confident when I put the tweet out I’d get a few people retweeting it. Not over a thousand though.
Be funny, but not hurtful, I’m quite self deprecating on the twitter account, and try and inject humour into the tweets. Do I think Yaya Toure would ever play for the Mighty Seagulls? Probably not. A good barometer is if I chuckle, then it’ll probably make a few other people chuckle.With that said, I try and tweet in a way that doesn’t have a laugh in expense of others. Unfortunately, there are cases of twitter profiles run by football clubs at our level whereby half of the tweets are getting one over on rivals. I do believe there should be some level of professionalism.
Be quick, This tweet was pretty much the opposite of the 45 days to write a tweet by committee. With a board of directors who are mostly north of 70, I don’t think they are even aware of the coverage they got. However, the club on the whole were happy with the coverage. This probably wouldn’t have happened if I had to okay content to go out. Admittedly it’s a small football club, not a large business, so we can be agile. Try and be as agile and quick with your social media as you can be.

And finally, if nothing else, go and watch your local team play. Unfortunately where I live my nearest team is Manchester United, but every so often I wander down to see Maine Road or West Didsbury & Chorlton play in the North West Counties League. Non League Day takes place on the 6^th of September. Go and support your local team, I’m sure Yaya Toure and co would do just fine without you.

Actionable Bullet Points from SAScon 2014

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 14:29:35 GMT

Last week Ben Barker and myself attended Manchester’s SAScon, the annual two-day conference for search, analytics and social media. And while we both had a lot of fun, we were really there to learn a thing or two. And learn we did! Here are the key takeaways from a whole host of talks from both days

Bloggers vs SEOs vs PRs - FIGHT! Judith Lewis, deCabbit Consultancy

Disclaimer: Judith asked that the audience didn’t blog about some of her practices, so I’ve honoured this request and only included the more general advice she gave (which is still useful, mind).

Bloggers are more “savvy” than ever, but more nervous too, especially about getting penalised for giving out too many links
Refer them to Google’s Guidelines for “Link Schemes”, the ASA, and CAP guidelines so that they are in possession of the facts
Bloggers will share details of PRs, SEOs who have used bad tactics in forums, in Facebook groups etc.
But they will also share the details of those who have done it right - Judith used the example of Eurostar who had given a blogger a brief for several articles, presented feedback, shared the final articles on their own channels, as well as payment in travel/hotel stays
Invest in blogger relationships rather than just paying for a link
SEO is essentially online marketing with PR, so learn from good PR tactics
If you’ve got a small budget, be honest and promise to pay when you get bigger clients as well as sharing on your own channels to improve their traffic
Check that your bloggers haven’t no-followed the links by using Screaming Frog

Planning cannot be emphasised enough - use a 10-step plan and follow through, especially if you want to run a successful SM campaign
Do a social mini-audit first - look at FB, Twitter, Google + and other relevant channels
Take screengrabs of everything so you can refer back to it
Aim to have consistency over the accounts - logo, colours, cover photos, tone of voice etc.
Work out what your social objectives are - do you want more likes, more followers, to drive sales, promote brand awareness, change brand reputation (or all of the above!)
Show a human side to the business
Build a future potential customer base by engaging with younger SM users
Educate management about the importance of SM - you need to give them a buy-in or the campaign will falter, especially if it needs to be rolled out across a company with loads of branches/locations

We need to stop banging on about engagement, virality, targeting young people and get more serious about social content and analyse the data
Social Media equals money - Jimmy Choo attributed a 33% increase in sneaker sales to Twitter activity
Look at a SM as an “assisted purchase” - it’ll give your customers that extra nudge they need
Plan, use spreadsheets to their maximum potential, and make sure you know what your social content’s purpose is
Find the sweet spot between what you want to sell and what your potential customers are talking about - find RELEVANCE
Work out how to integrate/span different communities by going for “context not content”
Have a 6-month plan and a weekly SM schedule
Use visuals in LinkedIn - not enough people are doing it and it increases CTR significantly
Take a look at the VCCP case studies

Competitive Intelligence Strategy Using “spying” Tools - Rishi Lakhani for SEMrush

This was effectively a promo talk for SEMrush but I’ll keep it as general as possible

Use the same four-five tools, including SEMrush, every day to drill through data
Google Trends, Simply Measured, Copernic Tracker
People aren’t using these tools to their maximum capacity and you can learn almost everything you need from them to stay competitive
Metrics are vanity; Rankings are sanity
Use Archive.org to compare past versions of pages - to gain an insight into where your competitors have made changes that worked
Look at historic backlinks using Majestic SEO
Use Linkrisk to find links you can leverage or to get a better insight into your competitors’ linkbuilding strategies
Look at lost/gained keywords
“Spy” on your competitors by signing up to their newsletters, affiliates programmes, monitoring press releases, liking their FB page and following them on Twitter
Use the + trick - add a plus sign to a bit.ly link to see key data about that link
put staging. in front of a URL to see whether you can see changes on a site before they are implemented

Google is trying to squeeze more and more money out of users
And paid search has a clear, trackable ROI
Google’s updates and penalties that are mainly aimed at bad SEO/content marketing practices have made companies skeptical about organic search
SEO practices are more risky than ever because Google can make changes and blow everything out of the water
Facebook is similar - your reach has been narrowed dramatically (5-15% of people who’ve liked your page) unless you pay to promote posts
On mobile, we’re now seeing only one organic search result above the fold (if we’re lucky) and the rest paid
The battle is boiling down to screen real-estate
And it’s getting harder for SMEs to get any visibility
Perhaps we need to accept we have to pay?
Yes, to a certain extent, but the basic on-site optimisations are still very important to get right
Retailers can’t escape paying - Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping

As an aside, I think Google have played the best “long-con” in history. They’ve created a captive, impotent (for now) audience of billions; they’ve dominated the search world so that the vast majority of traffic to your business comes from their search engine; they’re making organic search more and more closed-off; they’ve cracked down on black hat SEO practices; and once they monetise everything, whether it’s Google Analytics, Adwords, or Shopping, they’ve backed us into a corner where we have to pay, or sit back and watch our rankings and visibility decline.

SEO Penalty Shoot Out - Recipe for Success - Paul Madden, LinkRisk; Tim Grice, Branded3; Pete Handley, MediaFlow

Always get links removed where possible when working to get a penalty revoked, disavow is a last resort ~ Paul
Branded3 have never manually removed links, instead they create an in depth and detailed disavow file once they have audited the links then submit this to Google ~ Tim
The average time for a penalty to be revoked after the work has been done is around 6 weeks ~ Tim
LinkRisk have analysed over 7k backlink profiles, the common issues with bad links is always the anchor text ~ Paul
The Media Flow uses a combination of disavowing and manually removing bad links ~ Pete
Always proactively disavow bad links as you find them even if they are not causing issues with manual actions or algorithms (penguin)
Even if a bad link from a 404 page is pointing to your site you need to ensure you still disavow it as the page could become live again at some point or might only be temporarily not found
Negative SEO does exist but most “reported” cases are simply from tactics the site owners themselves have employed and mostly forgotten about
when auditing links ensure you use EVERY link tool you can get your hands on as they all give slightly varying data
The agreed common characteristics of bad links are; anchor text, sitewide and links from article marketing efforts

This was a really interesting panel because Paul and Tim have opposite views and processes when it comes to what needs to be done to get a penalty revoked but they both get the same end result (penalties lifted). Should we be simply disavowing links or should we still be spending time manually contacting sites to get as many links removed before we resort to the disavow file? personally our views are inline with Paul’s.

Attribution - Success Has Many Fathers, But Failure is an Orphan - Russell McAthy, Blue Glass; Darren Herbert, Latitude

54% of online businesses work with an attribution model
89% of websites that used them claimed it had a positive impact on their business
29% of businesses that used attribution models said it had a major impact on their business
Main barriers to success are a lack of disparate tools, resource issues and internal politics
Last Click is still the most common attribution model overall
First click attribution is the second most common attribution model
Google analytics and double click are free tools that all sites should be using as a minimum
Double click tracks impressions whereas Google Analytics does not
ensure if you do offline or alternative advertising that you use specific shortened URLs to track those channels
The best attribution models for your business are dependant on how your business operates it is all individual, there isn’t a one size fits all model
Do NOT customise attribution models unless you have done in depth research around which channels would work best for your business.
Ensure that you use content grouping in Google Analytics so that you can group your content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site

This was my favourite talk of the day, Russell and Darren really went into depth about why and how we should be using attribution models.The main point from this talk is that most of us are still using last click attribution as our models when infact we should be researching which one would suit each business the best.

You are What you Wear - Is There A Future in Wearable Media? - Martin Bryant, TNW; Sabine Douglas, Apadmi; Paul Gailey, Droiders

A lot of people perceive wearable media a “gimmick” rather than it being a functional accessory
Wearable media such as smart watches for example, have real world usage such as reading emails, texts etc
Police in London are now using wearable cameras that record footage live and that gets uploaded to a cloud server to be stored as evidence (www.evidence.com)
Wearable media is nothing new, police dogs have been wearing cameras for a long time before this became “mainstream”
The UK as a whole are more uneducated when it comes to wearable technologies
Our acceptance of technology is generally behind compared to what we are actually capable of creating
There is a fine line between wearable tech marketing products that you may be interested in and simply being “creepy”
There are some privacy issues with wearable media, take the smartwatch for example; if you have push notifications enabled then people around may be able to read texts, email snippets
Companies are now realising that to get wearable media mainstream they need to make it “fashionable” in the future we can expect to see jewellery inspired wearable media.

This was an interesting talk about the future of wearable media, the main points to take away form this is that wearable tech is not a fad, it is here to stay and will keep improving and advancing. We need to be aware of the implications of wearable tech, in particular the complications it may cause when it comes to privacy - it will be interesting to see how this unfolds!

You should be measuring links, shares & overall social reach
Make sure you are measuring referral traffic from social media channels
Make sure you are checking and split testing your content
Monitor your post frequency, asses whether or not you are posting too often/not enough
Be honest with your clients about what you are doing with their social accounts
Its important to understand that an idea that might work on one platform like Facebook, may not necessarily work on Twitter
You need to give people reasons to talk to you, even if they like your page/retweet you they probably won’t engage fully with you
Find the best keywords that convert for your audience, this is where split testing content comes in to play
Update or create a proactive engagement list for your social accounts

This was easily the most entertaining talk of the conference, it was full of humour and delivered really well, it was also full of useful information about how we should be managing our clients expectations and what we should be doing with our content on social media. My biggest takeaway here was that you need to split test your content and make sure you have differing ideas for the various social platforms.

The Difference Between a "Boss" and a "Leader"

Ben Barker — Fri, 23 May 2014 13:25:45 GMT

Recently I have been appointed to become the Head of Search here at FireCask and it got me thinking about all the different types of “bosses” I have had in the past and what I have learnt and how I can share this with the team here (it’s also about time i actually contributed to the blog :D). Firstly the title here is a little misleading.. I don’t actually believe there are good “bosses” there are only good “leaders”- what I mean by this is simply that a boss will generally manage their staff and often (not always) will take a back seat, give an order and let their staff get on with it. Whilst this isn’t a bad thing, this also isn’t in my opinion the best way to work in an efficient team. I strongly believe that a large amount of bosses believe that their staff are there to carry out their instructions and do a damn good job of it - again this isn’t a bad thing but it brings me nicely on to my next point…

To rudely interrupt - we’re hiring! Why not have a look at our current vacancy…

I Don’t Manage, I Support

A leader will get out there in the thick of it and support the team rather than manage them. This in my opinion is the key here, we as senior staff are here to support our teams. I have personally experienced it before (not in this industry) where the bosses have stood on the shoulders of their staff’s successes and came down on them like a tonne of bricks when something hasn’t gone to plan.

I’m not saying I am an accomplished leader by any means - far from it! I am merely saying this is the style in which I prefer to work. I want to support the team, I want to develop them in their given fields and give them all the support they need to reach their goals.

My #1 Priority

This is probably the most important point of all…keeping staff happy! The people make the company not the other way around, happy staff perform better - this isn’t science it’s a fact! It sounds obvious, but again I have personally experienced companies first hand who look after their management team and fail to support the every day staff, which is ridiculous because these guys are the ones who really make sure the important tasks are done and everything is running smoothly.

Finally…

There will be no doubt be people who agree and disagree with this post - as I mentioned, I don’t by any stretch consider myself a leader, this IS however the style in which I will be working with.

What are your opinions on this, do you agree?

Actionable Bullet Points from BrightonSEO

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 11:18:30 GMT

Malcolm Coles: How I earned loads of Links by ignoring SEO

https://twitter.com/malcolmcoles/status/459279169537728512

Lemonly - infographics, keep mobile in mind and try to make infographics responsive as readership is still very large on mobile devices.
Headlines - should be aiming to get people to read worthwhile, educative content
Dumbing-down that won’t last - need a more long-term vision for content production
People don’t share profanity so try to exclude from titles or structured data.
AB testing headlines - this is something you can do to see if the title is better for shareability. Also experiment with social structured data.
Most Facebook users browse on their mobile so ensure any shareable content is going to be viewed well on them.
“Newsjacking” - Wayne Rooney salary calculator as an example - almost forces a link if users have to see it to understand the story
The importance of collaboration - most affirmed generation in history

Pete Handley’s SEO audit checklist

Although the slides do cover most, here’s some more notes… (also, Pete is awesome)

Canonical tags - trailing slashes may be an issue so make sure they’re covering all possible dupe content issues
Optimise - mapping keywords to pages is something you should do and be on top of.
Sitemaps - use different Sitemaps for measuring indexation levels on different areas of the site. Here you’ll be able to knuckle down any indexation issues on a section/page level much easier.
Alt tagging - not used as much but ensure you do it, as well as making relevant filenames
HREF Lang - it’s a complex process. Having an XML sitemap over inline tagging makes life easier

Adrian Durow - Think Eyes… Not Keywords

Authorship markup won’t necessarily work, but more authors on a page tend to increase residual trust
Domain names do make a difference for authority
Naturally attracted attention - sales worthy language - review and number language, eg “3 reasons etc”

The Times They Are a Changing....

Alex Moss — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:08:34 GMT

Today isn’t just an important day just because it’s Anna’s birthday. Today’s important because it’s the beginning of a change we’ve both been working on over the past couple of months. This change is what you see right now, a new company called FireCask.

The Why

The reason the UK office is re-branding is simply due to international tax issues that are beyond our control. The Israel and UK offices will still be working closely and our teams will not be changing, we just needed to find the best solution for these complicated tax matters. As a result, we have now created a new UK Limited Company.

The last 18 months has been exciting and enjoyable and we have not only been recognised for the fantastic work we have done for our clients, but we have been nominated for several awards. We have always focused on getting our clients above and beyond the results they want to achieve and by creating FireCask we can ensure this continues without us having to worry about complicated tax matters!

New and existing clients will continue to receive the highest level and quality of service with our directors being your first port of call.

The What

FireCask will continue to work in the same office at Blackfriars House, and will contain the same wonderful team that has grown from 2 to 6 in less than 18 months.

The Future

FireCask already has a busy few months ahead with great projects already in the pipeline. We are also planning to recruit in the very near future and can’t wait to keep on growing what we have here at FireCask.

If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact us!

Charity Art Auction for @thefactoryyz on Thursday

Anna Moss — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 13:32:43 GMT

The Factory Youth Zone (FYZ) set 100 businesses in Manchester a challenge to raise a minimum of £1,000 each. I decided to do something a little bit different from a lot of the companies involved and I will be hosting an art auction on October 3^rd.

Purchase a Ticket!

https://twitter.com/alexmoss/status/385027962023591937

About The Factory Youth Zone

The FYZ gives kids a place to go after school and during school holidays and they offer a whole host of fantastic activities for all ages; from learning how to do spa treatments and film making to employability and enterprise workshops and a range of sports, just to name a few, all who attend the centre will find something they want to get involved with. Another important aspect of the FYZ is their mentoring programme. This gives those with any issues someone to confide in whether they are having problems at home, school or in their confidence. The centre is open to any young person aged between 8 and 21 and also caters for those with a mental or physical disability.

One of the areas of the FYZ that I really loved was their art department and so this fuelled the idea of holding an art auction.

Purchase a Ticket!

What Art is Being Auctioned?

Artists and photographers from in and around Manchester (and a few further afield such as New York based artist, Jon Burgerman) have donated pieces to be auctioned off and all proceeds will go directly to FYZ.

https://twitter.com/annamossSEO/status/378079258033143808

The Liquor Store has kindly donated drinks for the evening and is creating a bespoke cocktail for the event and a Cheshire based caterer is providing free canapés and nibbles. An experienced auctioneer is donating his time and will be conducting the auction and this will all be held in Castle Galleries in Manchester city centre who have very generously given me their space for free. All art that they sell will be removed from the walls to make way for the donated pieces.

https://twitter.com/annamossSEO/status/378058331828408320

I am certain that the event will be a fun filled evening with good food, drinks and people, all for a great cause. Tickets cost £10 per person and all proceeds go directly to the FYZ. There are still some available to purchase and you can do so by clicking the button below:

Purchase a Ticket!

#BrightonSEO September 2013 talks in Bulletpoints

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 11:34:42 GMT

This post is coverage of the talks we both attended on Friday 13th September 2013.

International Link Curation - Speaker - Kevin Gibbons

This was an interesting talk, Kevin Gibbons from Blueglass UK - he gave real examples of a client whereby they planned and executed an international SEO strategy which consisted of how they got content translated locally for infographics and bloggers, find the key points and info about this talk below!

Blueglass speak over 25 languages
Momondo (client), created an infographic and translated locally in 12 different countries
Doing outreach to bloggers, creating content and translating it locally for each country
Need local people with local knowledge
Translation isn’t good enough, you need local knowledge
Without centralisation it Is a mess, need a solid strategy
International success is tied in to a wider digital strategy, SEO, Social & Paid
We get a head start in the UK in terms of algorithm updates, on average 6 months before other countries, good time to prepare, test and refine ethical and effective tactics
Many languages have very limited geographic reach, ensure the content can be tailored to each location
Low DA in small markets isn’t unusual , it’s simply because those markets don’t have the same volume
Links from low quality sites from bordering countries can prove harmful, build logical bridges between content
Understand local behaviour and European holiday timetables
Outreach is easier with personal relationships - spend time to get to know your bloggers
Timing is CRUCIAL
HREFLANG is very powerful especially for lower populated countries

Country tips, Germany

Bloggers can be sceptical
There are good opportunities in other German speaking countries such as Austria and Switzerland
The content of the outreach emails MUST be written by a native speaker
German people are straight forward, just tell them what you want!

Country tips - Russia

Yandex has the majority of the market share - old school tactics still work here but still aim to build natural links
Russian web users are slightly younger than other western European countries, take this into account when creating content for them
Outreaching to bloggers in English can work here, but it is advised to try where possible to get a native speaker to assist as this still has a higher success rate

Country tips - Nordics

Very limited resources compared with other markets
Most are fluent in English, they do however search online in their mother tongue
Web users are savvy but SEO is far behind
There are consumer laws about sending unsolicited emails, personal relationships here are the key component

Country tips - France

Speak French to them!
Make sure grammar is spot on!
They are very anti SEO and will probably ask for money
Co-branded partnerships work much better than link exchanges

Country tips - Italy

Italian market is very small
Can get away more with building links from sites with standards below the equivalent English counterparts
Even national Italian media sites often have very average domain authority metrics

Country tips - USA

Have to make it win-win for both parties
building relationships is usually a longer process - don’t expect quick results in this market
Create content which shifts a niche’s standards and stands out
USA, have to make it win-win, building relationships can be a long process, expect quick results

Summary

Integrate a single strategy
It’s all relative, understand different market approaches
Implement HREFLANG, especially for markets where link building is tough.

Great talk from Alessandro Brunelli from Caliberi.com - in this talk he touched up on the influence of social from an international perspective and how we can use this to our advantage.

International social marketing
Why should an SEO think about international social media?
How do you measure success and tell the campaign is working
If you client is loving your work, think of how you can try new things
If they have a foreign office expand the strategy
2.55billion social media users worldwide
Recent studies suggest social media is becoming more important
Social networks need to be seen for what they are
They can’t be judged solely by SEO rules
Social strategy and brand building go hand in hand
SEO can maximise social
Facebook advertising, Facebook has the highest amount of active users in the world
Facebook ad manager can help you understand your users and which countries they are coming from ,what content they like etc
Think like an advertiser
Make your money count
Make fans care about what you are saying, keep engaged users coming back to your site
Edgerank values how much attention a certain person pays your posts over a period of time.
It is all about competing for space and attention
The less people that care the more money you will waste
Cost per like will likely increase as a result of an unsuccessful strategy
Social metrics are great indicators of what works and what doesn’t
It’s about knowing what events are going on well in advance
August 7th graph search became available for English speaking US users

Summary

Take notice of your users intent
take full advantage of your social data to drive changes
Know what is going on in your industry in terms of events etc

The Other Search Engines - Speaker 3 - Jan-Willem Bobbink

So we probably know enough about Google by now, what about the “other search engines” - this talk explained how some of the main search engines in other countries work. Good talk fromJan-Willem Bobbink from notprovided.eu.

Other search engines: Yahoo, Yandex, Bing, Google, Ask Jeeves, Conduit, Babylon, Baidu

Country - China (Baidu)

China is the fastest growing market for internet sales, 2012 108 billion in sales by 2020 there is an estimated 650 billion in sales!
14% of all online worldwide sales are made in china
China has firewall issues, there are restrictions, need an ICP licence without the licence you can’t get hosting
Chinese government have a list of forbidden keywords, if sites contain these keywords they will not be visible in search engines
Baidu is increasing and Google share is decreasing for market share
Baidu know what SEO’s are doing, they declared them the enemy of search engines!
800 million pages indexed in baidu compared with Google’s 48 billion pages indexed
In Asia more than 24% of users are searching in mobile
Number 1 thing to do in the Chinese market is optimise your site for speed!
Prioritise content
Optimise on page elements
Exact match is located in the left results, broad match is on the right set of results (as opposed to Google which have paid ads on the right)
The results also give company information once the blue V next to the SERPs results has been clicked on
Baidu has a problem with spam, has the money plant update which focuses on tackling spam in generic and article directories
Pomegrate update - targets low quality page content and malicious adverts
Baike is owned by baidu - it is the equivalent of Wikipedia
Social data, sina weibo is the equivalent of twitter
Sharebar, easily share posts or pages on Chinese social networks, there is speculation that the more users share the better the rankings will be
Early 2013 baidu lost a lot of market shares 11%

Country - China (360 Search engine)

More western looking google style layout
Built their own safe browser, built their own phone software also (like Google)

Country - Russia (Yandex)

Yandex is dominant
Matrix net is their ranking system algorithm
You can use favicons in the SERPs results
Have an extensive webmasters section, will help you optimise the website for them
Make use of rich snippets
Yandex islands, can check for flights online, buy cinema tickets, doctors appointments etc.
Keyword research for Russian market is easy, don’t need an account and they share a lot of data with you, freely accessible for everyone
Sape.ru is the biggest linking network in the world

Country - USA (Google, Bing)

Google 66.7%
Microsoft 17.9%

Other search Engines

Blekko is one of the top spam and virus free search engines for the latest updates on news etc
Segment results and are more granular
Duck duck go
Don’t track user or keyword data, very focused on privacy.
Post prism their growth has massively increased duckduckgo/traffic
Gone from 60 to 90 million searches per month

Summary

Take notice of how other search engines operate
Make full use of all of the resources and features that the international search engines offer

Who Do You Trust? - Speaker 1 - Dixon Jones

This talk was from Dixon Jones of dixonjones.com - the presentation revolved around who to trust with your budget.

The Problem - as a marketer you have a budget and you want to spend it as efficiently as possible.
Advertisers are being asked to trust the network.
It’s not just networks you need to trust, it is also people.
Numbers aren’t the best metric - Lady Gaga has more followers than Barack Obama, for example
You also need to trust technologies.
Trust isn’t always clear - star ratings and reviews aren’t always valuable.
To scale trust, you can use toolbars
In a link you have the following - content (is it a positive or negative link), relevance, reach, intent, influence, timeless, meaning etc. All are remarkably powerful and measurable.

Summary

Marketers are being conned
You need independent data when you spend money
Digital Assets come in many forms
Links can help understand relationships between assets at scale
Still more to be done at scale

Slides not currently available

Making use of Big Data - Speaker 2 - Dr Peter Passaro

This talk from Peter Passaro was centred around how to effectively use and make sense of large amounts of data.

Big Data is volume, velocity and variety - more data from a variety of sources as quickly as possible. Anything over a gig or datasets that can be a struggle to process on a laptop.
To understand large big data you need to make it as easy as possible - clustering or feature simplification.
Feature effects - only show one or two effects.
From an SEO perspective you want to summarise data, sentiment of the content, topics and keywords and named entities (people, places & Products).
Artificial Intelligence for analysing data.
Finding Patterns
Network Analysis
Clustering
Feature Reduction

Statistical Analysis for Data
Distributions
User Descriptions & Stories
Time Series Analysis

Map Language Space - useful for brands. So for example for a Lotus you can talk about individual car company, F1 team, corporate etc.
The final thing for analysing big data is to produce marketing pieces

Summary

To Go Big for Big Data you need deep analytics, content discovery, to prove your ROI, predict and plan for search engine updates.
D3JS is a great for visualising data
Google Fusion

Slides not currently available

This talk delivered by Alessandro Vinciarelli of SSPNet.eu was around processing social signals and how they can differ.

Nonverbal Communication can be poor - for example a picture of two people
appearing to be screaming can be interpreted in a number of ways.
Nonverbal Communication is important - you can present the same content in the same way and it have two different meanings.
Conflict is a mode of interaction where the attainment of the goal by one party precludes its attainment by the others
To automatic nonverbal communication we have to learn from data
To measuring conflict we can analyse speed of response, pitch and length of response, and also how often users
Non-verbal communication is a physical machine detectable evidence of social and psychological phenomena
Interdisciplinary approaching including both human and computing sciences can perform better

Summary

Measuring conflict perception is possible, but only some parts are automatically detectable - this is known as physical perception (i.e. fidgeting). Inference perception cannot be easily automatically detectable (i.e. “atmosphere is relaxed”). It is possible over time using data gained from crowdsourcing

Slides not currently available

Mobile Strategy for Smaller Businesses - Speaker 1 - Bridget Randolph

This LoMo session from Bridget Randolph (bridgetrandolph.com) addressed the importance of mobile users in the online world today and why we should care.

Mobile in 2012 was 12 times the size of the entire internet
77% users use phones to research products before purchase
Businesses need to be mobile friendly
70% of top 20 UK retailers have a mobile friendly website
A lot of SME’s don’t see value in mobile friendly websites
Mobile strategy for small businesses
3 stages, mobile friendly site, search and discovery, reaching out to customers
3 approaches, responsive design, mobile site, dynamic serving
Choose approach based on users’ needs
Responsive design is usually the best approach on wordpress CMS
Have a google plus and Facebook page if a mob site isn’t affordable
Mobile SEO, responsive design, separate URLs
Local search, businesses with a physical location or a location based service area
Optimise pages for location, local listings (local relevant business directories)
Local link building, NAP citations, the key is consistency
Images of store front and product images are important also
Structured data, markup for place and local business, KML file for Google maps
Social profiles, Google+ and facebook
Yelp and Google + local
Social media, is important for local SEO 4 out of every 5 people on FB every day are on their mobiles
Dinner party test, if you are at a dinner party you would you ask them the question? If not don’t ask on social media
Make sure content is mobile friendly
Step 3 reach out to customers, build apps, if business relies on frequent visits it’s a good way to get users back.
Exclusive mobile content, give consumers a loyalty app for example; coffee shops - buy 20 coffees get a free coffee, you can also use push notifications by geo targeting
Check in on phone and get 20% off services or products
Make sure if you do email marketing make sure you have mobile friendly templates.
Provide in store wifi for users, can collect email addresses or get them to answer survey questions

Design for Mobile, Responsive OR Adaptive - Speaker 2 - Justin Taylor

One of my personal favourites, great talk here from Justin Taylor of graphitas.co.uk - he touched on the various mobile web design, mobile internet usage and some interesting sales figures in the world of mobile.

Responsive or adaptive design
Mobile internet usage doubled between 2009 and 2012
Search from mobile with local intent has increased by 40% in recent years
Focus on the intent of the users
50% of all online sales for Mother’s Day came from mobile devices!
Mobile sales in 2013 forecast for £13 billion, from eBay alone
Mobile is the fastest growing platform ever
Speed is a huge factor on mobile
Users want easy, fast information, faster loading means more conversions!
Mobile users are less tolerant
Users don’t care if your site is adaptive or responsive, they care about finding information quickly
make sure there are clear calls to action
Design from a user’s perspective
Target your most popular mobile devices e.g. samsung galaxy phones, iPhones, tablets etc
enhance UX with mobile specific HTML
Put usability first above all else
Think like the customer not like the client

Summary

Always put users first when it comes to mobile design
Dynamic adaptive is a recommended option if budget allows, if not responsive is still a good option
Users don’t care how the site is made as long as they can find what they are looking for quickly!

Managing Local Listings - Speaker 3 - David Whatley

This was a bit of a different talk in that it focused much less on online and more on citations specifically. David Whatley from MiShopLocal.co.uk went on to talk about the importance of brick and mortar businesses even without websites having local citations.

Brick and mortar businesses with or without websites should make citation listings a priority
customer reviews for local listings are essential
ensure consistency in NAP citation listings
Getting citations on industry specific sites as well as the usual suspects such as yelp etc
All businesses regardless of size would hugely benefit from local listings and Google places optimisation
Local businesses are more concerned with getting customers on the phone than engaging with contact forms on websites
Even if there are multiple businesses in the same building you can still optimise local effectively by ensuring all of your NAP “anchors” are consistent

Summary

Ensure complete consistency across all external NAP citations
Even businesses without websites that have a physical presence should as a priority claim and optimise a local listing

Adwords for Local Businesses - Speaker 4 - Tara Dee West

This was another of my favourite talks from Tara West (Koozai.com) - she spoke about how to improve how you spend your budget more effectively on local adwords.

Account structure is the key here, make sure keywords are being targeted and segmented effectively, don’t lose traffic due to inaccurate IPs
Always bid on your brand name, it converts well, protects your brand, is cheaper and will boost overall quality score
Use modified broad match keywords - it is a good way of controlling broad match terms, helps discover new keywords and has lower CPCs
When clicks become less profitable reduce your bids - look at factors such as time of day, weather, current events etc
Exclude poorly performing locations and bid higher nearer to your office to counteract the poorer performing locations.
Ensure the site is optimised for mobile
Set mobile big adjustments at ad group level
Use/keep an eye on the Google Analytics bid adjustment reports

Summary

Account structure is the main focus
Always bid on your brand name
When locally targeting ensure to have 2 separate segments, 1 with locality keywords and the other geo targeting the same area, this way you capture the most possible clicks

How to Crush the Competition by Watching the SERPs - Speaker 2 - Rob Bucci

This section of the session was taken by Rob Bucci from Getstat.com - he talks us through how to analyse the SERPs and how we can best use this data to topple the competition.

Rankings aren’t dead, but the world has moved on from rankings have moved to a more holistic approach.
SERP Analytics is discovering and communicating meaningful relationships from SERP Rankings
Biggest challenge is to look at more keywords rather than short tail 10-15 keywords.
Segmentation is so important for analysing lots (~100,000) of keywords.
SERP’s are valuable data - you should look at more than your data than your own rankings.
Keyword Difficulty is a score 1-100% for how difficult it is hard to rank for a particular keyword - using Majestic SEO to analyse the authority on the top 100 rankings.
Top Competitors - Count frequency of top 10 rankings of a domain in your keywords.
Useful for doing second page as well.
Unsaturated Segments - find segments that your competitors aren’t ranking in.
Distribution of Rankings

Summary

Don’t just look at rankings anymore, the picture is much bigger than that
Look at more than just a small selection of keywords, try to analyse much higher volumes of terms for better analysis
Segment your data as much as possible

How to Crush the Competition by Watching the SERPs - Speaker 3 - Lisa Myers

This section of the session was taken by Lisa Myers (Vervesearch.com) - she touched on how important On page marketing is and why this should be a higher priority for businesses, as opposed to just looking at how to acquire links.

Google’s algorithm has changed more in the last 1 and a half years than the previous 3 years combined
Google is cracking down on over optimisation and has tightened the reins on the linking algorithm
On page SEO is the “Ugly Duckling” of SEO
You need to understand how people search, behaviour is very different now than it was in 2005!
Keywords and user intent have evolved from shorter, chunky terms to much longer tail phrases
Users are most likely to run a search query click on a site and bounce back to the SERPs to find another result than just Search > Click > Convert
You NEED to use supporting keywords on your page rather than targeting only your main term, this way you can catch related traffic
a staggering 70% of searches are longer tail keywords!
It’s now a key focus to understand user behaviour, target long tail keywords and improve user experience, this is real On page SEO!
Ensure on page elements are optimised efficiently, alt tags, H1’s, title tags etc
Make your site navigation “idiot proof” and simple

Summary

Do not NEGLECT your On page SEO
Understand user intent and target longer tail keywords
Keyword intent has evolved now to longer tail searches, users know exactly what they want when they search

Data and Content Production - Speaker 2 - Alan Cairns

Alan Cairns from Jellyfish.co.uk talks about how content should be driven by data.

Real Content has data behind it. Data.gov.uk is a great place to get plenty of data.
The G8 have pledged for all data to be open by default
Google ’s public data discovery tool is google.org
You can generate your own data through social media and APIs
To generate content visualise data in an easy to digest format
Data Journalism is the new punk, in that the details and tools are available to all.
Data Journalism is needed but be careful as data journalism can be interpreted and support any argument

Summary

Always where possible create content that is driven by data
Generate your data through social media and APIs

Low Cost Link Building with Juicy, Juicy Data - Speaker 3 - Stacey Cavanagh

Here Stacey Cavanagh (blogsession.co.uk) talks about low cost link building and the how to go about it!

Data for link bait: versatile and multi format, cross niche and can be newsworthy
Data should tell a story or back up or contradict a story
Surveys are a good source of data.
For Stacey’s blog on 1000 Americans to name a city other than London it cost $25 and 2 hours
Google Consumer Surveys or quickresponse.com
Analytics is another source of information
For Techmark’s surveys it was $0 and 16 hours of time
Look for stories in you analytics
Freedom of Information Act - great insights on data that people care about. Free but can make a reasonable charge if it takes too long.
Whatdotheyknow.com manages the request for you
Improve existing data
Update out of date data
Improve the formatting
Put data in to more meaningful concert

Read “Made to Stick” for the science on memorable
Find followers who give a crap from FollwerWonk, Technorati & journalisted
Give data to journalists and they write the story
Pick up the phone
Paid outreach through AdSense, outbrain & stumble upon paid discovery

Summary

Look at alternative out of the box ways to do outreach
Gather real user data from surveys and use it!
Update old data and repurpose it
Give data to journalists and let them write the story

Inhouse and Agency Should be Friends - Speaker 4 - Max Brockbank

Max Brockbank is the founder of BiginSEO

Bosses like PPC as it is instantaneous, visible and full reporting
SEO to be sold effectively needs to be sold like PPC
Help the In house SEO - it is your best asset to your agency
Making SEO “Bottom line” friendly
Document change
Itemise costs
Show your workings using Google Analytics annotations, Google docs, excel docs and a daily email

It needs to be consistent, clear and simple

Summary

Clearly outline SEO is NOT a quick process
Senior management like PPC as it shows instant results
work with in house SEOs they are an extension of your team

Slides not Available

How we Plan Editorial at BBC Sport - Speaker 1 - Paul Plunkett

Paul Plunkett from BBC Sport explains how they make best use of “SEO Juice” in their editorial copy and gives some interesting insights.

15.8 million unique users for the BBC - 15% from Search Engines.
52% of BBC Sport audience comes from Tablet/Mobile
Headlines - Getting to the Top of Google
SEO Kickers are big at the BBC - so you start search traffic with those phrases (i.e. Wimbledon 2012:)
BBC work with 55 character title tags
The individual is often bigger than the event in SEO terms (so Andy Murray is bigger in SEO terms than Wimbledon).
Story Summary
How you name your picture
Captions and alt tags
Inline links to own content
Inline links to external content
Intros to stories
How you update stories
Features, Video and Audio
Planning for big events

Summary

Moral of the story here, choose titles carefully to help make use of the QDF algorithm
Ensure internal linking is implemented in all content published
Plan ahead as much as you can in advance for big events

Technical Internet Marketing - Speaker 2 - Katrina Gallagher

Katrina Gallagher is the MD of Digitangle

Tips for CRO
Live Chat
Split Testing
Exit Surveys

Avoiding Duplicate content when split testing using rel=canonical, noindex, Google Webmaster Tools
Check page load time & if your pages work with JavaScript turned off

Summary

Make CRO a priority
Carry out proper testing for the best possible data outcome
Avoid duplicate content when split testing!

Slides from #BrightonSEO April 2013 - Social Structured Data

Alex Moss — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:38:47 GMT

Here are the slides to my talk at BrightonSEO on 12th April 2013. Please find the transcript below the slides.

Transcript

Today I’m going to talk to you about structure data, specifically for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. But first I want to tell you why you should be doing it.

Firstly it improves your click-through rate. By saying that I want to talk more about a presentation I made at SMX Israel about how rich snippets can be integrated into Google’s organic SERPS, and by implementing them using things like rel=“author” and review snippets, you can actually get a high click-through rate. And it’s all trackable via Google Webmaster Tools alongside using your own analytics tool.

It’s exactly the same thing on your news feed. If you have better media and better content, then it’s definitely going to work better for you in terms of CTR. Another cool thing about it is that you can actually tailor that content specifically to that social network. So you can have a different title, image, and description for Facebook, and you can have another one for Twitter, and another one for Google+. And you might have a different audience in each of those social networks, so it’s up to you to find out that audience and then tailor that content specific to that social network.

The other cool thing is it actually gains a bit more exposure. The fact that you’re sharing something that’s a bit more media rich makes it more attractive for it to be shared amongst other people. So I see a lot of Facebook pages, for example -t hey use a lot of images which are much more sharable than some random post update, and it’s just showing the brand is ticking along rather than sharing something interacting with people.

Lastly it can look messy. If you don’t have a description this is a great example… if you don’t have a Facebook Open Graph description, a META description or a Twitter card description, it decides what it thinks is the best content to produce. Sometimes that can just be the first 200 characters of page content. But if you were writing a blog post that might be “By Alex Moss” on today’s date. It’s not the best content to give people when you’re trying to describe what the whole post is about. Also if you’re not doing it I would class it as a form of automation - in a way like laziness. If you’re not implementing it then you’re just making another process think of what it needs to do to produce it on that news feed.

Google+

So first I’m going to talk about the simplest of the three. Google+ (bless them). I’ve used three examples here so the first one just has a title and content. It has no META description and what it’s done is just taken the first 200 characters. It doesn’t care where it’s from it just takes them. The second image has the title and I’ve also added a META description and an image in the contents itself. It’s cropped it and that’s all great. The third example is using the Google+ META text. Here I have used a specific image thumbnail, a specific title and a specific description. Tags usually default to articles but you can have things like apps, books, authors, products and so on but I don’t want to talk about that today - I just want to talk about sharing a normal URL. As well as this you also have the title, image, and description. The description’s up to 200 characters so if you’ve got a meta description you’re not going to be within that 150 character limit. So you’ve got an extra 50-odd characters so why not use them?

One prediction I want to make is that Google+ I think will be expanding their meta data. Facebook Open Graph is massive and I want to talk about that today. You could probably talk about that for a whole day. Twitter card’s just evolved their ability to share more media-rich URLs. My predictions is that Google+ will actually evolve it. Don’t know when, but I think they’ll either evolve their own data set or they’ll actually pull in the rich snippets that are on the URLs. If you have a review snippet, it’ll actually pull in to the post update.

Facebook Open Graph

The next social network to cover is Facebook’s Open Graph. So, my example uses three URLs and it produces three different results. The interesting one is the first example. In the content in the URL that I actually shared on here I had the first paragraph just have five words in it. Facebook has decided that that paragraph is too short and it skipped it. It went on to the second paragraph and output that - which is something I like a lot.

The second example is kind of the same but the image didn’t crop proportionally so people now think that I work for “3 Do Digi” which isn’t the best thing that you want, for branding at least. The third example shows where I’ve used the title specific to Facebook and an image specifically for it as well.

There are more available tags than Google+. The only other things you really need to add are the URL and the site name. Again, the type would either be article or on the homepage it would be website or on the product page it would be product and so on. When you do use products you have to use a whole other beast of Open Graph data which I don’t want to get into today but you can read a lot more about it here. The great thing about Open Graph is that you can use verbs as well as actions which they just implemented last year. So instead of liking or recommending something you can read something or rate something or you can listen to something. So all the information is on that.

Twitter Cards

Lastly are Twitter Cards. So here are two tweets. The first one is just a normal tweet. I shared some slides from SMX Sydney by Paddy Moogan (which was really good so take a look). Below that is another tweet. It’s exactly the same for me to tweet but if you click expand on the news feed, then it’ll it’ll show you who wrote the post, a little description of the post, and a bit of the title. It has actually got a deep link underneath saying “view on the web”, and if you want to see an example of it there’s a link to the actual tweet again that you can get from the slides later on.

NOTE: Twitter Cards work with Twitter oEmbed for WordPress! Simply enter the tweet URL and it will output as an embedded tweet - for example…

https://twitter.com/FireCask/status/426690981006934016

The interesting thing about Twitter cards is that it can be integrated into other apps. This slide illustrates how this can be output - with Tweetdeck on the left and the Twitter Android app on the right. I really like the Mashable tweet here as it used the image pretty much the whole screen and clearly overtaken Huffington Post on real estate.

There are more available tags with Twitter Cards. The interesting one here is you can actually have a site and creator. So if I were writing a blog on the 3 Door Digital blog, the site would be @FireCask and the creator would be @alexmoss so it can actually connect to the author as well as who you’re writing for… and again you’ve got title, image, and description.

[On 2nd April 2013] Twitter released another three Twitter cards for you to use. What you’ve been seeing up to now is the summary card, which is what you just saw. The image card which is if you were to upload an image to Twitpic or Yfrog and the video one if you were sharing something on YouTube or Vimeo. I really like them because you don’t have to go to YouTube to view what you want to view and it doesn’t distract you. The additions are:

gallery card
app card
product card

So, you’ve already seen the summary card, here’s the photo card. I have annoyingly decided to share a nice sandwich I had in New York last year and now I’m starving so that was quite a bad idea. But here you can actually define an image and a title for that image and you can view on your domain. The interesting thing is that that’s a photo I uploaded to imgur. So it doesn’t have to be hosted on the site itself, which you can abuse if you want to but it’s nice to know that it doesn’t all have to be in that one URL to share what you need to share.

The second one’s a gallery. Again I’ve used something from Flickr. These are four photos from RIMC last month. Here you can choose the title - it says that it’s by me. I’ve got to enter a description again and that can be linked to wherever it wants to be.

The next one’s the video which is quite interesting. I quite like this as you can define an image that overlays on top of the player. Now, I don’t usually like the image that YouTube uses as thumbnails. You never get the thumbnail that you want, so this is great for me. But on the other hand, you can have an totally unrelated picture such as a Pomeranian with sunglasses eating something out of a kitchen roll tube.

The product card’s quite interesting because I used it to broaden the scope to my WordPress plugin for Facebook comments. It’s not products per se, it’s more of an app which I’ll talk about in a sec. But it shows that you can define what you want. So I can define the word “price” and the word “downloads” and I put the variables that I wanted to. You can put up to two variables. If you’re selling a t-shirt you can have the price as usual but you can have available sizes. And you can put in your unique description and you’ve got a deep link.

So why did I put an app in a product card. The last one is the app card but it’s a bit odd because even though the app card’s listed in the six available cards you can’t actually use it. You can click into the landing page and it gives you sample code but it didn’t validate for me in the validator and it’s not even available in the generator itself. I’m not sure why, I don’t know - maybe it’s being abused, maybe they’re rethinking it, but it’s something to look out for.

One more thing about the Twitter cards is that you have to get your domain authorized. So if you’re on the quiet fast task and you want to get this out as fast as possible my suggestion would be submit your domain and then keep sure that you get the cards done as quick as possible just to quicken things up.

So to finish up I just thought I’d share these six URLs:

The first three are just information about all the available cards and structure data that I’ve talked about today and the bottom three links are all the testing tools for respective social networks where you can either put in your own HTML, you can generate it, and then send it to a dev, or do whatever you want with it.

If you’ve got limited time or resources my suggestion would be to only use Facebook Open Graph. The cool thing about this is that if Google+ META is missing or if Twitter card data is missing they both seem to revert to the open graph for the meta data so if you can’t be bothered, or you don’t have the resources then just do that and use Facebook and it’s much better.

Thank you :)

Slides from SMX Israel 2013

Alex Moss — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 08:07:03 GMT

On Sunday 6th January, Alex Moss talked at SMX Israel. Below are the slides complete with full transcript of his talk.

How to Leverage CTR with Rich Snippets

Up to now, everyone’s been talking about exactly what to do, and how to actually implement it. Today, I want to talk about why you want to implement all these rich snippets more from a psychological point of view, rather than a practical point of view.

Why do we want to actually use them? We want to give Google as much data as possible. We’re here to help them, and in return they’ll help us. They want to use that data and they’re going to use it more and more. As you can see from schema.org, they have a lot of stuff that you can actually use, and rich snippets, and actually output in the search results pages. As a consequence, you get more real estate on the results page itself, and I’ve got a few examples of that.

Barak talked a bit about events that I’ve been noticing as well. I’ve chosen the Red Hot Chili Pepper tickets as an example. The highlighted result there shows you the most upcoming tour dates, and by clicking them, you actually - it’s kind of like mini side links - and you don’t have to be number one to have those side links. By clicking, for example the Chelsea at Cosmopolitan Las Vegas, it will take you specifically to that venue, that date, and that concert, and therefore it’s easier conversion, as they won’t have to browse through all the locations and dates.

As well as that, there’s quite few star-ratings, and there’s kind of difference between them. For starters, products at the top, you can actually see that they’ve got a rating out of five, and they’ve got 51 votes. As well as that, you’ve got price range. The voting system can be either user-generated or it can be imported externally. Here I know that might be more trustworthy as a review, rather than the one above, because I’m seeing that 51 people have commented and they’ve actually expressed their opinion specifically.

Applications is a little bit different. It’s the same rating system and it’s the same voting system. You can have the same pricing system, but as well as that; you can have an OS that is an Anroid App that will say Anroid. I’ve chosen not to do that because this is my plug-in :)

The next one is a review, but by a specific person. I search for ‘Alton Towers review’, and you can see that Steve Wollaston has specifically written a whole entire article about the venue itself. Because of that, you can actually get a bit of authorship markup in there aswell.

The last one is one of the few that actually combine both the start rating system and an image, as well. You get even more real estate on there, and it’s more attractive to someone to click. One thing to notice here is that although they were number one for that specific search term, I’m going to trust that search result. They’ve got over 7,000 people who’ve actually agreed that the rating should be near five stars. I’m going to say to myself, “Not only do I like the look of that banana cake, but 7,000 people have also cooked and eaten it and been very pleased by it.”

I just want to talk about rel=“author” for a sec. It’s not a rich snippet, but I wanted to talk about it, because it’s now being integrated into a search result page. You can use any kind of head shot, and it all comes from your Google+ profile. As a tip, at the beginning when we launched 3 Door Digital, my image was black and white, and it was a plain white background. I then changed it to colour, and I’ve got a brighter background, and then after that I saw CTR double within days. Use something colourful, use a headshot, either be face-on or looking to the side, but at least be a little bit noticeable, so you as a person can be seen, and then if they search for something else, you’ll be noticed again.

You can also put coloured borders around it. It’s not against Google+’s terms and conditions and it works very well with Facebook advertising, and can also be applied here. At the bottom, I’m using Kenny Hotz, who’s a comedian based in Canada. He has a show called, Kenny vs Spenny, if anyone’s heard of it. I’ve just been working with him recently, and we’re going to be doing some testing on different variations.

On SEOmoz, Cyrus Shepard actually wrote quite a detailed blog post about variations and profile pictures. He used 4 different images of himself. He used about 8 variations of background colours, and tested all of them. Over here, Kenny’s looking at the actual search results itself, which may or may not indicate it’s a nonverbal conversion, if you were to point to a CTA on a page then you’re more likely to actually click it.

The last one is video thumbnails. This is the biggest thumbnail that you can actually have within a SERP. It alerts you that there’s actually more than just text on the page, there’s something to watch and listen to, and it also tells how long the video is. The top ones, date of search actually reviewed the WordPress video SEO plugin by Joost de Valk, that costs from $69, and it’s very easy to install if you have a WordPress blog. The great thing about it is that if you click the thumbnail, it just doesn’t open up and play video like it would if you were watching a video in the Facebook news feed, it actually goes into the page. You get the traffic, you get people reading it because you don’t need to have the video at the top, above the fold. People actually read it, and therefore, it’s more likely that they’ll stay on the site for you to convert them.

The really good thing about it is that if you don’t have a good development resource, you can actually submit a video sitemap. You can find more information on this within Google’s Video Sitemap page.

Lastly, I’ll give a few tips. I’d mark up as much as you can. As we’ve shown before, Schema has pretty much everything you can think of for stuff to mark up. Google is only going to use this more, and more… and more. You’ve seen this in the events themselves, that’s just in its infancy. It’s only going to evolve, and there’s going to be a time where you get everything you want on the search you want. You may just search, for example for, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it will not only integrate with your location, but the date. It will tell you when the next Red Hot Chili Peppers concert is in Jerusalem specifically. All of those things you should just do. It’s free to develop, except for time and results, and you might as well.

Another thing is make sure you get the author snippets in, as well as your star ratings. My friend Peter Handley, he works for theMediaFlow in England. He showed me one example he did, where he just did a normal recipe, a recipe snippet. He didn’t use a thumbnail or anything. He also has rel=“author” integrated into his site, and I can see that. He’s got star rating, his image, and he’s also got a little link, ‘More by Peter Handley’, which will go to his Google+ profile.

Lastly, check HTML. In the Google rich snippets testing area you can also, as well as inserting a URL, there’s an HTML tab so you don’t need to deal with anyone else to test things out. You don’t need to go to a developer; you can just develop yourself using the Schema.org instructions. Test it there without using any sites, or any test sites. Then from there, you can then forward that to the developer or then implement it very safely.

FireCask blog

Why Data Integrity Is The New Technical SEO

Schema is dead, right?

An SEO’s biggest threat: ambiguity

5 layers of data integrity

Aggregation, guidance and consumption

There is no consensus or agreed standard

What can you do about it now?

Don’t chase the protocol, own the layers underneath

Agentic Commerce Optimisation: Prepare For Google's UCP

UCP Isn’t Coming, It’s Here

UCP’s Six Layered Capabilities

Schema is, and will continue to be, essential

Prepare Your Merchant Center feed

Optimising conversational commerce attributes

Multi-modal fan-out selection

UCP’s roadmap is expanding into multi-verticals

Social proof and third-party perspective

TLDR: prepare now

Agentic Commerce: What SEOs Need To Consider (ACP & UCP)

What is Agentic Commerce?

Enter ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)

UCP: Google’s Answer To The Immersive Agentic Commerce Experience

Why This Matters for SEOs

ACO: Agentic Commerce Optimisation

schema.org is the Glue

Test the Agents

What can I do about it now?

ACP

UCP

Evolving Your SEO Strategy for AI Discovery

The Technological Rat Race

Old Hat is New Hat

The Web is Splitting into Two

“Short term wins” sounds like Black Hat.

Success metrics will change, not the execution to influence them

Is the emergence of AI going to render what I do as an SEO obsolete? No.

Revise your Success Metric Considerations

Same Same but Different… but Still Same

What CMOs Should Ask About Their WordPress Stack

What a Tech Stack Includes

The Invisible Cost of Cheap Hosting

What CMOs should ask:

Performance: The Business Metric Disguised as a Tech Metric

What CMOs should ask:

Deciding on a Theme should be Long Term

Bonus Consideration: Page Builders

What CMOs should ask:

Plugin-ception

Bonus: Some Plugins Require Attention Post-Installation

What CMOs should ask:

Security: Be Proactive, not Reactive

What CMOs should ask:

Maintenance: Forgotten until Required

What CMOs should ask:

“Frankenstein” Sites only get you So Far for So Long…

What CMOs should ask:

Key Takeaways

From Search To Discovery: Why SEO Must Evolve Beyond The SERP

The “Dawn” of the Zero-Click is over: it’s now assumed

From Answer Engines to Assistant Engines

Challenges are Different, but also the Same

The Shift of Success Metrics

What can you do about it?

LLMs.txt: the potential to be the new standard

Conclusion

WordPress Robots.txt: What Should You Include?

Where exactly is the WordPress robots.txt file?

The Default WordPress robots.txt (And Why It’s Not Enough)

Always Include: Your XML Sitemap(s)

First: Some things not to Block

Managing Staging Sites

Clean Up some Non-Essential Core WordPress Paths

Disallow Specific Query Parameters

Disallowing Low-Value Taxonomies and SERPs

Monitor on Crawl Stats

Final Thought

How To Improve Speed And Performance For A WordPress Site

Choose a reputable web hosting company

Server optimisations and CDNs