During his speech, Herbst revealed what he dubbed the 12 rounds of SEO challenges, before explaining how, like the lead character of the much loved ‘Rocky’ film, SEO is an “undervalued fighter”. The 12 rounds could be summarised as involving: understanding the company’s needs; continually improving; knowing the competition; conducting short- and long-term planning; building a business case; aligning resources; taking on appropriate new staff; evangelizing internally; building customer engagement; aiming for long-term investments and payoffs; aiming for multi-channel marketing; and accepting the difficulty of keeping track of technological changes and advancements.

Through using the high quality and reliable SEO services available from Jumping Spider Media, many UK businesses can be assisted in crafting a SEO campaign which truly has the ‘eye of the tiger’.

You can contact us to learn more about how these services can help your company to rise up to the challenges of its rivals.

The website describes itself in its debut blog post as “a blog by working copywriters that’s dedicated to exposing bad creative work”, describing that as “the stuff that gives advertising a label of distrust, a negative stigma, a bad name”. It pledges that “We’ll tell it straight but it’s probably what you’re already thinking”, before concluding the post with the declaration that, “By influencing a rise in creative standards, our hope is to make the world a better—more entertaining and less annoying—place to live in”.

Companies that wish to avoid in their own text copy the kind of advertising blunders pointed out by ‘Terrible Copywriter’ can do so with the assistance of the copywriting services available from Jumping Spider Media. Well-written web copy can be beneficial for not just your website’s users, but also its search engine rankings and, therefore, its online visibility and the overall Internet marketing campaign for your website.

As a highly regarded SEO provider, Jumping Spider Media can guide you through the various stages of creating an effective landing page. Although there are, of course, design features that can allow your landing page to make a bigger impact, the focus of today’s blog is on the written content of your landing page.

What is the purpose of your landing page?

Top SEO providers realise the importance of establishing the purpose of the landing page in question – for example, whether it is intended to achieve a direct sale or instead, provide a product or service in exchange for information such as an email address.

To be able to do that, though, you’ll need to first figure out what your online company’s Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is – namely, what it is that your firm offers and what makes it better than the offering of a competitor. This will need to be sharply defined so that you can explain, perhaps with the use of bullet points, the advantages of your products or services over those of any other company.

As part of the writing process, you will also need to define and understand your audience, which is again something in which the best SEO providers – such as Jumping Spider Media – have expertise.

Use the most compelling calls to action

Remember that the right headlines and sub-headings can play a critical role in improving the image of your company, product or service in addition to engaging them to invest. Such headlines should be relevant and reiterate the main benefit of the given product or service.

Also of great importance to a well-written landing page is one or more ‘calls to action’ that prompt visitors to take action of some kind. You’ll need more of these as your page increases in length, to help to keep your visitors focused on the purchasing process.

Here at Jumping Spider Media, we are an SEO provider that knows how to write landing pages so that they are effective as part of your wider SEO campaign. Call us now for more information on now we can do just that.

Worried about it? Not sure if it has had any impact on you? Well, we’re a couple of months down the line now. Check your search-related traffic from the day it was launched (April 24, 2012) and it should become fairly apparent if Penguin has hit you or not. If it has and your search-related traffic has taken a turn for the worse, the recommended move is to filter through your website and remove any spam. If you’re not sure, or truly believe that your website is spam-free, but Penguin has still had a negative effect on your ranking, remove anything that could be interpreted as spam.

Penguin can’t be “fixed” either. Ignore any emails that offer that service to you. Instead, put all your efforts into building authority into your webpages, and only optimise those that directly drive traffic through your website. Battering Google with hundreds of news feeds and updates will not push your rankings up. Anything that is not unique, interesting or relevant to your website must go. Don’t be scared to sacrifice elements. Be more discerning as to what you want your site to say and how you are going to say it. Penguin has been introduced to promote good content by moving toward a method of penalising poor content. Selectively optimise and make Penguin work for you. But what you mustn’t do is panic and look for the quick fix. It won’t work.

Using a poor Pay Per Click management service could potentially cost you a fortune in your online marketing campaign, particularly if it leads you to get caught in bidding wars, suffer poor conversion rates or pay for a lot of “junk” traffic. A poor Pay Per Click management service could see you spending a huge amount of company time and resources which could be more effectively spent elsewhere.

Online marketing campaign

However, using a management service provided by Jumping Spider Media as part of your online marketing campaign can help you to avert the aforementioned problems. For a start, the specialist staff here at Jumping Spider Media are thoroughly knowledgeable and experienced concerning best practice for keyword usage. Secondly, we can help you to use web analytics to lower your Cost Per Conversion (CPC) and boost your Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) without increasing your budget.

Thirdly, we can advise you on monitoring and addressing click fraud and also provide ongoing results analysis to enable you to continually measure the effectiveness of your Pay Per Click management service. And our clients have considerable choice concerning the level of control that they have over their PPC campaigns.

Why is this so? Well, SEO providers like Jumping Spider Media know that search engine spiders are concerned with finding the most up-to-date information, not least as this will maximise the relevance of the results that a search engine provides in response to a user’s particular query. After all, it is relevance to the human user that search engines are driven by, above all else.

When you are running an online business, there are so many changes that can take place that can impact on its relevance to the human user right here, right now. Who, after all, wants to be directed to an online store that has that product that they have long been searching for, only to discover that its price has been markedly increased or it has gone out of stock? Similarly, a blog that is devoted to the latest industry news may not have been touched for a while, again making it practically useless to the end user.

Target Humans & Spiders!

So, in summary, there are two main groups that SEO providers must please when they are providing your site with fresh content – the search engine spiders and human users. Both groups play a key role in determining your ultimate online revenues, and as a consequence, ultimately go hand-in-hand when SEO providers are producing new content for your website.

By having high quality and relevant content continually added to your site by SEO provider Jumping Spider Media, you can therefore really build your company’s brand, establishing yourself as a company that can be depended upon not only for the highest standard of relevant products and services, but also for all of the associated industry news, information and advice.

Our team of copywriters here at SEO provider Jumping Spider Media are trained in copywriting, journalism and research, and provide a highly effective service for maintaining your site’s relevance to the search engines that also encompasses press release writing, newsletter writing and even the setting up and subsequent maintenance of Twitter accounts.

To learn more about our services click here or send us an email.

It’s always great to receive a call from a publication you read regularly, especially one which is a household name. Last week when the Financial Times called to let me know they had picked up some blog pieces and content created by Jumping Spider Media for a client and would like to arrange an interview, it felt great.  Of course this can’t be done for all clients – the subject matter and fortunate timing is key – but improved visibility can result in much more than Google rankings. The client in question was Ryness Electrical and due to the banning of 60 watt light bulbs in September 2011, the FT wanted to know the consumer impact this would have.

Following the interview and subsequent published article, the exposure for Ryness has been great and the piece (although surrounded by a paywall online) produced some great traffic – http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8e27e850-d3c4-11e0-bc6b-00144feab49a.html#axzz1WhJNzQ1O.

The next call was from the BBC, asking similar questions but from different angles. This time, the interview which was set up with Ryness via us here at JSM,resulted in online exposure – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14743785 – the video on this link was broadcast in the morning news on BBC1 and BBC News 24. The respect and quality of the Beeb is unrivalled and the site is one of the most authoratitive in the world.

Creating quality, original content is the backbone of any SEO campaign. Yes, the content has to be plentiful and for exposure like this you need to be in the right place at the right time, but without the work of our trained online journalists and copywriters here at Jumping Spider, these publications would never have picked up the phone to get their scoop.

We never lose sight of the fact that content as part of an SEO campaign is primarily for rankings, but we believe in over-delivering. Why shouldn’t that content deliver  in terms of traditional PR and branding exposure as well? And if that results in the BBC, the FT or – as has been the case with other clients – the Daily Mail , A Place in the Sun and respected trade journals publicising our clients along the way, then that works for us. And, more importantly, that works for our clients.

Posted by Gareth

Here at Jumping Spider Media, we’re so entrenched in the world of search marketing that we can forget that not everyone is well versed in SEO (search engine optimisation), so it sometimes helps to go back to basics and remind ourselves of the basic drivers behind carrying out an SEO campaign. Why bother to carry out an SEO campaign at all?

Most people have at least heard of the term SEO by now and are aware that a search marketing industry has grown up around it. Search engine optimisation is the term used to refer to activities which are carried out in order to make a website visible to the search engines and get its pages indexed with the search engines in order to return them as high ranking results in the organic search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain keyterms. But what is the point of SEO – why is it so important to bother marketing your website in this way? Here are, in our opinion, the top 3 reasons why SEO is vital to the marketing success of any company:

1) A changing world. People no longer use the Yellow Pages or business directories to find businesses; they use search engines. And look at TV advertising: increasingly companies advertising on TV are not even telling their captive audience what their website is. They are simply relying on the fact that they know people will use search engines, saying, find us online by searching ‘vacuum cleaner’, ‘army jobs’ or whatever it is that they are promoting.

The first thing people do when looking for any product or service in this changing world is log on to Google and search for it. ‘Italian restaurant in Essex’; ‘sports therapist’; ‘plumbers in Manchester’; ‘SEO provider’; whatever it is they are looking for, overwhelmingly people are now heading straight to Google (et al) to find it. Simply having a website isn’t enough. If you’re a plumbing company in Manchester who isn’t carrying out an SEO campaign (or an SEO provider that isn’t, for that matter!) your website will not be returned in the SERPs. And if you’re not returned in the SERPs, not only will none of those searchers find you; they’ll find your local competitors that are carrying out an SEO campaign.

2) Targeted traffic. Now we’ve ascertained that in this changing world, any company wanting to reach out to customers must be visible in the search engines, let’s consider the second reason to SEO: the ability to reach out to the right customers. Car companies who pay millions for the best TV advertising slots would gladly pay even more if they could be ensured that the people viewing their advert were their target demographic and in the market to buy a new car. This is in effect what you do when you SEO – target those customers who are actively searching for your product or service by entering your website’s keywords into search engines. By bringing targeted traffic to your site, SEO is bringing paying customers to your door; and for a far lower investment than with pay per click advertising (PPC).

3) Reliability.The third reason why SEO is vital, and arguably more valuable than other forms of marketing such as PPC, is its reliability. Carrying out a paid search campaign, while having benefits such as instant traffic, is generally more expensive than carrying out an SEO campaign. Not only that, but both PPC and banner advertising only work until your (significant) allocated marketing budget depletes. With PPC, as soon as you have reached your budget your website disappears from the SERPs, whereas SEO your site in the right way and you’ll have long-term visibility. Many people choose to rely on SEO to help them gradually reduce their advertising budget on PPC, in the knowledge that there is more long-term reliability with SEO, and that research proves that more people click on the organic listings than the paid ads.

These are just three of the many reasons to SEO, but when you consider the ubiquity of a search marketing strategy in this changing world, choosing the strategy that will bring your website paying customers without costing the earth and one which ensures long-term, reliable results is surely something that every company would strive for.

Posted by Louise

Blogging has exploded from the world of the technology geek to the mainstream in the past few years. The term is a shortened version of ‘web log’ and refers to a website created to log regular commentary and opinion. Originally, blogs were online diaries written by individuals who would often link to other blogs and websites, creating a blogging community both within sectors of society (mothers; film buffs; DIY enthusiasts, etc.) and across society as a whole. Interactivity has become an important part of blogging, with the ability for readers to leave comments, interacting with both the blogger and other readers.

Blogging has since become big business, leading to lucrative book deals, massive advertising revenue and in some cases, allowing the blogger to quit their day job and earn a very respectable living as a blogger. Wherever there is money to be made, the corporate world pricks up its ears, and blogging is no exception. While a company’s blog will not get the hits and therefore the advertising revenue of lifestyle blogs, the ability to interact at such a direct level with customers, both existing and potential, proved too good to resist. 81 of the Fortune 500 companies (16%) now have blogs, in industries as diverse as retail, technology, food and beverages and pharmaceuticals.

What is perhaps more interesting is that the Inc. 500, the fastest-growing private companies in the US, has as much as 39% of the list blogging. These companies may have more freedom to blog, less restricted by the legal teams working away on behalf of the big oil companies, for instance. But it is also in all likelihood because smaller companies stand to gain far more than huge, established corporations. Blogging is all about engaging with the public, something companies have been attempting to do through focus groups and highly paid advertising for years. Blogs, if executed in the right way, engage more directly with the public than through just about any other platform.

So what is the right way? We’ve already discussed how not to use social media in the case of one high street brand and the micro-blogging site Twitter. But what should a company do when it comes to their blog, and what do they stand to gain?

Be real If you have the resources, have someone in-house blog for you, someone who has a real day-to-day understanding of your company, the latest products and services, etc. If you don’t, consider using an SEO provider or digital marketing company to blog for you, but make sure they take the time to really understand your company so that they can blog about what will really matter to your customers. Remember, this is not the arena to create an ideal image of your company, but rather to show a real , more relaxed image.

Interact 90 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs have the comments feature enabled. If you’re scared of what people may say about your company in the comments, you should probably not blog. A core part of the power of the business blog is being able to reach out to your customers and in turn for them to have their say. Even if that is negative, you then have the chance to remedy that problem, win back that customer (and others) and get invaluable market research on a product or service in the process.

Don’t sell. Add value! The two things most likely to turn off a reader of your blog are to be fake and to be overtly selling. Of course you want your blog to support your business, but this is not the platform from which to sell. Give your customers content that is useful to them, that is interesting, that is informative, and they will keep coming back for more. You may not have sold them a product, but you have kept their interest and created a positive relationship. The king of advertising, David Ogilvy, famously stated that “The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.” Your blog is your chance to be highly informative; by doing so you are persuading your customers to stick with you.

It’s all about the customer Don’t fall into the trap of making your blog all about you and your company. You will, of course, be writing about things that are happening in your business and the surrounding industry, but the entire point is to make that relevant to the reader. Even blogs which are essentially online diaries of an individual’s day-to-day musings are most successful when they are aimed squarely at the reader: this is what I think, what do you think?; this is something you may find interesting; this happened to me, has something similar happened to you?

This just touches the surface of what makes a good blog, but if you adhere to these core principals you won’t go far wrong. And what, after all this, does your company stand to gain? You will know your customer better; you will know your products and services better; you will start to build a community around your company; and – most importantly – you will start to build a brand buzz. A viral buzz about your brand is often what it takes to get your company to the next level. And – you never know – you could create that holy grail of customers, the “customer evangelist”: someone who is so impressed by your product or service that they become outspoken “evangelists” for your company.