Blogs
Dedicated Brunch with Branded3 room? Check. Two industry-leading SEO experts? Check. Plenty of coffee and muffins? Double-check. Yep, we’re all set for our second instalment of Brunch with Branded3 this morning at 11:30am, and we can’t wait for you to join.
If you’re stopping for a cup of tea and a bite to eat this morning, coincide it with our hour-long Google+ Hangout in which Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice will be answering all of your SEO and Search Marketing questions live.
Patrick and Tim will be leading the Hangout and will be joined by nine Search enthusiasts for what looks set to be an interesting discussion.
Follow Branded3 now on Google+ so you can watch the Hangout live in full, and you can still register here if you want to be sent a link to the video afterwards.
If you’re watching the Hangout, don’t forget to leave us your questions for Tim and Patrick on our Google+ wall, or simply tweet us using the hash-tag #B3Brunch for a chance of getting in answered within the session.
See you at 11:30!
Since November 22nd we have been noticing a new trend with how Google applies algorithms to detect bad links. Earlier in 2012 the focus was very much around major penalisations where a site would literally disappear overnight for lots of keywords but the trend across November, December and January is very much about Google reducing the rankings of certain sites gradually week after week.
We all know that Google has algorithms to detect bad links and the evidence of this was very visible earlier in 2012 but with this latest change Google seems to have developed the capability to continually detect and devalue bad links as part of the standard crawl process, something they were never very good at before. The net result of this is that as Google completes a crawl of a website and the sites linking to it they can devalue those links in real time rather than waiting to roll out a major update such as Penguin or a manual link penalty. Continue reading »
The announcement of Facebook’s newest feature has had the world of social media abuzz with rumours and predictions. The world’s largest platform has finally found a use for the deluge of data they have collected over the years and much like the Google Knowledge Graph, the Graph Search works on a basis of connection, from one piece of data to the next.
In order to make sense of the huge treasure pot of social information harboured by the platform, the Graph Search creators at Facebook have divided all information into four categories; People, Photos (and videos), Places and Interests.
The Graph Search bar is far more advanced than that on offer currently and is designed to give highly precise search results. The Graph Search is presently in Beta and is only open to a few thousand people, unsurprisingly, in the USA. You can sign up to the waiting list and get more information on the functions here.
Join us in our second instalment of Brunch with Branded3 on Thursday 24th January at 11:30am, where we’ll be discussing all things Search and answering your questions.
Better still, as a thank you to the nine participants chosen to get involved in the Hangout, we’ll be sending them a free muffin to extend their Brunch experience! Register here for your chance to be chosen as a participant.
Due to popular demand, the hour-long Google+ Hangout next week will be led once again by Search experts Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice, giving you the free chance to ask them anything you like about SEO.
Our first Brunch with Branded3 Hangout was a great success with questions focusing mostly on link penalties and the disavow tool and we’re looking forward to the same great turn-out next week, too.
If you’d like to get involved in the discussion for yourself and ask Tim or Patrick a question, then simply register here and we’ll let you know before the Hangout if you’ve been selected.
Don’t worry if you’re not though, as you can still watch the live Hangout in full as it takes place on our Google+ page, just make sure to follow us so you can see it!
You can also tweet us your questions live during the session using the hash-tag #B3Brunch or leave a comment on our Google+ page and Tim and Patrick will try their best to answer them all.
So if you fancy a spot of Brunch with our SEO experts next week, and possibly the chance of a tasty free muffin, simply register now and we’ll see you on the 24th!
Most people who buy a product online don’t make a purchase on their first visit and this causes problems for sites trying to track sales and allocate them to a particular channel. When you take into consideration different screens (work PC, laptop, iPad, phone etc) and offline conversions as well the problem gets even bigger.
The best quote I’ve seen about this is by Avinash Kaushik where he states:
If you happen to be in a larger company, say you spend more than $10 million on digital marketing per year, you’ll quickly see, having learned to be less wrong over time, that the question you want to answer with multi-channel attribution modeling is not “who gets how much credit” but rather “how can I optimally balance my digital marketing portfolio.”
Knowing who gets credit for each particular sale is largely irrelevant unless you are trying to prove ROI on a channel. The really important thing we need to do as an agency is increase the effectiveness of the overall search marketing campaign and drive more conversions. If SEO plays a role in assisting the conversion rather than driving the last interaction this is still a conversion path that we can optimise for.
The best way to do this is by understanding your customers & their search patterns and implementing a content strategy designed to optimise for secondary & tertiary conversions. Most people just optimise an SEO campaign for last click conversions but this really isn’t the best way of doing things. Continue reading »
Our development team is always keen to hear about new ways to improve efficiency and reduce the time it takes to code without compromising on quality. For example, if there’s a way we can use fewer keystrokes when writing code or executing commands, we’re all for it!
Have a think about which tasks you find yourself repeating every day, and how you could streamline the process to knock off a few seconds or even a few minutes off. It could be simple tasks such as:
- Opening your vital applications and helpful utilities
- Accessing your projects directory
- Adding entries to your hosts file
- Opening your Shell Profile / PowerShell Profile
- Accessing remote servers
We’re delighted to announce that we’ve kicked the New Year off in style by opening a brand new office in London!
Expert Search Strategists from our industry-leading SEO division are heading up the London team, offering a much more accessible base for our southern-based and European clients.
With plenty of our valued clients based in the capital; a move to London has always been inevitable for Branded3; and after another fantastic year of growth for the company which has included the acquisition of plenty of European clients too, we’ve taken the jump and set up shop in the big city.
Our London base will be a hub of Search & Digital strategy, with most of the execution being carried out in our Leeds head-quarters.
Our CEO Vin Chinnaraja, comments on how the London office fits into Branded3’s bigger picture:
“A London base has always been on the cards for Branded3, and the launch is right on target for our plans to expand into Europe.
“This is a really exciting phase for the agency and it marks the start of many more future office openings.”
With a new office in the Farringdon area of the city, we’re encouraging any neighbours to pop by and say hi!
We’ll be making more appointments in the coming months and hope to grow the expert team considerably over the year, with a move to a more permanent location in the capital by this summer.
If you’ve got any questions about the new office or want to get in touch with the London team, feel free to drop us an email and we’ll be happy to get back to you.
The holiday season is finally upon us, and we’ll be shutting our laptops and putting down our pencils at 5pm today to enjoy the festive break at home.
But before that, we’ve got some celebrating to do! We’ve enjoyed a pizza lunch, a SingStar competition, and Secret Santa, all in the name of Christmas. Take a look through some of today’s snaps (please excuse the dodgy Christmas jumpers…):
2012 was the year that Social Media was no longer regarded as the ‘add-on’ service, or the ‘we should be doing it but we don’t know why’ service. It’s the year that its cultural and political influence was established, and its business potential was confirmed.
Social Media is inherent in all of our projects, whether it’s an ecommerce build or an SEO campaign, and this year we’ve had some fantastic Social Media successes for clients which have demonstrated its business worth.
We’re saying goodbye to 2012 by taking a look back on our five most memorable Social Media highlights of the year:
This year has been huge for SEO; Google is finally clamping down on cheap, easy link-building and rewarding those sites with authentic, high-quality and engaging content.
The SEO industry is shedding its shady reputation and being recognised as a skilful online marketing art. Here are five of the most memorable updates the Branded3 SEO team were talking about this year:
Keeping track of Google algorithm updates is a time consuming job and one that you should try to make as straightforwards as possible – there are much more effective ways to spend your time than monitoring whether Google had made a big change. Having said that it’s still important that you understand when a change has happened so you can do the analysis at the time rather than just seeing the impact in your month end reporting and then trying to figure out when the change happened.
Some people say that ranking data is becoming less important and Raven Tools are no longer going to show the data in their system. The problem is that without ranking data it’s very hard to diagnose technical site issues, spot algorithm changes and perform an effective SEO campaign. Google has removed lots of keyword data via “not provided” and the recent update of Chrome while Apple has removed more with iOS6 so in 2013 we are anticipating that good ranking data will be more important than ever in a large scale SEO campaign.
Below are 5 really easy ways for you to monitor Google algorithm changes via aggregated ranking data & some nice free/paid tools.
With Christmas and the New Year just around the corner, we’ve decided to take a look back on 2012 and what it brought for Digital.
Working within such a fast-paced industry, we often have to adapt quickly to technology updates and trends, and our Digital team have found that these five updates in particular have changed the way they work this year:
Latest from B3Labs
- Another milestone reached for Branded3 as it’s acquired by the
St Ives Group - The latest media consumer findings & what they mean for digital marketers
- Talk to Branded3 at @BuyYorkshire in Leeds next week!
Latest from Blogstorm
- Why your press releases are getting you penalised
- After five years, Google still doesn’t know how to rank images
- Tickets now on sale for the next #B3Seminar in London – book now!
