My name is Michael James, I am a driven postgraduate part of the Bristol UWE Alumni. I am known for:
Thriving in social environments and building strong professional relationships.
Demonstrating an unwavering work ethic and relentless pursuit of goals.
Embracing challenges as opportunities for growth and learning.
Balancing academic rigor with a love for sports and active lifestyle.
My current area of work is UX/UI design and digital marketing, with a passion for enhancing brand images in the digital space. Currently exploring opportunities to collaborate on projects that push the boundaries of digital design and marketing. Keen to contribute my skills to forward-thinking teams and exciting initiatives in this dynamic field.
If you would like to learn more about myself and have any positions open..
Please contact me!
07873168911
https://mikeyj100.github.io/portfoliopage/
In the U.S. there are over 3 million B2B businesses, 86% of which use their website as their primary source of lead generation.
Yet, 48% of customers have described B2B marketing as ‘boring.’ So where does that leave your site? And what can you do to stand out as one of the interesting ones?
According to a Forrester report, 94% of survey respondents use at least one search channel for consideration/purchase, so the importance of having an engaging and appealing website should never be underestimated.
By creating a memorable digital experience, you can ensure your website users will remember and return to your website when they’re ready to buy a product or service.
The term ‘website design’ has 49.5k searches monthly in the U.S. according to Semrush. Clearly this is a topic on plenty of people’s minds – and for good reason.
In fact, it’s reported that first impressions of a website are 94% design-related. And to top that off, these impressions can be formed in as little as 50 milliseconds.
People often see B2B website design as corporate, outdated, or just plain boring. Whether it’s because the products B2B companies sell are more specialist or niche or because of complex sales cycles.
But times are changing. With digital designers and web design evolving hand in hand, website design has never been so full of possibility.
However, it goes deeper than designing for appearance alone. The most successful websites also apply user experience (UX) best practices to ensure their functionality matches.
Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios, coined the 7 principles of UX. These principles outline what affective UX should be:
If you can make your B2B website tick all these boxes, your site is much more likely to succeed in the marketplace.
This is because you should always be thinking about the user when it comes to your digital presence. This is how you make your audience feel valued and provide them with a stress-free digital experience.
Many business-to-business companies aren’t aware of the capabilities of their website, so they haven’t made moves to update their digital presence. This means if you take these steps, you’ll be setting yourself apart from the competition, and will stick in the mind of your customers.
After all, if 38% of consumers will bounce from a website if they find the design unattractive, ensuring yours is top-notch can help secure more business.
What’s more, user experience is a big factor in Conversion Rate Optimisation – meaning the better your UX design, the more likely people will take actions that benefit your business. That could be booking a call or product demo, filling in an enquiry form, or making a purchase.
The content that sits on your website is important for so many reasons. If the content on your site isn’t clear, relevant or well thought out, you stand to lose customers.
Your website content also reflects who you are – your personality as a business. It gives you the opportunity to add a personal touch to your buyer’s journey and build a connection with your audience.
It also tells prospects exactly what you do and the services you provide. So, ensuring your website content is optimised is key.
Your content may include headings, body copy, blogs, product descriptions, reports, whitepapers/ebooks, videos, and an array of other assets.
Content isn’t just about entertaining and informing your visitors. It’s also key to boosting your search engine optimisation (SEO) score.
As Google Search Central puts it, SEO is ‘about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine.’
One of the main aims of boosting your SEO is to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This means your website will appear higher on the google search page when people search for certain terms.
The terms you want to rank for could be down to your industry, your services, your location, and more. These terms are known as ‘keywords’. The higher you rank for your chosen keywords, the more likely you are to get page visitors.
A hurdle that many B2B companies face is getting ahead of competitors who may be operating in the same industry or selling similar services. But, by harnessing the power of SEO, you can increase your chances of outranking them and being discovered by more potential customers.
When deciding on the keywords you want to rank for as a business, it’s important to look for words that have a high monthly search volume, but low competition. This means people are actively searching for it, but not many other businesses are focusing on ranking for this term.
Ensuring your website content is helping your site stand out isn’t purely about technical optimisation and analytics.
Making your content engaging and unique goes a long way when it comes to differentiating yourself. And with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, originality is set to become even more important (and more rare, perhaps).
When planning the content you want to include on the website, you need a strategy. This strategy should consider elements such as:
By combining these personal aspects of your business, you are creating a recipe for a one-of-a-kind content plan.
Having unique content is so important because 40% of all final decision makers in the B2B marketplace say there is more thought leadership content than they can manage.
So, you now must work even harder to capture the attention of your prospects without drowning in the sea of generic thought leadership.
Business-to-business companies get an unfair reputation for being overly corporate and boring. It’s time to change that perception and start bringing more innovation and design flair to these markets.
Your website says so much about you as a business, so you can’t afford to let yours simply be ‘middle of the road’.
Using a combination of outstanding design and groundbreaking content, you can get ahead of the competition in a saturated market and gain new customers.
So, if your B2B website is looking like it needs a boost, get in touch with us at [email protected].
If you’re new to SEO or just want to learn the basics, this article is for you. As an expert team of SEOers , we understand that it can be difficult to understand all of the terminology, definitions and jargon that are often used in technical, off-page, and on-page SEO.
It’s important to know the different SEO terms because this knowledge enables you to inform and optimise your website’s content and practices. For example, if you know what backlinks, meta data, and keywords are, you can locate areas for improvement on your site and use each of these elements to help your website rank higher organically on a search engine.
We have compiled this helpful glossary to make it easier to get to grips with the basics. We hope this can help inform and build your knowledge around SEO, frequently used technical language to help you implement positive changes to your website that will get your business more visible online.
The glossary is split into three key sections below, to help you make sense of the different terminology used in SEO – Technical Terms, On Page Terms and Off Page Terms.
A-G
Caffeine
This is the name for Google’s modern web indexing system, created in 2010, enabling incremental indexing. As a result, there is a shorter delay between Google bots crawling your site and then being indexed, so Google can update its content more often and faster, and the SERP stays up to date. This is why it’s important that website content is kept fresh. See Crawling and Indexing.
Canonical tag
It’s a way to control duplicate content. When you have pages with similar content, you can add a canonical tag to the <head> section of the page, thereby telling search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in SERPs. Although, Google may not always choose the page you have designated the ‘master’ page. See Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Content management system (CMS)
A software that helps you build a website without having to do all the coding. Various examples include Shopify, HubSpot, and WordPress.
CMS migration
The process of moving a website from one CMS to another.
Crawling
This is the process in which search engine bots will look (or ‘crawl’) through your website and explore its content. Crawlers follow URLs and download the content on their pages to view it.
H-P
Hreflang tags
These tags are used when your website has multiple languages. It allows google to present the correct version of a website depending on a users’ location.
HTML sitemap
Similar to an XML sitemap, though written for humans (and bots), a HTML sitemap lists all the pages of a website to improve navigability.
HTTPS
In comparison to HTTP, HTTPS occurs when a website is SSL-encrypted, and is therefore more secure. It is also one of Google’s ranking factors and is a way for search engine’s to verify that your website is secure, and a user’s data is safer.
Image compression
When images take up too much space, and slow down the speed of a page, their file can be compressed so they take up less storage.
Indexing
After a website has been crawled, the data viewed by search bots is stored and subsequently ranked by Google, though its ranking depends on various factors, and displayed on SERPs. See Crawling and Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Log file
This contains a record of every interaction a bot and human have had with your site. They are an important aspect of technical SEO to understand how crawlers interact with a website and should be proactively audited to fix any crawl error issues.
Meta tag
A meta tag is an HTML tag used to provide metadata (information about the webpage) to search engines and web browsers. Meta tags are placed inside the section of an HTML document and are not visible to users. Instead, they give important information that can affect how the page is displayed or indexed.
NoIndex tag
This is a meta tag placed in the section of a page and allows a search bot to crawl a page, but not index it, so it will not appear on a SERP. This is useful for low value or non-public pages, because search engines still need to know these exist on your site, for example, ‘thank you’ or payment pages.
NoFollow tag
When a search engine bot comes across a link on your site, you can add a nofollow meta tag to the section of a page, instructing them to ignore that link and not follow that link trail.
Orphan pages
These are pages which have no internal links to them, making it very difficult for a crawler to find them. These pages are also a missed SEO opportunity, as they do not pass link equity. See Internal Links and Crawling.
Plugins
Software extensions for web pages, allowing its content to be customised, for example improving a page’s loading speed (although they can become a security risk if not added properly).
Q-Z
Redirecting URLs
These are used to direct an existing URL to another. For example, if you were moving your site to a new domain, using a redirect would simply transfer users from previous web pages to your new ones seamlessly. They are a key way to transfer existing authority and ‘juice’ your pages have.
Rendering
After a website has been crawled, a search engine will then render its pages. It takes information from HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to generate how a page will appear to a user.
Robots meta tag
A piece of HTML code that tells search engines how to crawl, index, and then display a web page’s content on the SERP. See Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Robots text file (robots.txt)
Encompasses a set of instructions for bots, to understand which parts of your website to crawl and index, and which to leave out e.g., thank you pages.
Schema markup
Keeping up with AI algorithms, this is a good way of highlighting certain parts of your website to make sure they show up on SERPs.
XML sitemap
A list of all the pages on a website, written specifically for crawlers, in the form of coding.
A-E
Alternative text (alt text)
Text, included in HTML code, that is used to describe an image on a webpage, increasing a website’s accessibility.
Anchor text
This refers to the word or phrase of text you use when inserting a clickable link. In the example, ‘check out the new Varn website’, the anchor text is Varn website.
Breadcrumb navigation
A way to improve user experience by showing users how they got to the page they are on, so they don’t have to keep clicking the back button.
Cache
In SEO, a cache refers to a stored version of a webpage by search engines or browsers to improve load times and user experience by serving the saved content quickly instead of retrieving it from the server each time.
Click-through rate (CTR)
How many people have clicked on your ad divided by the number of people who saw it (impressions), presented as a percentage.
Commercial search intent
When a user has interest in certain products and is trying to educate themselves in order to decide what to purchase. See Search Intent.
Crawl budget
Search engine bots cannot crawl a page forever, they have a crawl budget and will only search through a certain amount of pages in a given timeframe.
Crawl demand
How often google wants to crawl a page – this is dependent on the authority of a page and how often it is updated. See Domain Authority.
Crawler directives
Crawler directives are instructions given to search engine bots (like via robots.txt or meta tags) to control how they should crawl, index, or avoid certain parts of a website.
Crawl rate limit
The rate at which a google bot can crawl site, without overloading your server, giving a poor User Experience. See User Experience (UX).
Cumulative layout shift (CLS)
The amount your webpage shifts as more content loads.
Traffic that has got to a website from entering its domain in the address bar. Essentially, a user doesn’t need to get to a website through a search engine, social media, or an external resource.
Eager loading is a web development technique where all necessary related data is loaded in advance, typically in a single query, to prevent the need for multiple database calls later, improving performance in certain situations. See Lazy loading.
Email traffic
Traffic directed to your website via clicking on a link on a marketing email.
Determined by content quality, visitor engagement, and backlinks. See Backlinks.
Expertise Experience Authoritativeness Trustworthiness (EEAT)
A website needs to prove it can be trusted and that it is legitimate. Showing reviews of products/services, adding information about authors, and adding relevant content to a website aligns with this criteria.
External links
Links on your website that point users to another site by another business. See Internal Links.
F-N
Features snippet
A featured snippet is a type of SERP feature. A short description of a search query that appears above a website’s URL on a SERP (they usually appear at the top). See SERP feature.
First input delay (FID)
The amount of time it takes for your website to respond to the first interaction with a users.
F pattern theory
Theory that the user will mainly look on the left side of the webpage, and examine the top of the page.
Fold of a website
The bottom of the screen and everything below it that requires the user to scroll.
Hero of a website
The part of the website that the user sees first when the website loads.
Image carousel
An image carousel is an example of a SERP feature. The sliding row of images that appears towards the top of a SERP, displaying a series of products with an image, short description, and price. See SERP feature.
Informational landing pages
Provide quality and in-depth content, describing a specific topic so users understand. Informational landing pages will ideally rank for keywords with informational search intent.
Informational search intent
When a user is visiting for the purpose of learning something – they are typically not interested in buying yet but could be open to it. See Search Intent.
Internal links
Links on your website that connect to other pages on your site. See External Links.
Interstitials
Full-screen advertisements, typically appearing as pop-ups.
Keyword cannibalization
This occurs when multiple pages on a website target the same or very similar keywords, so end up competing against each other in the SERP. See Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Largest contentful paint (LCP)
The amount of time it takes for the largest piece of content to load.
Layer-cake pattern theory
Theory that the user will focus on the headings and subheadings, as they act as signposts for information.
Lazy loading
Lazy loading is a web development technique that delays the loading of non-essential resources (like images or videos) until they are needed, improving initial page load speed and performance. See Eager loading.
Local pack
A local pack is a SERP feature that appears towards the top of a results page, and includes a map of the closest businesses to the user, often with star ratings and links to their websites. See SERP feature.
Long-tail keywords
More specific phrases 3 to 6 words long that customers will search for, typically when the user is further along in the buying process. See Short-tail Keywords.
Meta description
The short description of the webpage that appears under the meta title on a SERP. See Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Meta title
The title of each page of a website that appears on the SERP. See Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Mobile-first indexing
The structure and function of a mobile site will hold greater value when determining the rank and visibility of a website because Google will put the mobile version of a site before the desktop version.
Navigational search intent
When the user already knows what they want and is searching for a specific website or product. See Search Intent.
O-Z
Organic content
Any content that users find by themselves that doesn’t rely on paid marketing techniques, for example, blog posts, social media posts, and user-generated content.
Organic search
The ‘natural’ ranking of websites, excluding all the paid search. See Paid Ads.
Organic traffic
Traffic to a website through unpaid, natural search engine results, as opposed to paid ads or direct traffic. It is driven by users searching for information and clicking on links that appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Page speed
The amount of time it takes for a web page to load.
Pagination
Dividing a long list of content into multiple pages to stop infinite scrolling.
Paid ads
These will appear above the organic search results, marked by a little ‘Ad’ icon. See Organic Search.
Paid search traffic
All traffic that has arrived at your website from paid advertising in a SERP.
Pay per click (PPC)
A digital marketing strategy where businesses bid an amount of money on a certain keyword to have their ad appear on a SERP. See Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Product landing pages
Have only as much information as you need to describe the product, and have breadcrumbs to other parts of your site.
Rich snippets
Add extra descriptions of the content on a site e.g., ratings or events information. See Snippet.
Referral traffic
Traffic to a website via a link on another website.
Schema markup
Coding on the site, that the user doesn’t see, to help search engines understand your content.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
The page that a search engine serves to a user in response to a query. The higher the position a link is on the SERP, the more likely it is to be clicked.
Search intent
The primary goal a user has when visiting your site. This is used in reference to keywords, and can usually be broken down into 4 categories. See Commercial search intent, Informational search intent, Navigational search intent, and transactional search intent.
Search generative experience (SGE)
Google’s use of generative AI to give users a summary answer to their search query, improving user experience.
Search volume
A metric showing the amount of people searching a certain query.
Search difficulty
Also referred to keyword difficulty, this is a metric that measures how hard it is to rank for a particular keyword in search results.
Seed keywords
Broad, core words and phrases that your customers will search for.
SERP features
Elements on a search engine results page (SERP) which add extra information to the simple list of URLS. Google uses these to improve user experience (UX).
Service landing pages
Describe the information about the product or service you offer and link to related information.
Short-tail keywords/head terms
Words that are 1 to 2 words long that refer to broad topics and have a high search volume. See Long-Tail Keywords.
Social traffic
This includes all traffic that has arrived on your website from social platforms.
Spotted pattern theory
Where the user will jump around the most interesting spots of the site, typically following website design.
Snippet
Offers a brief description of a website and often includes a map, contact details, videos, or photos (these are different from meta description).
Title tag
This is a piece of HTML code that gives a page its title. A H1 is the main title, and H2s and H3s are subtitles used to split up sections.
Transactional search intent
When a user is ready to buy (this is the best time for immediate action on a site). See Search intent.
URL
The address of a webpage. For example, https://www.varn.co.uk
User experience (UX)
How a user experiences a website, including their emotions, responses, and perceptions.
User experience design
The process of increasing a user’s level of satisfaction with a product or service by making improvements to its functionality, convenience and ease of use.
Website architecture/site structure
How a website is structured and organised.
Your money or your life content (YMYL)
Any content online that has potential to cause harm to the reader in any form – Google takes this content more seriously.
A-Z
Backlinks
Links on other websites that point to your website. They are a good way to increase the authority and credibility of your site.
Broken link outreach
Finding broken links on good quality third-party sites that can be fixed and retrieved.
Data-led content outreach
Involves researching a business in order to write a story backed up with data, with the primary aim of attracting press attention.
Guest posts
Where you publish an article on someone else’s website – it is a key way to gain more awareness of your business.
Image link building
Outreach through reverse image search tools targeting client-owned images that have been used without accreditation.
Inbound link acquisition
Creating and optimising onsite content that organically acquires links over time.
Link equity
The authority a link passes to its destination page. Links to a page act like a ‘vote’ from the origin page, and a higher quantity of links from trustworthy websites is a positive signal for Google.
Link profile
A link profile refers to the overall composition and quality of all backlinks pointing to a website, including factors like the number of links, the authority of linking domains, anchor text used, and the diversity of link sources, which together influence the site’s search engine rankings. See Backlinks.
Product outreach
A strategy where you send a product to bloggers in exchange for a review or link to your website.
Partner/client site outreach
Outreach to existing partner and owned websites.
Unlinked mentions
When your business is mentioned on the web but there is not a link directing users to your website.
Now you have taken a look at the key SEO terms you should have a better idea of what SEO involves, and you may even have ideas of elements you want to implement to your website. We understand there are a lot of key terms, so you may need to revisit this list multiple times before using them.
If you are still unsure about any of these terms, don’t hesitate to reach out to our expert team who are happy to help. Contact our expert SEO team
Hey! What? recently launched their Elvis Evolution campaign in partnership with Layered Reality, The Outernet London, Sold Out and Channel 4.
Elvis Evolution is a forthcoming visitor attraction to be launched in May 2025 from the UK’s leading immersive specialists Layered Reality. The experience, which combines cutting-edge digital technology, live actors and musicians, mind-blowing multimedia and heart-pounding music, will be opening in Immerse LDN in central London.
Hey! What? has not only produced traditional press and out-of-home but they have also produced a huge multi-screen 3D anamorphic digital billboard as well as their first prime time TV commercial.
Zest in Bath are a firm of local estate agents established in 2008, by Glen Perry, who runs it with his wife Beth. They have since achieved a Gold award at the British Property Awards, three years running, and been voted as Business of the Year by Best of Bath.
Zest were very interested from the outset in what we could achieve for them, especially in light of the results we’ve achieved for Bristol based letting agents, Hopewell.
This wasn’t going to be a small website design project as the site had to integrate seamlessly with Vibra Alto, Zests’ in-house property management software. Having used the fantastic Property Hive suite of plugins on previous projects this was our go to choice for Zests’ new website.
In addition Zest required additional functionality, including an integration with Locrating, a tool that displays local amenities, sold prices, transport links and local school information such as catchment areas and Ofsted reports.
Zest has an increasing portfolio of student properties to let, so it was important to be able to display these on the website clearly. To that end we created a separate section of the website aimed at students and with distinct branding.
After the website build, we were tasked with growing the website’s search presence across a number of property related keywords in Bath. In a highly competitive and lucrative property market like Bath, that meant a lot of work to do.
The website was a custom design and WordPress build, based on Property Hive’s standard framework, that gave us the code with all of the hooks that we needed to integrate with their property management system. Once this was done we then set about importing the data and testing the site to make sure everything was working as it should.
With Zest’s local SEO strategy baked into the web build at the foundational level, all the initial keyword research and on-page optimisation was complete, meaning we were able to start writing additional content to go up on the new site, during the build phase.
Being involved at the web build stage allows us to really craft solid optimised websites that hold up really well and see immediate bounces in ranking when they launch (just of the many benefits of having an SEO agency build your website).
As well as creating their beautiful new website, the real benefit to Zest has come from our ongoing digital marketing work, specifically organic SEO and Google Ads. The results here have been excellent, with the site now ranking second for the coveted “letting agents Bath” keyword and getting onto page one for “estate agents Bath”.
Between the new site launching in August 2022 and January 2023, we saw a 60% increase in organic traffic, compared with the previous six months. Comparing the most recent data, from 2023 with 2024, we have seen these results really accelerate:
With over 5000 attendees, digital marketeers flock to Brighton twice a year, for a 2-day global search marketing conference, which has the aim of helping search and digital marketers meet, learn, and do their jobs better. Tom Vaiughton is a regular speaker at Brighton SEO and after 25 years of working in search and digital marketing, Tom is frequently asked to share his ideas and thoughts on how search, Google, website visibility and SEO is evolving and impacting brands and businesses. This October 2024, Tom Vaughton, founder and CEO of Varn, delivered an insightful talk on the main stage at Brighton SEO, on the future of SEO in the AI era titled “How ‘Awesome’ will define SEO in the New Era of AI-Powered Search.”
Drawing on 25 years of experience in the SEO industry and having worked with over 400 clients worldwide, Tom shared a thought-provoking reflection on the evolution of search and the impact AI is having on SEO strategies today.
In his talk, Tom explored how AI-powered tools like natural language processing (NLP), voice search and image and video recognition, are transforming the way search engines interpret and rank content. He emphasised the importance of staying ahead of these shifts while remaining true to the core principles of great SEO—high-quality content, strong user experience and an unwavering commitment to long-term success.
One of Tom’s key takeaways was the need for SEOs to stop relying on shortcuts and to fully embrace the concept of “awesomeness,” a term borrowed from Google’s John Mueller, meaning businesses and agencies should aim to be exceptional in all aspects of SEO; whether it’s content quality, user experience or technical optimisation. He encouraged attendees to test, learn and evolve their SEO strategies, highlighting the critical role of innovation, thoughtful content creation and a clear understanding of user intent in the age of AI. Tom emphasised the importance of creating exceptional, user-focused content that delivers true value over time, rather than simply chasing algorithms. As AI becomes more adept at understanding nuanced queries, SEOs must prioritise personalisation and relevance in order to capture and convert users at every stage of their search.
Tom’s talk provided a thoughtful, forward-looking take on SEO in a new AI era, urging SEOers and marketers to stay adaptable, experiment with new approaches, don’t take shortcuts and always prioritise your end user.
The Varn team also attended many other insightful talks this year. Read on to hear our key takeaways…
Tom shares examples of errors that AI makes, that his young children were able to easily identify correctly. His example shows that while AI is powerful, it’s not flawless, emphasising the need for human insight.
Tom cautions against over-relying on AI in SEO and highlights the value of human experience and judgment. His proposed “cybermethod” blends AI’s efficiency with human expertise to produce higher-quality results by combining their strengths.
Key takeaways:
Carla offers marketers a unique way to approach their target audience research. Rather than categorising by demographics such as age and gender, she suggests categorising by five ‘curiosity cohorts’.
This approach encourages marketers view their audience through a fresh lens. This can potentially drive greater ROI, and results in content that truly speaks to the consumer’s interests, increasing brand loyalty and engagement.
Key Takeaways
In her talk, Nikki provided a thorough guide to overcoming website migration challenges, focusing on common blockers and how to address them. She highlighted the importance of asking the critical questions and strong communication throughout the process of migration to ensure everything goes smoothly.
Key takeaways:
In this talk, Yasmin drew our attention to Gen Z: how they are changing search, and how do we adapt to this? As the younger generation have grown up with technology and are more tech savvy, there are 3 priorities we need to consider to make SEO more accommodating:
Key takeaways:
Nathan began by explaining the importance of Bayes Theorem in SEO, in particular paid ads. Essentially, when you are testing a hypothesis and making changes to your SEO strategy, you need to assess the impact in order to know if this hypothesis was successful or not by keeping track of changes such as levels of organic traffic.
Key takeaways:
Liv Day opened the conference with a deep dive into the critical role that relevance plays in a site’s link profile. She highlighted the impact of irrelevant backlinks on traffic and rankings, detailing how such links can skew the perceived topicality of a website, potentially causing search engines to misunderstand a site’s focus.
Her team removed toxic and irrelevant links pointing to the site, including those leading to 404 pages. The results? A surge in traffic in August 2024, the best organic performance in five years. These results led Liv to emphasise that relevance should be treated as its own metric. She urged brands to use data to close relevance gaps between their content and backlink profiles. She shared her process, using tools like IBM Watson’s natural language processing to help analyse website content and links to confirm their alignment for link building success.
Key Takeaway:
Darren Jacobs explored the explosive growth of retail media and the convergence of e-commerce and digital advertising. Retail media systems are created by brands to advertise directly on retailer websites, to create an end to end customer journey from browsing to purchase.
With 20% of global ad spend going to retail media, driven in part by the post-COVID shift to e-commerce, retailers are turning their own first-party data into a powerful tool for closed-loop attribution and personalised customer experiences. Jacobs explores how companies like Walmart and Tesco are leading the way, by building sophisticated retail media networks to make the most of their revenue streams.
Key Takeaway:
In the third talk of the online PR section, Sophie Coley emphasised the importance of boundaries in fostering creativity and maintaining relevance. Drawing on her journalism background, she shared how she uses a persona-driven approach to content creation. By doing so, she aligns with the daily lives and emotional triggers of the audience.
She shares how important it is to understand key life moments when products or services are needed. This way, brands can create more meaningful and resonant content. She recommended using tools like Google Suggest, Reddit, and TikTok to dig deeper into audience personas. She also suggests creating buyer personas to map user journeys to align organic strategies with.
Key Takeaway:
Jonathon’s talk provided valuable insights into automating SEO content audits, helping to extract key on-page SEO elements such as meta titles, descriptions, H1 tags, and word counts. Given how time-consuming content audits can be, this approach offers a much more efficient and scalable solution.
Key takeaways:
Jo Cameron’s talk explored the potential benefits and challenges of starting a podcast, building on her experience of creating 20 episodes of MozPod in just seven days with a budget of $20k. She demonstrated that starting a podcast doesn’t require a huge budget and can be highly effective in reaching new audiences.
Jo left the audience with an inspiring message from one of her podcast episodes. A guest shared how she and her partner reflect on three things they are grateful for each day, especially on difficult days. This was a reminder that even in SEO, recognising small wins can help maintain motivation and focus on long-term success.
Key takeaways:
Jenna’s talk emphasised the importance of “letting go,” linking this idea with the concept of a site-wide clean-up. She took the audience on a journey through the gradual decline of their organic blog traffic over the years. Through various discoveries and a deep-dive process, her team managed to identify the root of the issue and transform their approach to improve site performance.
Key takeaways:
Our team had an insightful few days at BrightonSEO, with helpful insights for our Future Talent Graduates from some of the SEO industry’s leading experts. Thank you to all the speakers this year, it was great to hear from you.
If you want to learn more about SEO, get in to
Can you respond, with impact, to those big industry moments when projecting integrity, trust & credibility becomes key?
On Friday 19th July 2024, the biggest global IT outage to date caught leading service and security providers completely off-guard. Banks, manufacturers, media firms, airports, airlines, rail services, payment systems, the London Stock Exchange, multiple news organisations, and many public and emergency services platforms held up by Microsoft all reported severe interruptions.
Put simply: because resilience is a growing buying priority.
The world’s largest and most industry-critical enterprises are held up by increasingly complex supply chains and vendors.
In the wake of the debacle, thousands of buying groups (including downstream suppliers, partners, industry ecosystems and less-affected but increasingly cautious organisations) will be questioning the reliability of their current IT systems.
And they’ll be asking themselves one thing: do they have the capability to keep the lights on when the next Big Moment hits?
Cutting-edge data from 6Sense reveals that B2B buyers spend 70% of the buying journey doing their own research before talking to vendors.
(view image in blog here.)
Here are the biggest headlines steering optimised B2B content performance in 2024:
Source: 6Sense Point of First Contact Research Summary
If your content and campaigns rely on buyer conversion via a landing-page form or traditional lead generation it’s time to rethink. You won’t be getting your brand in front of key decision makers and influencers when they’re gathering the information that will heavily influence their purchase decision.
It is urgent for B2B sellers to increase their roster of ungated, educational content. You need to remove as much friction as possible for potential buyers wanting fast insights without a form.
Blogs, external product validation, helpful articles, videos, even some higher-value guides/buyers guides should be readily available to your audience without requiring an email. Concerned about tracking conversions when using more ungated content? We can help!
Whether you’re a fledgling startup or an established technology vendor selling into enterprise, Google and LinkedIn are likely your hero channels for paid media. Most organisations have not activated a key superpower: using the two platforms in combination. Deployed correctly, you can build trust with your audience and maximise awareness of your brand during that crucial first 70% of the buying journey.
Installing the LinkedIn Insights Tag on your website pages means you can track visits to specific website pages from your upper-funnel traffic-driving activity. And funnel those people back into LinkedIn. Now you can filter that audience down to your ICP profile (specific companies or industry, job function + seniority), and offer higher-value site visitors a better-connected content experience. Showing them the most relevant assets based on what they have seen and the strength of their engagement. That builds trust faster and accelerates the time between browsing and buying. And it can keep customers loyal when that next big crisis hits.
It this all sounds incredibly complicated, we get it! You want to make sure your content is making an impact on today’s buying journey. That you’re getting the most out of B2B paid media in the do more for less era. And that your digital communications are robust enough to achieve the right impact in a global emergency! That’s where we come in. Talk to us and find out how we can help build you a robust B2B platform.
Looking for a new jacket? According to Ibis World, there are 298,036 apparel manufacturing businesses globally. So how do you choose where to buy?
There’ll be several elements that affect a purchasing decision – particularly cost, quality, and/or location. But other factors that play a major role in where consumers shop are values and authenticity.
In fact, 90% of consumers say that authenticity is important when deciding which brands they support. In addition, 75% say they are likely to buy a product from a company that shares their values.
So, why are values and authenticity in marketing so important?
We’re now in an age where fake news, deep fakes and influencers peddling products they don’t actually use is the norm. And with the rise of e-commerce, we’re constantly being sold items and services every hour, of every day.
This bombardment of false promises and shallow marketing has driven customers to look for companies with more substance; companies that support their claims with actions.
Customers typically see straight through – and don’t appreciate – inauthentic and impersonal marketing tactics.
So how can you ensure your business doesn’t make these mistakes? It all starts with ‘why’. Why do you do what you do in the first place?
Being authentic and having strong values go hand in hand. But there are some important distinctions between the two.
AUTHENTIC: According to Oxford Languages, the definition of authentic is ‘of undisputed origin and not a copy; genuine’.
VALUES: The definition of values is ‘principles or standards of behaviour; one’s judgement of what is important in life’
While values are about beliefs and one’s outlook on life, authenticity is about who you are as a person (or in this case, business).
Unfortunately, an all-too-common occurrence is businesses falsely claiming they have certain values and beliefs to gain social clout and more customers.
This is also known as colourwashing (which we’ve written a blog about here). Not only can colourwashing slow down progress towards positive and important changes, but it also creates distrust in your company.
Stretching the truth about your values, and not being transparent in your marketing activities, will weaken the connection you have with your customers.
Not convinced?
According to a 2016 study, almost 94% of all consumers are more likely to be loyal to a brand when it commits to full transparency.
And when you obtain loyalty from your audience and customers, you’ll see business growth, more people making repeat purchases, and an enhanced company reputation.
Almost 94% of consumers are more likely to be loyal to a brand when it commits to full transparency.
You may be wondering where to start when conveying your values truthfully to your audience.
First you need to establish what your values as a business are.
Next, start showing you mean what you say through action.
For example, you could raise awareness of issues and organisations that align with your values, or donate some of your business’ profits to relevant causes.
It’s also important to note that this action isn’t a one-and-done situation. You need to continuously back up your claims to build audience trust.
Now, it’s time to tell people about it!
Communicating your actions and values both internally to your team and partners, and externally to your customers and stakeholders, is vital for a business. It deepens connection and understanding between your company and your audience.
Communication examples include:
What to do: Mind Corporate Partnerships
Mind is a mental health charity that stands up to injustices in healthcare, work and law which make life harder for people with mental health problems.
A section of their charity is dedicated to corporate partnerships so businesses can work with Mind to support their work and help fight for mental health.
This feature is so effective because not only are they starting a conversation with individuals, but they’re opening connections with businesses so even more people can get involved.
Their website contains plenty of resources and support for those struggling with their mental health, including workplace wellbeing.
By pairing their business statements with tangible resources, more people are likely to work with them and recommend their services.
What not to do: Naked’s lack of transparency
For this example, we’ll look through a more B2C lens, although the principles still apply to B2B businesses.
Naked offers a range of juice drinks, manufactured by PepsiCo. These products are marketed in such a way as to lead consumers to believe they’re a healthy option.
Statements on its packaging once included ‘only the best ingredients’ and ‘no sugar added’, but the Centre for Science in the Public Interest filed a lawsuit in 2016 because they were misleading.
In fact:
Following the lawsuit, Naked amended the erroneous claims and offered compensation to those who purchased products between a certain timeframe.
But despite its attempts to rectify the situation, both trust – and therefore loyalty in the brand – was lost.
Authenticity and values are interlinked – being authentic is about staying true to said values and being intentional about them.
However, authenticity is about also showing people who you are as a business. It’s about transparency in your marketing. It’s about being open with an audience, even if you’re not perfect.
This vulnerability leads to brand trust.
“Your audience is used to ignoring inauthentic marketing attempts from other businesses. Differentiate yourself by being genuine.”
So how do you go about being authentic as a B2B business? And how do you share this with your audience?
It’s crucial you remain honest in your statements and efforts.
Establishing brand guidelines early on also plays a key role in exhibiting your authenticity. This is because it will help you stay consistent in your messaging, your marketing materials, and your goals.
A major part of authentic marketing is having direct communication with your customers. This may be through:
By opening the door to discussions in real time, you’ll receive invaluable feedback that will allow you to make profound improvements.
In fact, according to a report by Microsoft, 77% of customers have a better opinion of brands that ask for and accept customer feedback.
Another interesting method to show authenticity and gain brand buy-in is through ‘behind the scenes’ materials. Whether this is showing your audience where / how your products are made, the team behind the business, or a Q&A session.
And finally, testimonials are a great way to offer transparency. Sharing feedback from those not necessarily invested in the company itself – i.e. objective opinion – creates believability. This is known as social proofing.
Social proofing is:
“the psychological concept that people are influenced in their decision making by others, compelling them to act within societal norms or expectations.”
Social proofing done well
Airbnb utilises the power of social proofing in their marketing brilliantly. In fact, as a platform that’s built to both enable people to host strangers in their properties, and for people to stay in strangers’ properties, their business success depends on it.
Airbnb includes reviews from guests and hosts which can include photos, stories about people’s stays, and their names.
This adds a personal touch to the platform, which increases trust from users. But it also provides details of others’ experiences using the service, giving clear evidence of customer satisfaction.
Authenticity and value-based marketing ultimately comes down to 4 things:
It’s as much of a benefit to you as it is your audience. In return for your honesty, and so-called vulnerability, your audience will be significantly more likely to invest time (and money) into your brand.
With a loyal customer base, you’re increasing your chances of seeing more growth in your business as people recommend your products/services to others.
And it’s important to remember – this isn’t just for B2C companies, B2B companies should be doing the same.
We’re now in an age where businesses are trying to sell as much as possible and advertise wherever they can. So, when 57% of consumers think that less than half of brands create authentic content, make sure you’re standing out for the right reasons.
After all, people now value quality over quantity, and neither you nor your customers should settle for anything less.
Looking to find out how you can tell your audience about your authenticity and values? Get in touch at [email protected] to find out how we can help.
Are you feeling like your blogs and social posts are shots in the dark, fired out without a clear aim and, ultimately, missing the mark?
Or maybe you feel there are never enough hours in the day to be consistently updating your digital platforms, like you’re always catching up.
There are a number of reasons why your B2B digital strategy might be falling flat.
So, how do you keep the conversation about your brand, products, and services fresh and engaging, without sounding like a broken record? And why does it feel so challenging?
“…58% of businesses don’t have a digital strategy in place…”
It turns out, 50% of businesses don’t have a digital strategy in place. Those that do certainly aren’t immune to avoidable marketing mistakes. And, as Roger L. Martin – strategy and management expert, and author of A New Way to Think – puts it, strategy is NOT planning:
“A strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice, in a way that you win.”
In essence, strategy is a theory, meaning there is a ‘how’ and a ‘why’. The ‘why’ is the reason you choose to do it. And the how, is the way you plan to beat your competition – playing to your organisation’s strengths to gain opportunities and sidestep risks.
Why do you need a digital strategy?
Every business will have different aims, but here are some reasons you might want to dial up your digital strategy:
Your competition is growing a strong following and gaining market share
Digital platforms give you the opportunity to test what works and what doesn’t, helping you hone your messaging and stay competitive. If your competitor is gaining traction online, it’s likely no accident – you can bet they have a solid strategy in place.
You’re under pressure to do more with less where your marketing budget is concerned
Compared to traditional OOH marketing, TV and print, digital marketing can offer low-cost opportunities to reach even more people – both organic and paid. A robust digital strategy will help you prioritise where you spend that limited budget to maximise returns.
Your sales and marketing teams don’t have enough data to confidently modernise their approach
It’s a misconception that B2B sales are all about meeting rooms, suits and handshakes. In fact, a recent report from Sana found that 58% of B2B buyers prefer placing complex and high-value orders online. By harnessing the power of data in your digital strategy, you can learn a lot about your audience and their preferences. This has the power to transform your marketing communications, your sales patter and direct messaging, and dictate how and where you choose to advertise.
Your audience needs your products or services, but they don’t know it yet
Sometimes an extra step of awareness and education is needed to nurture prospective customers. If you have products or services that require a bit more explanation, digital marketing offers numerous opportunities to build anticipation and understanding, guiding them into the next stage of the funnel. LinkedIn advertising is a particularly effective way to educate a B2B audience.
How will you plan your strategy, to ensure success?
“Invest deeply in understanding the problem before proceeding. You create a strategy; you don’t pick one. Design and imagination are critically important to strategy.”
– Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters.
Diving deep into the complexities of your industry and consumer behaviour isn’t just helpful – it’s essential groundwork for crafting your B2B digital marketing strategy.
You’re battling lengthy sales cycles, multi-seat buying committees, and high-stakes transactions. So, it’s crucial to nurture your audience with a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy.
This means catering to every key audience persona, at every stage of the marketing funnel – from awareness, right through to decision.
Equally, business-to-business marketing is a competitive game. Developing an effective B2B marketing strategy requires an in-depth understanding of not only your industry and audience, but your competition.
Once you have your market research in place and a solid understanding of the pain points your audience is facing, you can figure out how you want to position yourself.
Key challenges when developing a B2B digital marketing strategy:
What to do?
1. Choose the channels you want to reach your customers on
Where can you find your audience? How do you want them to engage?
2. Develop a content strategy
Provide content that speaks to your audience in every stage of the buyer journey: awareness, consideration, decision, as well as making it unique and reflective of your brand. What value are you adding to your audience? How is your content going to solve their problems?
3. Use paid promotion to your advantage
Decide where you want to put your budget that will be most effective for you. For instance, do your customers mainly search for your product on Google? In that case PPC may be the most viable option. Or perhaps you offer a product that appeals to Gen Z – if so, consider TikTok, Instagram or Snapchat. Be sure to track your spending and the conversion rate to optimise wherever possible and get the most bang for your buck.
4. Map out the customer journey
Use tools like Hotjar and GA4, and any other analytics tools you’re subscribed to, and map the journey of your customer from awareness of your brand (social media engagement, for example) and first website visits right through to purchase.
5. Decide which tools best meet your aims
Ensure you research marketing tools carefully before subscribing, and select ones that most seamlessly slot into your processes, providing the most efficient and effective support for the least investment.
6. Get your hands on as much data as possible
Use it to evaluate the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy, which should be flexible enough to adapt with your findings. Then, be sure to make use of A/B testing to find out how your data works in practice.
Not sure where to start?
Chat to us today for a free consultation and we can provide some tips to help breathe new life into your B2B digital marketing strategy, boost engagement and get you those all-important conversions.
Our Google Ads campaign achieved a Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) of 16.09 and helped Holt Farm sell every pitch at their independent campsite for Glastonbury 2024. And all that in just eight weeks.
Holt Farm is a new luxury camping concept for Glastonbury 2024, created by one of our long term clients, Yurtel.
With guaranteed pitches just 200 metres from the festival’s main entrance and amenities such as clean toilets, hot showers, organic food vendors, and even a wild spa, Holt Farm is designed for comfort and community, allowing groups to camp together in a secure, well-equipped environment.
Holt Farm was a brand new offering around one of the most famous and popular festivals in the world, Glastonbury. After a delayed start, the challenge wasn’t selling the festival but selling a large number of pitches in a relatively short window of time (just a few weeks).
With so much noise and buzz in the build up to the Glastonbury festival, standing out and making sales via Google Ads needed to happen quickly and effectively. This was a high pressure, high speed campaign.
We also had the support of this being a multi-channel campaign, with brand awareness being built by the client on Facebook and Instagram as well.
Our results can be seen in the tables below:
Conversion Rate: 3.44%
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