Making a Point of Difference
Let’s face it – we work in a competitive industry. SEO is offered by so many, but done by so few – if that makes sense! If it doesn’t, what I mean is so many agencies offer “SEO”, but very few actually have the experience, resource or knowledge to really practice SEO for anything even semi competitive. Some so called SEO experts don’t even offer link building as part of their package – errr, excuse me!
This, you might think, is a good thing – after all, we do practice SEO for some very competitive terms ( if you want to know a few, send me an email – shaun@i-fluid.co.uk ). So surely business is queuing up at our door – well we certainly are picking up business month on month, but we really didn’t know it was going to be like that – so from the outset of our business being formed, we strove to offer some points of difference – what could we do to make someone want to use us against a mirror image of us if it existed?
After a lot of brainstorming, we eventually settled on a few great factors :
We are transparent – you want to know what we’re doing – we’re cool with that, in fact we’re so cool, we’ll pro actively tell you!
Get personal – you know what, after you’ve worked with us for a month, you’ll feel like practically part of the family. Now this might scare a few people off – but what we mean is we don’t employ faceless sales and client manager robots – we employ people with expertise and personality. It’s amazing how much faster you can get someones business kicking in from SEO when you have ad hoc conversations – you know, just get to know them a bit better!!!
Why not invest in an award winning project management tool? Ok – we did! We use Basecamp – so do others – but we really USE Basecamp! Nearly a year into using it, I can confirm, 27 out of 27 clients love Basecamp!!! Not everyone uses it to the same extent, but everyone loves it nevertheless. If you have never heard of Basecamp, or used it – drop me a line, and I can give you a walk through on our demo project – you might not use us for anything, but you SO will use Basecamp!
Prove we Walk the Walk – ok readers, BIG factor here. There is no difficulty in saying ” we can rank you for blah blah blah – sign on the dotted line! ” – seriously, any salesman, any salesmans dog, in fact, even Bruce Forsythe could probably say that.
However – what about ” we can rank you for blah blah blah – and you only pay us when we do! ”
Sorry – you just spilled your coffee – and guess what? You didn’t misread that. If your business meets our performance plan criteria, we’ll work with you on a performance basis – no monthly fee’s – you pay us when the work we do makes you money – too good to be true? No. It is good – and it is true. Want to know more? Email me!
And that friends, are our points of difference!
No Sign Of Xmas Wind Down or Double Dip Recession
Here at i-Fluid Media, i’m pleased to announce that November has been another record breaking month! Being our first trading year, we had actually budgeted November and December to be flat months, knowing that for a lot of businesses, this period is either the busiest time of year and so wouldn’t have time to consider SEO or Social Media, or they wind down ready for the New Year.
Then with the much media hyped “Double Dip recession” we were even more hopeful of JUST remaining flat! However, the complete opposite has happened – already, with just under a week to go, November has been our busiest month yet in terms of new clients coming through the door!
And we have a few more that are ready to sign in December as well! The best thing is a lot of these new clients have been referred by existing customers, because they’re so happy with our work. This is definitely one of the most rewarding ways to grow any business!
A quick thanks goes from me to the entire i-Fluid Media team – they are without a doubt some of the hardest working people I have ever worked with – keep up the good work team!
Shaun
Link Building – The Easy Way
SEO is a many horned beast – there’s on page SEO and off page SEO at a simple level – but then both these get broken down into literally hundreds of different elements.
We realise that not every company wants or needs our full SEO service packages – some just need a good healthy dose of link building done for them. Because we recognised this need in our market, we now provide 3 bespoke link building solutions.
Each solution is effective, has been proven to work and will deliver quantifiable results to your website. We are in the process of getting the link building page upadated on the main site, where details and costs of each package will sit.
What I can tell you straight away is there are 3 levels of package – a bronze package, a silver package and a gold package – dependent on what your need is.
I thought it would be good to give you a quick heads up – if you are about to do some link building, or about to outsource some linkbuilding, please drop me an email on shaun@i-fluid.co.uk first! We’d love to work for you!
Google Starts Crime Fighting!
Well, we all live in an age where Google is seen as one of the most powerful companies on the planet. It still dominates the internet Search pie, a pie which incidentally is still growing ( music to an SEO consultants ears ).
Google has made people millions of pounds, created company’s where there were none before, and even helped people who are lost find their way to safety via Google Maps.
So should it really be a surprise that Google has now taken to crime fighting! If my artistic abilities were any better, I would have sketched a picture of the Google emblem with a cape on right about now!
So here’s the story – a family in Derbyshire had their caravan stolen over a year ago. The theft has remained a mystery, with no witnesses reporting anything, and the caravan never having been recovered.
Step in Google – or more accurately, Google Streetview. The son of the family was looking up his house on street view ( I wonder what % of the population has done this!! ) when he noticed the image included the caravan – and a stranger on the driveway! Further investigation reveals that the man is no prime suspect no1!
Here’s the view :
There have been, of course, numerous reports of cheating partners being caught out by Google Streetview, as wandering spouses are seen leaving addresses they shouldn’t have been at!
If you have an interesting streetview story, we would love to know!
Company Culture – Important?
As a “service” company, we get to know a lot of other businesses and quite often visit them on their premises. This is great for us for all sorts of reasons – quite a selfish reason is we get to see common signs of success.
Something we’ve been discussing recently is company culture – and by this, we mean the values we want our company to have, and also for the staff to buy into.
Both myself and Jon come from an SEO Consultancy background – a lonely World of working for yourself, and so your company culture is largely defined by what you want! It is YOU!
Now we have a fast growing, rapidly expanding business, we realise we need to be sure of what our culture is, and take the relevant steps to promote it to our staff and ensure they want to be a part of it.
Because you’ve taken the time to read our blog, we thought it only fair to share with you our foundations for our culture, and as ever, invite feedback and comments.
So without further ado, our culture is :
- Work should be enjoyable. We want each and every member of staff to enjoy what they do. We’ve employed them because we want them on board, so we hope they enjoy being there.
- Hard work will be rewarded in a clear and transparent way. Each member of staff will have targets, if they meet those targets, they will know the reward they will receive.
- We are all a team – the company belongs to all of us. We are a small dynamic company, therefore, every success, every failure, should be shared with everyone. We want all our staff to feel the joy and pain of the business. It is their company as well.
- Honesty – we insist on honesty within our team.
- Work Hard – Play Hard – we expect a lot from our staff, but we realise work has to have a relaxing element to counter it. So we encourage regular nights out, fun activities and competitions.
We’ll be adding to this over the next few weeks – we’d love to get your comments, or even some details on your own company culture!
All the best,
Shaun
When SEO Makes You Feel Good
Wow, some days I feel incredibly fortunate to be in the position I am. We have a successful business with some amazingly talented and motivated staff – and, we get to help people.
Help people? Yes, help people! Sure, we run this business to make money – we have mortgages to pay, mouths to feed, and the latest Call of Duty game on pre order – but at the end of the day, seeing the results of our work actually make a tangible difference to a business is actually much – in fact infinitely – more fufilling.
We took a client on way back in May. The sun was shining and we were looking forward to the World Cup – the company was however struggling a little, and we had to persuade them that SEO and Social Media Marketing could be the answer they were looking for.
Traditionally when we knew a company was in a tight spot, we would do a bit of seo consultancy for them to give them a path to safety, with little risk to ourselves. However, that was the old days, we’re a little bit braver now, and we’re more willing to put our money where our mouths are.
So for this particular client, we offered to work on a performance only basis – we would take a % of the increase in revenue seen from the work we did – not the time to go into the detail, but you can basically extract this data from Google Analytics or any good analytics package.
They agreed to the deal and we set to work.
Today we went in to see the client to present to them a 5 month review ( we see the monthly, but this was a bit of a bigger review including fancy graphs taken from analytics ). The results were astounding when we were talking about the data.
We had increased traffic by well over 400%.
The bounce rate had gone down.
The non brand keyword terms had gone from zero to in the hundreds.
But…and this is where this post has been leading – although we knew we had done an amazing job, the proof of the pudding was when the business owner told us that they had gone from the brink of disaster to now looking to expand. They had not done any marketing since we came on board, but through what we had been doing, they were able to focus on what they did best – servicing their customers.
It made me, and the team, feel really good to know we had quite possibly saved a business. If you want to talk to us about how we can help you, please just drop us an email to shaun@i-fluid.co.uk – we’d love to hear from you.
Elements of SEO – A Few Thoughts
Shaun Measday 
i-Fluid SEO 
effective seo, good content, keyword reserach, link building, seo, seo elements, site design, site promotion, sitemap, social mediaI have just finished recording our 2nd Vlog ( you should be able to see it here tomorrow – some minor editing still to finish ) and without giving too much away, the content of this weeks broadcast made me think about the different elements that make up effective SEO.
A lot of what you read on the internet will tell you that good content and links are all you really need – and in it’s most refined form, that’s not too far from the truth, but only in terms of the ongoing process. And, both those elements can break down into about another 50 sub elements.
But there are so many more elements that really are part of effective SEO. Here’s just a few off the top of my head :
Site design - can the search engines come to your side and navigate sensibly around? Does the structure of your site in terms of levels of navigation make sense? A quick tip – if the search engine can’t understand it, it’s highly likely that your visitors will struggle with it as well.
Is your site copy legible and user friendly – wasn’t sure to include this, but, yes I think it is to do with SEO. Is your copy user friendly? Can the lowest common denominator understand the what you have written, and does it help them? I’ll debate all day with anyone why this contributes to SEO – but if you disagree, surely this will help conversions anyway?
Keyword Research – Oh what a biggy! Keyword research is one of the most important SEO factors – get this wrong, or rush it, and all your work from there on in is devalued. Now good, effective keyword research is somewhat of a science. So many people plump for a high traffic keyword phrase related to their product / site / service. That’s fine – but that ain’t keyword research my friends! Keyword research is pulling together several data sets, analysing and interpreting what keywords can deliver some volume and also will convert. It’s also taking into account competitveness of the different keywords – AND then bringing it altogether into some kind of coherent strategy.
When we take on a new client, we will spend several days on keyword research, and we will normally run it through two different people to gauge what they both come up with. If there’s differences in the end results ( and there always is ), we view that as a good thing and then we pow wow through the differences. What we end up with is a set of keywords, that as company, we know will be successful for the client when we get them ranking highly.
Content – So content as we know is important. Good structured, well written content is what we’re after here. In the old days, I probably would have also said to make them keyword rich etc etc – but these days, i’m much more of the inclination that the content should be as good as possible and then let the page mark up do the rest.
Page Mark Up - Not sure if this is the right phrase, but here I mean good title tags, good description tags and good H1 tags – all should be keyword rich and structured well. These 3 elements can, on their own, deliver a massive SEO boost.
Backlinks - Far to big a subject to get into here, but yes, backlinks are, and will continue to be so important in SEO. Getting the right links, at the right time, in the right quantity ( i’ve said too much already! ) is the key here. Go at it like a bull in a china shop, and your SEO strategy will crumble like that china! Get it right, and Google is yours for the taking ( just don’t tell Google I said that – please! )
Site Map – Just popped into my head – do a sitemap, it’ll help you a lot. Actually, it helps the search engines a lot – which in turn helps you!
Social Media - A bit like backlinks, this is a whole ebook on its own, but good social media marketing is now an essential part of SEO. For the purpose of here, remember, social media does include, but is not restricted to Facebook and Twitter.
Site Promotion – This is so often overlooked. SEO’s will often participate in relevant forums to gain backlinks – well, come at it the other way if you will. If your site is about garden tools, you should be active on gardening forums to give your site visibility in front of your target market. Forget the backlinks when doing this kind of work – and they will come. We have a client who in the first month we worked with him, doubled his sales purely from this kind of work.
There are so many more elements to good SEO – I just wanted to throw a few out there to get people thinking. SEO, good SEO, is more than content and links. It’s going the extra mile, beating your competitors, doing everything they do, and then a whole load more.
Have a great evening,
Shaun Measday
Co-Founder www.i-Fluid.co.uk
Our First Vlog – Anchor Text in SEO
Hey, we’re proud to announce our first Vlog!! Or video blog is you like! It’s been recorded by one of our co-founders, Shaun Measday. Every week, we’ll be talking about a different aspect of online marketing, or online business. The recording quality isn’t amazing at the moment – we’re working on it – but we’d love to get your feedback and idea’s for future vlogs!
In this Vlog, Shaun talks about link buiding and the importance of anchor text and not over utilising the same anchor text. We hope you enjoy it!
Check back next week for another Vlog from us!
Google Chrome v7 Released for Download
Whilst not strictly related to online marketing, it is to do with Google so we thought we should at least mention it! Google Chrome V7 has just been released and is available for download.
In this version of Chrome, Google have promised they have fixed literally hundreds of bugs from previous versions, making this version the smoothest yet.
Here at i-fluid, we are a real mixed bunch on the browsers we use – Firefox is the weapon of choice by Jon – but that makes sense due to the handy SEO plugins available for it.
Personally, I’ve loved Chrome from the first version – it’s simple, easy to use and effective – just what I want from a browser to be honest!
I’ve just downloaded the latest version – and yes, it is smooth and it is noticeable how easy it is to use. For anyone reading this that has never given Google Chrome a try, please do, you might be pleasantly surprised.
The other thing that Google thinks will be of interest to the web community, in particular developers, is that new version provides full AppleScript support for Mac OS X which is for UI automation and implementation of the HTML 5 parsing algorithm, File API and Direct Upload. As well as this, Chrome 7 provides easier blocked cookie management.
Talk to you all later!
Exact Match Domains – Too Powerful?
There’s an interesting article over at SEOmoz about the power of exact match domains. The analysis is quite convincing that having an exact match domain is THE most powerful on page factor you could possibly have.
The article can be found here is you’re interested : SEOmoz Article
The article then goes on to argue that because the domain name can carry so much strength, that it’s a factor that should be discounted and probably will be soon.
This is where I disagree – the domain name has always been a string factor in on page SEO. In fact in the ( good ) old days, a domain name could be enough to get you a top 3 listing even for a competitive term!! But times have changed, and now, the whole SEO cake is divided between on page and off page factors. For me, link building is probably the most powerful factor.
To put this into perspective – give me a handful of high PR links on relevant sites, and i’d take them over an exact match domain any day of the week.
From Google’s point of view, it has an extremely complex algorithm which gives weighting to 100′s, nee 1000′s of factors – I don’t see there being any devaluation over something like domain name strength anytime soon.
Just my opionion mind you – and the guys and gals over at SEOmoz certainly know their stuff, so i’ll be watching with interest!
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