SEO London, Edinburgh Internet Marketing Breeze Media

Recently we’ve seen an increase in the so called “Social Media” companies pushing overpriced packages on to unsuspecting small businesses. These packages are typically sold in the form of Facebook fan pages, Google local packages and Youtube Videos. In all the examples we have seen, the fees being charged are extortionate and the  level of work carried out is appalingly poor, or in some cases no work being done at all. In view of this, we strongly advise any business being offered such packages to be extremely wary and do not sign any contracts until you obtain professional advice, or at least a second opinion.

We have outlined the stuff you need to be on the lookout for below:

Google Local Page Scam:

• Typically £250-£300 setup fee
• 10 guaranteed reviews per month

Why it’s a scam: A Google local page can be created in around 10-20 minutes, so paying £300 for this service is quite over the top. A Google Local service should normally be offered as part of a proper SEO strategy, requiring research and evaluation of your local market to obtain the best possible exposure for your business. The real scam however comes from the guaranteed monthly reviews being offered with these packages. If any package offers guaranteed reviews, then it is almost certain that the reviews are being faked from collections of Gmail accounts or being bought in bulk from countries that employ slave labour. Fake reviews can often be scripted in pigeon English or be cut an pasted from a script and your site can be reported and removed by Google.

Please note: Some companies setting up your Google local page will use their own email address or a mobile phone as backup and can prevent you access should they decide. Always ensure your Google page is in your own control and verified by your own phone number and email address.

If you need advice on Google local page setup, please contact us for free advice.

Facebook Page Package Scam

• Typically £500-£600 setup
• £300-350 per month for updates
• 20-30 “likes” per month

Why it’s a scam: Typically, the company will set up a basic Facebook page, using the “wall” page to notify people of any special offers or promote your products. This type of Facebook page can be created in around 30 minutes so being charged such fees for setup are extreme. The £300-£350 per month updates typically involves a few “wall” posts or images being uploaded taking no more than a few minutes to do. The 20-30 likes per month are almost always fakes and come from either a network of facebook accounts or from countries using slave labour. It is extremely important to remember that having a large number of Facebook “likes” (or Fans) in this way will not generate you any business but you will still be charged the fees each month.

A well constructed Facebook page will consist of good design with calls to action and links to your own website where visitors can buy from your products and services. Typically, and depending on content, a good Facebook business page will cost in the region of £300-350 for a small business. Ongoing monthly work to your page will depend on the level of work. The work done on your Facebook page will link to reports so you can track sales and measure the success of your special offers.

Youtube Video Scam

• Typically £600-700
• 30-60 second “optimised” video
• 5000 – 10,000 guaranteed views
• 20-30 “like” ratings
• 20-30 comments
• 20-30 subscribers

Why it’s a scam: The youtube package is one we particularly recommend you avoid. The “videos” we have seen have been nothing more than Flash/Powerpoint presentations formatted for Youtube and not in the least bit likely to drive any traffic or business to your company. In fact they are more likely to show you up in a bad light.

Video production is a time intensive process (as we know), requiring consultation, storyboarding, on site shooting of various scenes and post production editing. Any reputable video production company or those with the real skills, will come to your premises, do some scene evaluation, discuss your message then return again to light and shoot your video. A good video company will charge in the region of £5-600 per day for this service alone. You wouldn’t want a plumber to fix you car after all!

Aside from the quality of the video, the obvious conbcerns are the guaranteed number of views, likes and subscribers. Ask yourself where the company offering the package is getting the views. These will without doubt bought in bulk from seeding networks or from countries using slave labour. You can buy 10,000 guaranteed views from various networks but be under no illusions that this will do your business any good.

Customers are not that easily fooled by such videos that have acquired fake reviews and likes and it can actually do your business a lot of harm. We have seen numerous videos where the viewers have eitheer exposed the numbers as fake or left extremely bad comments. This does your company’s brand and reputation no good at all so don’t be tempted by such offers – if it sounds too good to be true then it is too good to be true.

If you would like any advice on how to avoid being ripped off by these packages then please contact us where we will be more than happy to help.

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It never ceases to amaze us, the number of new clients who have never used or even heard of Google alerts. Far too often overlooked in digital marketing campaigns, it’s one of the most amazing tools you could have at your disposal. It can be used for both online and marketing campaigns and it can give you the edge over your competitors.

What is Google Alerts?

Google Alerts are updates of Googles search results based on any kind of subject, product or service you can think of, and they get sent automatically to your inbox.

What’s the point of Google Alerts?

Quite simply to update you on your chosen subject, service, product etc.

In marketing,  it can be used to great advantage such as;

• monitoring your products and services
• keeping up to date on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest news on industry releases

And so on…

Google alerts for marketing

Google alerts can be used for both reactive and proactive marketing of your products and services. Keeping up to date with current trends or news for example can provide you with an opportunity to get first to market or anticipate demand for products and services.

For example, this example of reactive marketing highlighted an opportunity for increasing sales and improving safety at the same time. The recent BP oil spill sparked outrage at the time but it also highlighted safety issues in the workplace, with the knock on effect of thousands of companies in the oil industry supply chain reviewing their saftey procedures and checking their supplies. The safety and response product suppliers quickly realising the fact made sure their sites were optimised, emails were at the ready with offers of safety products and their PPC campaigns were tuned to address the immediate issue.

In proactive marketing, you can watch events over a course of days or even weeks. For example, a few days before an outdoor music festival you might want to keep an eye on the weather. If it’s to be hot and sunny and you sell hats or sun glasses you may want to be ready with your products to capitalise on the heatwave. If it’s to be raining, you had better stock up on umbrellas and disposable Macs.  You get the gist.

There are literally millions of opportunities to be had from Google alerts and if you’ve got a success story then feel free to leave your comments below.

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Google have just released an updated version of their SEO guide!

Whilst much of the advice has been “known” by SEO professionals for some time, very little has ever been publicly acknowledged by Google – until now. We now have three important giveaways in the new guide, namely; 

1. Totally new – Google considers Social Media (word-of-mouth buzz) as building your site’s reputation. 
2. Google says you can promote your content effectively – old but good to have their seal of approval
3. Linking to spammy websites can damage your website’s ranking/reputation. Again, old but they’re basically telling us you could get banned.

So what does this mean?

Word of mouth buzz (Social media, online PR)

We’ve known for some time that links are the prime currency for ranking well on Google but it’s now official. Google now acknowledge that getting deep links to your content pages from Social Media and “word of mouth buzz” can help your website’s reputation (and ranking). Here’s what Google say;

Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.

Quite clearly, Google are indicating that adding quality content to your website then getting it out by word of mouth (social media and online pr ) is good for your website’s reputation. 

Promoting your content

It’s nw official! Promoting your content can help your website’s reputation. Their guide says

Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject.

So if you have a blog or update your news page on a regular basis then make sure you, or your SEO company are promoting this for you through the right channels, or getting links from other websites to your new content. If you want help on promoting your content then contact us now.

However, they do warn that;

As with most points covered in this document, taking these recommendations to an extreme could actually harm the reputation of your site.

Everything in moderation as they say but however you read into this, Google clearly considers promoting your content to be a good thing.  

Linking to spammy websites

Whilst not new, it’s never been officially public but it now comes straight from the horses mouth. Here’s what Google say on the subject;

However, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site.

So, if you haven’t already, then get checking all those outbound links. It’s imperitive that you check all your outbound links to ensure you’re not linking to any bad websites or link farms. Make sure you check for broken links while you’re at it and get them fixed!  There are a number of good tools for checking and it’s worth the effort for all the time it will take you.

If you need help with social media, promoting your content or any other aspect of the new Google SEO guide then give us a call or contact us now.

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Established in 1998, we’re one of the UK’s first internet marketing companies, which means we have the experience and expertise most companies can only dream of. We’re trusted and our results speak for themselves. Ready to find out more? Read more »

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For the past 12 years, we’ve got more companies to the top of Google than most companies have had hot dinners.  Let us get your company to the top of Google. Read more »

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PPC spend can easily get out of control and costs can rocket if not managed. Breeze Media can manage your PPC spend and obtain maximum return on investment. Find out more. Read more »

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Whether you want to sell more of your products or get more enquiries, Breeze Media can turn your online visitors into buying customers. Let us get you more customers. Read more »

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Social media is huge and we mean REALLY huge. Facebook has half a billion users, youtube uploads equate to 24 hrs of video every minute. Let us show how we can promote your online brand for excellent ROI.

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The lastest call centre scam/craze of the moment seems to be social media.

If like us you are being bombarded by telephone calls from companies selling 20 thousand social media bookmarks, or social media campaign management or social media monitoring  packages then you’ll understand. They’re as annoying as those vuvuzelas every body’s complaining about that are ruining the world cup.

So what should you be on the lookout for?

Basically, if they do manage to get through your switchboard or past your receptionist then listen for the buzz of people in the background – it’s a sure sign of a call centre.

Social media bookmarking offers

The typical first lines will be

“would you like 20,000 social bookmarks to sites like Digg, technorati”

“we guarantee to get you on the front page of Googele with our social media packages”

Getting social media bookmarks and links in vast quatities like this means spamming the social media sites and this is frowned upon both by the social media websites and search engines.

The methods used to get thousands of such links involves automiatic submissions programmes that submit under false accounts. The accounts themselves may have been generated automaically or have been created by people slave labour call centres in 3rd world countries.

Social media monitoring offers

Whilst these aren’t scams we’d strongly advise wasting any money purchasing such tools and offers. We’ve had numerous calls in the past few weeks from companies selling social media monitoring packages. There are numerous free packages that do the job every bit as good as some of these “branded” packages.

Have you been called by the latest scammers? If so we’d love to hear your story.

Fill in our comment form below.

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It’s easy to believe that redesigning your website will improve your website traffic and bring you more sales, but don’t be fooled, because it can actually cause more damage to your online business than you realise. At best you’ll have something nice to look at. At worst you’ll have a huge bill, your site will drop off search engines and your sales will dry up.

Redesigning your website won’t make you more money.

Spending thousands of pounds on redesigning your website won’t make you more money or convert more customers unless you test the impact. Products that go on supermarket shelves always go through market testing so what makes you think a website redesign is any different? People have different tastes and you may put off more people than you attract, so don’t risk it for the sake of vanity.

Don’t believe everything a web design company tells you.

Most web design companies selling redesigns aren’t interested in the bigger picture, such as your search engine optimisation or your long term marketing strategy – they’re only interested in making money from a redesign. Their sales staff work on a commission basis, and their designers will almost always push one of their designs rather than a design that will attract new customers and enquiries, so bear this in mind before you fork out expensive design fees.

Learn from the mistakes of others – a true story!

A client contracted a web design company to redesign their website but it had disastrous consequences, which saw their site drop from the search engines and all their enquiries disappear over the course of a single week. The web design company responsible for the redesign had replaced the clients’ website with a “Joomla” based content management system, renaming their existing pages and removing all of the on page optimisation they had done previously. The bill for redesign cost £4500 with the client losing £3000 in online sales over the same week. On top of this, the client had to launch an emergency adwords campaign of £2000 to cover the period where the site dropped from the rankings leaving them out of pocket by £9500. Even after the original site was reinstated their rankings took over 4 weeks to reappear in the search engines, during which, the company lost several thousand pounds in online sales.

Note: 40% of all our new clients who came to us in 2009 describing drops in enquiries and sales were as a direct result of their websites being redesigned.

The moral of the story is this;  if you have an existing business website that earns you enquiries and sales, then do not redesign until you have assessed what you could lose!

Tweak your way to success with conversion optimisation and split testing.

Tweaking your website with small changes over a few months is far safer and can save you thousands of pounds in design fees and lost sales. This method is known as conversion optimisation. It involves making small changes such as changing the colour of a button, adding a form, changing page header and asking asomething the right way.

Read about how conversion optimisation is done.

Each time a change is made, the effects on orders and sales are measured in a process called split testing. The best performing changes are kept and the process begins again; increasing your sales!

After a few months your site will have changed from what it was into something new and beautiful that makes you more sales. Best of all the small changes are very cheap to achieve.

If you want to know more about conversion optimisation then give us a call.

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