We’re experts with a proven track record in SEO and Internet Marketing

Only a handful of companies in the UK can genuinely claim to have a proven track record spanning more than a decade. With over 12 years in the industry, we at Breeze Media are experts in search engine optimisation, paid search, social media and converting visitors to customers. We deliver results for a broad range of companies from small businesses to charities to global firms.

Over the last 12 years we’ve achieved top results for companies in ultra competitive online markets such as mobile phones, beer and email marketing  – results very few companies could ever come close to.

We’re a small company which means you’re never a number or a sales target. We’re focussed on your success and we’re transparent about our prices and our processes.

We achieve top results for all our clients, so if you want a company you can trust to achieve success for your online business then we’d love to hear from you.

Over the last few years Google has changed dramatically. There are now videos, images and shopping results in Google’s results pages. Add to that the real time feeds from the likes of Facebook and Twitter plus numerous other items such as maps and news results to name a few. Google even personalises search results for each individual computer so the search results you see on your home computer may be completely different from your work PC.

We’re now seeing more and more mobile devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry and numerous Android devices such as the HTC smartphones. This too has impact on search results.

From years of experience and understanding of search, we know that SEO is far more effective than paid advertising. As Google has evolved, we too at Breeze Media have evolved – keeping up with the pace of search engines so that we keep our clients happy and  at the top of Google.

If you aren’t getting significant returns from Search Engine optimisation then maybe it’s time you let us get you to the top of Google.

Contact us now if you want to get to the top.

Don’t fall into the AdWords trap:  exposing the truth behind the myth

It’s easy to believe that the AdWords system can instantly improve your website traffic and sales for low costs, but don’t be fooled by the sales hype. Some internet marketing companies try to persuade companies that spending substantial amounts on AdWords will give great results but in fact the company often ends up with spiralling costs and very little to show for it. At Breeze Media we take a more considered approach, analysing your business needs in order to provide real results and value for money, and helping you to avoid expensive mistakes.

Avoiding Pay Per Click scams

It’s always tempting to think that a simple solution, such as a Pay Per Click advertising campaign, will be a quick fix for your marketing needs. However, without being intelligently managed it is usually just a waste of money. This is because the companies pushing PPC schemes such as AdWords don’t have your business interests at heart. Their sales staff usually work on a commission basis and push up their costs with set-up and admin fees that are often unjustifiable expenses, particularly for small to medium businesses. They aren’t interested in the big picture either – your search engine optimisation goals and your long term marketing strategy are of no interest.

How to be clever with AdWords

If intelligently managed, AdWords can be used effectively, particularly for fast moving consumer goods. However, companies which provide services and place value on their customers should think twice about how PPC fits into their sales cycle and whether it is likely to convert clicks into actual sales. Although PPC methods such as AdWords have their place, they won’t make any difference to your search engine rankings. You get far more long term benefits by building up organic Search Engine Optimisation by cost effective methods, and gradually replacing AdWords  – a skill that Breeze Media specialises in.

Real results: how Breeze Media helps clients save money

Example 1:

Company A * was using AdWords to generate sales. They started off paying £200-300 per month for a few months, then it grew to £500-700. They got an ‘AdWords professional’ who charged £1,500 to set up a campaign and after 18 months, their AdWords spend was £86,000 per year. The company was ranking reasonably well with the same search terms in organic searches. Concerned about costs, they came to Breeze Media and we reworked their AdWords campaign, reducing their annual AdWords costs to £8,200 and saving an eye-watering £77,800 a year. At the same time we optimised their organic SEO campaign and got them higher rankings. As a result, the company is getting considerably more sales for considerably less spend. *Client name provided on request

Example 2:

A small company* in a niche market with very  little competition started paying for AdWords in 2007. From an initial £300-400 per month the AdWords costs spiralled to over £26,000 a year after they recruited an “AdWords management company”. They were told by the AdWords company that they would risk losing sales if they didn’t keep up the AdWords advertising. When Breeze Media looked at their campaign, we discovered that the high monthly fees and advertising costs were actually losing them money and creating a negative ROI. We also discovered that the AdWords management people (who didn’t have a clue about SEO) were linking adverts to keywords which already had page 1 ranking anyway. We took the bold step of turning off  AdWords for two weeks to see what difference it made and there was absolutely no drop in sales or enquiries. We then trimmed their AdWords budget to £150-200 per month, targeting more productive keywords. The net saving to the client was £23,600 per annum. *Client name provided on request

The above are only two examples of the numerous companies Breeze Media has rescued from out-of-control AdWords costs in the past year alone, and in some cases we have even obtained refunds. Our results speak for themselves – for example, we’ve just created an organic SEO campaign for a client, costing only a few hundred pounds a month, which has resulted in double the amount of traffic to their site in the first quarter of 2010.

If you want to know how Breeze Media can improve your internet marketing and get a grip on your AdWords spend, contact us now.

Why conversion rate optimisation is really important

The majority of websites do a really bad job of converting their visitors into customers. Typically they will only convert 1 or 2% of their visitors into customers. This is effectively turning away 99% of your visitors which is bad enough but when you consider that the people visiting your website are actually looking for your products and services then then it’s really bad. Why you really need to improve your conversion rate

1. With 98-99% of your visitors turning away you are losing money hand over fist – literally!
2. Adwords, PPC is getting increasingly more competitive and more expensive each passing month. For too often companies will increase their advertising spend just to compensate and they just end up throwing money away needlessly. PPC is costing too many companies a fortune and the only people getting rich are the PPC agencies and Google so you should be looking at ways of reducing your adwords spend.

On the flipside of the majority of websites turn 99% of their visitors away and that’s bad – and when you consider that these same visitors are actually looking for your products and services then it’s really bad! That’s why conversion rate optimisation is really important.

So how do we do conversion rate optimisation?

Let’s start with your existing website and see how it well it converts as it stands. Now that we’ve got our base conversion rate we now want to duplicate the pagea couple of times but this time we’re we’re going to change the buy buttons with something more eye catching. We’ll also try different wording and this is known as the “call to action” or “sales command”. We’re now going to test the new pages using a technique called split testing. We use Google optimizer to serve up different versions of our test pages to each visitor in a loop so that we obtain different sets of results. Just like this;

Visitor 1 sees page A………Visitor 2 sees page B………Visitor 3 sees page C As you can see the changes we made have made a difference and page C performed the best giving the highest conversion rate. This is great stuff so we now want to use page C as the basis for a repeat of the test we just did. This time we’re going to introduce a catchy headline and change the colour of one of the buttons. See below; As you can see, the addition of the catchy headline has improved the conversion rate but the combination of the catchy headline and the different colour we used for the button has had a bigger increase. Great – we’re definitely on the right track. We can take this even further again by adding things like;

• bold text in the descriptions
• bigger product images
• persuasive text phrases in the product descriptions such as
  • take action now
  • when you order
  • when you make the purchase

In fact there are hundreds of things you can add to increase conversion rates. The main point to remember is that you can only make changes in small steps and you have to measure the results every time. There are no shortcuts and not even the best brains on the planet can predict what will produce the best conversions. If you would like us to evaluate your site and help you increase your conversions then contact us now.

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.

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.

The new interface now sports a number of new features such as 3d form buttons, a left hand side bar, highlighting and graphical icons to name but a few.

The new interface however, does not seem to have surfaced across the globe yet. We’re seeing it in our Edinburgh office but not in our London office. Reports from clients accross the country are mixed with some seeing it and others still experiencing the old inteface in search.

One thing that is common is that it is only appearing on IE browsers. We have “straw polled” our clients and none are seeing it on any of the other browsers so this may point to Google doing some kind of split testing on IE before rolling it out to the rest of the browsers.

Reaction from those of our clients who are currently seeing the new interface is a unanimous thumbs down. Features such as the radio buttons to switch bewteen pages from the web and pages from the UK has been replaced by a text link nested in the left hand sidebar. All clients made reference to this new change and we also have to agree that it was much simpler to click the radio button on the classic version.

On the whole our clients have said that navigating round the new GUI is much less intuitive, frustrating and slower.

New Google Sidebar

The new sidebar now shows highlighting, icons and serveral “sort by” features giving the user several ways to find more accurate results but are they actually making life any better for the searcher?

To our eye, it seems like a poorly designed database interface. Sort by filters are commonly placed on top of columns such as those in a spreadsheets or highly visible forms on a web page, so it’s a little puzzling to us why these would be hidden in a collapsible section of the sidebar. It kind of defeats the purpose and we’re not alone in our opinion as our straw poll indicated.

Interestingly, when you look at such things from Google, it’s easy to not see the wood for the trees and clients can surprise you with the simplest of comments. For example, first impression feedback we received from a few clients was highly supicious of the new changes, citing that the new Google GUI was designed to keep people on the site longer so that more people would click on the sponsored links. No doubt, conpsriacy theorists will agree with such observations and this may turn out to be true in time. Certainly, the perception of Adwords amongst the majority of our clients has been less than favourable of late. Many are blaming the unreliable results and the number of totally irrelevant USA/dot com sites appearing in UK search as a way to boost Google’s Adwords take up and they see the new interface as yet another way for Google to force businesses into going down this route..  Google do earn their revenue from advertising so maybe there’s a “debate-worthy” article on the back of this.

Other new changes include a localisation feature. Whilst this may be of use to many on a local search, the question is…will it have implications in search when seeking national or international companies to deal with or sell to? This is one area where we will be keeping a close eye on Google’s tinkering and we intend to conduct a few experiments to explore variations in search.

If it ain’t broke….

It’s obviously early days for Google’s new interface but no doubt many questions will arise as to why the change was needed at all. The classic Google GUI has stood the test of time and this is undoubtedly what has made Google so popular in the first place. Tinkering with interfaces, adding sidebars and complicating how we interact with Google in our opinion is the wrong thing to do. We just want search results and this new GUI seems very much like adding corners to a wheel.

As the saying goes….if it ain’t broke then don’t try and fix it!

Ok (I paused and thought)… I’ll politely try and explian that they are acually deliberate. But when I tried to offer an explantation, his rather rude response was that we were unproffessional and we were writing like call centres from other countries! He then continued to “educate” us briefly for a momento on SEO and we took his advice then ended the call politely and wished him luck in his quest for an SEO quote.

Needles to say, we, like every other industry, get these calls from times to time and in moist cases they come from individuals who tink they know better than a professional SEO company with 12 years track record and globally clients…but I digress!

Wot I tried to explian was that the misspellings are deliberates and form part of an advanced SEO testing technique that has proved time and time again to be successfully for many of our client’s websites. We are constantinople testing the pages of our website and include misspellings as prat of split tests or as pages on their own in order to measure the impact they may have on rakings. We use our own site to experiment and any successes we get, we pass on for the benefit of our clients.

These misspellings do not mean that we are unprofessional or “call centre-like” in our approachings. Far from it actually, because most so called SEOs haven’t got a clue when it comes to misspellings and wouldn’t know-how implement them in a solid SEO campaign.

Google accounts for over 10 million misspellings in search every single day. If you put this into context then that is a LOT of potential customers to mis if your website is grammattically correct and 100% free of such misspellings.

Google even provides misspellings in their keyword suggestion tool for adwords campagns. For example, two of our clients’’ we promote online are targetting keywords related to” accountancy” and “jewellery” and Google kindly provides us with common misspellings people are searching for every day.

For example…see these images from April 15th 2010 below.

As you can see clearly above, there are far too many people searching on these misspellings to ignore in an SEO campaign.
SEO on the page is about optimizing your web pages for key phrases that people are actually searching for. People misspell words evry minute of every day so do we ignore these and miss out on a large number of potential clients? Obviously not, but it has to be crafted carefully and precisely into any SEO or PPC campaign. It’s not just a simple case of misspelling words and throwing them on your pages for the sake of it. Reasearch and discovery of these misspellings need to be undertaken so that they can be optimised into your pages the same way you would optimise any correctly spelt version of your content.

There are many ways to identify misspellings which can be implemented into your website. These can be obtained from Google’s adwords tool, your analytics, misspelling generators or even by trial and error. Web pages on the whole are “skim read” by the vast majority of visitors and it’s very rare that someone will read every word on every page of your site, so you can quite easily afford to dot the odd misspelling here and there and measure the results.

Want to talk about misspellings opportunities for getting more visitors? Give us a call or fill in our form.
Disclaimer: This page was spell checked by a Cray II computer operator on the planet Venus.

Search Engines are the first port of call for almost everyone who uses the internet whether it be conventional computer based access or via a mobile device such as an iPhone, or Blackberry. Mobile device users will be searching for your products and services in the same way that someone sat in front of a computer does.Your company should take this into account when you look to the internet for new business and steer your efforts towards meeting the needs of every type of online visitor possible.

Maximising your online visibility profile ensures the best possible chance to make your online business a success and depending on the nature of your business, and what you sell, your profile should include most (or all) of the following;

1. Relevant, content rich website
2. Found on search engines
3. Mailing list
4. PPC adverts pointing to your sales landing pages
5. Online PR
6. Articles on your products, services such as top 10 tips, faqs etc
7. Social media stuff like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace
8. Google merchant centre account for free product listings
9. A blog
10. RSS Feed
11. A forum
12. Videos (youtube, metacafe etc)
13. Local listing
14. Mobile device friendly alternative website

Relevant Content Rich Website

Unique relevant content on your website is attractive to search engines, meaning you can be found in searches. Unique relevant content also makes it good for your visitors to make informed decisions about your products and services. Unique relevant content is attractive to other website owners encouraging them to place links back to your website increasing your visibility further.

Be found on Search Engines (SEO)

Being found on Search Engines is crucial to getting new visitors and customers. You must perform SEO on your web pages as well as build links to your important pages.

Mailing list

Every time someone visits your website, offer them a way to subscribe to your mailing list. Every time someone places an order with you, offer them a way to join your list and be kept up to date with new products, special offers or tips on how to use your products. Offer your customers every opportunity to join your list and be kept up to date on everything your offer or sell. Offer them a way to recommend a friend.

PPC (paid advertising)

Paid advertising gets customers actively looking to buy your products and services. Learn as much as you can from data you gather about successful sales techniques and apply these to your organic pages. Watch market trends, peaks etc and advertise during seasonal periods such as Easter and Christmas. Watch out for sporting events, news articles or anything that may give you an opportunity to sell products and services during these times.

Online PR

Your online PR is a wonderful method to increase your visibilty and make potential customers aware of your products and services. Regular press releases can increase your visibilty far and wide.

Articles

Write articles and place them on your site. Articles are excellent sources of content for search engines, searchers and potantial customers. Submit versions of your articles to some of the popular article directories. Links to your website from articles can help your rankings. A good quality article can attract a potential customer.

Social Media

Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook can put your products and services in front of specific groups ready to purchase your products and services. Twitter can be useful for broadcasting special offers.

Google Merchant

Upload your products to Google Merchant Centre regularly. Google lists your products for free in their product search and your products can appear in blended results on the first page of Google results. These listings are often percieved by customers as a “recommendation” from Google.

Get a blog on your site

A blog is a fantastic way to produce regular content and comment. Post regularly with new information and articles about your products and services. Post opinions, news, topics on everything your offer. Blogs attract links and are attarctive to search engines.

RSS Feed

Get an RSS feed installed on your website. Potantial customers can subscribe to your feed and be kept up to date with your products and services.

Create a forum

If you offer products or services that you can create discussion around then install a forum. Your forum can be a valuable source for building a community, building a list of potential customers and making your company an online authority in your marketplace.

Videos

Post videos of your products and services on video websites like Youtube, MetaCafe etc. Make your videos informitive, instructional, saleslike or wacky. Your videos can be cited as good sources of information or go viral increasing your company’s online visbility dramatically.

Local listing

A local listing is essential if you only operate in a certain geographical area. Even if you operate globally your staelite offices will benefit from a local listing. Mobile device searchers will regularly search for local companies to meet their needs.

Mobile friendly website

Install a mobile device friendly version of your website. Mobile device users are set to expend rapidly in the next few years so you should provide an alternative version of your site so that your pages can be easily accessed on mobile phones.