Make It Rain wins Center Parcs SEO account
6 December 2011, London: Center Parcs, the UK’s favourite short break destination has appointed Make It Rain to drive its SEO account forward into 2012.
Center Parcs provides family short breaks in forest settings in the UK, with a variety of outdoor and indoor activities and the famous Subtropical Swimming Paradise.
There are 4 UK locations (Whinfell Forest – Cumbria, Sherwood Forest – Nottinghamshire, Longleat Forest – Wiltshire and Elveden Forest – Suffolk), each is set in a forest environment, typically 400 acres in size, providing high quality accommodation in fully equipped apartments and lodges, set amongst trees and streams.
Each village offers an extensive range of sports and leisure activities plus numerous restaurants, bars and retail outlets.
Make It Rain won the SEO account for centerparcs.co.uk following a competitive pitch process. Make It Rain’s expertise in developing online strategy for leisure, retail and travel brands won the brief to improve the efficiency of its web campaigns through SEO.
Simon Jarratt, Online Acquisition Manager, Center Parcs comments: “We wanted to take our SEO acquisition strategy to the next level to help drive efficiencies and reduce our reliance on PPC. We had great chemistry with the team at Make It Rain who demonstrated excellent commercial acumen, technical expertise and creative ideas that we felt would benefit our SEO strategy. We believe they are the right partner to take our SEO to the next level and we already feel like they are an extension of our online marketing team.”
Justin Hayward, Managing Director at Make It Rain comments: “We’re delighted to be working with Center Parcs. They have a great brand and a unique proposition, with our successful experience of travel and leisure SEO we believe we can drive greater customer acquisition through SEO and reduce their reliance on heavy PPC spend throughout 2012.”
Whittard of Chelsea Chooses Make It Rain for UK & US SEO
London, 7th August 2011: Whittard of Chelsea, fine tea and coffee merchants since 1886, have appointed Make It Rain to manage their UK and US SEO campaigns.
Celebrating their 125th anniversary this year, Whittard have recently launched a new website with numerous improvements and improved usability as well as features that uniquely represent what Whittards are all about, such as enabling customers to specify exactly how they would like their coffee beans ground and allowing users to blend their own tea – a modern take on the Whittard tradition of creating bespoke blends for customers.
Make It Rain will focus on driving traffic and increasing sales through the new site by ensuring the right messages of quality, heritage and British-ness reach the right audience.
The US campaign will initially focus on both East and West Coasts where Whittard have experienced a rapidly growing demand for the quintessentially British product.
Justin Hayward, Managing Director at Make It Rain comments: “I’m really excited to be working with Whittard, a brand with such heritage and rapid global growth. It is a great opportunity to use our latest multi-national SEO techniques to help Whittard achieve their online sales goals. ”
The History of SEO 1994-2011
With SEO being one of the more fickle and unpredictable industries to be involved in, it’s quite fitting that the practice is still but a teenager. 14 years old, in fact, if we count her birth as the year in which the term “SEO” was first used (1997). And hasn’t she grown up fast! Search Engine Journal have documented the milestones and main developments in the search engine marketing journey from 1994 to 2011 in the nicely presented infographic below:
![The Evolution of Making Page 1 [INFOGRAPHIC]](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/20110909-SEJ-Making-Page1.jpg)
Top 15 Internet Marketing Books According to 50 Influential Bloggers
As much as us Internet marketers love to learn from blogs and other online resources, you still can’t beat a properly planned, structured and researched book for gaining insightful, actionable knowledge. In my quest to find the best books on SEO, PPC and Social Media, I asked 50 online marketing bloggers to chose their one favourite internet marketing book. This is the list of 15 digital marketing books that came back:
Social Media books
Inbound Marketing
By Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, David Meerman Scott
An introduction to online marketing for those that are baffled, Inbound Marketing covers a wide range of topics. Offering hands on advice for getting your business found via SEO, blogging and social media, with a particular leaning towards social media.
Recommended by Brian Rogel and Paul Dunay
The Experience Economy
By B. Joseph Pine II, James H Gilmore
Taken from the blurb: “Businesses must form unique connections in order to secure customer affections”. The focus of The Experience Economy is on marketing your brand through creating an experience and engaging with the customer. The premise is that by enhancing the experience you add value to your product and therefore to your bottom line. This book is particularly relevant to new marketing, with the rise of social media marketing being considered by many as a product of the customer’s increasing demand for an “experience” and feeling of affiliation with a brand.
Recommended by Brian Solis
Engage
By Brian Solis
Engage guides you from planning and implementing a social media campaign through to measuring success and ROI. Actionable strategies are given for increasing SOV, growing loyalty and trust, community building and identifying brand evangelists and influencers. A good introduction to social media.
Recommended by Tamar Weinberg whose own book New Community Rules also focuses on social media.
Content Rules
By Ann Handley, C.C. Chapman
Content Rules gives tips and strategies for creating engaging content for blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms, along with tips on maximizing the reach of the content that you create.
Recommended by Jay Baer and Todd Defren
Launch
By Michael Stelzner
A hands on guide to community building and customer engagement with a strong focus on content creation and relationship building – both with customers and also with peers who may help promote your content. Launch also highlights how to retain customers though continuing to hold their attention thereby increasing the ROI of online engagement.
Recommended by Michael Stelzner
Meatball Sundae
By Seth Godin
Answering the question: ‘how can we alter our business to become an organisation that thrives on new marketing?’ Meatball Sundae looks at how the internet is transforming our perceptions of marketing, the way we want to makes purchases and the type of products that we want to purchase before guiding us on how to modify business models to succeed in this new environment.
Recommended by Jennifer Laycock
SEO Books
Art of SEO
By Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, Jessie C Stricchiola
Details SEO best practices from the basics to an advanced level, from managing SEO projects to building a competent SEO team. This book really gets to the heart of search engine optimisation, and is very useful both for those who are new to SEO and for seasoned practitioners. The Art of SEO is widely believed to be the best SEO book out there.
Recommended by Zarko
Don’t Make Me Think
By Steve Krug
Written with web designers in mind, Don’t Make Me Think focuses on on-site optimisation and web usability. An invaluable resource for SEOs as success of an SEO campaign should not only be measured on increased traffic and improved rankings, but also on increased sales. This look at how customers interact with a site and how to optimise for conversions is a great starting point. Accessible and easy to read, yet still offers useful nuggets for the more advanced web professional.
Recommended by Linda Bustos and Joost de Valk
PPC Books
Winning Results with Google Adwords
By Andrew Goodman
A comprehensive guide to Google paid search which includes strategies for setting up the account, writing successful ads, and optimising campaigns once they’re up and running. Winning Results with Google Adwords offers tips for getting the best ROI possible on your Adwords spend.
Recommended by Jonathan Allen
Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords
By Perry Marshall
Another guide to Adwords that teaches the creation of keyword lists, setting up accounts, writing copy, targeting, and conversion optimisation.
Recommended by Ashu Jangid
Website Analytics Books
Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity
By Avinash Kaushik
Written in the same jargon free style in which Avinash Kaushik delivers his presentations, this is a well thought out and easy to understand text. With a focus on the analysis of data, Web Analytics 2.0 lays out what you should be looking for in your analysis, and more importantly, how the data can help you. Giving specific, actionable recommendations and strategies, this is a valuable resource for improving the performance of your website.
Recommended by Mike Grehan
Marketing and Internet Marketing Books
Made to Stick
By Chip and Dan Heath
An explanation of how humans absorb information and what makes us more likely to remember an idea or story, Made to Stick guides you on how to create compelling and memorable marketing communications.
Recommended by David Armano
Buyology
By Martin Lindstrom
Buyology looks into the psychology of why people buy. Citing neurological studies and tests that investigate the subliminal reasoning behind making a purchase decision, Lindstrom illustrates the emotional connection that customers have with products and services. Good to dip in and out of.
Recommended by Murray Lunn
Get Rich Click
By Ostrofsky
An absolutely monster guide to setting up a profitable online business, Get Rich Click guides you through buying a domain, setting up an ecommerce business, promoting your online business through SEO and PPC, selling ad space, affiliate marketing, content creation, social networking, mobile marketing and more.
Recommended by Chris Brogan
Business Books
The Dip
By Seth Godin
A fresh look at running your own business, The Dip looks at what you should do when times get tough. Godin takes the stigma out of quitting by showing that sometimes that is exactly the right thing to do.
Recommended by Ross Hudgens
Thanks again to all those that took part. If I missed you off the list and you’d like to share your favourite online marketing book – please do so below!
Should I Optimise my Site for Mobile? Google Study Points to Yes.
Having spent a gentle Friday afternoon perusing Google Analytics data on a number of websites for which I have access, I noticed a lot of similarities in the way visitors use (or don’t use) the sites. None of the websites that I looked at are optimised for mobile, but an average, of 8-12% of visits are coming from mobile devices. Looking in more detail at these visits, we see increased bounce rates, decreased average time on site and decreased page views when compared to data for “all visits”. Mobile visitors are not enjoying themselves. They’re not finding what they’re looking for and they’re heading off back to Google to find someone who can help.
So should we all invest in a mobile optimised site?
8-12% of visits, that’s just not a big enough percentage to be creating a whole new mobile site for them I hear you say. And anyway, what value will this actually contribute? People don’t want to be making a purchase from their phones right? Ever heard of ROI?
That might still be the opinion of many, however, a recent study carried out by Google in the US would beg to differ. The study showed that, following conducting a search on their mobile, 74% of smartphone users had gone on to make a purchase. 76% of these purchases were made in store, 59% online, and 35% did, in fact, make the purchase on their phones. So there.
And if the predictions of the clever people are correct – this is a trend that will only continue to grow (see the pretty picture below). Including mobile optimisation in your online strategy now will put you ahead of the game once mobile becomes a channel that can’t be ignored.
Click to enlarge
What is Google +1?
Since the late ‘90s, Google have prided themselves on providing the answers to some of life’s most pressing questions such as Is Elvis dead? or What’s up with Charlie Sheen? But then Facebook came along with their shiny Like button and suddenly everyone was sharing what they thought was cool with, well, everyone. And Google didn’t have an answer to it…until now.
In March 2011, the world’s most popular search engine announced the release of their +1 button. Unofficially, this is their answer to Facebook’s ever popular “Like” button. But what is it? How does it work? And, more importantly, when can we use it?
1. What is Google +1?
In Google’s own words: “the +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.”
The button itself appears on the right hand side of a listing or paid advert on the search results page, and is a way of sharing websites you think are worth a click with your nearest and dearest.
2. How does it work?
Sign into your Google account. Search for something interesting and take a look through the listings. If you find a website that well and truly blows you away then let your Google contacts know about it by clicking the +1 button.
The theory is: the more +1s a page has the higher that site will sit in your (and your contacts) personalised search results.
3. How can I use it?
At the moment +1 is mainly available for users of English Google.com with UK users only able to join the experiment. However, there has been definite talk of an embeddable button to go side by side the “Like” and “Tweet” buttons on a landing page of your choice.
It remains to be seen whether this is just another disastrous plunge into the world of social (remember Google Wave?) or if it will actually have a deep impact on both SEO and Social Media. But with Bing incorporating Facebook Likes into personalised search since 2010 one thing’s for sure, expect this digital dog fight to get hotter and hotter.
Gransnet launch: why they don’t rank for their name
I heard on the radio that Gransnet was launching today. So, as we do nowadays I quickly Googled them rather than type in the URL. I was amazed to find that they didn’t rank for their name. Instead Mumsnet was the first result:
As we all know Google is smart enough now to know when a Query Deserves Freshness, i.e. when there is massive short term buzz, PR, media and social mentions of a URL.
This has clearly been the case for Gransnet whose launch has been a case study in great 21st Century PR: mentioned in all of the mainstream press, retweeted by Martha Lane Fox, all over Fivelive and Radio 4. They are everywhere today, apart from Google.
Optimising for Google not only requires great online PR and social media outreach – you also need a strong technical understanding of good old fashioned SEO.
During the development process the Gransnet developers appear to have been using the sub-domain dev.gransnet.com -this has been open to crawlers; no NoIndex or Disallow whatsoever.
As a result, Google now has over a hundred dev pages in its cache…
…that have swiftly been joined by their duplicate brethren in today’s launch. Apart from the homepage, which it seems has run afoul of a duplicate content filter/penalty:
This can be easily remedied by quickly 301 redirecting all of these URLs to their new homes and to expedite matters further I would use Google Webmaster Tools to manually remove each URL, starting with the homepage.
Remember: if you are running a new site launch to NoIndex all of your staging content. Otherwise, come launch you may enter a duplicate content SEO blackhole – regardless of how good your social media and PR is.
Google’s Panda Update
It might sound like breaking news from London Zoo but Google’s latest update to their search engine algorithms could be affecting your website. But what exactly is this Panda Update all about?
What is Panda?
Panda is an improvement to Google’s ranking process which, they have openly admitted, impacts 11.8% of US search queries alone. The official line is that they’re targeting sites that are low in value, copy content from other websites or that just aren’t very useful. But, taking into account Google’s stance on search engine spam, it’s well known within the SEO world that this update has been designed specifically to tackle content farms.
What are content farms?
Content farms are websites full of low-value content geared specifically towards gaining an advantage in search engine rankings. Google are focused on providing the highest quality results to search terms as they possibly can. Content farms and their shallow content have long undermined this aim.
How can it affect you?
If your onsite content strategy has always been quantity over quality then the Panda Update could affect your site. Pumping out useless copy for the sake of page 1 wins could land you in deep, murky water with a nasty dip in traffic to your site.
I’ve been hit. What next?
Time to rethink your content strategy and claw back some of those losses. Use Google Analytics to gauge what pages have been affected and start creating quality content that is both useful and relevant to the user and the search engines.
David Lloyd Leisure flexes its online muscle with Make It Rain
Health and fitness provider looks to replicate number one share in UK across Europe
David Lloyd Leisure, the leading premium Health, Sport and Leisure business has appointed Make It Rain, the search and social specialist, to manage all of its PPC (pay-per-click), and SEO (search engine optimisation) on behalf of its 10 European Clubs in Ireland, The Netherlands, Spain and Belgium.
The pan-European campaign follows a successful two-year search marketing campaign by Make It Rain on behalf of David Lloyd Leisure’s 78 UK Clubs. During this time David Lloyd Leisure has climbed from number four to number one in its competitive share of search traffic.
The European brief aims to further strengthen the David Lloyd Leisure brand online, driving new membership sales growth in its European territories. Make It Rain will focus on delivering cost efficient, quality sales enquiries on a CPE (cost per enquiry) basis, through a geo-search strategy supporting all of the David Lloyd Leisure Clubs.
David Brosse, Head of Digital & Marketing Communications at David Lloyd Leisure Group comments: “Our online performance in the UK has been completely transformed by adopting a geographic search strategy to drive traffic directly to the relevant club. Making it really straightforward for customers to search, find and click-through to their local David Lloyd Club sounds simple, but it’s made a world of difference.
“Through the sophisticated ongoing measurement and monitoring that Make It Rain has introduced, we’ve been able to apply real-time insight to maximise efficiency by making small changes to website structure and page content in line with the PPC and SEO keywords and terms. Make It Rain has been a key supplier in enabling our online success and we’re looking forward to working together on developing our European markets.”
Justin Hayward, Managing Director at Make It Rain comments: “Expanding our brief with David Lloyd Leisure is a fantastic endorsement of the success we’ve been able to achieve with the company in the UK, and we hope to be able to boost performance in a similar way in Europe. Our approach with David Lloyd has always been to deliver CPE results, but to do it in a way that builds the online brand in a consistent way over time; we’re offering more than a series of campaigns and the results we’re seeing prove the need for continuous management of search and social.”
Make It Rain wins Shaun Leane SEO Account
3 September 2010, London
Shaun Leane, UK Jewellery Designer of the Year for the fourth year running, has appointed Make It Rain, the search and social specialist as its SEO agency to support the launch of the celebrity jeweller’s first e-commerce store.
The London-based designer is well known in celebrity circles for his catwalk collaborations with Alexander McQueen and creating bespoke jewellery pieces for Sarah Jessica Parker and Daphne Guinness which have graced the pages of Tatler, Vanity Fair and Vogue.com. The recent launch of shaunleaneshop.com is part of the brand’s web strategy to bring a new range of fine Shaun Leane jewellery to discerning consumers around the world.
Make It Rain landed the SEO account for both shaunleane.com and shaunleaneshop.com following a competitive pitch process. Make It Rain’s expertise in developing online strategy for premium and luxury brands won the brief to build the brand online beyond bespoke commissions, reach a wider audience and to improve the efficiency of its web campaigns through SEO.
Shaun Leane, UK Jewellery Designer of the Year 2010 comments:
“The opening of our online shop represents a great opportunity for our brand as we look to grow our audience, but it’s absolutely critical that we maintain the reputation we’ve earned offline for high-craftsmanship and premium pieces in the online world. Our SEO strategy has to deliver results sensitively for our business and brand and we believe Make It Rain is the most specialised agency at working with high end brands to deliver this on our behalf.”
Justin Hayward, Managing Director at Make It Rain comments:
“Shaun Leane is a talented designer with a niche following of high-net worth clientele. Our expertise in working with premium brands means that the SEO strategy we adopt will ensure the brand maintains its integrity online whilst delivering access to new audiences and new customers.”