Category: Phils SEO Blog

Building A Better Web – How We Can Do It – Phil Gregory: Peak District SEO

After 21 years of working in the web industry, I have seen a fair few websites. One common theme is that they could always be done much better.

Its been three years since I launched my own SEO company and throughout that time I have been thinking about how I can work more closely with other web professionals to build a best practice document.  I want to create a framework that will revolutionise our working relationships and dramatically improve client happiness and retention.

Working as SEOs, we often get businesses asking us to improve the visibility of their existing websites on Google.   The very fact that these websites are already built and are live online presents us with at least 2 clear challenges.

1. Can we improve this website to the level that the customer expects, within the budget?
2. How to liaise with the existing web developer/designers and web hosts.

It’s point two that I want to look at in this post.

Web designers and Web developers are sometimes the same person or sometimes a group of people within an agency, multiple agencies or separate freelancers.

What this generally means is that not all 3rd parties involved in the creation of websites are governed by the same set of expectations, either from peers, bosses or clients.  Each individual company has its own motivations for working in the way that they work.  Very often, decisions are taken for financial reasons. Other times there is simply a disconnect between what web teams,  marketing teams, hosting teams and even clients want.

So how do we bring all the different web professionals together under a best practice umbrella?

Having worked inside an agency, I know very well that collaboration can sometimes be tricky even in one company.  There are different personalities at play, and an informal approach, ie ‘asking’ or ‘telling’ other people to do things doesn’t always work out.  Tact and diplomacy will carry you so far but without a formal structure that everyone accepts, it’s hard to see where processes breakdown.

Someone has to step up and create a best practice document that is agreed upon by all and then regularly review that document to ensure it stays relevant.

So I’m making a start. Over the month of July 2020, I will be reaching out to industry professionals to get their advice on how they work.   I’m asking a simple set of questions to web professionals with the aim of creating a best practice framework to ensure better communication and collaboration leading to more effective working practices.

Web Designers & Developers

Designers & Devs, could you please help me out with this short questionnaire? Complete the survey. Afterwards, I may follow up with more specific questions.

I will be creating a questionnaire For SEOS and Web hosts shortly – Watch this space.

Why are you doing this Phil?
Designers and Developers, SEOs and Web Hosts, we all need to work together to provide the best websites possible for our clients.

The most important outcome of this project should be happy customers.

If you’d like to chat with me about this please feel free to email me on phil@peakdistrictseo.co.uk or drop me a message on Twitter @askPhilSEO

Benefits of Keeping a Work Diary: Phil Gregory, Peak District SEO.

I have kept a work diary for a long time, though I’ll admit, not always consistently. It all started years ago after my friends’ grandma gave me a copy of Samuel Pepys Diary.  I was in my early 20s and was fascinated with the book. A personal diary that was written hundreds of years ago which painted such a vivid and relatable picture of a mans’ life.

Pepys Diary is a great read. It illustrates the actual work that Pepys was doing for the English Navy board in the 1660s.  Not only that, it reveals the intricacies of his working relationships.

A Work Journal is a Good Habit.

We all have habits and one of the secrets to running a good business is standardisation and the adoption of standard systems. By making notes of your working week you can begin to see patterns.  Also,  it provides a great reminder of your successes and mistakes.

Running your own business can be a hectic process, and to stay focussed many of us keep pushing forward, never looking back.  Whilst it’s certainly positive to keep moving forward, we must learn from our mistakes, and revisit techniques that worked well for us.

A Powerful Written Legacy

Whether your business was set up to create a job and income for yourself, or whether you had loftier ideas about growing it into a local, national or International brand.

A written journal will leave a legacy of the businesses progression, as well as a record of your own personal and professional development. Of course, it all depends on how honest you are when writing it.

Benefits of Keeping A Work Diary

• Time management
• A record of progress / Show your wins and losses
• Helps you to improve and refine your skills and methods
• Nurtures self-discipline and builds self-confidence
• Helps with Goal Setting and Job performance
• Reminds you of what makes you happy in your work
• Reminds you of what makes you angry about your work
• Mental health benefits of self-reflection
• Stimulates Creativity Development

Time Management
If you use your diary to set the next day’s tasks it can help you to see whether you are managing your time well, perhaps you’re biting off more than you can chew, or maybe you’re coasting?

A record of progress
It’s all too easy to sail along, nose to the grindstone.  The days, weeks and months pass by and we forget the work we’ve done, we forget our epic wins, and also our massive cockups. By writing these things down, you can set target and goals to replicate the wins and avoid the failures.

Helps you to improve and refine your skills and methods
Some working practices take time to stick.  if you record what happens in your work life you’ll see patterns start to emerge, you’ll be able to refine what you do leading you away from failure and towards success every time.

Nurtures self-discipline and builds self-confidence
By being regular with your diary, you force yourself to create a record. Almost like a social media schedule or a blog schedule, you force yourself to improve. As you improve you’ll become confident that you can consistently deliver on a difficult target.

Helps with Goal Setting
The very act of creating the diary is hitting a target. Your increased self-confidence becomes a transferable skill that you carry forward into other areas of your work. Remember it’s impossible to hit your goals if you’re not setting them.

Reminds you of what makes you happy in your work
This is really important.  If you can identify the things that made you happy, included and proud in your work, then you can take steps to make sure that those feelings occur more often.

Reminds you of what makes you angry about your work
This is equally important.  If you can identify the things that made you cross, excluded and deflated about your work, then you can take steps to make sure that those feelings occur less often.  It’s about avoiding the negativity.

Mental health benefits
We all get caught up in little dramas. It’s what makes us human. Being able to look back at what happened, after the fact can help us get things in perspective.  Like, “oh jeez, why was I so upset about that thing”, or “ooh, they were really mean to me there, and I didn’t see it at the time”.

Looking back on a work diary can help you to realise that your place of work, colleagues, rules are totally terrible, or it can hold the mirror up and show that YOU were totally terrible.  Either way, it helps you to grow.

Stimulates Creativity
This is a nice side effect, because the more we write the more creative we become, our speed, lucid thinking and creative language expands.  Furthermore, you’re creating some fantastic content for your blog, social media, presentations and white papers.

It’s a win-win situation.

Ways To Keep  Your Work Diary

There are plenty of ways to keep your work diary.

Traditional note pad. 
This is easy but not recommended. If you leave it lying around or drops from your bag, people may look at it.  That could create issues if you’ve been more candid than tactful.

Digital Journaling
I personally find this is the easiest way to keep a work diary.  It can be done on your laptop, phone or tablet.  Use the cloud to sync your files and you can update the diary from anywhere and on any device.

As A Blog / Vlog
As a blog/vlog, your diary can be used for the good of the team or the whole company.  Obviously, it will need some additional thought and editing if other people are going to be reading / Watching it.

Audio notes
Audio notes are simply the new dictaphone. The added benefit of audio notes is that they will help to add another dimension when listening back to them. You’ll be able to better gauge your mood by the tone of your voice.

Note: Think about who might hear your recordings. Audio files are incriminating evidence, so if you’re being negative, having a pop at the boss, customers or workmates make sure your device has a strong passcode.

Sketches
If you’re artistic you could always illustrate your diary with sketches. Satire is a great way, to sum up, annoying or humorous moments in your work life.  Again, beware, not everyone will share your sense of humour, and be kind with the drawings, nobody likes a bully.

My Top Journaling Tools
Notepad (Windows) Notes (Mac) – Sync with the cloud
Soundcloud
WordPress
Youtube / Vimeo
Some other ideas

Do you keep a Work Diary?

I’d love to hear from you if you do, did I miss anything out? Tell me about the benefit’s keeping a work journal does for you.

Google Tools Unification: Peak District SEO

Peak District SEO helps businesses to unify their Google tools.  This blog will highlight some of the most useful tools and why you should use them all together under one login to maximise their potential.

Google provides a huge raft of free software, that can be useful for business. The ones I’ll mention today are:

• Gmail
• Google Docs /Drive
• Google Analytics
• Google Tag Manager
• Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools)
• Google My Business ( formerly part of maps, and Google+)
• Google Ads (formerly Adwords)

It’s important to get these tools working together as seamlessly as possible

Gmail

If you need an email with a smart filtering system? Gmail by Google is a free web-based email.

why use webmail, well my question is why would you fill up hour hard drive with a mail app, and worse, risk losing all your email when the app breaks or your computer dies?

Gmail has many useful features, such as the ability to filter messages using labels and filters which enable messages to skip the inbox or drop into specific folders for easy archiving.

Additionally, you can import other POP email addresses into Gmail, making it easy to manage your ‘work email from your mobile phone, or home computer.

You can also easily send email from your branded email addresses through the Gmail interface. Which is really handy.

The great thing here is that your email is all in the cloud, not on your laptop, clogging it up and making it go slow.

How many times have you lost all your past emails because your laptop broke or your email software broke? That will never happen with Gmail.

Why use Gmail though? There are other email packages.

The use of your Gmail email address just makes things simple.  Having to log in and out of multiple different accounts can be time-consuming and confusing, worse, it can lead to mistakes.

Try to use ONE Gmail account associated with all of the above tools.

Something like ‘YOURBUSINESS@gmail.com, this Gmail account can be used as the universal sign-in for all the tools,  making life so much simpler, especially when you need to connect one app to another.

No matter which application you need to check, ad spend or which keywords brought visitors to your website, you can use the same account to access them all.

*If you have a large business with the need for multiple Gmail accounts, we advise you look at Gsuite

It’s not rocket science
There are many reasons why a company might have many logins for their Google apps.  We see huge amounts of businesses with their analytics, Google Ads, email and Google My Business etc all under different logins and to be frank, It’s a nightmare to manage.

Google Drive

Google Drive or Docs as it was formerly known, is a great set of free to use applications.  It’s like your standard office software, but FREE!

Google gives you 15 gigabytes of storage for free to use on files such as documents and Sheets. If you need more you can buy it for a small monthly fee.  You can share documents via email or by granting collaborative access to other members of your team.

“I’ve lost count of the number of times people say to me  “I’ll send the files..have you got Word”, or “Have you got Excel?“

The answer is no, I don’t have either, I don’t need them

Microsoft Office apps obviously have their merits, but the vast majority of their functions can be carried out by other FREE applications.

Google Docs and Google Sheets are, in my opinion, every bit as good as the Microsoft counterparts.

Granted, there are differences, but there are also hundreds of tutorials online showing you how to effectively use the apps.

Why Unify Your Google Apps?
Most days I export CSV files from Google Ads or Analytics right into a Google Sheet. Then export the results out as a PDF and email it using Gmail.

Of course all that’s made much easier if you’re using a unified login.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is, in my opinion, the most powerful free tool that you can use to monitor your website performance.

Analytics lets you collect data about your audience such as:

• Demographics – Learn more about your audience, including their location and language and whether they had visited your site before.
• Devices Used – Find out what browsers, operating systems, and networks your visitors are using to view your website.
• Mobile devices – Want to gauge the effectiveness of your website for mobile users? GA gives you the opportunity to see what devices they use and whether they leave quickly, engage, enquire or buy from you via a mobile device?
• Traffic Sources – Analyse what websites, keywords, search engines, and other referrers send traffic to your website.
• Social Media Traffic – See what social networks send you traffic. The reports will help you to increase engagement across all your platforms.
• Top pages – Learn which pages are your top entry and exit pages. This will help you tailor your content towards what your audience is looking for.
• Conversion Tracking – Set up goals in Google Analytics to find out which visitors complete conversions such as purchasing a product or signing up for a mailing list.

Why Unify?
Google Analytics integrates well with Adwords, Search Console and Tag manager as well as a few others. It really is the necessary Google app.

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is one of those applications that you never even knew you needed until you use it.

I blame Google for this because they have never really adequately engaged with the general business community to demonstrate this app or how easy it is to set up and use.

It seems complicated at first, but really it isn’t. I think it would benefit from in-app,  step by step prompts to help novice users get the best from it but, truly, it opens up a world of possibilities for tracking data.

I use it to track website visitors, phone call clicks, email clicks, form submissions, file downloads and more. I’d urge any company who sells online, particularly ecommerce businesses to find out more about GTM.

Why Unify?
Tag manager gives you extra options with your analytics data allowing business owners to track website interactions without the need to be a coder.

Search Console (Formerly Webmaster Tools)

Google Search Console is another app that many website owners have never heard of. It used to be called ‘Webmaster tools’.

Google Search Console helps you, monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.  This app helps you understand and improve how Google sees your website.  It’s not the same as analytics, but there is some crossover.

Search Console offers tools and reports on:

• Provides crawl information
• Informs you of indexing problems and lets you request re-indexing of new or updated content.
• Search traffic data for your site, showing which search queries show your site and when searchers click through to your site for those queries.
• Shows you a selection of sites that link to your website..which can be useful, but not comprehensive.
• Troubleshoot issues for mobile usability, and other Search features.

Why Unify?
Verify your link to the business through Analytics or Tag manager, and send date from GSC directly to analytics too.

Google My Business

Google My Business is a free tool that lets you manage how your business appears on Google Search and Maps. GMB allows you to add and update information about your business.

This information shows on the right-hand side of the SERPS and also in the local pack

GMB allows you to:

– Place a map marker and address
– Gather reviews your business may have had.
– Show photographs and video of your premises
– List your opening hours
– List your social media accounts
– make mini posts highlighting blogs, products and events that appear on the search results

Why Unify?
Having quick easy access to your GMB helps you keep on top of the first impression people get when they type the name of your business into Google.

Google Ads

Google Ads (formerly Adwords) are a great way to raise visibility for your website or event quickly.

If you’re not getting enough traction with organic search traffic, adding paid search campaigns using Google Ad can help. Bear in mind the benefits can be temporary because when the budget runs out, so does the traffic.

Create campaigns, segment them into groups and test multiple ad versions.

target ads using the right keywords and you could gain a considerable amount of qualified traffic. that said, if you build the campaigns wrong, you will waste a lot of money.

Reasons to unify AdWords. You can connect your Google Ads to Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager. You can import conversion settings from Analytics, into Adwords and vice versa, for clearer data sharing.

Need Help Unifying your Google Tools?

If you need help to unify your Google tools Get in touch today. We can assist you to really make the most of your Google marketing tools. 

SEO Spam, we all get it, nobody wants it. So what’s the motivation behind it? Peak District SEO owner Phil, asks why these so-called SEOs send these emails.

SEO Spam, we all get it, nobody wants it. So what’s the motivation behind it? Every single day I get an email from a so-called SEOs offering me SEO services. Every single day I consigne the emails to the spam bin before clearing them out.

The standard format goes something like:

Now, I admire the entrepreneurial spirit of people who get up of their backsides and hustle up some cash. I really do. However, this is not the way to do it, in my opinion.

I’m sure that somewhere, someone is replying to these emails and getting completely ripped off.  Probably having their personal data and credit card details stolen too.

Or, perhaps, in some magical, Unicorn land, these people are REAL SEOs with amazing skills and they really are getting websites to number one on google for 20 chosen keywords.  I doubt that very much though.

Basic Professionalism

Let it be stated here for the record, that there are levels of professionalism.  Personally, I do not like too much formality.  I prefer a friendly more personal way of doing business.  That said, the basics have to be inplace before things can happen.

Imagine, sitting in your work office and suddenly someone barged in and hit you with a sales pitch, in broken English.  Would you go for it?  Unlikely, so why do people try it via email?

Do Some Research

Do some basic research on the client you are emailing.  Most of the emails I get tell me I’m not ranking for my “chosen keywords”.  At least look who you are emailing, at least check the keyword positions.

Sort Your Email Address Out

However, emailing people from a Yahoo email address is probably only acceptable if you’re over 65 or under 16.   If you don’t have your own website domain and associated email address, then why would I trust you to look after my website?

Sort Your Pitch Out

Pitching is hard.  Even if you’re good at it.  Even if you close a deal 99% of all pitches, it takes work and a proper formula. Which is why, every morning when I open my emails and sigh as I see the SEO spam, I think

“Perhaps today one will be ok, maybe today, I’ll be impressed by the pitch.”

I never am.

Sort Your Grammar Out

Let’s not be prudish about grammar here.

We all make grammar mistakes here and there.  Most of us have published grammatical mistakes.  Let’s be honest about it.

I’ve found them in books, newspapers, the BBC website etc.  It happens, let’s accept it,  It’s not the end of the world.  It’s a human error, and a fairly low level one in my book.  However, If you want to win trust, I should think that your pitch has to be pretty much error-free.

The person who sent this morning’s email didn’t have an English surname and the content of her email reflects that English probably isn’t her first language.

If I were a non-English person,  sending emails to businesses based in England, the first thing I’d do is get somebody who is fluent in English to check the content.

Or, imagine this crazy idea, I’d use a spellchecker. Or maybe Grammarly.  You could avoid glaring errors like this:

Don’t Be Conned By Speculative SEO Emails.

The idealistic part of my personality likes to imagine that the person behind each email is a poor, but plucky SEO, in a developing country, just hoping and praying for that big break.  We all need a break to get started right?

If this is the case though, they need to get a proper email address, and a website so that prospective customers can read case studies, see reviews, and blogs etc.

Band together to form a co-operative but do it.  The opportunity will come.

The cynical side of my personality thinks that it’s probably just some huge organised crime ring, autogenerating emails and senders addresses. They are sending out thousands, no millions of emails each day.

They are praying on the cash strapped, a non-techy, website owner who thinks $20 a day for SEO is about right.  Subsequently, these criminals, are making a lot of money, even if just 1% of people respond to their pitch.

Nobody wins with this approach.
If the spammers are genuine SEO practitioners, they just have to up their game. If they are organised criminals, they could still improve their tactic, thankfully, for now, the emails are pretty lame, and most of us are safe.

Either way, the only kind thing to do is to add the email to our spam bin.
It seems a bit fruitless, as they keep coming.  However, the more we mark as spam, the harder it is for them to continue in the same manner.

Do not respond to them directly.  You are putting your personal details at risk.

Just add them to the spam bin and move on.  There’ll be another two or three to read by the end of the week.

The time has arrived, Peak District SEO Just hit its one year anniversary. It’s been a wild ride with both highs and lows as one might expect for a start-up SEO company.

I promised the followers of Peak District SEO that I would answer their questions via a blog and social media video.

This article will try to answersome questions about SEO and also about our first year in business.

I used social media to call for questions from people who follow our accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Questions to an SEO Company…

 

Will Asks:
“What does Google’s latest core algorithm change mean for sites and their content?”

Well, to answer that question well I think I actually need more time.  The latest Google algorithm updates the speed update and it’s not been out long enough to form any serious conclusions.

Google is planning to move the entire ranking factors from desktop computers to a mobile-first system. This makes good sense given that more and more people are using mobile devices to search for what they are looking for on Google.

In January 2018, Google announced they would be rolling out the speed update. Google informed us was only going to affect the slowest load being websites on the mobile-first search results.

Towards the end of July, we saw evidence that the speed updates have been deployed, With Webmasters and SCO professionals reporting some changes in the SERP.

Personally, I do not believe the update will cause major problems for the majority of active and well-maintained websites. I think the biggest impact is going to be on sites that have not had any attention for some time.

It is going to be more likely that those sites will not have been built with mobile devices in mind. Therefore the likelihood that they will display poorly on mobile devices is much higher.

If sites are not optimised for mobile they are likely to be ranked lower by Google.

The good news is the majority of my clients have fully mobile friendly website so I’m not expecting to encounter a huge amount of problems. To recap, Websites that can expect major issues are likely to be older sites that are hand built or built on bespoke CMS That do not focus on delivering content to mobile devices such as phones and tablets.

-Stephen Asks:

“In the last few years, I’ve noticed the rise in the use of the verb ‘Shop’ in place of ‘Browse’ or ‘Buy’. Do you think this is for SEO reasons when someone’s looking for a shop that sells a particular item or is language evolving to use this word more?”

I think that this is just an Americanism. The same way that we can now refer to the shopping process of any e-commerce website as the cart.

We do not use the term “shopping cart” in the UK, we call it a basket or a trolley. But in the online world, we say “add to cart”, This is just a cultural crossover.   In many e-commerce platforms heavily developed using US English.  Those in the IT industry tend to use a more ubiquitous version of English rather than one more particular to one region of the world.

So when we see the term “Shop Shirts today” I simply believe this is an extension of this US English. I’d do not expected to carry over into everyday language.

My personal preference would be that people didn’t use the term “shop”. There may be some SEO value to using the word “shop” because shoppers might use the query “local shirts shop” or “men’s clothes shop”.

Additionally, there may be some psychology being deployed in the sense that “shop shirts today”  sounds more like a suggestion than an order like “buy shirts today”.

At any rate, this is either a fad that will go away, or we will see more and more of these “universal English” terms creeping into our daily online language.

– Shantelle Asks:
“Do you feel that you faced extra challenges due to your ethnicity, and are there any ways/wisdom that you could impart to other prospective black/ethnic minority entrepreneurs?”

This is a really interesting question, and probably warrants a more detailed answer than I can give here.  I  try to take as many steps is possible to remove the possibility where natural biases might get in the way connecting with potential customers.

Anyone who is searching for SEO services is actually looking for someone to help them overcome website problems. I  try to position my business as having the solutions such problems.

By presenting a clear idea outline of technical SEO issues faced by potential customers and then offering a clear path to the solution, with affordability and support built in demonstrates why businesses should hire me.

I find this resonates well with leads encouraging them to focus on the project goals rather than people or  any perceived differences.

• – Rose Asks:
  “What do you feel was your biggest win/best moment of success in your first year?”

Without a doubt, the biggest win of the year is just staying in business.  Milestones are a good way to gauge whether or not your service is effective.

Another big win is landing larger clients. When you first start out, you tend to attract smaller clients to only pay very small fees.   When you do get that larger client feels like you’ve arrived.   I always temper this relation with the knowledge that once you have landed a client that is just the beginning of the relationship.   You have to keep them.

Whilst larger clients pay more, they are often more demanding and expect more detail and attention. Losing large clients can be a major blow to your cash flow and reputation.

Whenever I land a bigger client, I always review my systems and policies to ensure that they will be well served.  That way they’ll be leaving positive reviews and testimonials to help me bring in similar clients.

-Keith Asks: “What were the things that motivated you this year?”

Funnily enough Keith, I always tell people to ignore the naysayers but I don’t always take my own advice.  In some ways, their words do stick with you.  You have to use other people’s negativity to drive you on!

When people tell me I can’t or won’t achieve something. I just love making them eat their words.  A couple of things someone said to me early on were

“You have the wrong approach”

and  “in your first year, you’ll be lucky to make 10 grand”

These two statements have propelled me forwards during the tough times.

I simply wasn’t prepared to let those people be proved right.  I knew they were wrong at the time and by completing a year in business validates that. I’m under no illusions that it’s all plain sailing from here. The work starts all over again to achieve even more in the second year.

Thanks to all who supported Peak District SEO

I’d like to thank all the people who helped and supported me and showed a little belief, you’ll never truly know what that means to me.

Thanks for reading this article, and please share it on social media if you enjoyed it.  Watch this space for more updates.

How important are local business meetups to small and medium-sized businesses?  – Phil Gregory:  Peak District SEO

I’m not averse to attending business meetups. I know plenty of business owners who say that they just aren’t useful.  So who to believe? Continue reading “What Are The Benefits of Local Business Meetups?”