Even if social media and mobile marketing are becoming more attractive, email marketing is still the most popular and effective way to increase sales and grow your business. If you’re not yet taking advantage of it, here are a few reasons why email marketing is vital to business success.

To make the most of it, you should conduct a competitor analysis. By keeping an eye on your competitors’ email marketing tactics you can see what you’re up against and what you can do to make your email communications stand out from the crowd.

Think about it this way: when your prospects and customers receive a batch of five emails in their inbox – one from you, the other four from your main competitors – don’t you want them to immediately click on yours?

Below is short guide to conducting an email marketing competitor analysis that you may find useful.

PS: If you’re not sure who your main competitors are, head on over to Google and run a search for your products and then make a list of the top five sites that appear most often in search results. You can also check out step one in our SEO competitor analysis guide as it provides more detailed instructions on how to identify your competitors.

Step 1: Sign up to your competitors’ email newsletters

Start by creating a new, generic email address, which you can then use to sign up to their mailing list. This way you’re not broadcasting to your competitors that you’re spying on them – although the chances are they’re doing the same to you. Whether you use a free Gmail or Yahoo account, just make sure that the email address you create has no identifying features to you or your company.

Step 2: Analyse

When you begin receiving your competitors’ emails, don’t just scan them but instead take a closer look at specific elements such as:

• Frequency: How often do they send emails: weekly, bi-monthly, monthly? Also, which day(s) and time(s) of day do they email?
• Subject line: Is it enticing people to click? How long/ short is it?
• Content: Are all their emails always purely promotional (things like product releases, special offers and discounts) or are they using the platform to build a relationship with their subscribers (for example: blog posts, how-to guides)?
• Call-to-action (CTA): CTAs are extremely important so make sure you analyse them carefully: are these buttons or text links? Is the text on the CTA generic such as “find out more”, “buy now” or is it lengthier and more specific?
• Length: You may also want to look at how much content they’re sharing in each email. Is their email made up of a customised image with a line of text and a CTA or is it a long email with several pieces of content?
• Design: Are they using images? How does the layout look?
• Mobile: When you open the email on your tablet and smartphone, do they display properly?

To make it easier to track all these emails, create a simple spreadsheet and take note of the above information for each competitor’s email. After you’ve been tracking your competitors for a few months, you will be able to assess the quality of their content, map out their mailing schedule and also be able to spot weaknesses that you can then take advantage of with your own campaigns.

Step 3: Conduct a SWOT analysis

Using your spreadsheet, conduct a SWOT analysis to evaluate strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for each of your main competitors. This will help you to draw actionable conclusions from your investigation.
Strengths
Try to identify the elements of your competitors’ emails that you think they’re doing well, such as:

• Professional design
• High-quality, useful, interesting content
• Great offers
• Powerful subject lines or calls-to-action
• The ability to engage customers in further conversation

Weaknesses

Now identify the things that you feel they are not doing well:

• Are they only using email to push their products, without offering any real value?
• Is their content poorly written?
• Are they sending emails too often?
• Is their design unprofessional or not optimised for mobile devices?

Opportunities

Next, based on the weaknesses that you’ve identified, look at ways in which these can provide you with an opportunity to do a much better job. For example: quality of writing, professional design, email frequency, the type of content your prospects would enjoy more (eg how-to articles, blog posts etc).

Threats

Finally, identify the areas that your competitors are doing really well, areas that you would find difficult to compete with. Look at things like high-quality, engaging content, comprehensive how-to guides, amazing discounts and prices. My advice? If you can’t do something better, then do something differently.

Here’s an excellent example of an email marketing SWOT chart from Shopping Cart Strategies:

Wrapping up

After you’ve been tracking your competitors’ email campaigns for a few months, the information you’ll have collected will be amazingly useful for assessing the quality of their email strategies and for identifying weaknesses that you can improve on. It will also be easier for you to identify opportunities that can help differentiate your emails from your competitors’.

If you’re interested in some other ways to see what your competitors are doing online, you might want to check out our Swift Six where we explain the six best tactics to use to keep track of your competitors.

Have you ever monitored and analysed your competitors’ emails? If you did, what was the most useful information that you got out of it?

The post A 3-step guide to conducting a competitive analysis for email marketing appeared first on Better business online: Tips, insight and advice.

Let’s take a look at how you can optimise your YouTube videos in a way that will help them rank highly in the platform’s internal search engine, as well as in all-purpose search engines such as Google. At the end of the guide, there’s a link to a YouTube optimisation cheat sheet, which you can use to guide you whenever you upload a video.

Video filename

Before you upload your video, you need to make sure the name of the file is descriptive of the video content. In this case, the filename we’ve chosen isn’t ideal. We would have been better off going with something like “gTLDS-the-new-generic-domains-from-123-reg-final.mp4″. For your video, include the name of your brand and any product mentioned in the video.

Video title

Again, your video title should be descriptive of the video’s content. You should also include a relevant keyword or phrase. In the below example this is “New Generic Top-Level Domains. It’s also important to include your brand so people can easily see who is responsible for the content they’re watching.

However, space is at a premium here so whenever possible keep the title to a maximum of 60 characters (including spaces). If this isn’t possible, ensure you include the most important information (such as your keyword) in those first 60 characters.

Choosing a thumbnail

The thumbnail is a static image displayed before a YouTube video starts to play. The ideal thumbnail is eye-catching and gives people a taste of what they can expect from the video. YouTube will automatically generate three thumbnails for you to choose from. However, these aren’t always great so you may need to upload a customer thumbnail to ensure you use the best possible image.

Tip: If your video features someone talking and you want to use a picture of them as the thumbnail, take a still photograph at the time of recording. Freeze frames of people talking rarely look flattering.

Video description

Here you get to go into detail about the content of your video. Make sure your description is unique (eg don’t just copy and paste a description you’ve used on your website), includes your main keyword or phrase along with other relevant keywords and that it accurately summarises what the video is about.

Video tags

Tags offer another chance to add keywords. Simply add any tags that are relevant to your video. Don’t forget to include your brand.

Video annotations

Annotations allow you to add links to your video. This means you can direct people to a product page. Make sure you include a link to a relevant page.

SEO for YouTube cheat sheet

By following the above steps you’ll be able to ensure your videos are easy to find. Below is our YouTube optimisation cheat sheet. Keep it handy and use it whenever you upload to YouTube.

The post SEO for YouTube: How to optimise a YouTube video appeared first on Better business online: Tips, insight and advice.

Barry gets in the Christmas spirit

In his latest post Barry Adams, founder of Polemic Digital, explains how to make sure networking doesn’t become a chore. You can check out Barry’s other posts on starting your own business here.

Before I started out on my own, I thought networking was a waste of my time. Precious hours spent in the company of strangers, having awkward conversations over cups of stale coffee about nothing of real importance, with the overarching aim of handing out as many business cards as possible. It’s not my idea of fun.

Yet networking is seen as one of those crucial cornerstones of business growth, an essential aspect of long term success. I never really understood why, because the networking events I attended were invariably dreary affairs where I made precious few worthwhile contacts.

But my perspective on networking has changed, mostly because I realised I was looking at it entirely the wrong way. I thought networking by definition had to be a hokey, uncomfortable occasion. But there were many other events I went to that I didn’t classify as ‘networking’ events, because I had fun there. For me those events were just catch ups with friends in the industry, or useful seminars where I could pick up a tip or two.

But it was precisely at those events that I did the best networking, where I established genuine connections with great people that later down the line resulted in new work for me through word of mouth recommendations.

I’ve come to realise that those are the best sort of networking events; where you feel totally at ease, with an abundance of people you are at least passingly familiar with, talking about a whole range of topics – many of which have nothing at all to do with business.

I never really categorised those events as ‘networking’, but that was my mistake. It’s at those occasions that the best connections are made and where you will see the blossoming of long-term business relationships – which really are just friendships that have shared business experiences as their core bonding material.
So it’s something I would wholeheartedly recommend for people wanting to grow their business. Find the right networking events for you, and attend them as often as you can. The trick is, of course, to pick the right events.

Looking back at how I first came across the networking events that I enjoy the most, some common themes emerge.

Conferences & seminars

Some of the best connections I’ve made originated at industry conferences. It’s a great environment to meet new people, as everyone has at least one thing in common: a sufficient interest in the topics of the conference to come and attend. It certainly makes conversation starters much easier; you can always discuss the contents of the talks.

If there’s a social event after the conference, I would wholeheartedly recommend you be there as well. It makes for a much more relaxed environment, and it’s there that superficial connections made during the conference day can become lasting relationships. Some of my best friendships in the digital marketing industry originated from drunken sessions after a conference.

Networking groups

Generally speaking I’m not a fan of dedicated networking groups, because they can be very prone to those awkward moments I mentioned earlier. Yet I can’t deny that a few networking groups I’m a member of have contributed greatly to my business success. One group in particular, the Digital Exchange in Belfast, has a warm place in my heart. I see it not as a networking group, but more as a recurring counselling session where I can vent my frustrations and learn from others how they dealt with similar scenarios.

I think the Digital Exchange works so well because it’s a fairly small group with people from a wide range of different backgrounds and career paths, with a common interest in technology and digital marketing. It makes for interesting discussions and fresh perspectives.

So I’d definitely recommend you find local networking groups and attend some of their events to see if you like the flavour and get along with the regular attendees.

Belfast, home of Digital Exchange and Barry Adams

Online groups

It’s not just the face to face events that fall under the ‘networking’ banner. Some of the best connections I’ve made were online-only, at least at the start. I’m a member of a few private groups and forums, all of which are intended to share knowledge and experience about specific aspects of the industry I work in.

It’s in these groups that you can demonstrate your expertise on specific topics, which can sometimes translate in to new jobs or speaking opportunities at conferences and seminars. It’s also a great way to connect with other professionals, which can provide great sources of insight when you need them.

I never cease to be amazed and delighted at the willingness of many industry experts to share their knowledge and experience, which has helped me greatly over the years. I do my best to reciprocate and give freely of my own knowledge in these groups, knowing it can help others in their own struggles at work.

Chats over coffee

In the end, few things can beat an informal chat over a cup of coffee when it comes to building lasting business relationships. I’m not one of those people that always expects a commercial outcome from a meeting. I just like to socialise and meet people in a casual setting, so that there’s no immediate pressure to make the meeting too business focused.

Less than half of the meetings I have in coffee shops have a positive commercial outcome for me in terms of new business opportunities. Yet I try to always make time for such chats, and always endeavour to be generous with my time and insights. It’s through such casual conversations that bigger opportunities may arise later down the line.

I don’t believe in karma or cosmic balance or anything like that, but I am a believer in generosity being its own reward. I don’t expect anything back from people who ask for my insight or opinion, and maybe that’s the reason people recommend me to others so frequently. It’s that form of word of mouth advertising that money simply can’t buy.

The post Starting your own business – Part 6: Networking (the right way) appeared first on Better business online: Tips, insight and advice.

But you can still plan for the future. Let’s look at four new year resolutions anyone of which will help your site reach new levels over the next 12 months.

Get to grips with coding

Are you terrified by HTML and baffled by CSS? The technical aspects of the web can be very off putting. That’s no barrier to running a great site, but if you often find yourself relying on the technical knowledge of others then it may be time to take the plunge and get to grips with coding.

You won’t become an instant expert, but should be able to quickly pick up the skills required to make changes to your website. If you can do it yourself, you won’t have to pay a web designer to do it for you, or have to wait until they have a gap in their schedule. That means even basic coding skills could save you time and money.

There are plenty of online resources which provide free coding courses. Among them are Codecademy and Codeschool.

Embrace design for mobile devices

In 2014 visits to retail sites from mobile devices overtook visits from computers for the first time. That means if you’re running a website and people can’t access it from a mobile device, you’re missing out on visitors. And if you’re missing out on visitors, you’re missing out on customers.

If you haven’t already developed a version of your site that looks good on phones and tablets, then you need to do so in the year ahead. You can opt for responsive design, where your site content rearranges itself based on the size of the screen used to view it. Or you can go for mobile design, a separate version of your site which is displayed to people when they visit it from a mobile device.

If you’re serious about doing business online, you need to embrace mobile. If you don’t and your competitors do, then they’ll have a clear advantage over you.

Spring clean your SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is something that often gets overlooked, especially if you’re happy with the amount of traffic it’s generating for you. But regardless of how well your site is ranking, there’s always more to be done.

Exactly what kind of spring clean your SEO needs will depend on your past efforts. Here’s a selection of ideas to inspire you, along with links to guides which will tell you exactly what you need to do to conduct a successful spring clean.

Get started with SEO – perfect if you haven’t done any SEO before.

Learn how to do competitor analysis – see how your rivals are using SEO and copy their best tactics.

Optimise your WordPress site – if you’re using WordPress, this is the SEO guide for you.

Have you been hit by a Google penalty? This guide will help you recover.

Commit to reaching customers in a new way

If you’ve been running your business for a while, you’ve undoubtedly built up at least one reliable way of attracting customers. But what if that channel was to dry up overnight? It might sound dramatic, but it’s far from impossible. A search engine penalty, or a change to a social network’s algorithm can lead to a huge drop in both traffic and customers. It pays to diversify. Here are some ideas for new ways to attract customers, and again there are guides to help you get started.

Use AdWords to attract new customers – This guide will teach you the basics of AdWords.

Embrace Facebook ads – Attract new customers via Facebook with this guide.

Give Twitter ads a go – This guide has everything you need to advertise via Twitter.

If you need more inspiration, check back on the 123-reg blog throughout the year as we’ll be bringing you more guides and tips over the course of 2015.

The post 30 minutes to a better website: Website resolutions for 2015 appeared first on Better business online: Tips, insight and advice.

The basic premise of the new law is that VAT is now to be charged for such services according to the rate applicable in the EU country the customer is located. As Keng Yip Cheong, Corporate Tax Manager at Ward Williams Chartered Accountants points out:

“The change affects only those offering digital services and basically those services that don’t require human intervention. Live webinars for example are excluded because you have a human having to do the presentation, but what is covered are those services where there is streaming of a video [so a recorded webinar].”

If you are simply offering those services to other businesses however, the new law won’t apply, it is only applicable to sales to consumers; “As in private consumers, individuals.” As Cheong points out, “If you are talking about B2B then the old rules still apply [VAT charged at the rate applicable in the county of the selling business] what they are talking about here is B2C.”

The new law brings the VAT rules up to date for modern commercial practices: “VAT rules don’t change that much other than the odd tweak. This is just a catch-up really in terms of the digital marketplace.” Explains Cheong. The law also unifies procedure across the EU – although not VAT levels which still vary between states (VAT rates across the EU average at 21.54% but range from 15-27%). “The UK has a very high [VAT] threshold, compared other countries in the EU.” adds Cheong, explaining that many businesses in the UK don’t currently fall within the VAT regime.

The biggest impact for small businesses in the UK could be due to that high VAT threshold which has previously allowed them to be exempt from VAT registration and all the administration that requires. However, businesses won’t be required to register for VAT in each and every state they do business in as Cheong observes:

“As a small business, if you meet the conditions of this new law and you are selling to a consumer in Germany, but you don’t have a VAT registration at the moment – say you are under threshold in the UK and because of the old rules you have also never registered for VAT in Germany – you still don’t have to register in Germany. You can use something called a VATMOSS (A VAT Mini One-Stop Shop) https://www.gov.uk/register-and-use-the-vat-mini-one-stop-shop”

Unfortunately, whilst you won’t have to register in other individual states if you use a VATMOSS, you will lose your exemption from registration in the UK to use it:

“For those not yet registered in the UK, they would now have to do it, to make use of VATMOSS. Meaning they will have to charge VAT.” explains Cheong, “The VAT MOSS would take care of everything for you. You basically do all your returns in the UK and HMRC will take care of the rest but first and foremost you need to set up VAT registration in the UK and then it’s a form-filling exercise via HMRC once you get your VAT number.”

If registering for VAT and using a VATMOSS sounds all too much for your small operation there are other options you could consider.

As Cheong points out, the emphasis on dealing with the VAT is on the business selling to the consumer, so by using a third party sales agent, you can place the burden on them to deal with it:

“If for example you are selling via Amazon, then Amazon would be the one responsible for dealing with the VAT.” confirms Cheong.

If you are selling direct via your own site and your overseas sales are minimal, you could also simply restrict certain sales into other EU countries and avoid the VAT changes altogether, but monitoring the same could be difficult and could lose you sales.

Essential information collection

Whatever your choice, if the changes are likely to affect your business you need to consider making changes to your data collection and order processing procedure. For all sales you will need to be sure of the consumer’s actual location, which is not as simple with electronic products as it is with physical ones. The law requires at least 2 pieces of information to be collected to validate that consumer’s location and that information must then be used to accurately bill – according to the VAT level in that said country. All a little complicated for however large or small your operation.

A positive note

One potential positive for the UK as a whole from the VAT law change is that VAT now collected from UK customers will go to the UK Treasury. At present many companies in the electronic services industry technically operate in other EU countries such as Luxembourg and Ireland to take advantage of their lower tax conditions. This change alone is estimated could raise an additional £300 million per annum for the UK Government.

For more information check out these links:

HMRC VAT @gov.uk https://www.gov.uk/business-tax/vat

Webinar from Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales – http://www.icaew.com/en/technical/tax/tax-faculty/tax-webinars/vat-is-changing-in-2015

The post All that, now VAT – New law you may need to know appeared first on Better business online: Tips, insight and advice.

With the rise of social media marketing, your may be asking yourself: Is it still worth investing in email marketing?

The short answer is YES.

Sure, it may not be as sexy or trendy as social media, but it’s by far the most effective way to increase sales and grow your business.

Plus, it’s cheap. With a return-on-investment of about 4,300%, email pays for itself. And saves a few trees as well.

Let’s look at some stats:

• Customer acquisition via email has quadrupled over the last four years, and it’s more effective than Facebook and Twitter (Source: Custora)
• Customers who come to businesses via email tend to shop more and spend more. (Source: Forbes)
• 4325% Return on Investment (ROI). For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment (Source: Experian)
• 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an email marketing message (Source: Direct Marketing Association)
• 3 billion new email accounts are expected to be opened in 2016 (Source: The Radicati Group)

And if these stats aren’t enough, here are six reasons why email marketing is vital for businesses of all sizes and why savvy online marketers won’t be giving up on it any time soon.

1. It’s an effective way to keep customers informed

Email marketing isn’t good just for marketing your products and services but also for helping you to deliver useful and interesting content and information to your customers.

So, use emails to keep your customers informed and up-to-date with the latest on what you’re up to and what’s new in the industry. Whether you’ve written a comprehensive guide on how to save money when renting a flat, a case study where you show how your design skills have helped a client sell more online, or just a simple blog post where you share tips and advice on how to fix a dripping tap – use email to share this useful and interesting content with your database.

You will see that there is real value in staying connected to customers and email marketing makes that so easy to do.

2. It allows you to target the right customers with the right message

 Email makes it easy for you to send a piece of content to hundreds of people and still be able to personalise your message.

You can even create separate lists of subscribers and send highly targeted messages to different groups. This increases the chances of them opening your emails and of finding something that they’re interested in buying.

3. Makes it easy to reach mobile users

What makes email marketing so valuable for business owners is that it’s an easy way to reach customers on mobile without investing loads in new technology or software.

Litmus showed that 66% of Gmail messages are opened in mobile devices while the Experian Q2 2013 Quarterly Email Benchmark Study revealed that 50% of all “Unique Opens” and 40% of all “Unique Clicks” happen on mobile.

Plus, mobile email already accounts for 13% of online transactions and this is just the beginning as numbers are expected to grow as more users are using mobile devices to surf the web and buy stuff online.

This means that you need to be smart about creating a new channel to deliver your messages: right in to the inbox of your prospects!

4. Email coupons drive online and in-store sales

In a recent study by Blue Kangaroo, a coupons and deals site, 70% of recipients said they’ve used coupons and discounts from promotional emails. A Nielsen study found that 27% of online shoppers subscribe to store or product emails in order to save money. Plus, Shop.org reported that 64% of Internet users have printed a coupon from an email.

So, use email marketing for promotions as it’s a great way to attract the growing number of online bargain hunters.

5. Easy to integrate into other marketing channels 

You can integrate email with just about any marketing channel or tactic. Think search engine optimisation (SEO), social media, public relations and more.

Whether you include links to your social media channels to encourage readers to connect with you on Facebook and Twitter, or links to a blog post which sends more traffic to your site, your email marketing can achieve even better results when you integrate it with your other marketing channels. Read our previous post on how to integrate SEO into email marketing and how you can use email to boost engagement.

If you’re more interested in how to integrate email and Facebook for success, I recommend watching Jay Baer’s video from Convince & Convert:

6. You can measure the results!

With the huge variety of analytics tools available today, it’s so easy to track your email campaigns in order to find out what worked and what needs tweaking.

You can find out how many people opened your email, how many clicked on the links inside the email and how many unsubscribed. You can even track sales and revenue. There are even formulas that can tell you the monetary value of your email subscriber. This isn’t something you can figure out on every channel, especially social media channels.

If you want to use an email marketing tool, a good one will have these reporting features:

• Sent and delivered – How many people you sent the email to, how many opened it and how many bounced.
• Opens and clicks – How many users opened your email and how many clicked on a link. The click tracking report will also show you exactly who clicked what and when.
• Goals – If you’re using goal tracking, you’ll get to see how many people completed a specific goal that you’ve set. For example, how many purchased a product that you’ve promoted in your email.
• Shares – How many shared your email on social media or forwarded it to a friend.
• Unsubscribes – How many unsubscribed from receiving your email or clicked the “this is spam” button.
• Comparison with industry average – See how your opens, clicks and more compare to those in your industry sector.

Make sure the tool you choose includes these features as they’re very important for when you need to see how your email has performed.

Bonus: Email marketing is cheap

Whether you decide to do it yourself or to hire an agency, marketing to hundreds of prospects via email will cost you close to nothing compared to other channels of advertising.

As a small business owner on a budget, this solution is far better than channels like TV, radio and even Facebook advertising.

So while email is an old tactic, it’s still a vital one and the most affordable if you want to make more sales but don’t have loads to spend on advertising your products and services.

Want to dig deeper? Check these out:

• How to do email marketing the right way
• Email marketing tactics that are wasting your time (and what to do instead)
• Why most sales emails fail

Wrapping up

Email is the only direct channel of communication with your customers that remains private. Plus, it’s cheap, easy to use and, most importantly, gets results!

There are so many benefits to using email marketing to grow your business that you have no excuse not to be taking advantage of it. After you run your first campaign, I bet you’ll find some other great benefits that will help your business.

Have you used email marketing this year? Are you happy with how your emails performed?

The post Six reasons why email marketing is vital to business success appeared first on Better business online: Tips, insight and advice.

Here are three reasons why a .xyz domain name could give you a subtle advantage:

XYZ makes sense of the world

XYZ is a universal term applied across many industries to label key terms or methods of explanation. For example, In judging colour across the colour spectrum, the references XYZ define how the human eye interprets colour and is used by artists, broadcasters, photographers and scientists as a reference every day. XYZ are also the universal labels for the axes on 3D graphs, with the majority of the developed world working with these on a daily basis, meaning the combination is built-in to their understanding as an important defining term to pay attention to.

XYZ is a common call to action

Ever been told to XYZ? It’s a colloquial term usually told to men who are spotted with their trouser fly down. e.g. “Man, you need to XYZ” as in “eXamine Your Zip”. To many, that means every reference to the letter combination XYZ attracts their immediate attention. Attention grabbed your website, email or online project takes an advantageous leap.

Less barriers as a global brand

Going online means you literally can be a global brand but so often a UK name that has worked so well can’t transfer to other continents or even other states in Europe because of language issues. Perhaps the word has a different meaning in another language or at least a slanted connotation. With a .xyz you at least eliminate that potential issue with your domain suffix. Quite simply, the letters x,y & z are the universally recognised as the last three letters of the Latin alphabet. That means .xyz creates a global identifier and literally is the final word in domain name extensions.

Psychology of words is an often underestimated persuasion tool. In branding and in business if there is a short, quick and efficient way to gain a psychological advantage in your attempts to persuade a customer to choose you, it is well worth considering.

The post The Destination domain: .xyz appeared first on Better business online: Tips, insight and advice.

Each year Google updates its search algorithm hundreds of times. Most of these updates are minor but every few months, boom! – the search engine giant rolls out a major update that affects search results in a significant way.

While analysing and worrying about Google algorithm changes may make sense for search engine optimisation (SEO) experts and webmasters, small business owners don’t have the time to keep up with every update.

However, understanding Google’s algorithm updates and when they rolled out can help explain certain fluctuations in organic website traffic and rankings.

So, today take five minutes to read this post and find out what were the major changes that Google has made this year that had the biggest impact on search results.

Here’s what we’ll talk about:

1. Panda 4.0 and the updated Google Quality Rating Guidelines
2. Google’s abandonment of authorship markup
3. An adjustment to the local ranking algorithm (the Pigeon update)
4. A new ranking signal in HTTPS (secure encryption)
5. Penguin 3.0

Let’s get started.

1. Panda 4.0 and the updated Google Quality Rating Guidelines

On 21 May, Google’s Matt Cutts announced Panda 4.0 on Twitter. About 7.5% of English-language queries were affected.

Since it first rolled out on February 24, 2011, the goal of Panda has been to penalise sites with poor quality content while boosting sites with high-quality content in the SERPs. So with this update Google wanted to ensure that users would always get the highest quality results first.

If you want to find out more about Google’s Panda 4.0 update, this post explains everything you need to know: what it is and what small businesses should focus on to ensure their site never gets hit by a future Panda update.

Ultimately, the key to this algorithm change (and many other) lies in Google’s guidelines for content creation. Basically, if you create quality content, you’ll never have to worry about riding the Google update rollercoaster.

In July, not long after Panda 4.0 rolled out, the latest version of Google’s search quality evaluation guide was leaked, giving users more clues into how the search engine giant determines quality.

The Quality Rating Guidelines is a 160-page guide that includes Google’s instructions to human quality raters for when they review search results. This new version includes some new terms and concepts, such as:

• “E-A-T” which stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust, the elements that Google values most in a website.
• Website maintenance which refers to keeping pages updated to show that someone cares for and maintains the site.
• YMYL (“Your Money or Your Life”) where Google sets a higher standard of excellence for sites with content related to a person’s health, finance and wellbeing.

If you want to dig deeper and learn more about the latest version of Google’s search quality evaluation guide, I recommend reading this post from Search Engine Watch.

2. Google drops authorship markup

Author photos and bylines next to search results are gone. So is the 35% click-through rate increase that those photos seemed to generate.

Removing authorship markup data was one of Google’s major (and surprising) updates. To summarise, this markup was signaling to Google the Google+ profile associated with an article’s author. So when you would search for an author name on Google, the search engine results page (SERP) would also show the author’s photo and byline next to the title and summary of the article.

Here’s how it used to look:

On 25 June, Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller, announced that Google would be dropping all authorship photos from SERPs. The drop was complete on 28 June, at which point the author byline and other stats, like the number of G+ circles, were still showing in SERPs.

Then on 28 August, Google announced that they would be completely removing authorship markup. A day later and all authorship bylines had disappeared from all SERPs:

No photo, no byline, just a simple result.

So, why did Google decide to remove authorship markup data?

The official statement was that Google is striving to create a cleaner, universal look across different devices. However, many SEOs believe that profile images made the natural listings more noticeable than paid results, which was decreasing Google’s ad revenues.

IMO, most compelling explanation for Google removing profile pics from search is that it distracted from ads, and cost advertisers clicks

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) June 25, 2014

A month later, in September, Google’s John Mueller advised webmasters not to bother removing existing authorship markup as the data will be ignored anyway. Who knows what Google has in store so you better not remove your authorship markup, if you already have it in place.

Extra resources:

Google announces the end of author photos in search: What you should know

Google removes author photos from search: Why and what does it mean?

It’s over: The rise & fall of Google authorship for search results

3. Updated local ranking algorithm

On 24 July, Google launched an update to their local search algorithm to help them provide more accurate and relevant local search results.

While Google didn’t announce it officially, they did confirm the update with Search Engine Land (SEL) which decided to codename it Pigeon “because this is a local search update and pigeons tend to fly back home.”

So, this update aimed to provide a more useful, relevant and accurate experience to users seeking local results. We’ve also written a post on the Pigeon update, what’s it about and how it affected local businesses so make sure you read it.

4. HTTPS becomes a ranking signal

At the beginning of August (and after months of speculation), Google finally announced that they would be giving preference to secure sites and that HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) is officially a new ranking signal.

This means that sites going HTTPS by adding a SSL certificate to their sites will be given a minor ranking boost.

Google mentioned that this carries “less weight than other signals such as high-quality content”. However, they may decide to strengthen the signal because they want to “encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.” So, make sure you add some extra security to your site.

Extra resources:

Google starts giving a ranking boost to secure HTTPS/SSL sites
Google Webmaster Central official announcement
Google’s Support documentation on securing your site with HTTPS

5. Penguin 3.0

At the beginning of October there was a lot of buzz on a potential Penguin refresh. And, as everyone predicted, Google Penguin 3.0 was indeed launched later that month, on October 17th. This refresh was “a large rewrite of the algorithm” and was meant to help those sites that have been hit by a previous update but have in the meantime cleaned up their bad link profiles.

Google launched the Penguin update in April 2012 with the purpose of uncovering spammy backlink profiles and punishing sites that are violating Google’s quality guidelines by lowering their rankings in its search engine results.

Penguin 3.0 would be the sixth refresh and Google confirmed that it’s still rolling out so it’s definitely a big one!

Read our post on Google’s Penguin 3.0 update to learn more about it, its impact on websites and rankings and what you can do to clean up your link profiles for future updates.

Wrapping up

So, there you go! These are the most important Google algorithm changes from 2014. Hopefully you got a better understanding of these updates so you can make changes to your site, if necessary, and also to anticipate the future changes coming from Google, which we’ll discuss in detail in an upcoming blog post.

The post 2014 Google updates: What were the major updates in SEO? appeared first on Better business online: Tips, insight and advice.

What’s it all about?

Established as a grassroots, non-political, non-commercial campaign, Small Business Saturday is about highlighting small business success and spreading the message to consumers of the benefits to those who ‘shop local’ and support small businesses within their communities. Held the first shopping Saturday in December it is aimed at sowing the seed of shopping local for lasting impact and a change in people’s routines.

This year Small Business Saturday UK will take place on Saturday December 6th and hopes to be as successful as last year’s event which led to great success on social media with more than 1.5 million Facebook views and #SmallBizSatUK trending in the top 3 for the whole day. The increased awareness led to an estimated £460 million being spent in small businesses on the day.

It was such a success that is running again this year in the run up to Christmas. So how can you get involved?

• Get promoting the day via social media especially via Faceboook and Twitter - Don’t forget the hashtag #SmallBizSatUK – so that more people are aware of the initiative.

• Get out onto your own High Street and get supporting your own local small businesses and give them some sales.

• Use any ways you can to celebrate & champion the UK’s 5 million small businesses that are essential to our economy.

• Remember Small Business Saturday is just the start. Encourage people to use their local small businesses and start  building your own network with local businesses to help structure the support system in your local area.

Want to see other businesses who have got involved. There are some great case studies on the official YouTube channel

Remember, supporting small businesses is not just for Christmas, they are the lifeblood of the UK economy.

The post Small Business Saturday – Support those like you appeared first on Better business online: Tips, insight and advice.

Further reading

You can learn about creating Twitter ads with this guide and learn about creating Facebook ads with this guide.

The post Swift Six: How to get more traffic to your blog appeared first on Better business online: Tips, insight and advice.