The last few months have been particularly busy for us here at Mackerel Media and one of the exciting projects that has been keeping us occupied is a search engine marketing campaign for Edinburgh Edge, a new partnership venture between Dalmahoy, Maximillion Events and the Edinburgh International Climbing Arena (EICA). It’s particularly fitting that we were approached by the team at IfLooksCouldKill to partner up on the project.

Edinburgh Edge is a collaborative project designed to offer superb value accommodation, conference and activity packages in the West (or edge) of Edinburgh. The team has many years of experience working together to deliver world class events to both corporate and leisure markets.

Our work started with detailed keyword research, looking at the competitive search landscape, followed by an on-site search engine optimisation exercise to the ensure the site is as friendly to search engines as possible. A link-building campaign is underway, which will in turn be followed by a comprehensive pay-per-click campaign to drive highly targeted traffic to the site.

James Morrow are one of the country’s leading hi fi and home entertainment systems retailers, with an amazing shop in Edinburgh at Tollcross and a dedicated Bose shop in Glasgow. Putting the emphasis firmly on service and advice, the company offers customers a huge range of equipment and a bespoke installation service to customers around Scotland. Brands the company carries include Sonos, Linn, Creek Audio and Cyrus amongst many others. Incidentally, if you haven’t heard a Cyrus separates system in full flow, get down there and have a listen – you’ll be amazed!

Our work covers organic optimisation of the James Morrow site, along with a healthy dose of link-building and promotion, with a particular focus on the local Edinburgh, Glasgow and Scottish markets. Already, results are looking good, with across-the-board ranking improvements for target keywords, including a number of coveted position 1 placements on Google.

This is something of a poacher-turned-gamekeeper role for us and one we believe we can bring significant value to through our experience of working with advertisers and understanding exactly what they’re looking for in an advertising product and by working closely with the STA to help them bring their offer completely up-to-date and make the most of the thousands of visitors they attract every month.

Focusing primarily on display advertising, we’ve worked with the Authority to develop a business model, ensure their new site (still under wraps unfortunately) has the capability to accommodate the adverts and select, set up and manage a suitably robust ad-serving platform.

After a detailed assessment of a range of systems, we selected the tremendously powerful OpenX system and we’re very excited to be working with them using their Community Hosted product, which is a perfect match for the Authority.

Speaking of the appointment, Brian Wilton, Director of the STA said:

“Mackerel Media was highly recommended to us and I have to say that Nick Craig’s patience in explaining (more than once!) the complexities of online advertising is above and beyond the call of duty. It’s very reassuring for technical trogladytes such as to have such expert advice on tap.”

If you are a publisher looking for advice on improving your product, or if you’re an advertiser looking to get the most out of your online activity, please don’t hesitate to contact us -we’d be delighted to help you out too.

Designed and developed by the chaps at The Weather, the new shop builds on the tremendous success and popularity of the previous incarnation, focusing in particular on sales of the Distillery’s excellent Personalised Whisky Bottles that are despatched daily to customers around the world. The new shop is powered by the very flexible Magento ecommerce software, replacing a bespoke system developed a number of years ago.

Our role was to ensure the new shop is as well-optimised for search-engines as possible and to ensure that  - from a search perspective – the migration from old shop to new went as smoothly as possible. We’re also carrying out a link-building campaign to get the shop in front of as many prospective customers as possible.

With the nights drawing in and Christmas fast approaching, there’s nothing quite like settling down in front of the fire with a good book and a dram of beautiful whisky. And where better to buy that whisky than direct from the distillery? Get on over there!

We’ve been a little lax here in keeping the blog up-to-date with our new clients wins and completed projects, so in the spirit of more frequent announcements, we’re extremely pleased to announce Welcome to Scotland as a new search engine optimisation client.

Owned and operated by Landmark Press – the group also responsible for the Landmark Visitor Park, Inveraray Jail and Edinburgh’s Camera Obscura – WelcometoScotland.com is the country’s premier tourism portal, featuring over 11,000 providers of accommodation in Scotland.

We were approached following the redevelopment and re-launch of the site to assist with a broad search engine optimisation campaign aimed at promoting the site and the many businesses it features to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who make Scotland their destination of choice every year. With the recent upsurge in holidaying at home, the campaign focuses on the local, national and international markets, a combination that presents an intriguing set of challenges, namely the need to promote a huge range of accommodation providers including Hotels, B&Bs, Self Catering, Holiday Cottages,  Caravan Parks and Hostels.

Already the signs are looking good, with a number of excellent ranking positions secured for prominent keyphrases. Watch this space though – we’ll keep you updated on progress.

We’re very pleased indeed to announce that FreeAgent, an online accounting application company, has come on board as our latest PPC client. As the title of the post suggests, we are also a client of FreeAgent: we use their brilliant software to manage all our accounts, bills, expenses and financial admin.

With a keen eye on expansion and after having secured funding for growth, FreeAgent appointed us to work on their Pay Per Click campaigns, with the objectives of improving click-through rate, reducing cost-per-click and reducing cost-per-conversion. Our approach involves a variety of tactics, all of which are designed to bring visitors to the site who have a very good chance of becoming a customer. Without giving too much away: so far, the results are looking very positive.

We’ve found their software absolutely invaluable over the past year (if you’re a freelancer, a small trader or a small business, do check it out!) so we’re particularly pleased to be able to help Roan, Ed and Olly achieve more from their advertising and attract more customers. All the best guys and thanks for choosing us!

The truth is that we’ve been very busy on some very interesting client projects and precious little time has been left for the blog. So, apologies to our regular readers. Unfortunately we can’t talk about the projects we’re working on – they’re strictly confidential – but when the right time does come we’ll be able to explain exactly what we have been up to. Until then, not a word!

Incidentally, we’ve just passed a year in business – the time has flown by. As always, thanks to our clients for their support and business and thanks to our colleagues and partners for their hard work.

Despite the enormous economic turmoil going on all around us, the digital sector (as far as we can see) remains relatively buoyant. We’re finding that the recession is positive for us, in that clients are looking to squeeze as much as they can from their marketing budgets and that those niggly SEO and PPC problems that were overlooked are now being given attention – all the more work for the likes of us.

For what it’s worth, we think the downturn will also be positive for the internet marketing industry as clients become much more selective about how they invest their money and with whom they do so. That will only lead to us all having to up our game, proving that we can and do deliver a return and showing clients exactly where their money is going.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to chip in and get the discussion going.

The blog previously ran on the Serendipity Platform, which proved to be a little restrictive for their needs. We’ve now migrated the blog to WordPress (of which we are great fans) and applied a customised theme that ties in much more neatly with the design of the main site.

The aims of the move are threefold:

1. Make writing and publishing articles easier, quicker and more frequent
2. Utilise the SEO-friendliness of WordPress
3. Widen the distribution and visibility of the content

If you have a spare few minutes, I’d thoroughly recommend your stopping by and having a read of the delightful little articles Charles and Dee write about their life on the farm, Northumberland and the animals, of which there seem to be many more since our last visit! The blog is at http://www.southlandsfarmcottages.co.uk/blog

By the way – we also redesigned the cottages page to show the cottages in the very best light possible.

The company caters for a wide range of the market, from the occasional hill-walker looking for something to ward off the dastardly Highland Midge, to the rescue team making their way carefully through a remote rain forest whilst being pestered by mosquitoes.

Our work will take in Search Engine Optimisation, PPC Advertising and Link Building, all aimed at attracting hordes of visitors to the site.

You can see the site at www.healthy-travel.co.uk

We’ve been working on a couple of campaigns for different clients, playing the game, patiently waiting for new links to be established. Out of the blue, we found we had two fantastic links on our hands – from two of the most visible sites on the web, let alone in the UK. Both The Guardian Newspaper and The Sun are sending traffic to sites we manage. Needless to say we were very pleased, as it was somewhat unexpected.

What was the secret to this? Content, pure and simple. It just goes to show that for all the talk of enticing links through quality content, it’s quite true. And whilst these not might be the Holy Grail of links, (we’re still holding out for that elusive front-page-of -Google link – we might be waiting a while!) it shows that with a little effort, directed cleverly, you can achieve great results.