Please note: applications from recruitment agencies are not wanted at this stage and will be politely declined without being viewed.

The Mackerel team is on the move! We’re excited to announce that have now moved office to a fantastic converted grain store on Montgomery Street, just off the top of Leith Walk. The building is home to a wide range of creative businesses and so far we’re settling in very nicely indeed.

We’d be delighted to have you round if you’re in the area, and you’ll find us at:

77 Montgomery Street
Edinburgh
EH7 5HS

We have also updated our phone number to 0131 558 5438 – all other comms including mobiles, email and Skype remain the same as before. Our national number is also still the same: 0845 224 7428.

We have parking available if you’re travelling to the office by car, the entrance for which is at 77 Brunswick Street, through the pend and to the right.

See you here soon!

In the vast majority of cases the problem arises when well-meaning developers implement functionality on a site that should in theory assist users with their goals by making the process of searching or navigating a site more efficient, but in reality cause problems due to the way in which the tools are constructed and their acting as a block to search engines. If the information architecture of a site isn’t perfect or doesn’t provide a browse-able route to all of a site’s content, then content can be blocked or hidden away in the bowels of a site, never to be seen again.

An Example

Take, for example, the Association of British Insurers, the body charged with representing insurers in the UK. Given the high winds we’re currently experiencing in Scotland and the troublesome ash cloud drifting over from Iceland, they probably have their work cut out for them at the moment and are probably experiencing more than their usual levels of attention, so they make a good example for a brief case study.

Supposing we’re interested in looking for Scottish insurance companies, so we might type ‘Scottish Friendly’ into the search box. We would see this page here:

http://www.abi.org.uk/MemberSearchResults.aspx?searchQuery=SCOTTISH%20FRIENDLY

That’s a normal search results page and not one you’d usually expect to be published to the web, unless search engines have gone to the trouble of using the search tool on the site.

However, if we look a little more closely at the main members’ database, we see a few interesting ‘features’:

• Filter results by: allows you to filter the results down by the first letter of the name of the company, but it does so in an entirely search engine-unfriendly manner (it uses a script) that means the content can’t be indexed.
• Next >> allows you to move to the next page of search results but again the subsequent pages are accessed via a script that can’t be indexed.

Neither of these are a particular problem if we are looking solely at links off a rarely used search results page, but given the main members database relies on exactly the same filtering technology, in effect it means almost none of the content is visible to search engines. Whilst we’re on the subject, here’s another example.

This problem could be solved with some technical changes but as always, it’s better for the problem never to arise in the first place, and that comes from thorough SEO planning and strategy from the outset.

Our targeting has hitherto been restricted to the use of keywords to build topics around which we’re interested in placing ads. For new users (and for some clients) this takes a little getting used to as the methodology required is somewhat different from the way in which keywords are used on the Search Network, where there is a clearer relationship between the keyword and query.

As of this week we’ll be able to target ads to over 1,750 topics and sub-topics, allowing us to build much more closely refined ad groups that move us more towards our ultimate goal of Right Ad, Right Person, Right Time.

Right, time for some Display Network optimisation…..

Whilst at the time of writing the update has not been rolled out in the UK, from our perspective, the ‘new’ advice is very much in line with the advice we’ve always given to clients, namely offer good products or services, write good content, offer something unique and useful to users, market your site in the right places and keep on developing it. We thought it would be useful to share some data from a recent project that might go some way to showing just how effective good quality, unique content can be at gaining ranking positions and beating down the competition.

The Essential Background

• The site is brand new
• It operates in a highly competitive sector
• A focus was placed on writing a large amount of totally unique content

The Results

The graph below shows the rise in organic search traffic during the weeks after the launch of the site, denoted by the arrow towards the left hand side. Whilst we can’t share exact figures what we can say is:

• Over 15,000 different keywords brought traffic to the site
• The maximum recorded increase in traffic is over 1,000%
• Google brought most traffic by a factor of >200

What Can We Conclude?

This clearly isn’t a particularly scientific study, but what it does show is that good quality, unique content, well target and well-optimised can bring in significant amounts of traffic in a relatively short period of time. It shows that unique content is rewarded with high ranking and it shows that once ‘accepted’ as being of high-quality, the site’s traffic can grow substantially. The positive impact of good quality content is clear.

What remains to be seen is whether the relatively young age of the site and its limited backlink profile will count against it once the Farmer update hits the UK, or whether it will continue to attract traffic in similar volumes. The answer will of course be to keep developing the content and keep marketing it to develop good quality links, both of which are happening.

What Do You Think?

What have you experienced like this? Good? Bad? Indifferent? Let us know in the comments below!

The new site was developed by Line Digital using the Magento Ecommerce platform, and features over 9,000 products for sale and close technical integration with the company’s fulfilment centre.

The Mackerel Media team has been involved since the inception of the project and has worked on a range of services including:

• Domain Name Acquisition
• Organic Search Engine Optimisation
• Technical SEO
• PPC Advertising
• Strategy & Planning

With the summer fast approaching we’re looking forward to seeing the site prosper as Britain’s 1 million caravan owners seek out bargains!

The initial scope of the project was to research, plan, set up and manage an international Google AdWords advertising campaign targeting individuals in the company’s key markets of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East, which we duly did.

We were subsequently engaged to provide search engine optimisation consultancy and advice for a new web site being developed by Inigo Media, which launched earlier this year and has already proven successful at encouraging potential customers to enquire.

Nikki de Prey kindly gave us a brilliant testimonial saying:

Working with Mackerel Media has been great from the start.  In my initial call to enquire about Google AdWords Nick [the MD] spoke to me in a language I understood, put me at ease that what I was wanting was possible, and was happy to spend a long time on the phone with me finding out about my marketing needs and telling me about his background.  I got several quotes at the time, and although Mackerel was not the cheapest I just couldn’t bring myself to go with anyone else!  And I’m thrilled I made that decision.  Their attention to my company and my needs has been fantastic, even though I’m small fry!  In short, Mackerel  know what they are doing, work until they get the results the client wants, and offer great customer service always with a friendly voice!  I am so glad I found them!

It’s not every day you get a quote like that from a client – thank you Nikki!

The iAd network is designed to give advertisers access to the millions of individuals around the world who own an iPhone or an iPod Touch and is said to combine “the emotion of TV advertising with the interactivity of internet advertising” by allowing in-app, interactive adverts to be displayed on devices.

This will of course pitch Apple squarely against Google in the mobile advertising sphere and specifically create something of a high-noon standoff between Quattro Wireless, the mobile ad network Apple bought a few months ago and AdMob, the mobile advertising network Google acquired for an eye-watering $750m.

In a further complication, Apple recently changed their terms of service to prohibit any application developer from using an ad network associated with a company that distributes mobile operating systems, a rather roundabout way of saying “you won’t be using AdMob thank you very much”.

Apple claims to have $60m of media booked already, which they say represents almost 50% of the total mobile advertising spend in the US for the second half of 2010. Let the battle commence!

Although they’ve been criticised for it in the past, one of the most fascinating things about Google is that they can and do rely on the data and the facts and in this case it will be interesting to see the outcome of the experiment. There are a whole host of factors at play here and obviously their aim is to maximise the number of clicks on the ads, thereby maximising their revenue. Unfortunately us picky humans are in the way of that and suffer from all sorts of ailments like advert fatigue, varying sensitivity to colour, varying monitor settings and so on.

What do you think of the new colours? Have you noticed? Do you prefer any of them over the others? Let us know in the comments below!