We’ve been shortlisted!
Tecmark has been shortlisted for the upcoming How-Do Awards, in the ‘SEO and PPC Agency,’ category.
The category is one of 16, with other categories awarding magazines, radio programmes, newspapers and social media agencies amongst others.
The winners of the awards in all 16 categories, will be announced at the ceremony on 26th May 2011. We’ll certainly be there!
Developed in partnership with game designer Sanjay Purswani, Good Shot is the latest mobile game from Tecmark.
Inspired by the legendary NES game Duck Hunt (1984), Good Shot is a 2D shooter just as visceral as its 8-bit predecessor. Combining polished graphics with an amusing storyline and a reassuringly direct touch-screen interface, it’s definitely not as easy as it looks, but all the more rewarding as a result.
Good Shot is based around a story mode which puts you in control of a bumbling, pie-obsessed hillbilly who still lives with his long-suffering ‘Ma’. She needs ducks for her notorious home-baked pies, so you load up your 12-gauge and head on out. Along the way, you meet the local flirt, and slaughter some flying pigs in a rather inspired dream sequence. Waddle we think of next?!
There are two difficulty settings in the story mode, and you unlock arcade versions of each level as you progress through the game. Be warned, the arcade mode will suck you in!
You can have a quack at the game for free by downloading Good Shot Lite, or buy the full version from the App Store for just 59p. For screenshots and more, visit www.goodshotgame.com.
…and more to the point, why does it matter?
So, congratulations. You got to number one in Google for your prized keyword and you’re getting thousands and thousands of visitors a month.
SEO job done, surely? The team can pick up, pack up, pat themselves on the back and go home, right?
Wrong.
The rankings is just the beginning. What really matters is what these thousands and thousands of new website visitors do once they arrive on your website. And that’s where your conversion rate comes into play.
That depends on your website.
What do you want your website’s visitors to do?
Conversions are essentially actions you want traffic to your site to take on your website and commonly include:
Before you even embark upon a SEO campaign, you should have a clear idea in your head of what you want people do to once they are on your site and the site itself should be optimised to encourage those conversions.
Your conversion rate is essentially the percentage of visitors who “convert,” and carry out your nominated conversion actions.
Conversion rates vary based on:
What use is a load of traffic that turns up at your website, has a quick nosey around and then disappears elsewhere to buy services or products from your competitors? Not much.
Chasing rankings blindly is pointless. Everything in SEO should be geared towards ROI, which means getting your users to convert to sales or leads. Chasing rankings for poor converting, irrelevant or unsearched keywords isn’t going to help you to generate more leads or sales. By the same token, achieving rankings for great keywords and then sending that traffic to a website that confuses users will deliver equally poor results.
You can monitor conversions through the free (and incredibly awesome) Google Analytics. There’s comprehensive e-commerce tracking as well a host of other goal types you can monitor. Analytics can tell you not only how many conversions you received in any given month, but which keywords and traffic sources that delivered those conversions.
The internet has made it possible for people to say pretty much whatever they want about any brand or company they want and to an audience that could potentially be huge. Forums, blogs, review sites…. they all allow and even sometimes encourage users to share their own experiences with companies.
That’s great for users – to a point. If a company is bad news, we’d all be in agreement that consumers have a right to know. But review sites have been open to abuse for as long as they’ve been online. Former employees, disgruntled clients and even competitors could write whatever they want about your brand online.
What makes this such a big problem is that these websites will often show up highly in Google – and if someone is writing about your brand on that site, a Google search for your company name could return negative commentary listings on the first page.
A fine example would be that of oil giant, BP. Typing ‘BP oil,’ into Google shows up news results from the massive oil spill of 2010 more than 6 months on.
We’re a nation of Googlers. Despite its market share dropping to just over 60% in the USA, Google still has almost 90% of the market in the UK. Consumers with access to the internet (so almost all of them, surely?) are armed with information about your company. A quick search engine search on a company you have never heard of would be ‘due diligence’ to many consumers, before parting with their cash. And if the top ten isn’t particularly favourable to your, for whatever reason, that could be enough to sway someone against becoming your customer.
You can’t just call Google and request the removal of listings that contain negative commentary. They won’t oblige.
There are things you can do such as responding appropriately to reviews on the websites that are rankings. You can also start engaging in social media to build a more positive and prominent brand for yourself online.
For help building a positive brand online and in the search engines, contact us about our online reputation management services.
Tecmark updated this research in August 2011. The most up to date version can be viewed here: Tecmark Mobile Internet Research August 2011.
We all know mobile Internet is growing. Many of you are a part of the growth, checking sports scores, browsing holidays, catching up on the news or even reading posts like this on your Smartphone. Whether you’re sitting in your lounge, standing around a supermarket or commuting, mobile devices are proving more popular than many thought possible for accessing the Internet.
With that in mind, at Tecmark we carried out some research of our own with a focus on the UK internet visitors. We took data from a number of websites in a number of different niche areas that gave us anything between 0.5 million and 1.5 million total website visits per month and we assessed how many were accessing these various sites from mobile devices.
We took our data from September 2009 right through to January 2011. We were pretty sure we would see an amazing growth over that period in terms of the percentage of a website’s users that are browsing from a mobile device and we were not wrong!
The PDF can be downloaded from the bottom of this page, but let us sum up for your our key findings.
The iPad 2 announcement was widely anticipated, as were many of the features revealed. In fact, the biggest surprise was that Steve Jobs himself was up on stage unveiling this giant iPhone 4 new tablet. But what are they key features?
And when will it go on sale? Well, launch date is 11th March 2011 in the USA and 25th March everywhere else.
And how much will it set you back? Well, the prices are staying exactly the same as the current iPad.
It all seems a little ‘rushed.’ A summer launch was widely anticipated but in actual fact it’s to be in the shops in the US in little over a week and internationally 2 weeks later. It doesn’t offer anything (except snazzy ‘smart cases’ which accessories companies won’t be thankful to Apple for) than the iPhone 4 doesn’t really.
So it does seem a little like a ‘big iPhone 4.’ Except it’s not bigger in every way. It’s thinner. As far as tablets go, though, on paper it’s streets ahead of any other device on the market. So if you’re a tablet user, you won’t find a better one.
There’s no denying that Apple have enjoyed great success with the current iPad and Apple fanatics are sure to be queuing up outside shops ahead of its launch.
Will you be joining the queue?
These days, organisations of all sizes are talking about social media strategies. Social media is becoming an increasingly important marketing tool, without doubt. It can help you engage your customers better or get more insight into how they behave, and it’s also a platform you can use for things like PR and recruitment.
At the moment, however, many businesses don’t really have a clue what to do once they’ve signed up for Twitter and Facebook.
Here’s a couple of examples from 2010 of how not to do social media:
Social media can go wrong, but learn from the mistakes of others – don’t be put off. Most organisations can benefit from developing a social media strategy, so if you haven’t already included this in your business plan, you may want have a re-think.
