This Christmas saw a surge in ownership of tablet computers in the UK. Some 12 million adults now currently own a tablet, and reports suggest that a further 7% intend to buy one before March 2013.

YouGov are reporting that the increase in adoption has been thanks to the release of new competitively priced tablets, such as the Kindle Fire and the Samsung Galaxy. Of the tablets received as gifts over Christmas, the Kindle Fire accounted for 35% of purchases with the Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy following on 24% and 12% respectively. [More]

We are only just two weeks into the New Year, and already it seems that the market is sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Last week saw the closure of camera retailer Jessops and last night news broke of HMV going into administration. [More]

A recent report on eConsultancy has indicated that the adoption of mobile commerce (mCommerce) is due to finally become a main stream channel rather than the just another toy for aficionados. This is in thanks, largely, to the increased saturation of tablets within the personal computing market. [More]

Once again, the increasing trend of online consumer retail has grown year on year with Boxing Day 2012 breaking all records for eCommerce retail. Early figures suggest that a collective 14million hours were spent by users trawling through online stores, generating somewhere in the region of 113million visits to online shops, thus ensuring that 26/12/12 became the UK’s biggest day for internet shopping. [More]

So Christmas is here, 24th December 2012, the excitement is building in the homes of Millions as children start to become filled with anticipation as to what Santa is going to bring. Parents (and husbands alike) are rushing around to get the final bits and pieces that they have inevitably forgotten. But, the one thing pulling this all together is the bond of blood and love... Christmas always has been, and in my opinion always should be, a family time. [More]

A new report out this week from online casino, RoxyPalace, suggests that the average Brit is planning on using Social Media to share the festive traditions such as opening presents, the festive dinner, the Queen’s speech and the family knee’s up. [More]

The BBC recently published an article documenting the biggest losers on the high street in this current economic downturn. The names included in the article included well documented leading brands, i.e. HMV, JJB, Thornton’s, Clinton Cards, Game, Habitat, Peacocks, La Senza... I could go on. The majority of these brands, when I was growing up, seemed untouchable in terms of business strength and high street power. You knew that if you wanted a card you would go to Clintons, if you wanted a CD you would go to HMV, for chocolate you would go to Thorntons etc... The situation at that time was vastly different today though. Whereas 10-20 years ago you would have that relatively limited choice of retailer, the advancement of the internet has meant that consumers choices are greatly widened online. Undoubtedly this has led to a more sensitive customer, in terms of price, variety, delivery, ease of purchase etc. We have seen on the majority of our client’s analytics figures that there has been a year on year increase in traffic, revenue and conversion. This would suggest people are more willing to hunt out the deals that they want, but more importantly, the customer tends to know initially what they want to purchase (it is the add/upsells that they aren’t sure on). A lot will be written in the coming weeks that the that the JJB administration re-emphasises the lack of consumer confidence on the high street at the minute, but is the reality that the customer is more savvy and utilising eCommerce more than ever. For example, many customers (myself including), would visit a high street store when looking to purchase white goods, research them instore and then go online to try and get them cheaper. It would be foolish to make a sweeping statement about these companies online presence and their marketing online. However, what we have seen through our own client base, by investing in constant development and improvement on your website, there are significant benefits to be had through the aggregation of marginal gains (for example, Multi Variant Testing) and through sustained effort to grow your business online. If you want to find out how EAOM can help to develop your business online then contact us at contact@eaonlinemarketing.co.uk or call us on 01772 331830.

If the number of visitors your website gets has dropped dramatically since April, then you could be a victim of Google's Penguin update. If you weren't using an online marketing agency and merely relying on people finding your site by searching for specific keywords, and now they're got getting to you any more, what can you do to get yourself back on track? Google continually updates the way they search the web to rank sites and pages, with Penguin just the latest version of their ever-changing algorithm. There are many companies out there who now specialise in keeping ahead of Google's updates and helping keep companies thriving in the tricky world of SEO (search engine optimisation). A digital marketing agency like this keeps track of what Google and other search companies are doing, or plan to do, and adjusts your online presence accordingly. Hiring an SEO agency will mean that you don't have to suffer from the shock of suddenly seeing your visitor numbers drop when the rules changed. A quality online marketing agency will be experts in SEO and they'll already be alerted to the changes that are coming, giving you expert and timely advice on your websites to ensure that you keep getting the visitor numbers you need. If you're looking for a digital marketing agency, make sure that you compare what they offer and how they differ. Some may specialise in traditional marketing done online, while others will focus themselves on skills like SEO. You need to assess what your business needs - do you require lots of brand awareness amongst consumers, or do you just want to generate more hits and visits to your website? A good online marketing agency will be able to work with you on your goals and needs, and they'll also be able to advise you about how things might change in the future, and what you need to do now to adapt. Whether you're looking for a digital marketing agency or a specialist SEO agency, make sure that they can answer your questions. Ask how they can help you adapt to Penguin, and what they've done for past Google updates, such as Panda. A good SEO agency will ensure that you keep getting lots of hits to your website, however Google choose to change the rules in the future.

Yesterday I went to the first ionSearch Search Marketing Conference in Leeds, where I attended a mix of both speaker talks and expert panel sessions. Overall it was a really great first conference with some really interesting debate and discussion around current and future industry issues and best practice. I attended a total of 10 talks and expert panels and have summed up what I believe to be the main take aways from each session below, with a few common themes coming out: With Panda and the recent updates to Google’s linking algorithm exact match anchor text can be risky if over used, with the context of the surrounding content now more important. The lines between SEO and Social are blending further and social should be part of all content strategies Blogger outreach and relationship building is becoming more key than ever to link building efforts Expert Panel: SEO Content Strategies Use social media to look for up-coming trends and plan your content development around them Measure closely the link between rankings and traffic to judge content success. Plan your distribution first, focusing content writing on what network, sites or blogs find the most useful. In boring industries look to humanise content to add context. look at building content around more interesting subjects and relate that back to your original site. Expert Panel: SEO for eCommerce Users buy at product level, develop your SEO campaigns to start from product level up. E.g. Product Detail > Sub Category > Category > Home Page. Look at what competitors are targeting that you are not for opportunities. Error management (404’s, 505’s, 301s) is important for site and link stabilisation, use tools such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Google Web Master Tools & Xenu to identify them. Out of stock messages naturally lead to high bounce rates, look at how you can capitalise on these pages with related products and data capture for pre-order. Don’t ignore customer demographics take time to drive meaning from Google Analysis and your CRM system for content ideas. Think about page titles from a gender perspective and match them to your market. Men like bold statements, women like answers to questions. Look at improving the CTR of your SERP’s using schema.org mark up Reviews are becoming more and more key to SERP CTR You have to work for reviews, make sure you chase your customers for them, rotating through different review sites. Video is cheaper to produce than you think and can improve both conversion and dwell time, both of which are metrics that Google is focusing on. Google shopping ranks price with delivery included Reviews also play a big influence in Google Shopping, further showing their growing influence. Ideally look to update sitemaps as often as possible, daily if achivable. Google can deal with pagination, but ideally look to implement ether rel="next"/"prev" or using rel canonical tags to point back to a ‘view all’ page. Don’t share any bespoke product text with affiliates, use manufacture text. Physical stores should always have a dedicated page rather than any dynamic pages, making sure you mark-up addresses with schema.org. Speaker Talk (Tim Grice): Link Building in Competitive Industries Bad link are those which are low in quality, un-relevant and contain large amounts of exact match anchor text. Look at turning your link profile into a graph, comparing the number of links to the quality and see where the most links are held, looking for unnatural spikes. Target landing pages not keywords, focusing on between 10-15 keywords per page. Look to mix anchor text and don’t have exact match links that make up more than 15% of your back link profile. Social signal can be a catalyst to justify link quality in Google’s eyes. When creating content for both social sharing and linking bear in mind these can be two different types of people, target those who both share and link for the best results. ‘Fresh Rank’ is becoming more important, links in old ‘High PR’ page may not be as effective as they once were; look to develop links in fresh content. Competitor Analysis, rather than just matching competitor link profiles look to discover why competitors are gaining links. Develop a content production process such as that used at Branded3 (See slide 6 here) . Develop content for the network, website & blogger rather than for your-self, going beyond the ‘build it and they will come’ approach. Find your social influences and develop brand champions. Speaker Talk (Jon Alderson): Symantec HTML Schema.org is helping blend the lines between the information web and data web where extrapolating data from written information has previously been difficult. Use html mark up to maximise Google’s ability read your website e.g. Marking up an address for restaurant using schema.org. Think about what your mark-up tells Google about your content? are using it correctly? Speaker Talk (Roland Dunn): SearchBots! Don’t ignore your server logs, they can tell where GoogleBot is visiting on your website. Segment and graph the data to understand if GoogleBot is getting lost on your website and not hitting the pages important to your SEO strategy. Compare GoogleBot’s visits to other user visits to see if they differ and identify if your structure or navigation is causing Google to visits areas your uses don’t. Speaker Talk (Ralph Tegtmeier, AKA Fantomaster): Turning Black into White - Auto Content Generation for SEO. Automatically generated content has now advanced to the point where you can’t distinguish between it and real content. Depending on the hat your wearing, high quality machine written copy can provide real benefits for scalable content production. If your providing readable, usable, non-duplicated content for sites where thin content is an issue is it really black hat? Speaker Talk (Dave Snyder): Content Marketing in a Post Pander World. The content matters as much as anchor text now, if not more. Authorship can help add authority to content. Look at how words relate semantically. Create content with depth, that doesn’t just mean words: mix content with pictures, video and audio etc… Think about how you curate your content, look at where you are going to published it Many social network offer adverts for promoting your content e.g. StumbleUpon, or Reddit offer cheap but effective content advertising channels. Expert Panel: Creative Link Building Reverse engineer your link strategy, think about where you’re going to get them and who’s going to give them to you, then develop your content around that purpose. Understand your audience and what they share or link to. Use Google ImageSearch to find where you infographic has been syndicated to optimise those links Build outreach networks and relationships for syndicating content, keep these relationships strong. Use services like myBlogGuest to find guest posters for your own sites to develop brand advocates. Paid guest post still happen but if you guest post is of a high enough quality bloggers will accept for nothing Create a link building process, covering industry review, blue sky ideas, relationship building and promotion. Find out your clients pain threshold e.g. how risky or controversial can your link building ideas be? The more pain the more likely you are to get links. Track news and social and try, riding the back of those waves to drive traffic and links from your content. Link your creative to KPI’s e.g. traffic, sales, links Audit your company’s assets, what can you do with them from a link prospective. Create websites or content around debate that has some form of relevance. Create blog posts for un-live products to drive buzz and links, using rel=canonical to transfer link juice once live. For small agencies doing link building focus on developing blogger outreach networks, using tools such as MyBlogGuest, Exact match anchor text is dead, the context of content surrounding links now carries equal weight Expert Panel: How to use Twitter, Facebook & Google+ for SEO When doing social for SEO your dealing with real people and as such are representing the brand and must understand the responsibilities that go with it. Your content needs to be on point with your brand making sure your discussing the same subjects that are being talked about socially and in other channels. Measure KPI’s from what social activities e.g. ranks etc… Schedule content/social updates around events and weekends, allowing you to be re-active to comments/retweets etc… A StickyEyes study showed the ranking correlation between social and SERP’s is strong with sites that have high keyword positions often have a solid social footprint. Consider moving brands onto Google+ as Google integrates more services with it, potentially even Google Maps. Expert Panel: Future Proof Your SEO Holistic SEO is future proofing, making sure you cover all the angles from social & structure to content production and html mark up. Eliminate bad links from the backline profile where possible. Prime link elimination efforts should focus on removing duplicate content and scraper conten.t Audit client backlink profiles as part of proposals to avoid dealing with legacy SEO issues. Social vs. Links profile should look natural. Building links without social mentions could be risky and result in unnatural link vs social footprints which Google may penalise.

As a forward thinking and ever expanding company, we have been looking at taking on a number of new team members over the last couple of months, both for EAOM and the parent company Exact Abacus. Prior to this latest drive we have prided ourselves on using our own networks, traditional channels and social media to get applications for positions in either side of the business. However, for whatever reason, this time the market seems to have dried up from these channels and we have been left looking at using recruitment agencies for the first time. In my experience recruitment agencies within this industry are very much like the creative agencies themselves. Some can really talk the talk, but very few can actually walk the walk. Thankfully, I have made some great connections over the last few years and trust the agencies that we are using to deliver the right sort of person with the right sort of quality for interviews. Without taking anything away from the agencies, I find it astonishing that for a forward thinking industry with so many employees with their finger on the pulse of all things digital, the get up and go of people looking to move positions within the industry is next to none. For those involved in the social media marketing on a day to day basis, you would think that they would be keen to avoid agencies in order to benefit from better salaries... this obviously isn’t the case and it leads into another question, if those marketing social strategy on a day to day basis aren’t using it for their own gains, then who is??? If you feel that you have got something that you can add to our ever growing team and have the get up and go about you to be proactive for yourself then why not drop us a line or pop in for a brew. 01772 455052 or email careers[at]eaonlinemarketing.co.uk