William Exchange

Email. It has become a staple of the office environment. Every morning when you turn of your computer, you’re hoping there aren’t a bazillion emails awaiting your reply. When you login, not only are there multiple emails, but a quick glace over indicates many of them are ads and spam, asking you to buy this or subscribe to that. Your anticipation of what awaits on the computer screen quickly dissipates in disappointment as you promptly begin the arduous task of deleting those annoying emails. How and why did emails turn from a moment of excitement when we heard the magical “you got mail” in the 1990s to emails cluttered with bold, capitalized print, shouting at us to get our attention and our money? Email marketing has become an essential component of any marketer’s marketing plan. Marketers know that multiple times a day we check our email in hopes of finding those few that are truly interesting, amusing or informative.  Because ...

SEO and content marketing are, technically speaking, two very different beasts, and yet, they go together hand in hand. One relies on the other for success, and vice versa. Maybe it’s not so much that they are two different beasts, but that they are two sides of the same coin. While these two processes seem to work very differently on the surface, it’s important to understand that they are really inseparable, and both are required to grow the traffic to your website. In previous days, growing traffic was as simple as changing around link structures, adding keywords here and there, or experimenting with your metas. Once those elements were in place, you could start building more links on your site and sit back and watch your traffic grow. Today, that process is a little more complicated. You’ve probably heard it before, but Google prefers (more like: “expects”) high-quality content over everything else. “Content is king” is one of...

Spring is often associated with a fresh, new, clean start and a renewed sense of life. For many, this getting rid of the old and in with the new takes on the form of spring cleaning.  While you may be thinking about the house, why not think of refreshing and reviving your business’ website?  After all, your website is your business’ presence online and is the first interaction customers have with your company. Does your website accurately display your company’s character, personality and culture? Is it current and up to date? Like your home, you may acquire a different taste in décor and choose to go beyond cleaning to overhauling a room’s look. Spring is a great time to do the same for your business website. There are some things to consider when spring cleaning your website: Update Content and Information Does the content of your website still embody your company’s personality and mission? Is your last blog post o...

Getting your website the love and recognition it deserves is all about building as many links as you can. Isn’t it? One of the goals of effective SEO is to get your website to the top of the search engine’s results pages for a given keyword, and link building has long been at the heart of most online marketing strategies. Links can drive traffic and they can contribute to the authority of your site. And SEO was a lot easier when that was all there was to it. There’s a lot more to SEO these days than just linking to your site using a couple relevant keywords. You might even be able to get some good attention without an actual link. It takes a little more work, but when you combine these tactics with traditional link building the results can be very effective. The Evolution of Link Building In the earliest days of SEO, a lot of online marketers took great liberty (and advantage) of link building, which often took the form of ma...

If you work at a digital marketing agency, you’re familiar with the fast-paced work environment—your staff needs to work quickly and accurately, while managing both internal and external expectations. It’s not an easy task.  Why is it so challenging? The answer is probably obvious. In addition to competing with other agencies for business, you're also up against companies bringing these services in-house. With the number of rivals growing in the industry, it’s important to look at all aspects of the business to ensure success.  Your clients come first, but agencies that focus on increasing profitability and scalability, beyond just providing excellent client services, are the ones that find long-term success . It’s a tough balancing act—understanding that you want to deliver the best results to your clients, but not at the expense of it costing your agency more time than anticipated—but it’s not impossible. Accelo recently partnered with WordStrea...

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is an essential element of a comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) strategy because it brings immediate results. Businesses can achieve several goals with PPC, including brand visibility, identifying new leads, increasing traffic, and conversions. Creating a PPC campaign takes some strategic planning to ensure success. Research Keywords Keyword research is one of the most important parts of a PPC campaign. The keyword you choose lets the search engines know when to display your ads. It is also critical that you choose the right keywords. Keywords and keyword phrases can be considered as a prospect search when there is an intent to buy something. That works best for PPC. Tips for selecting keywords: What is your target audience looking for specifically? Check out what the competition is doing. Be specific with your keywords. Look at keywords as far into the buying cycle as possible. The better your keywords are, the mor...

Marketing tactics are pronounced dead on a daily basis, print has more lives than a cat. The latest addition to the “it’s dead” category is brand loyalty. Retailers and marketers alike are pronouncing brand loyalty dead. Why? Because a lot of brands are seeing a drop off in repeat customer purchases and changing consumer spending habits. In reality, brand loyalty isn’t dead. There are however two camps forming in the world of retail. Brands that are loved and brands that are hated. You can imagine which one has the best brand loyalty metrics. There is no room in the middle, middle of the road brands are treated with indifference and their once loyal customers abandon them for a competitor with better customer experience. The threats to retail keep growing Toys R Us, BHS and Mothercare are just some of the big names lost in the past decade. Moreover, with almost 10,000 retail jobs lost in the first three weeks of 2020 alone retailers are looking more vulnerable th...

Backlinks are an important part of blogging, but often the question of updating them can be neglected. Few marketers doubt the importance of good content marketing and writing blogs remains a central feature of organic web content. True, there are a few dissenting voices declaring content to be dead, but they are usually engaged in trying to sell their own ‘alternative’ marketing solutions. Equally, content writers are also familiar with the importance of ensuring their blogs have all the best SEO and the elements. Great keywords, Relevant content, Good images, Embedded videos. Why Backlinks are Important In addition to all that, of course, you should consider backlinks. When chosen well, these can add plenty of authority and push your rankings higher. It’s not that good if writers neglect these. Of course; it is well known that they can make a positive difference, something that matters when the difference between page one and page two of the Google ranking...

As Google Maps turns 15 years old, the product is getting a slight overhaul with a new icon, new navigation tabs, and new features. First, here’s the new icon. It’s a simple, Google-branded pin which replaces the old map intersection icon. Google explains the design change in a blog post: “It’s based on a key part of Google Maps since the very beginning—the pin— and represents the shift we’ve made from getting you to your destination to also helping you discover new places and experiences.” New Features Starting today, the Google Maps app for iOS and Android will have new navigation tabs at the bottom of the screen. These include: Explore : Quick access to information, ratings, reviews and more for nearby places. Commute : Set up your daily commute to get real-time traffic updates, travel times, and suggestions for alternative routes. Saved : View all of your saved spots in one convenient place, Contribute : Quickly contribute to Google Maps by sharing local kno...

Google Ads is notifying advertisers that standard Shopping campaigns will soon be able to reach Gmail users. In an email sent out to Google Ads advertisers, the company says Shopping ads will be eligible to appear on Gmail starting on the week of March 4, 2020. This includes both Product Shopping ads and Showcase Shopping ads. When Shopping ads are rolled out to Gmail, data will be reported under the Google Display Network. Standard Shopping campaigns will be automatically enabled to run on Gmail, as long as the campaigns are opted into “YouTube, Gmail, and Discover.” Advertisers can ensure their Shopping campaigns are eligible to serve on Gmail by following the steps below: Sign in to Google Ads Select a standard Shopping campaign in the Campaigns tab Click the Settings tab Under “Networks,” look for a checkbox next to “YouTube, Gmail, and Discover.” If the box is checked, then your Shopping campaigns are eligible to display on Gmail. Besides that, there’s no...

Google’s John Mueller advises SEOs on the correct, and incorrect, ways to use hreflang attributes on a web page. In a thread on Reddit, a user asks whether hreflang attributes can be used in anchor tags. In testing, the user found that Google didn’t pick up on any hreflang attributes when placed in anchor tags. Mueller responded to the thread saying “we don’t do that” – meaning Google doesn’t look for hreflang attributes in anchor tags. He goes on to advise the ways in which hreflang attributes should be used. “Use link tags in the head if you want hreflang to be picked up. Hreflang is hard enough when you do things technically correct, don’t make it harder by hoping it works in non-documented ways.” To be clear, Google looks for hreflang attributes in the <link> tag within the <head> of an html document. Hreflang attributes will be ignored if used in anchor text. The SEO who started the Reddit thread notes that hreflang attributes were found i...

In SEO, there are many long-running debates. That’s why the term “it depends” gets thrown around so often in our industry when answering questions. One such topic of debate: does URL capitalization really matter for SEO? Read on as we try to clear up some of the confusion. John Mueller Says URL Case Doesn’t Matter While I think this is an oversimplification of matters, let’s take into consideration what Jennifer Slegg says: “So Google doesn’t consider letter case in itself as an SEO issue, but you should keep it consistent across individual URLs, because Google considers URLs to be case-sensitive. This means, if you have the same page accessible and indexable (without canonicals) as example.com/PAGE.html and example.com/page.html, Google could crawl both those URLs and the one you want to be ranked may not be the one Google chooses. You could also end up splitting ranking signals between the two pages. That being said, many feel that URLs that utilize upper case...

In the majority of countries in the world, there is a huge emphasis on Google-first SEO. That is, looking to Google for the latest changes in how to optimize websites and achieve better levels of organic search traffic. This, however, might not always be the best approach. There are many other search engines that can help our brands be surfaced to our target audience. Some of them don’t always spring to mind when we talk about SEO. The same optimization principles will apply, however. When working in SEO, we hone our skillset. We become great at understanding our audience. We know their content needs and how they search. These skills can easily translate to other platforms outside of the traditional web search engines. Google is not the only web search engine being used. Google might be the largest search engine in your region. It’s probably the most popular with your demographic. However, it won’t be the only search engine they are using. Reasons for Opti...