The Great Northern Blog

To deliver maximum benefit for WSI clients, Andy Wooles recently sat the Google Advertising Professional examination, passing with flying colours.

This follows on from the recent training event in the UK for WSI, hosted by Google UK.

One of the immediate benefits is we can now offer some exciting incentives from Google for any clients wishing to try advertising with Google AdWords.

For UK companies, your first choice for Search Marketing should be WSI – Google Adwords Professionals working directly with Google. Why settle for less?

Could the internet work harder for your business? Do you want to ’speed up’ in the slowdown?

Then contact Andy Wooles, your WSI Internet Marketing Consultant in Cheshire today!

We can help you to improve the return on your current internet investment and implement a strategy for future growth success.

A great YouTube video highlighting the ever-increasing and relentless pace of change and innovation of the modern world. Well worth a watch.

We’ve been working together for years: Google – the world’s No 1. search engine and internet company, WSI – the leading supplier of internet solutions to small and medium businesses worldwide. Last Friday that relationship moved closer with a unique event.

Andy Wooles, along with over 60 other WSI Internet Marketing Consultants from the UK and across Europe were invited to Google’s  UK  Headquarters in London for a custom training day specifically designed to reinforce our working relationship.

The theme was ‘Survival of the Fastest’ – how using the latest internet tools and techniques can enable businesses large and small to be agile and move ahead during this recession.  The presentations ranged from industry trends, and Google Adwords through to improving the  conversion rate of sites, especially eCommerce. All were solidly anchored around UK case studies, often of major brands. Most importantly, hints and tricks were shared and there was plenty of wide ranging Q&A covering almost every Google product!

So what were the outcomes of the day?

WSI’s UK consultants broadened their knowledge of Google’s products and tools. It established lines of direct communication to enable individual consultants  to co-operate effectivelywith Google and gave an insight into the company which has become a legend in the industry for drive and innovation. 

For UK companies, your first choice for Search Marketing should be WSI,  a Google Adwords Professional Company working directly with Google. Why settle for less?

And for new Adwords clients, we can now offer some extra incentives to working with WSI! Just ask!

Could the internet work harder for your business? Do you want to ’speed up’ in the slowdown?

Then contact Andy Wooles, your WSI Internet Marketing Consultant in Cheshire today!

We can help you to improve the return on your current internet investment and implement a strategy for future growth success.

Whether you are new to Adwords, running your own campaigns or working with a consultancy like WSI, you will find Google’s new Adwords Step by Step guide to be a useful read.

It maps out in three chapters the three main elements to creating a successful AdWords campaign – organisation, choosing appropriate keywords and creating good advertisements.

So whether you are trying to start your own campaign, or want to understand better the campaigns created by your agency, this guide is a good starting point to build your knowledge.

WSI offers a range of fully managed Google Adwords services to suit businesses of all sizes.

An interesting new site has just popped up - http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ which enables searchers to blind test Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bling search engine.

Its a beta site so lacking elegance and a bit buggy. You just enter your search term and you will presented with three sets of search results with all search engine branding removed.

You choose which set of results you think are the “most relevant”, and then your choice is revealed. Can you tell the difference between the results of the world’s favourite search engines?

At the moment, the overall voting totals are not being displayed as some people are trying to ‘game’ the system.

In my own experiments, it was almost impossible to recognise the individual search engines from the results. Give it a try, I’d be interested in your feedback.

There’s a great post today from Seth Godin which concisely summarises the difference between marketing and sales. In summary:

Marketing tells a story that spreads.
Sales overcomes the natural resistance to say yes.

Seth then posed the interesting question – how do you overcome that resistance where you don’t have a salesforce?

For companies that use their website to generate leads or direct sales, the answer can be very simple – your website has to do that work. It has to help the site visitor to overcome their natural resistance.

However the ability of a website to persuade a prospect, to convert their interest into action doesn’t happen by accident. It must be designed into the structure and content of the site,  to steer visitors through the sales process and overcome their objections .

A lack of attention to this vital  ’sales role’ is the primary reason why most business websites fail to deliver a real return on investment for their owners.

If you would like a free review of your website and a discussion about improving its performance, please call us today.

The following YouTube video was brought to my attention by a colleague.

It was created by a US marketing company, extolling the benefits of Inbound marketing over Outbound in a humorous and musical form! Enjoy!!!

With the shift of marketing budgets towards online activities, more and more companies are adding collecting visitor data, using technologies such as Google Analytics.

However a recent survey in eMarketer reports that while 79% of companies are capturing data, only 30% are then using that data to improve the perfromance of their internet marketing and website!

This is a missed golden opportunity, not just for the 49% who are not using their data effectively but also for the 21% who are not collecting web visitor data!

Is your company in the 30%, 49% or 21% sector?

To find out more about how Web Analytics can help improve the performance of your company, download WSI’s free Web Analytics whitepaper.

Alternatively just get in touch, and we’d be happy to discuss it with you.

One of the ‘joys’ of social networking, Web 2.0 and the internet today is that people are sharing their opinions about products and services all the time.

When researching a purchase, most people will look for reviews and testimonials to add some ‘colour’ to the supplier’s own information. A good supplier understands this and will encourage clients to post reviews on his own site and other relevant websites, forums etc.

But what happens when you get a very negative review posted to your site. The instinctive response for many is to edit it out, however as Jeff Sexton pointed out in a recent blog, there are sound reasons why you shouldn’t edit your way out of negative reviews. A negative review can give credibility to the other positive reviews and the review process on your site.

To ensure any negative review is seen ‘in context’ then you should actively encourage clients to review your products and services on line. It is the majority of clients who have a positive experience with your product or service who are the least likely to post a review.

So work to increase the overall number of reviews and the impact of the occasional negative review can be minimised. Let the readers ‘edit’ it out by realising it is the exception, not the rule.

For advice on how to encourage reviews and use the power of social networking, call or email for a free consultation.

Paid Search or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is an effective and powerful marketing tool that allows your company to create online brand exposure to your target markets and prospects.

PPC advertising is available through all of the major search engines, however the brand leader and dominant force in the market is Google AdWords.

Recently WSI published a PPC white paper as part of its monthly webinar program. Entitled “Don’t Leave Your Money on the Table”, it clears away the myths, legends and lies surrounding PPC and explains how it can work for enterprises of any size and in most business sectors.

Download your Guide to Paid Search now, or call me to discuss how it could help your business today.