Sidenote: There’s a really great story from a few years ago where two security experts intercepted around 120,000 individual email addresses from 30 Fortune 500 companies. Read it here if you’re interested.

Snickers have taken advantage of this and rolled out a really super campaign in the UK, called “You are Not You When You’re Hungry”, that targets misspelt keywords. The agency that assisted Snickers obtained 500 search terms and used an algorithm to run through common misspellings of these words and produced a list of 25,381 different misspellings.

Guess what the outcome was? In just 48 hours, the Snickers campaign received 558,589 impressions. Here’s an example from SEW:

Interesting, Snickers have revealed several of the misspellings that they used: “wether”, “gool”, “ness”, “amazon”, “definately”, “wierd”, “vacum”, “moonsoon”, “publically” and “facw”.

I suppose the interesting thing to note here is that they weren’t targeting the misspellings of keywords associated with their brand, but rather capitalising on keywords across the board.

The agency behind it, AMV BBDO released a fantastic video:

Note: Targeting misspelt keywords in a Google AdWords campaign is against Google’s Terms of Service, so Snickers had to work with Google to get approval on this campaign.

The post Snickers clever misspelt keyword campaign appeared first on iMod Digital Marketing Agency.

YouTube, the popular video hosting website that shot musicians like Justin Bieber and Psy of Gangnam style fame, is set to launch paid subscription channels as early as next week.

This move has been in development for months and will see some specialist top channels allowed to offer paid subscriptions. The service will only be available to around 50 YouTube channels at first and many suggest that subscriptions will start from as little as $1.99 or R18 per month.

Rumours have been running around for ages that YouTube was looking for other ways to monetize its top content generating channels, and in January, there were reports that YouTube approached a small group of channels to apply to be among the first of those offering a paid subscription.

This will be another exciting innovation to the Digital Marketing landscape and offer companies another form of revenue generation model. It will be interesting to see who is offered it first and how they adapt to the service.

The post YouTube Set To Launch Paid Subscriptions appeared first on iMod Digital Marketing Agency.

Although we follow our 6 step SEO approach, we always come up with a strategy for each project and this is the approach we used to achieve the results above.

1. We performed a comprehensive audit on the website. This looked at content, back links, competitors, technical matters and a long list of other criteria. From this audit we were able to compile a list of recommendations that would assist with optimizing the website.
2. In this case, our first port of call was to rebuild the website. The website was a big mess, it had no technical on-site SEO in place and had been horribly neglected over the years. We recommended this to our client, found a solution and received the go-ahead.
3. Once the website was rebuilt, we offered training and taught him how to manage the website with SEO in mind.
4. In conjunction with assisting him, we implemented all the technical requirements determined from the audit.
5. Following this, it came down to monitoring, tweaking and carefully putting a strategy together, which included the requirement to generate content.
6. We’ve rolled out this strategy over a few months and the results speak volumes.

Of course, traffic alone is one thing, but what about the conversions? For the same period, the conversions go as follows:

It’s been a lot of work, but the return on investment is now being seen and we’re thrilled that we were given the opportunity.

Click here to talk to us about doing the same for you.

The post Pushing our clients to new levels appeared first on iMod Digital Marketing Agency.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about finding out which keywords were bringing business to your website and today I want to touch on a similar topic that will assist you in determining which keywords are performing well for you.

The first thing you want to do is fire up Excel and create a column for the landing pages on your website and a second column for the keywords that you are optimising for each landing page.

The next step is to open up your Google Analytics account and navigate to Landing Pages, which can be found under Site Content, which is under Content on the left. This report gives you a list of the landing pages on your website ordered by the number of visits received.

Finally, we want to take the list of landing pages and keywords, and link it up to the list of landing pages and the visitor counts. What we’re doing here is determining which landing pages are getting the most visits and in turn, taking a look at which keywords are potentially bringing the most traffic.

Your spreadsheet will look like this when you’re finished:

Bonus: If you create multiple columns in the spreadsheet to track month to month data, you could create a useful graph that maps out the traffic trends of the various landing pages, and that would give you further insight into which keywords are performing the best.

Because the “(not provided)” count is getting greater and greater, learning how to access useful information about your keywords is becoming more critical than ever.

The post Google Analytics: Keyword insight through landing pages appeared first on iMod Digital Marketing Agency.

Here are some screenshots:

The new application has some great features:

• You can verify your business listing directly from your phone.
• You can update your business information, such as hours, address, contact information and description.
• You can track the traffic visiting your listing.
• You can post photographs on your local Google+ page.
• You can also manage multiple locations from one instance of the application.

That’s a good collection of features, the most important and useful one being the ability to verify your listing directly from the application as this has always been a fairly tricky part if anything doesn’t go directly to plan.

If you want to give the application a try, you can download it from the App Store for free.

[Photographs from iClarified]

The post Google Places for Business goes iOS appeared first on iMod Digital Marketing Agency.

Today, we came across an incredibly innovative campaign by Volkswagen, a campaign that was powered by SEO and a campaign that’s worth spreading and sharing with the world. Guus ter Beek was the man behind an innovative campaign for Volkswagen that used SEO to do something exciting and to our knowledge, completely unique. The focus of the campaign was to use Google Images to rank images at the top of the Google Images search results. These images when displayed together formed a picture of the new Volkswagen Passat Variant. The concept came into play when someone searched for the term, “ultimate business car”.  In other words, when you searched for “ultimate business car” in Google Images, VW ranked 5 images that combined together looked like the example below:

A video has been compiled to give you a visual understanding of what they did and what it resulted in, take a watch:

We love nothing more than an innovate SEO campaign – Volkswagen’s backlink count will have sky-rocketed and their exposure will have gone through the roof. Well done Volkswagen, this is just plain awesome.

Like a boss!

The post Innovative Volkswagen SEO Campaign appeared first on iMod Digital Marketing Agency.

Here’s a nifty website a friend of ours found that illustrates responsive design extremely well. It’s especially useful when explaining to non tech savvy clients.
http://finecitizens.com/defineResponsive/
http://finecitizens.com/defineResponsive/#/www.microsoft.com

A little bit of backstory.
While it’s close to impossible to say who first used a method like it, it was Ethan Marcotte that brought the idea to popularity with an article he wrote in 2010. Since then (near two years) responsive design has grown and evolved tremendously with new methodologies, best practices and a myriad of image handling techniques etc. It’s still growing as I type this, and I still constantly see tweets and blog posts flying by my screen about responsive design.

Why do we want to use responsive design?
More and more devices appear on the market, day by day, from laptops, to mobile phones, to tablets. Catering to the multitude of displays is almost becoming a requirement for web agencies and web designers.

The advantages of responsive design?
The ability to maintain a single codebase and a single set of content instead of managing a handful of mobile sites is a huge advantage. Another item I really love about responsive design is that the user experience across a responsive site is always similar, it’s never significantly diminished per device because the mobile layout of a responsive site is just a streamlined version of the desktop. It’s the same site. It’s using the same assets. Too often have I landed on a mobile site and been completely ostracized from its parent site. Here’s a funny private one that’s has always irked the hell out of me… people linking me to mobile sites on my desktop! Haha. No more of that!

Is responsive design without its drawbacks?
Of course it isn’t. The first, and some would argue probably the biggest point is the time and financial additions that come with responsive design (On the counterhand maintenance and future changes won’t have this problem, so you decide). Design, designing for responsive takes longer as you’ll need to wireframe different layout scenarios.

A final thought.
Is responsive design the perfect solution? No. Is responsive design the best solution we have? Yes.

Some sites we think have done an incredible job with their responsive design:
Digital Atelier
Oak Studios
Starbucks
Happy Cog

The post A catchup on responsive design appeared first on iMod Digital Marketing Agency.

The World Wide Web thrives with people who steal content and publish it for self gain. This is, of course, theft, but there is very little a publisher can do to stop it from happening. Fortunately, it’s not all doom and gloom, and remaining positive about the situation is the way forwards as there are ways to benefit from this.

Today, I want to look at several things that relate to finding out who is stealing your content and how to benefit from it.

1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts are an incredibly useful method for monitoring the web for new content that gets published. With a Google Alert you’re able to track a word or a phrase and when it appears on the Internet, Google will send you an email notification along with a link to where the content was published. You could set up Google Alerts for phrases in your best pieces of content and then get notified when people steal your content. This is an effective method, however, rather labour intensive.

2. Copyscape

Copyscape is one of our favourites, a simple website that allows you to enter in a link to your content and in return it provides you with a list of other websites that have published your content or similar content. This will assist you in quickly finding websites that are copying your content. A premium account at Copyscape will allow you to receive notifications of plagiarism.

3. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools offers a feature that shows you all the links back to your website. Through this you will be able to click through to the websites who have linked back to you, and identify if any of them are linking back to you for reusing your content.

Those 3 methods will assist you in tracking down who is using your content and from here there is room to look for opportunity. Here are a few ways to benefit from people stealing your content:

1. Requesting a reference link

Once you’ve identified someone who is stealing your content, you could approach them via email and ask if they’d please link back to the original source. Most people think that this won’t yield any returns, but don’t be so quick to assume, we’ve had great success with this method. The secret is to be polite and don’t attack the person who has reused your content.

2. Automate the reference link

Tynt is a very useful tool on the Internet that inserts the page URL when your content is pasted into emails and social sites. What this means is that when someone copy and pastes your content, a link to your website is automatically included in the content that was copied.

3. RSS Feed link inclusion

If you’re a WordPress user, and someone is stealing your content, you could use a WordPress plugin such as RSS Footer. This plugin allows you to easily add a link of text to the beginning or end of all the articles you publish, so if someone steals your content through an RSS feed, and publishes it elsewhere, it’ll automatically include a link back to your website. Please note that this plugin is rather outdated and should be tested before using.

At the end of the day, the best way to handle content theft is through optimism and an attempt to gain value from it.

There are alternative options, such as using a Takedown service from the DMCA, speaking to a copyright lawyer or using myows (A South African startup that assist with copyright protection), but sometimes it’s just easier to do a little outreach marketing yourself.

The post Who’s stealing your content? appeared first on iMod Digital Marketing Agency.

One of the most valuable uses for Google Analytics is being able to see which keywords people searched for in Google that went on to be a conversion. Today I’m going to run you through how you can go about this and on top of that I’m going to show you a trick on how to move past the (not provided) that you will probably run into. I’m going to assume that you have goals set up in Google Analytics, if not, then you should take a read of this article.

Please note that when I refer to a conversion, it’s the same thing as a goal.

Converting Keywords

The first thing we need to do is set up a custom report that allows you to drill down and extract the keywords that are leading to conversions. The process of doing this is as follows:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account and navigate to your profile of choice.
2. Select “Customization” in the orange bar, click on it and then select “+ New Custom Report”.
3. Configure your custom report as per the example below and click the save button.

Time Saver: If you’re lazy, you’re welcome to click this link and it’ll automatically add the custom report above to your website profile on Google Analytics.

The screen that loads after you’ve saved the custom report shows you the sources of visitors who were converted on your website. You now want to click on the source of choice, “google” if it appears. Follow this by clicking on “organic” if it appears. (If neither “google” nor “organic” appear in the process, this means you haven’t had any conversions from people performing Google searches).

Now you’re left with a list of keywords that your converting customers searched for in Google. That’s incredibly useful information!

Getting Past the “(not provided)”

(not provided) appears instead of the keywords when a person that is logged into a Google service performs a search and arrives at your website. Google changed its privacy policy and decided that people logged into Google, their searches should remain private. But now what? We’ve created this custom report, but we can’t see what keywords people are looking for! No problem, here’s what you want to do:

1. Look for “Secondary dimension” and click on it.
2. Choose “Landing Page” from the list.
3. Now, on the right of (not provided), you will see which pages your converting visitors arrived on.

From the landing page you might not be able to determine exactly which keyword a person searched for, but you could get an idea at least. For example, on our website there are a large number of (not provided)’s in our list, but when we add Landing Page as a secondary dimension, we can see that a large number of people landing on our SEO Services Page and we can therefore deduce that the keywords leading to a conversion revolve around topics such as “seo” or “seo cape town” or “cape town seo” and so forth, because those are the words we’re targeting on those pages.

Conclusion

This approach certainly doesn’t give you exactly which keywords are leading to conversions on your website, but it brings you as close as possible and assists you in understanding the nature of the keywords that are converting and through which areas of your website these conversions are taking place.

Invaluable information like this can be used to further your reach. For example, if we were getting conversions from people searching for “seo cape town”, for example, and when we Googled, “seo cape town” we saw that we were ranked in position 8, imagine how many conversions we’d get if we moved up to position 1, 2 or 3!  The beauty of this approach is that we know that these keywords are converting, so we’re not guessing – the rule of more traffic will lead to more conversions is more than likely going to fit.

Related: Keyword insights through landing page analysis.

The post Google Analytics: Which keywords are bringing business? appeared first on iMod Digital Marketing Agency.

The concept of Inbound Marketing is like the name says, “inbound”. In the sense of digital marketing, the idea is “bringing people to your online asset”. Another way to look at this is to think of inbound marketing as a tactic to attract people to your website or online entity which in turn might bring you a new business lead. Inbound Marketing goes a little further than just being about getting people to your website, it includes the process of converting someone from just a visitor into a lead and the analysis around the movement through the marketing funnel.

If you’re familiar with digital marketing or have stayed abreast of news, you’ll know that services such as SEO, Social Networking, Blogging, Content Marketing and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) are no longer services that should run on their own, but instead, these services should all work hand-in-hand with each other and it’s this collection of services that has brought the term Inbound Marketing into play. Of course, these services may be used individually and results will be achieved, but to maximize the results, they should be used in conjunction with each other. It is the all encompassing Inbound Marketing that leads to a successful online venture in this competitive platform we know as the World Wide Web.

This image belongs to iMod Digital (Pty) Ltd

One should look at Inbound Marketing as an involved plan that encompasses the services listed above, but also includes a number of additional tasks such as defining calls to action, landing page design, lead nurturing, the analysis of website visitors, conversion rates, as well as competitor analysis.

In South Africa, Inbound Marketing is still a somewhat unknown practise. However, like most things, as Inbound Marketing becomes more popular overseas and success stories increase, so will South Africans start to incubate the term. Get ahead of your competitors by embracing Inbound Marketing before it becomes the done thing.

If you’re interested in employing some Inbound Marketing strategies for your business, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line and we’ll be happy to assist.

The post What is Inbound Marketing? appeared first on iMod Digital Marketing Agency.