Gravytrain does Nightrider 2012

Posted in Charity, News on April 30th, 2012 by Angelina

We love doing our bit for charity and this time we are raising money for our friends at African Revival who are based around the corner in Hampton Hill.

African Revival is a wonderful charity that believes in the power of quality education in order to change lives. By building schools, training teachers, providing resources that schools need, African Revival helps break the cycle of poverty and offer inspiration and opportunity to Africa’s future generations. They currently work with over 25 schools in Uganda, Zambia and South Sudan.

To raise money for our chosen charity, we have put Kevin, Craig and Matt R to the challenge. They will be doing a 100km bike ride around London at night time, alongside 3,000 other cyclists! On the 9th June 2012 at midnight, they will be starting off at Crystal Palace and will cycle past London’s iconic landmarks including the National Maritime Museum, Tower Bridge, St Paul’s Cathedral, City of London, Canary Wharf, Mile End Stadium, Emirates Stadium and finish their journey at Alexandra Palace.

They have been training hard for the event, through wind and rain, and would love to get some sponsors on board to get them motivated.

Please help support the guys on their gruelling 100km cycle around London by sponsoring them on Gravytrain’s Just Giving Page.

Day Two of Internet World 2012

Posted in Conferences on April 27th, 2012 by Stephanie

This year is the 20th anniversary of Internet World and as Steve said in the last blog post, Gravytrain are attending for all of the 3 days. Day 2 was mine and Alex’s turn to visit Internet World (on the wettest day of the year, but still worth it!).

Alex and I got the venue and while we drip dried we listened to Markus Fehr from e-Spirit. He talked about integrating CMS and online shopping to an already substantial business that is offline. It was interesting to hear how many businesses are still wary about having an online presence as they feel it may discourage shoppers from their local stores. However, as the world is now largely on the internet, the amounts of visits to local shops are declining and those businesses that don’t have an online presence are realising this.

The next was a talk on email testing. Sean Duffy from Email Center showed us that by using a multivariate testing technique we could see a 45% increase from email marketing. Here we learned that an email testing plan was something to avoid as you need to be dynamic and that each test is a trial and therefore not to worry if the results are negative.

The last talk Alex and I attended, I thought, was the best out of the three. It was hosted by Luca Benini from Europe, Buddy Media. Here he spoke about “The elusive ROI of social media: Tracking connections through sales.” Luca spoke about how actually, the ROI is not elusive. He said that by interacting with consumers, many are drawn away from the customer service phone line and are more inclined to tweet or post, which is a lot cheaper to reply to and therefore, is an instant return on investment from social media. This was one of the points Luca said was a way to measure ROI from social media. The others included: Brand equity, shareholder value, “talkability” for a TV show, Web traffic referrals and sales. He gave an interesting statistic about web traffic referrals that showed more traffic was generated from Facebook to YouTube than from Google to YouTube.

This shows the complete shift in the way people access information and highlights the importance of having a presence on social media sites.

Day One of Internet World 2012

Posted in Conferences on April 26th, 2012 by Steve

This week the Gravytrain team has been attending Internet World across all three days of the exhibition at Earls Court. On Tuesday, myself and Matthew Read represented Gravytrain as we soaked up the informative seminars and browsed through the masses of exhibitors at the event.

Upon arriving at the event we knew exactly which seminars we wanted to attend so we wasted no time in making our way to the Advertising, Affiliate and Search theatre for a talk regarding the optimisation of video ads. One particular take-away from the opening session was the fact that Google will soon be launching a new interface for managing your video ads. Currently this technology is in the beta stage however.

After this we perused the multitude of exhibitors in order to engage in the friendly, relaxed atmosphere of the event and in order to, of course, look for new ideas and new contacts within the Digital-sphere.

After a bite of lunch we headed to the Content Management Theatre to take in a very informative talk regarding the on-site customer experience and the engagement of information. Sonja Keerly, of SDL, spoke about the importance of engaging content and understanding your audience so that you can target them effectively with relevant and remarkable on-site experiences.

The next talk we attended was to do with the future of organic search and how there is an apparent ‘untapped goldmine’ within organic search. What astounded me was the sheer volume of new search queries made each and every day. It’s been recorded that there are around 200 million new queries being made every day. With a means to tap into these new and increasing search queries, many businesses have been making additional revenue. The talk was thus an example as to how any website can be optimised for the additional search queries that pop up on a daily basis.

The final talk of the day was made by Branded3, a Digital Marketing Agency in Leeds. They discussed the relationship between Twitter and Google Rankings. Using a mass of data they correlated that Twitter certainly does have an impact on Google Rankings – something, to be fair, we already knew, however they wanted to measure precisely (or as precisely as possible) just how much, or indeed how little, of an impact Twitter can have. The conclusion they drew was that if you are able to get a link tweeted 0-50 times, then Google’s algorithm will take note and your rankings should improve.

All in all, Internet World proved to be a great event to enhance your knowledge and generate new, creative ideas in what is a constantly evolving industry. I’d certainly recommend next year’s event!

Hotspots in the UK Infographic

Posted in Infographics on April 18th, 2012 by Stephanie

Last month we produced another infographic, this time for our clients GT Refrigeration and we are writing this post to let you all know about it.

With the up and down month we all experienced with the weather in March, we thought it would be a good idea to show you the hottest places in England and who will need air conditioning the most.

With April showers well under way this month, it also gives us something to look forward too as we can see from this infographic temperatures could be soaring in the coming months.

We can see that all the record temperatures have been located in the South. The infographic shows that for at least ¼ of the year we need to have the air conditioning on in the office (well only if you still want your staff to come to work in the summer!).

Take a closer look at the blog post for more information and let us know what you think below.

A Few of My Favourite Bits at BrightonSEO Spring 2012

Posted in Conferences on April 17th, 2012 by Angelina

Last week, we visited BrightonSEO, one of our favourite conferences to attend, as we get to meet and catch up with familiar faces in the industry and also get to listen to fresh and interesting content from different types of people. It’s a conference that people from all over the world travel to, as Kelvin, the organiser of BrightonSEO, discovered that there were attendees all the way from Thailand and America! I’ve picked out a couple of my favourite bits, as there is far too much to write about:

Ask the Engines

BrightonSEO kicked off with an “Ask the Engines” panel discussion, which included Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, Dave Coplin, Director of Search for Microsoft, Martin McDonald, SEO Strategy Director at Expedia EAN, Rishi Lakhani, Online Marketing Consultant and Tony Goldstone, Head of Search for Fresh Egg. It was a chance for us SEOs to ask questions (and grill) representatives from Google and Bing.
After reassurance that SEOs will always have a job (as long as search engines are around), Google were asked what SEOs should do if they are penalised by bad links and Pierre’s answer was that they need to show Google that they are making an effort to remove bad links and to not pay for links as they are against their guidelines. However, it was then pointed out that most people buy links to stay competitive (although everyone denied buying them, of course!).

Social and Search

Glenn talked us through schema mark up for rich snippets, using his Yorkshire pudding recipe as an example (which made my tummy rumble) and explained that it was reported that click through rates had an increase of up to 30% from rich snippets! As expected, it was also said that rich snippets can be messed around with by spammers/fake reviews, which if reported would be removed by Google. It was also mentioned that in the future, fake snippets may lead to loss of site rankings. It’s definitely something I want to learn, although I’m sure it will be a challenge as I’m not a techy person. Also, was I right in hearing that Google said keep it cool and if you see spam report it?!

Roland Dunn – Searchbots: Lost Children or Hungry Psychopaths?

Another interesting presentation was from Roland Dunn. We all know that searchbots crawl our websites, which is why we make our sites accessible for them, but we don’t actually know which sites they land on.
Roland accessed his server logs for one of his websites to see which content the searchbots landed on and found that in over 2 months, 40% of Google searchbots only requested 2 URLS, on a website with approximately 40,000 URLs in Google’s index! Roland concluded that searchbots do not request all content, can use their time inefficiently and can become distracted. Therefore we need to treasure the time they crawl our sites and may need to help them focus. Roland suggests that we should embrace the logfiles as they are full of useful information, check searchbot behaviour and if we find that they are distracted, alter the website’s internal linking and navigation, robots.txt out or take an expensive approach and alter the URL construction.

I also found his thoughts of how Google and Bing’s searchbots would sound quite entertaining!

Dom Hodgson – I appear to have started a sweetshop (and advertising company)

Ok this presentation may have been quite off topic compared to the other presentations but it was a good end to the day and certainly caught my attention. Dom Hodgson talked through his online sweetshop business and the ups and downs that he had. Here’s what I learnt from his presentation:

• Everybody loves pick n mix, but people like to have a choice of different sweets and will complain if they don’t.
• Giant snakes are expensive.
• Fried Eggs are the most popular.
• If you put a squirrel on a website, make it wink.
• Don’t put a squirrel on your website, it confuses people.
• If you have a brilliant business idea, just go for it (while your other half is away of course)!

Dom also officially launched his new advertising company at BrightonSEO and got people on the stage celebrating the launch with him with party poppers. He certainly knows how to entertain the crowd!

We finished the day with drinks on the pier. BrightonSEO was awesome this spring and we are very much looking forward to the next conference!

April 2012