We are happy to announce that First Insurance has joined Gravytrain this December.

First Insurance not only offers a wide range of great value motor, home and commercial insurance products to their customers, but also offer amazing discounts off car insurance for students -the better their grades, the better discounts they’ll receive!

We will be running their social media campaign to spread the word about First Insurance and the incredible discounts they offer to students with good grades. The campaign aims to bring a huge boost their presence online, and drive their core audience to their new website.

We are always ecstatic about having new clients joining us at Gravytrain. If you want to find out more about any of our SEO, PPC, Social Media packages or Web Design and Development services, please contact our Business Development Executive, Alex Moran, on 0203 582 6870.

Two days ago some people may have noticed that their PageRank toolbar started to only bring back values of N/A or 0. It got tongues wagging about the web and people were wondering whether it was a glitch, a new update, or if Google had disabled PageRank scores altogether.

After reading SEOQuake’s tweets this morning, it turns out that Google has simply moved the tool bar query URL.

To fix the PageRank on your SEOQuake tool bar, go to your preferences, on your parameters tab, select ‘Google pagerank’, edit and change the word ‘search’ to ‘tbr’.

Before -

[NAME]=Google pagerank
[TITLE]=PR
[URL_R]=http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&hl=en&ch={gchecksum}&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=info:{url|encode}
[REGEXP]=Rank_.*?:.*?:(\d+)

After -

[NAME]=Google pagerank
[TITLE]=PR
[URL_R]=http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?client=navclient-auto&hl=en&ch={gchecksum}&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=info:{url|encode}
[REGEXP]=Rank_.*?:.*?:(\d+)

Then select ok, clear your cache and restart your browser.

PageRank is a measure of the volume and quality of links pointing towards your site, but it shouldn’t be used as the only comparison to how your website is performing. Other factors include the relevancy of the domain, page and domain authority and also the age of the website. We always hear of people who say “SEO’s should ignore PageRank”, but it’s hard for us to ignore a domain if it has a score of 8, for example!

Link building is a main technique used by many SEOs which some people believe may eventually be killed off by Google and its future algorithms, but there’s no need to panic… not just yet anyway…

Last week, Matthew Oxley, Gravytrain’s Head of Search, talked to New Media Knowledge about how one of our clients, Just Landlords, a specialist insurance company, benefits from an excellent search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign.

Before embarking on an SEO campaign, Just Landlords received just 108 visits and 74 conversions each month. However, one year later traffic has increased by more than 1,500 visits and attained 950 more conversions.

The article focuses on a case study around how Just Landlords achieved these figures using SEO to increase their visibility in Google for their main product, landlord insurance. Therefore, the main search terms were focused around “Landlord Insurance” and “Landlords Insurance”.

The case study describes the two main challenges with the campaign, the first being that Just Landlords website was relatively new and the second being that the website had been penalised due to their previous SEO activity being too aggressive. The article explains how Gravytrain overcame these challenges and also includes more information about our search strategy which includes link building, content and social media.

After 18 months of SEO work by Gravytrain, Just Landlords receives more than 2,400 visits per month.

Matthew concluded that, “The Just Landlords Case study demonstrates clearly that while SEO can take time to be successful, the eventual cost effectiveness often significantly outperforms other channels”.

You can read the full article on New Media Knowledge’s website.

Like most people in SEO, I spend a fair amount of time reading industry blogs, to see what people are currently talking about in the world of online marketing and looking out for the next big thing in SEO, such as Google+.

A couple of months ago you couldn’t move for posts about Google+, with everyone talking about its rivalry with Facebook, its sudden influx of 20 million users and hundreds of debates about how it was going to completely change the game! But now when I look around SEOMoz, Econsultancy, Search Engine Land and the rest I see barely a few mentions of this ‘revolutionary’ new social network.

To be fair, I am no better than the rest, when Google+ first came out I was straight on it and published 2 or 3 posts about how it could topple Facebook, change the way we connect online and add a huge new element to SEO, but now I am paying about as much attention to it as I am to AOL.

The fact of the matter is, so far we have seen little to no impact on SEO by Google+, and although it has 20 million+ users I haven’t seen a fresh update from any of my circles in weeks! Meanwhile, Facebook continues to roll out new features, such as the subscribe button, and both Facebook and Twitter are still much better places to interact with friends, fans and customers.

So where do we go from here?

A couple of months ago everyone was discussing how Google was becoming much more social and how we need to adapt to that and move away from traditional SEO tactics. However, in the last month there has been very little impact from Google+ and Google have not renewed their deal with Twitter, effectively losing some of their social element, rather than increasing it.

So should we just forget about Google+ and social networks altogether? Well no, social is obviously still very important for online marketing, with Twitter and Facebook being excellent mediums for creating brand awareness, customer interaction and content distribution, but I do think it is fair to say that the initial hype over Google+ was a bit much and that, although a move into social is good, abandoning traditional SEO tactics in favour of a social only approach might be a bit too presumptuous.

Last week, Google threw itself into the big world of social networking. They have launched a new project called Google+ which aims to make Google more social. It is a communications tool designed to complement and reflect all of our offline relationships. At the moment, Google+ is still in a limited field test and the service is currently restricted, unless you were one of the lucky people who got an invitation.

In the past, Google used Twitter for faster indexation of content, to power real time results and also for use in their ranking algorithm. It has been reported that Google removed real time results from Twitter and other websites such as their News and Facebook. However, Google plans to reinstate real time results using Google+.

Even though Google+ is different from Google+1, with each having their own unique functions – they do connect with each other. Users who have a Google+ account or a normal Google account will be able to click on the Google+1 button, which will essentially allow users to vote for their search results and see which websites other connections or friends have “+1ed”. Therefore, the result’s rankings will not only affect you, but also people that you are connected with through Google.

Some of Google+’s features

The main feature of Google+ is the Circles feature, which is similar to Facebook and Twitter Lists. Circles allow you to allocate contacts to Circles e.g. Family, Friends, Snowboarding Group, Acquaintances and whoever else you want in the Circle. You can then publish content to specific Circles or specific individuals, because as Google states, “not all relationships are created equal”.

At the moment, there seems to be more control over privacy on Google+ compared to Facebook. You can share photos with your family in one post, and then publish something publicly in the next post.

Hangout is another feature of Google+. It’s a group video chat feature where you can invite members of a certain group by sending them a notification. An additional feature of the new social networking site is Huddle, which is a mobile group chat service which could also become available from your mobile phone in the near future.

Sparks is an online sharing engine where you can create a topic of interest and share links with group friends who also have the same interests. E.g. you could share results of Snowboarding in France with your “powder chasing” friends.

Why Google+?

Some people may wonder why Google has bothered launching Google+. The reasons are because nowadays, search is about real-time information, people and the relevance of information to them, not just about pages.

Google has been an advocate for real time and social media for a while now, with Google Buzz, Google Places, Google Wave and not to mention the list of its acquisitions of social sites e.g. YouTube and Blogger.com.

The senior vice president who oversees Google’s social product, Vic Gundotra, said “It’s ‘project’ rather than a product because it’s an ongoing set of products and ‘Plus’ because it takes products from Google and makes them better”.

Google doesn’t see itself as a competitor to Facebook or Twitter, as they say that the way people connect online is limited – it’s just a new way to connect online with the people that matter to you.

What’s next?

For now, businesses and organisations have been warned to stay away from Google+. Christian Oestlien, advertising lead on the team behind Google+ explains that the social media site was designed for individuals in mind, “We’re working on building a optimised business experience for Google+ which will hopefully be rolled out later on this year. It will include the ability to connect to other parts of Google such as AdWords and other rich analytics”. However, their main focus at the moment is optimising the consumer experience for Google+.

In terms of SEO, social media won’t replace traditional SEO however, it will indeed help it. SEO practices including link building, content creation, keyword research and targeting will be the foundation for ranking success. Even though social media is gaining more importance and interest, using a combination of both technical SEO techniques and social media are the best steps towards success.

Sadly, we weren’t lucky enough to get our hands on an invite the first time round, but we are looking forward to when we are able to get onboard with the project.