Thank you to South Oxfordshire District Council for organising yesterday’s workshop  at Milton Park. I can’t praise the team there highly enough. They promoted the workshop for us, booked the room, dealt with printing… the works.

And it went well; plenty of positive feedback as I understand it, we’re still to see the feedback forms, from around 25 delegates.

Search Engine Optimisation is a vital tool for any digital marketing team, but its real cost is often shrouded in mystery. And there’s no shortage of ‘SEO experts’ out there, but the industry is also rife with cowboy operators who promise the earth for a rock bottom price, and often end up doing more harm than good.

So, how much money should you invest to ensure you are purchasing a high-quality, ethical SEO service that will deliver a healthy return on your investment?

Here are three things you need to do before investing in SEO.

SEO can make or break your company profile, so how do you know who to trust? Is your SEO agency really full of SEO experts or is that just part of their sales pitch? Here are 9 warning signs we’ve picked up on to help you make sure you’re not wasting your time. 

There’s an awful lot of advice flying around about Search Engine Optimisation (‘SEO’). Much of it is technical and difficult to understand, and it’s further complicated by different sources telling you to prioritise different things.

Not only is it difficult to know what to do and where to begin, but there’s also confusion about what SEO actually is. Is it “technical stuff you do to your website so it ranks well in Google?” Or is it “building links from other websites… so it ranks well in Google”? Or is it both, or is it something else entirely?

Whatever SEO is, it’s generally accepted as important. After all, doing well in the search engines is a good thing for your business, isn’t it?

One of the best forms of traffic to website is the “free” traffic that comes due to your rankings on Google and the other search engines.  No rankings = no organic traffic.

So it is prudent for most business owners to have a handle on how their website is performing in the search engines. Here we will look at how to set up professional rank tracking for your website.

For Zanzi client First Line IT, ranking well in Google has been a bit of a struggle.

Competition for the ‘money’ keyword ‘IT Support Oxford’ is fierce, and we’ve noticed some arguably underhand manoeuvring by rivals to get to the top of search rankings, and benefit from increased website visits, and therefore sales enquiries.

Between Zanzi and First Line, we were determined not to let this get the best of us, and after a long slog, we’re now back on top and blowing our own trumpet!

At Cicada, I am the “Trainee Digital Marketing Analyst”. And what must trainees do? They must train of course! And that’s just what I do.

Luckily for me, August was handed over to me as an opportunity to develop my own learning programme, and  absorb as much information as I could, so that I could begin adding more value to Team-Cicada.

This gave me a chance to sit back with a cup of tea (and plenty of chocolate biscuits) and enjoy some of the exciting training tools and tips from around the web.

At the top of my list I chose two main platforms:

1) Google Analytics Academy (I will discuss this in a later post)

2) Moz Academy, which I will tell you about now: