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The Cheese Emporium website is now live!

Exciting news – the brand new website for The Cheese Emporium is now live!

Image showing a laptop and mobile version of the new Cheese Emporium Website

Earlier this year, our client The Mouse Trap decided they wanted to split their business into two areas, and therefore needed two websites. 

The Mouse Trap, based in Ramsbottom, is a wine and cheese bar, offering corporate and celebration charcuterie platters. The Cheese Emporium will focus on selling cheese boxes for delivery across the UK, as well as platters for local pickup. 

This means that we now focus on The Cheese Emporium as an eCommerce B2C client, rather than mixing eCommerce and local SEO with The Mouse Trap’s website. The client also created separate social accounts for the two branches of the business. 

The client tasked us with designing and developing a simple, easy-to-use Shopify eCommerce site, built with SEO in mind every step of the way. The site will be hosted on Kinsta to make the site as fast as possible.

We’ve added filters such as ‘availability’ (some products are seasonal or sell out quickly) and a price filter. We’ll be making further tweaks and adding more content over the coming months as the website grows from its infancy, so watch this space! 

You can read case studies of our client’s more established websites here. 

How Small Business Owners Can Acquire Assets To Grow Their Business

This article discusses the ins and outs of acquiring digital assets to grow your small business. It also discusses the advantages and disadvantages.

Growth is a requirement if you want to remain competitive as a small business owner operating online. You need a solid strategy for growing your business.

While most businesses will opt for tried and true growth methods, thinking outside the box can yield impressive results.

One of the best outside-the-box methods is acquiring digital assets (e.g., niche websites, social media profiles) to help further grow your small business.

Let’s discuss the ins and outs of digital assets.

The Status Quo of Growing Your Business

Most businesses opt to pursue traditional growth methods for lack of knowing better. Some of the more popular growth strategies typically include things like:

  • Obtaining organic traffic through content marketing
  • Developing an email list
  • Being active on social media
  • Investing in paid advertising
  • Word of Mouth

However, there is another less known way to pursue your growth goals that can potentially yield better results: growing your business by acquiring digital assets.

Digital assets are significant because they don’t come with much of the overhead that brick-and-mortar businesses have. It’s also possible to find a wide range of assets within your price range, giving you more options than traditional acquisitions.

Why Perform Growth Through Acquisitions?

The digital mergers & acquisitions (M&A) landscape is still largely in the early stages compared to more traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. That leaves plenty of opportunities for strategic acquisitions that can grow your business overnight.

Unlike traditional acquisitions of brick-and-mortar companies, which can be complex, owing to the transfer of hard assets such as land, vehicles, etc., digital assets can be easily transferred in short timespans – often in a day. 

This allows you to utilize cash on hand or leverage capital towards a growth outlet that provides more immediate returns than advertising and social media strategies.

Acquiring digital assets allows you to take on a company’s clients, content, website traffic, search rankings, email lists, etc. These can lead to more users for your service or buyers for your product in short order.

Assets you can require

What Kind of Assets Can You Acquire?

There are many digital businesses, which we will cover below, and not all of them will make for good acquisitions for all types of companies.

Before you begin looking at businesses to buy, you must understand the upsides and downsides of that particular website model. 

Understanding these risks and benefits will help you plan how the digital asset can fit into your current business model in the short term and over the long run to help you maximize returns.

Blogs and Niche Websites

Blog and niche websites can be an excellent investment, as they provide businesses with various ways to engage their audience and drive growth. This is especially true for online businesses or those that operate on a national or global level.

Typically, blogs and niche websites benefit from content that can rank in search engines like Google and Bing. This content drives traffic that can be monetized in a variety of ways, including:

By buying a website, you can use this traffic for marketing your products and services to visitors to the blog. It’s also possible to monetize through the aforementioned methods to increase revenue.

Social Media Profiles

Acquiring a well-established branded social media page or profile can expand your potential customer base overnight. This is a common way for businesses to skip past the growth phase of building up their social media profiles.

You don’t have to keep the branding of the social media page you buy, either. There are many prominent social media profiles and pages that have been purchased in the past and changed to new names without losing subscribers, so long as the new branding is relevant.

You first need to understand which social media platforms your target audience spends the most time on. Then, you need to figure out what type of content can help you better engage them. Different businesses will benefit from specific social media platforms, so don’t just rush out to a market like FameSwap and purchase an account.

Not all businesses will benefit from social media, either. So, start with understanding if you’d be better off acquiring another asset such as a blog or aged domain. 

Lead Generation Sites

For service businesses that rely on a steady stream of new leads, a lead generation website can provide you with plenty of growth opportunities. Some of the business types that commonly work with lead gen sites include:

  • Locksmiths
  • Plumbers
  • Roofers
  • Commercial Refrigeration

Because building lead generation websites can be complex, it’s best to purchase an established website to skip past the initial growth phase.

Ecommerce Businesses

For brick-and-mortar retail stores, acquiring an established eCommerce business can quickly allow you to expand your reach without the costs associated with building new stores.

Purchasing an established eCommerce business can be a better option than trying to build your own. For one, buying a site that is generating revenue ensures you already have customers visiting. It also allows you to skip past setting up the eCommerce backend, which can be costly and time-consuming.

You can altogether skip the initial phases of a new eCommerce website, allowing you to instead focus on bringing in new customers and expanding sales. Any business that sells products, from clothing shops to sporting goods stores, can benefit from purchasing an established store.

SaaS Businesses

Saas, for the uninitiated, stands for “software as a service”. It’s a method of licensing software on a subscription basis instead of the traditional way of selling software licenses. 

Likely, you’ve already used SaaS software many times in your life. Some of the largest software companies in the world have moved to SaaS models, as it makes their software more accessible to consumers. Some popular SaaS brands include:

  • Adobe Creative Cloud
  • Microsoft Office Online
  • Google Workspace
  • Quickbooks Online

Depending on the type of business you are operating, you can acquire an established SaaS product that can benefit your customers and work complementary to your business and expand your potential customer base.

An example of this would be a marketing agency purchasing customer relationship management (CRM) software. The agency can offer the CRM to their clients and now also has a host of businesses that use the CRM they can provide marketing services for.

Look at the acquisition of keyword research tool Ubersuggest by Neil Patel for a real-life example. Purchasing this tool allowed him to market services to people using the keyword research tool and expand his potential customer base overnight. He was also able to turn the keyword tool into a paid subscription generating further revenue. 

Aged and Branded Domains

Aged domains are domains that were previously used for websites but have since been dropped, either due to disuse or because a company forgot to renew its domain.

The first of those is what you want to look for. Avoid domain squatting, which is buying a domain from an active company that simply forgot to renew, as that is illegal.

Instead, look for domains previously associated with businesses but have since been discontinued. The benefit of these domains is that they have a backlink profile, traffic history, and likely residual brand recognition. You can do a few things with these domains, including:

  • 301 redirect to your primary website
  • Building a new website on them (LeadGen, secondary brand, etc.)
  • Change your current domain to the new one

Aged brandable domains can be beneficial. These will allow you to build a secondary website to capture more search real estate and improve traffic and leads. Or, you can redirect to your primary domain to increase your SEO backlink profile.

How to find assets

How to Find These Assets

There are a few different places to find digital assets listed for sale. I recommend that business owners who haven’t worked with digital assets stick to reputable public marketplaces, which is listed in the next section

Public Marketplaces

Public marketplaces are websites set up for people to list their websites, SaaS businesses, and other digital assets for sale. A few of the most popular public marketplaces include sites like:

There are many others, so keep looking if you don’t find something of interest on one of the above marketplaces.

These marketplaces typically have vetting processes for websites and other listed assets. Usually, this vetting will verify the website or assets analytics, traffic, finances, and additional important information. 

While this doesn’t mean you can forgo doing your own due diligence, it can provide a good starting point for first-time buyers that decreases risk.

Private Brokers

Similar to real estate sales, there are private brokers, such as Website Properties, that work with sellers to help find a buyer and facilitate a smooth sale of digital assets. 

You can find digital asset brokers for everything from social media profiles to websites, YouTube accounts, crypto portfolios, etc.

One benefit of working through a private broker is that you are likely to find higher-quality assets. Because broker fees are typically higher than public marketplaces, they tend to be more selective about who they are working with.

Private Sellers through Outreach

Many of the best opportunities won’t be publicly advertised on public markets or available through private sellers. Instead, you will have to reach out to private individuals and create those opportunities. 

The best way to go about this is to use a tool like Ahrefs to discover websites similar to what you want to purchase. Make a complete list of each website that meets your criteria and send out letters of inquiry.

You will likely be surprised at how many website owners would be interested in selling for the right price. As with anything, make sure to do your due diligence to put yourself in a better position for negotiation.

6 Things to Watch Out For

There are a few key things you need to know before attempting to purchase a digital asset. As with any investment, things can go belly up quickly if you don’t perform your due diligence and don’t fully understand what you’re getting into. The following are 6 things you should watch out for when investing in digital assets: 

1. Have a Long-Term Strategy

When you first start looking at websites, you will likely find numerous sites that look appealing. However, don’t be too quick to make a purchase.

The first thing to think about is how a website fits your long-term strategic goals. You want to purchase a digital asset that will grow with your business and continue delivering value over the long term.

Consider your business’s long-term goals and mission. Make sure that any digital asset you purchase fits in with that mission before making any purchases.

2. Perform Due Diligence

Due diligence is what separates successful investors from those that barely scrape by. With digital assets, due diligence can save you a lot of money and headaches in the long run.

While you can minimize your potential downsides by purchasing assets from reputable marketplaces, nothing will take the place of due diligence. This means going over the analytics, finances, link profiles, followers, etc.

The reality is there are people out to scam whoever they can. As with traditional investment schemes, digital assets have their share of scams that the unwise investor can fall for when rushing into a purchase.

The first rule is never to purchase a digital asset where you can’t see at least six months or more of records or all relevant records for assets less than six months old.

Use multiple tools to verify any data you are presented with.

3. Ensure the Asset Integrates with Your Workflow

Just because a digital asset passes your due diligence and fits within your long-term goals doesn’t mean it’s right for you.

It may not be worth the trouble if you have to expend considerable resources to integrate a newly purchased asset into your current workflow.

I’ve seen websites that, on paper, looked like great investments. The sites made plenty of money, had consistent traffic, and were primed for long-term growth. However, upon further looking at how the business was set up, things were unorganized and would have required a significant overhaul to work efficiently.

There are plenty of assets available for purchase, so don’t feel compelled to buy one that doesn’t integrate well with your workflow or complicate your business.

4. Sign a Sales Contract Laying Out the Terms

Once you’ve decided to purchase a digital asset, make sure you have a contract detailing timelines, deliverables, an NDA if necessary, and anything else you need to protect your investment.

Ensure that, when writing out the timelines, you leave yourself room to review all the deliverables. 

Some sellers may not want to work with contracts. This is particularly common with low-value sales. However, you should be wary of sellers who won’t use contracts for larger transactions.

5. Don’t Overpay

It seems like an obvious statement, but you don’t want to overpay for a digital asset. As with any other investment, there is a negotiation process, and the more information you have, the better your position will be.

Digital assets are typically sold in multiples of between 32x and 36x the average monthly profit of the previous six months. However, there can be a massive variance in this. I’ve seen websites sell as low as 12x and as high as 40x or more. 

As part of your due diligence process, you should have a solid understanding of traits unique to each asset that increase its value. Things like high-quality content or aged and brandable domains can make a website more valuable. Look for digital assets with these specific traits that are undervalued.

6. Use an Escrow Account

With higher valued assets especially, the transfer and payments must be run through an escrow account. This will decrease the risk for both you and the asset seller. 

An escrow account serves as a holding account for funds and acts as an intermediary for transferring files, passwords, domains, and other deliverables. The seller doesn’t transfer anything until the money is deposited, and you don’t release funds until all deliverables are confirmed.

You will need to discuss with the seller whether you are responsible for the escrow fees or if you both do a split. Avoid sellers who don’t want to work through escrow.

Actionable Takeaways

If you’re in the growth phase of your business, and the prospect of pumping money into SEO or advertising for a year doesn’t appeal to you, acquiring digital assets may be the way to go.

You can seriously cut down the time it takes to see results by acquiring established digital assets already bringing in traffic and income. However, be prepared to spend money. This is not a good strategy if you don’t have working capital or cash reserves. 

Assets that are established and bringing in revenue will sell at a premium. The good news is that you can find digital assets at all price levels, making it more likely to find solid assets within your price range. So, if you want quick growth without the downsides and risks of SEO and advertising, consider purchasing digital assets.

Kinsta Hosting Review – We think it’s the best WordPress host around

When it comes to hosting a website, it’s important that you use a hosting company that allows your website to perform at its best and can be closely monitored for any errors. Having adequate hosting will ensure that your website runs optimally, giving you the best chance of online success. 

We use Kinsta for all of our client’s websites, and it has helped to power our business in several ways. Below, we’ve rounded up a full summary of what Kinsta does, and the key factors that we, and other agency owners, enjoy.

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Table of contents

What is Kinsta Hosting?

Kinsta is a secure, fast and reliable hosting platform – the best we have ever used. We host over 100 sites and consult with our clients on where to host their WordPress websites. To this day, we still haven’t found a company that is better at hosting WordPress sites than Kinsta. 

We normally see an instant performance improvement of over 50% reduction in loading speed, along with being able to update the core files, plugins etc. on a staging site without the fear of losing anything on the live website. 

You can get all of this from $35 per month for one website. Check out their pricing plans here.

Our favourite Kinsta features

There are many features we love about Kinsta, detailed below…

Staging with the click of a button

With one click of a button you can create a staging site that is an exact replica of your existing website. It also handles blocking search engine crawlers to stop duplications of your site in Google’s index along with the ability to click to update plugins in the MyKinsta dashboard.

Security is top notch

One of Kinsta’s greatest service offerings is the free removal of malware from your website. We all hear of the issues with WordPress security, and don’t get us wrong, it can be an issue if you don’t have a maintenance plan in place and site software is not updated. It’s great to have the back-up of the support team to help out if the worst does happen. 

Sai Blackbyrn, CEO at CoachFoundation, has enjoyed this feature too: “Fixes for hacking are available for free. If a customer’s WordPress webpage is hijacked, we’ll take care of it right away.” 

Support is second to none

This is one of the biggest reasons we use them for all our hosting. There are many companies online who claim to provide great customer service, but Kinsta is by far the best we have ever experienced. 

Within minutes of raising an issue with the support team, they will do their very best to help. We have had some issues over the years and we have always been able to rely on the team. 

Mushfiq Sarker, CEO of Stream SEO, is also a fan of the support provided: “The customer service at Kinsta is outstanding. Whenever I have an issue or a question, the team is always quick to respond and help me out. They’re also very friendly and seem to genuinely care about their customers.”

Pedro Braz, Co-Founder of Investing in the Web, adds: “The Kinsta customer support has always been friendly and very fast to work with. This is something that we find very valuable since it is something that we’ve had troubles with in the past with other hosting companies – delayed responses, closing chats, etc. With Kinsta, everything has been running smoothly.”

Kinsta Server Locations

Kinsta has 32 data centers throughout the world, you can select the server location nearest your target audience. 

List taken from this page on the Kinsta website.

When creating your site, you can choose from 32 data centers:

  • Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1)
  • Hong Kong (asia-east2)
  • Tokyo, Japan (asia-northeast1)
  • Osaka, Japan (asia-northeast2)
  • Seoul, South Korea (asia-northeast3)
  • Mumbai, India (asia-south1)
  • Delhi, India (asia-south2)
  • Jurong West, Singapore (asia-southeast1)
  • Jakarta, Indonesia (asia-southeast2)
  • Sydney, Australia (australia-southeast1)
  • Melbourne, Australia (australia-southeast2)
  • Warsaw, Poland (europe-central2)
  • Hamina, Finland (europe-north1)
  • St. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1)
  • London, United Kingdom (europe-west2)
  • Frankfurt, Germany (europe-west3)
  • Eemshaven, Netherlands (europe-west4)
  • Zurich, Switzerland (europe-west6)
  • Montréal, Canada (northamerica-northeast1)
  • Toronto, Canada (northamerica-northeast2)
  • São Paulo, Brazil (southamerica-east1)
  • Santiago, Chile (southamerica-west1)
  • Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (us-central1)
  • Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA (us-east1)
  • Ashburn, Virginia, USA (us-east4)
  • The Dalles, Oregon, USA (us-west1)
  • Los Angeles, California, USA (us-west2)
  • Salt Lake City, Utah, USA (us-west3)
  • Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (us-west4)
  • Milan, Italy (europe-west8)
  • Paris, France (europe-west9)
  • Madrid, Spain (europe-southwest1)

Selecting a server location in MyKinsta

Free SSL on all sites

Kinsta supports both free Cloudflare SSL certificates and custom SSLs. For most users, the Cloudflare SSL integration provides HTTPS support at no additional cost.

Push just theme files or databases from staging to live

The ability to choose whether to push theme files, databases or both to the live environment is a great tool for any Woocommerce site owner. 

Developing new features on a Woocommerce site can be a bit of a handful to make sure you keep all live orders in tact. When a website is in the development environment (‘staging’ on Kinsta), there can be sales happening on the live website. When you then push the website to live, the orders that have been made in this development time can be lost if you’re not using an external order system. 

With the ability to just push changes to the theme files, the database will remain the same and you will therefore not lose any orders. 

Kinsta Woocommerce Hosting

Kinsta is a great platform for hosting a Woocommerce website. The speed improvements help with increase in revenue, SEO and a number of additional benefits. 

Kinsta uses the Google Cloud Platform to make sure they are using the very latest and greatest cloud hosting technology available. 

This is a feature that Patrick Garde, Co-Founder of ExaWeb, also enjoys: “We moved from Hostgator to Kinsta and we never looked back. It improved our website’s performance as well as our clients’ websites. We liked the infrastructure of Kinsta as they use Google Cloud Platform. In addition, expect a speed up on content delivery with their CDN as it is powered by Cloudflare.”

DevKinsta for local development

If you prefer developing on your local machine, then DevKinsta is a great addition to the platform. It has seamless integration with your MyKinsta dashboard allowing you to upload changes you have made straight to your container, similar to using GitHub. 

You can also download your website with the click of a button to your local machine and work away in your own time.  

Fastest loading theme we have seen on Kinsta

We have a few different themes on our Kinsta account, but by far, the one that performs the best is Generatepress. So, our recommended WordPress theme for using on Kinsta is Generatepress. 

One of our better performing sites is The Goldfishtank, built with Generatepress and moving the site to Kinsta improved Core Web Vitals in a very impressive way, especially when the site attracts traffic from across the globe. 

How much does Kinsta cost?

There are numerous plans available depending on your business needs, starting at $35 per month – view details below or read more here (correct as of June 2022).


Mushfiq Sarker, CEO of Stream SEO, also adds: “You get what you pay for with Kinsta, and I think the extra cost is worth it for the speed, features, and customer service you get in return.”

Overall, we’re massive fans of Kinsta for hosting. If you have any further questions, or want to chat to us about web hosting, email us on hello@taodigital.org or call us on 01204 282 213.

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11/01/2022

Matt Tomkin

4 Steps for Successful Collaboration Outreach

How do you create a successful marketing collaboration outreach campaign? After all, networking is an important business aspect in any industry. Let’s discuss what steps are essential to initiate and establish a successful collaboration outreach strategy.

Before we get into that, let us ask you a different question. How many emails do you get a day?

The answer will obviously depend on what you do (or how popular you are). But overall, the number of emails we send every day is growing. According to statistics, by the year 2025, the number of daily emails we send and receive is expected to increase to over 376.4 billion.

That’s a LOT of emails. Now, in addition to email communications, marketers use social media as a collaboration outreach tool. So, add on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram messages, posts, and stories. You’ve got yourself a whole ocean of information going around the world in hopes of reaching just the right shore.

Within this, we, as marketers, have a very difficult task to do - stand out. Somehow we need to figure out a way to reach out to people in our niche and deliver our message in a way that is so unique, it will capture people’s attention. Not easy! But not impossible either.

So here are steps to creating a successful collaboration outreach.

1. Have something cool to share in collaboration outreach

Have you ever been to a party where you get stuck talking to someone who has a lot to say? Yet, you find yourself staring absent-mindedly at the dessert table, wondering how to introduce the excuse of going to get some cookies just to get out of the conversation?

Well, you’re on your own there with the “talker.” But we would like to point out that not being “the talker” yourself when planning a collaboration outreach is a really good idea.

As we established, we all get bombarded with information pretty much every waking minute. So when we do open an email or read a social media post, we just want to get value from it. It could offer informational, supportive, inspirational, or entertainment value. Or, it could bring up something that would address the current pain points we’re experiencing in our lives.

Whatever it is, the information you send has to matter to the recipient, not to the sender. Therefore, it’s essential to focus on the needs of your audience, not on your own goal to promote yourself. Of course, you still do need to promote yourself a little bit. So the key here is to find your audience, then learn enough about it so you can support the audience’s needs.

To do that you have to get creative.

Shoot For Radical Differentiation For A Successful Collaboration Outreach

Being creative with your content will ensure that you get your audience's attention. Of course, we are all tired of hearing the endless calls for “being creative” and no specific advice on how to do it.

Louis Grenier, the creator of Everyone Hates Marketers, comes to the rescue here, with a specific plan to create radical differentiation in content marketing. According to Grenier, radical differentiation is what it takes to stand out and be noticed in the sea of information. He recommends a five-step process to create a strategy that makes a company stand out. (Click on the link above for more information on each step.)

  • Get rid of your self-limiting beliefs - take risks, you CAN do it!

  • Pick a direction - simplicity and focus go a long way

  • Obsess over your customers - make them your top priority in every way possible

  • Engineer your uniqueness - what is different about you? Highlight that!

  • Identify your status quo - where are you at on the market?

  • Show it to the world - it’s not fair to hide your unique self from people. Show off!

2. Find the Right People (Once Again by Being Creative)

A natural step in a successful collaboration, this one is probably the trickiest one. Making friends is hard enough. Making friends in the right places is even harder. Where can you find your collaboration partners?

Your email box

Yes, you read that right. Some of the people you need are already right in front of you. All those emails you get? Some of the senders can be recipients of your content and potential collaboration partners.

For example, let’s say you get a message from a company that is offering you products or services, but you have no need for those products and services. However, the company and its audience are in your niche (selling similar products or sharing content on similar topics). Instead of trashing the message or letting it drown under piles of more daily emails, email the sender.

In your reply, let the sender know that while you might not be interested in his or her offer, you are open to collaboration. Personalise the message by discussing a specific piece of content on the sender’s site that you found interesting and offer some of your content. Suggest a collaboration that can be beneficial for both parties.

One advantage of these email replies is that the original senders are more likely to open and read your email. After all, your message shows up in their mailboxes as a reply to a message they have sent themselves.

Of course, there is always a chance that the person emailing you does not handle content and would not be the right contact person for a content collaboration. That is why it might be helpful to include a quick note at the end of the email, asking to be forwarded to the right person in this case.

Backlinking and Journalist Tools

Content marketers are always on the lookout for expert insights. That is why tools such as HARO, JustReachOut, and others similar to these offer a great opportunity for successful collaboration outreach.

These tools can connect you to the right audiences when it comes to sharing your expertise and insights. But there are additional opportunities there. Once you connect with a writer or marketer through the platform you can build and maintain strong collaborative relationships. That, in turn, can help build up your audience.

Here is an example of this strategy at work:

Social media

Whether we like it or not, social media rules the world today. We use it for everything, from shopping to connecting to our distant relatives. It is also a gold mine for building relationships and creating successful collaborations.

The important thing here is to remember that just like when you walk into a room full of people, connecting with them takes time and effort. Good news for introverts, however. On social media you can be as outgoing, engaging, and frequent with your interactions as your time and energy allows. All of that can be done from the comforts of your home or office, no need to even dress up.

Participate in Twitter Chats, read and comment on LinkedIn posts and articles, and join some Facebook groups that discuss topics relevant to you. You never know whom you're going to meet on social media, but you can bet you will learn a lot from these interactions. You might even have some fun along the way.

Google Search

Another great source for collaboration outreach is, of course, Google search. After all, this is where you want your content to appear. It only makes sense to find what content already appears on the first pages of the search, and try to join the party. Here are steps to connect with people who write and share topics similar to yours and to enhance your content promotion strategy.

  • Come up with a list of keywords relevant to your content topic or products

  • Search each of these keywords in Google Search

  • Review the results and see if you have any information to add

  • Find contact information for content authors and publishers

  • Contact these important people and offer them your content to add

  • Offer them something in return. After all, they have already completed their work and it has been popular and relevant enough to reach the top of Google Search. What is in it for them if they add your content to theirs? What can you offer?

Here is an example of such an email from a fellow marketer at Motionbox:

3. Stand Out with Your Messaging

Going through tons of email messages every day can be a monotonous task. Wouldn’t it be great if the emails we got were fun to read? Well, in the words of Michael Jackson, “If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change.”

The first thing your recipients see is the subject line of your email. You only have a second or two to appeal to them through one that does not cause them to yawn and move on with their busy lives. Check out this one:

Yes, that is the same Louise Grenier that called for radical differentiation when it comes to marketing content. He stays true to his belief and adds a flare of creativity into everything he puts out. I say he is on point with getting my attention.

Once you get your contact to open the email you still have some work to do. You can make your email body text stand out by creating unique, non-boring messages. Here is one that I think did a stellar job at that.

I mean, how can you say no to that face? If Ayah sent me an old boring email about link collaboration, there is a chance I would miss it. But Archie makes this email memorable, increasing chances for a successful collaboration outreach. Ayah and Archie for the win!

There are many ways to make your emails stand out by adding some fun and creativity to them. The more “you” you make the messaging, the better. Remember the words of another great poet: “There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

4. Don’t Give Up and Follow Up

Years ago, back when I was in Journalism school, I got an internship at my local city paper. My biggest assignment on the weekly basis was to select five top events in the city to highlight in the weekend section. Five. Mind you, every week a pile of about 300 print-outs with event details sat tall on my desk. There was no way in the world I could read all 300 and select five. Most of the time I’d read from the ones on top, discarding those that did not fit or sound fun, until I had five. Sometimes I would cut the pile in half and read from the middle, but those events on the bottom of the pile never had a chance.

The lesson here is that in the vast world of information (of which there is so much more in digital format) sometimes to stand out you might need some pure luck. You never know who will come across your emails, when, and in what state of mind. Research shows that the percentage of cold emails that receive a reply varies between 1 and 3 percent. That is one to three people out of 100!

How can we make our own luck? By staying positive, staying persistent, and following up. If someone misses our message the first time, there is a chance our recipient might see it the second time.

And if not, perhaps we need to reach someone else’s desk.

So, how does one create a successful marketing collaboration outreach campaign? By sharing the right content with the right people in a creative way. By being authentic and fun. By being uniquely you in every message you send. And by never ever giving up.

Natalya Bucuy
Content Marketer at HelpSquad

Natalya Bucuy is a content marketer at a B2B live chat agent company, HelpSquad. With expertise in customer service and marketing, she has written numerous articles on the topic of customer experience, employee experience, and small business operations.

19/11/2021

Matt Tomkin

Law Firm SEO – The fundamentals to better search rankings

The legal sector is one of the longest standing and seen as one of the most professional sectors in the UK. A number of law firms are really lucky in that their client base is relatively secure and has been for some time.

They get recommendations from other professional service providers for the services they offer and have spent numerous years building those networks to create a solid foundation for the firm to keep going.

Recently, with Covid-19 being a large driver in this, we have seen a number of law firms now looking at what other channels are available to drive revenue and visibility for their brands.

We work with a number of law firms on their SEO presence and continue to see great results from organic search visitors.

Table Of Contents

But, how does a Law Firm do SEO? 
3 core parts to SEO
Technical SEO for legal sites
Page load speed - why is it important and how do you fix it?
Mobile usability: we all know why this is important, don’t we?
Check nothing is blocking Google or the search engine spiders
Core Web Vitals: what are they and why should you care?
What are the Core Web Vital measurements?
Search content for legal sites
Writing for search engines and users is an art
Creating search content for each stage of the buyer journey
Links for legal sites

But, how does a Law Firm do SEO? 

What do they need to implement internally within their business to gain from SEO as well as the component parts that have to be implemented correctly to gain the up-tick in visitors from Google, Bing, Duckduckgo or any of the other search engines?

3 core parts to SEO

There are 3 core parts to SEO, these are:

Technical SEO, Content and off-site signals.

Technical SEO for legal sites

Technical SEO is all about making sure your website is built in a way in which the search engine spiders can access the information and understand all the information in the most efficient way possible.

Top level technical considerations are things such as:

  • Page load speed

  • Mobile usability

  • Checks that nothing is blocking googlebot from accessing the websites pages, etc.

Then there is Core Web Vitals to consider, but this does incorporate a number of scores that we’ll discuss in further detail.

Page load speed - why is it important and how do you fix it?

In a nutshell, page speed is how fast a web page is loaded when a user visits it.

No-one likes a slow website! It’s as simple as that. Google, and the other search engines, therefore see this as a ranking factor (how they decide where your website/page sits in the search engine results) and a slower website is seen as bad for the user.

The ideal time for a website to load on mobile is between 1-2 seconds. Yes, this is fast, but studies show that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. Here is the study for further information: Think with Google.

However, with the addition of Core Web Vitals, there is now more complexity in the recommendation to “just make it load faster”. Core Web Vitals have been introduced to help website owners understand how to improve overall website experience, rather than outright speed.

For example, the content layout shift measurement is now targeting those annoying moments when you go to click something, but the page shifts as you do it and you end up on a random page; i.e. one that you didn’t want to go to.

Mobile usability: we all know why this is important, don’t we?

Everyone now uses their mobile to browse the internet! If your website doesn’t show properly on a mobile device and users are unable to read, click or even use the site at all, then this is going to affect how you rank on Google and on other search engines.

In Q1 2021, internet users on mobile devices accounted for 54% of all traffic, and this is not slowing down. People are moving away from their laptops and just using mobile devices for all things internet. Make sure they can access your site properly.

Test your website now to see if it works on all the latest devices, use Blisk to check.

Google now, and has been doing so for a few years, ranks websites using a “mobile first” ranking method. This means that if your site doesn’t work very well on mobile, it is very unlikely that the site will perform well on desktop Google searches either.

Check nothing is blocking Google or the search engine spiders

Website owners and developers can use a very tiny piece of code on the back end of a website to ask Google, amongst others, to not index an entire website, or just certain pages. This is great when you want to make sure some pages don’t show up in search for whatever reason, but we have seen examples of developers forgetting to change this to allow indexing of an entire website.

Sometimes, this happens when a new site has been built and the site is set to ‘no-index’, making sure there isn’t a duplicate. The only problem is, it gets forgotten about when the site goes live.

Believe me, this happens. We’ve seen websites disappear from Google within days due to a tiny error like this. Normally, it’s easy to sort and relatively quick to get the rankings back, but it can have permanent damage if not found quickly.

This is just one of many things that can affect how search engines get blocked or have issues with finding and indexing your website pages.

Core Web Vitals: what are they and why should you care?

Core Web Vitals is the name given by Google to a number of measurements that affect user experience and they believe every website owner should be measuring.

They will be used to help determine where a website ranks across all of Google’s tools. As of yet, we’re not sure how much of an impact this has on search results, but you can be sure they will be having some; especially in competitive sectors such as law.

They are measurements from real world data, so it is extremely important to keep a close eye on these scores within your Google Search Console portal.

Page experience is so important and should form part of your overall plan for how to attract new visitors and keep them on the site. However, if you need a push to do this, then Core Web Vitals is for you.

What are the Core Web Vital measurements?

They are split into 3 aspects that affect user experience: loading, interactivity and visual stability.

Google terms these aspects as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

  • First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.

  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less.

It has never been more important to measure how your website loads for your end users and to make sure that there is a budget in place to improve the way your site is built. This is why we moved into website development, to help our SEO clients’ sites load better and hit the scores where needed.

If you need any help understanding your website's speed metrics or technical issues, get in touch.

Search content for legal sites

So, you have likely heard the saying “Content is King” - this phrase does have some truth to it. The real saying however, should go “The Right Content is King” when it comes to SEO and gaining website visitors from search engines.

What we mean by this is that you can write as much content as you want but, if your goal is to get more visitors to your website via organic search, then you need to make sure it matches what Google knows the user is looking for. We call this the ‘intent of the searcher’.

Blog content that doesn’t target search is very important, but only once you have customers on your website. We’re talking about SEO in this article, so we will be concentrating on what we term ‘search content’ or ‘SEO content’.

Writing for search engines and users is an art

When you are looking for more traffic from Google or other search engines, you have to think about what they understand the intent of a search to be. We call this the search intent.

Search intent is basically what a user wants to find when they type something into the search box.

There are 3 different types of search intent as we define them.

  • Informational: A searcher is looking for content to help understand something or find the answer to a question.

  • Navigational: The user knows where they want to go and uses a brand name or place to find the relevant website.

  • Transactional: A user is wanting to buy a product or service. This can include researching a type of product or service, and it could be that they know what they want to buy and go ahead and purchase.

A great example of an informational search would be “How long does probate take?” which is searched for an average of 6,800 times per month in the UK (and this is actually an underestimation of the actual volume!).

The person searching this is higher up in the sales funnel and we want to answer this question for them along with other relevant information surrounding the topic in the best way possible. Once we have answered all the questions this searcher has, they will likely move through the buyer funnel to the point where they will then use a more transactional search, such as “probate solicitors” which is a 1100 per month search volume; again, an underestimation.

Creating search content for each stage of the buyer journey

It is so important to create content for each stage of the buying process.

Links for legal sites

Google was the first search engine to use links to help decide where to rank a website in its search results. They worked on the basis that some links are more trustworthy than others. As an example, the BBC would be very trustworthy as they have very high editorial standards and are one of the most trusted websites and organisations in the world.

However, a website that is not trustworthy and has lower editorial standards will be discounted as a link in the eyes of Google. They need to be good, relevant and trusted links.

It is therefore important that you build inbound links to your website that are from trustworthy sources. Let’s be honest, you’re not likely to get a link from the BBC every day of the week, so we use a tool that estimates the potential domain rating of a website.

This score is out of 100 and can help build a picture of how valuable a link might be if you were to gain one to your website.

The Law Society website https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/en, as an example, has a domain rating of 84/100, meaning that having a link from this site would be great for any law firm.

The content of the page linking to you is important too. Let’s say a major newspaper uses you as a source for an article about probate law; this would be seen in the eyes of Google and the other search engines as a trusted and reliable source and would be a great link.

On the flip side of this, an article about changing the tyre on a car that contains a link back to a law firm's website would not be a relevant or trusted source.

13 Jul 2025

Matt Tomkin

SEO vs. PPC: Which is better?

As a search marketing agency, we get asked about SEO vs. PPC a lot. Of course, what we recommend completely depends on the client and their industry, and there are many things to consider before we look to recommend either channel.

In this guide, we’ve gone back to basics about what each of the processes involve (feel free to skip ahead if you’ve already got some understanding), how they can work together and the pros and cons of each.

Table Of Contents

What do SEO and PPC stand for?

SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and PPC stands for ‘Pay Per Click’.

Search Engine Optimisation isn’t just a case of optimising your pages once and never looking at them again. Due to constantly changing search algorithms, site infrastructure updates, your competitor’s activity and much more, you constantly need to be on the ball to make your site as search engine friendly as possible. This is done through a mixture of technical SEO, content marketing and digital PR.

PPC refers to the ads that you see at the top of Google search results. As a business you will pay per every click received on your ad. It’s not a case of paying the highest, although this is a factor - rather, it’s all about the quality of your landing page experience, ad copy quality along with a whole host of other factors. 

What is the difference between SEO and PPC?

There are a few differences between SEO and PPC to bear in mind:

The positioning on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

First and foremost, the most obvious difference between the two is their positioning on the SERP. The paid ads are the first results you see and are labelled as ads, as shown in the graphic above.

The organic results are shown from that point onwards and are what search engines believe to be the best match to a user’s query, starting from the best match and descending from there.

The goal for both search channels

With SEO, it’s likely that you want to boost the site's visibility in the search results, which is a great investment in the overall value of a business. There are a number of advantages to SEO, improving your keyword rankings, increasing your domain rating through gaining links, improving site traffic, bringing more site visitors that will lead to more sales and leads.

SEO is best viewed as a long term investment in your business, it can take some time and considerable investment to make major gains in organic search but the value keeps building over an extended period.

With PPC, you’re normally directing your site visitors to one page (often a particular service page you’d like to push, or a contact form we term a landing page) with the aim being to get users to take an action - ideally, buy a certain product or contact you for more information.

We wouldn't recommend starting a PPC campaign without having a very focused landing page, or set of landing pages, depending on the campaign and number of ad sets you are running.

The time frame

SEO is a long-term strategy and investment in your businesses long term lifespan.

Creating a new piece of content, whether a blog or new service page, goes live, you will need to wait till the search engines ‘index’ the page.

This can be sped up to an extent, but it completely depends on your website's authority and how important the search engines see your website. It can take 3-6 months before you start seeing traffic to the page - in fact, the average time a URL takes to hit page one is over 12 months, according to Ahrefs. On the other hand, paid ads are live immediately and can start generating results quickly when done correctly.

The sort of visitors you will bring to the site

Having managed PPC for a wide variety of clients, alongside undertaking SEO work, we have certainly noticed a difference in the sort of leads that each one will bring in.

With SEO, you’re likely to attract the sorts of visitors who may be at the top of the sales funnel. For example, if you’re a craft insurance business, many small craft businesses won’t know exactly what they need to cover them from claims - these sorts of visitors are at the top of the sales funnel.

Say for example they search a question such as: ‘What sort of insurance do I need for craft fairs?’. They may come across your piece of content, a guide to showcasing at a craft fair. After reading the guide and finding out the sort of insurance their business needs, they may request a quote from you as you have positioned yourself as an expert. (p.s. - you can also read our guide for more information on how to use Google searches to create content that answers user’s questions).

If you did want to target people who are more towards the bottom of the funnel, perhaps you want to create a highly targeted piece of content around getting a quote for insurance. SEO can target both top of funnel and bottom of funnel users, it all depends on the content produced and the competition for the terms.

With PPC you can attract visitors much further down the sales funnel who are either looking to make a purchase now or are looking for very quick results - e.g. someone who has left organising their car insurance until the last minute and is looking for a quote as soon as possible.

They may fill in forms from several of your competitors in order to see who responds first. This means that you may have to filter through more leads to see who is seriously considering buying your product or using your services.

In some instances, you may want to target further up the sales funnel, like promoting a piece of content or a guide, but typically we do see PPC being used for bottom of the funnel purposes.

How SEO and PPC work together

Although SEO and PPC do have their differences, you can seriously reap the benefits of using both together.

Getting greater target audience insights

PPC can give you invaluable data about your target audience. Once your ads have gone live, Google collects information about who is clicking on your ads, such as their age, gender, industry, job role, the area they live in, etc.

This data can help you to refine your next projects as part of ongoing SEO. For example, if you are a business coach and you see that owners of insurance businesses are clicking on your ads, you might want to create a piece of content or a service page around ‘Business Coaching for the Insurance Industry’. This can help you to continue bringing in leads through your PPC work and also attracting those leads organically too - it’s a win-win situation as you start to dominate the SERP!

Increased brand awareness

Using both together also boosts brand awareness. For example, someone might be carrying out some quick research about your industry, and once they visit your landing page from an ad they get a general idea of your offerings and who you are. They may get distracted and leave the site.

However, when that person searches again, or really does need your product this time, they will remember your name and click on your organic listing this time. Or, you could even use remarketing list search ads on Google and make sure you are there for both organic and paid ads.

Testing what works and using it in your SEO efforts

You can also test new keywords that can help with your SEO. Choose a word or phrase that you think you could potentially rank highly for and use it in your PPC ads. If you see great results, this is a sign that you should start to include this keyword in your content.

You can also review statistics such as time spent on the site and bounce rates to see what is working on your landing page and what isn’t - for example, are people getting tired of reading a huge piece of content, or is a call to action too far down? This can help you avoid the same mistake in other pieces of content across the whole site.

Does PPC affect SEO?

Not directly, but as we’ve touched on, you can use the insights to better your SEO. It can be part of your overall SEO strategy, but it’s not essential to your efforts, especially if you have a smaller budget starting out.

What are the pros and cons of SEO and PPC?

SEO: Pros

  • Increase traffic, leads and brand awareness

  • It often isn’t as costly as PPC can be

  • Visitors who view your site are likely to have a higher level of trust as search engines have suggested you as the best match to their query, rather than paying to get there

  • You can easily attract local traffic to your site by taking advantage of Google My Business and other local listings

  • You can become an authority figure in your industry as people search your site for information and guides

  • One great piece of content can consistently bring in leads - we’ve seen this with some of our client’s top performing pages

SEO: Cons

  • SEO takes longer to see results, so return on investment isn’t instant and needs a consistent budget

  • In some extremely competitive industries, SEO needs a vast amount of resources to compete. You may need to use PPC as well to generate results in the shorter term

  • There are no guarantees with SEO - algorithms change constantly

  • You can suddenly go down in rankings due to a variety of factors, such as competitor activity, the toxicity of the sites that have been linking to you, algorithms etc.

  • The organic results aren’t as high up on the SERP

PPC: Pros

  • Generates almost instant results

  • Return on investment is very clear

  • Can feed into your SEO strategy and give insights that are more difficult to find through SEO

  • Gets you to the top of the SERP immediately, compared to months or even years of effort with SEO

  • Targets people who are at the bottom of the sales funnel, and so are looking to buy NOW

  • You can set a maximum daily budget to make sure you aren’t spending too much

PPC: Cons

  • Once your competitors catch onto you efforts, you could face a bidding war where essentially the price per click consistently increases

  • Many people don’t trust ads as much as they know businesses have paid to get there - 97% of all clicks go to organic search results.

  • Money can be burned up quickly if it isn’t done correctly - we’ve spoken to many business owners and marketing managers that have tried their hand and spent so much with little ROI!

  • You can get caught up in ‘click fraud’, a process where people or certain pieces of software constantly click on your ads to use up your money

  • The data can be complex to understand for those who are new to PPC

So, which is better overall?

Sorry to go for the typical SEO answer here, but really… it depends (yes, we can hear you booing over there).

If you want quick results and know how to optimise a campaign as best you can, PPC might be the best option for you.

However, if you want to put the effort into an SEO strategy over time and bring in consistent organic results, that could be a better choice.

In our honest opinion, a combination of both works really well due to the insights you can get. For the clients we do this for, we are constantly reviewing PPC campaigns to see what’s working and what isn’t, then implementing this into their content.

If you want great results that will take your business to the next level, get in touch with us today. All of our clients receive monthly video reports that prove real return on investment and growth over time.

Thrive Apprentice WordPress Plugin Update 2021

Thrive Apprentice is one of the most easily customisable, online course builders available and is considered to be one of the best WordPress LMS (Learning Management System) plugins.

The course builder has been well loved since it’s release back in 2014, but it was only last year where it really began to improve.

With the latest update, released on the 30th June 2021, users are set to have complete creative control and total visual design freedom over their online classroom.

What is changing in Thrive Apprentice?

As of June 30th, Thrive Apprentice is set to become one of the most powerful WordPress LMS plugins available on the market. Their new updates promote complete user control like never before.

Here are the key features of the new update, explained:

New Design Tab Dashboard

This new integration makes editing your courses simple. Through a single access point, you will be able to:

  • Choose your course ‘skin’
  • Set your chosen typographies
  • Edit course templates

You will also have access, through the new Design tab, to the all new…

Check out Thrive Apprentice and the update by clicking here

Thrive Apprentice Quick Start Wizard

The new Course Setup Quick Start Wizard can guide users through the steps it takes to create an effective online classroom. You’ll be able to customise your online school with ease – simply use the tool to modify branding such as your logo, colours, templates, headers and footers. Easy!

Page Customisation

With Thrive Apprentice, you’ll now have complete custom control over all elements of your online school. Each section, each individual page in fact, will be customisable.

Course Overview Page Customisation

This is where first impressions count. Your students will see your course overview page first when they enter your online classroom. Now, you’ll have access to:

  • New, professional templates designed by the Thrive experts
  • Full creative control over your Overview page, from scratch
  • The option to create multiple templates and save them

Lesson Page Customisation

Your lesson page in your Thrive Apprentice classroom is where you prove your worth as an online teacher. You’ll now be able to access simple drag-and-drop control over all of your content and easily display your resources in any way you’d like.

School Homepage Customisation

With the new School Homepage update, you’ll be able to choose a starter template, upload it and customise each and every element to suit your desired brand.

There will even be access to new course content sections, including:

  • Lesson Lists
  • Course Lists
  • Lesson Resource Lists

You can use these elements anywhere on your school homepage, only displaying the features that you want.

Header and Footer Customisation

A simple, yet useful update to the LMS. There will now be multiple header and footer designs to choose from and, like the homepage, you’ll be able to customise these templates as much as you’d like.

Course List Element

Once again, you’re going to have total design freedom when it comes to customising classroom elements. There will be multiple, new Course List templates available to choose and change.

Choose where your course list sits, how it looks and fits in with your theme and branding and how it all works. No restrictions, just control.

Rapid Course Sales Funnel Building

Complete customisation control is negligible if there has been no focus on conversion. Your sales page is hugely important in convincing students to join your course – this is why Thrive Apprentice has integrated their custom control options with their smart Landing Page templates.

Your tutorial demo can now be completely customised through online course-specific templates. Now, you can easily present exactly what your prospects will learn from you, right on that all-important landing page.

You will also be able to use the above course list element on your landing pages to really promote your courses, using full customisation techniques to your advantage by building a conversion-focused, lead driven, well branded online school.

Is Thrive Apprentice a good WordPress LMS plugin?

Thrive Apprentice has always been a highly successful LMS, regardless of its new, impressively hefty update.

With a recent UI update, Thrive Apprentice is a flexible, easy-to-use online course builder that rivals that of its competitors with complete entrepreneurial control in WordPress.

Prior to the new update, users benefitted from new, pre-designed course templates for Overview and Course Lists. Now, with these elements being enhanced through new customisation capabilities, your online classroom can look and feel exactly as you envision.

Better user experience and unique student experience

The Thrive Apprentice team has already stated that there will be more, fully-customisable templates to come. Through full visual editing of all elements of your courses, modules and lessons, your online classroom can look just how you want it. Simple.

With detailed editing capabilities, such as edits being allowed to:

  • Styles and themes
  • Colours and branding
  • Spacing and typography
  • Mobile responsiveness

… you’ll have all the customisation options you need to create a unique learning environment that both looks and performs extremely well. With all new, full customisation options to improve branding, an integration with WooCommerce to make selling easy and a focus on visually improving classroom landing pages, there is no reason why your online school can’t thrive, with Thrive Apprentice.

What’s a Good Click-Through Rate (CTR) for Facebook Ads?

As you figure out how to measure your Facebook Ads’ performance, you might hear a lot of advice about click-through rates (CTR). This number measures the percentage of an ad’s viewers who clicked on the ad’s primary link.

Nifty, right? While you want plenty of eyes on your ad, you also want the people who see it to act on it — that’s where the money comes from.

But, if you look at Facebook’s help page for CTR, something’s missing. It tells you what a CTR is, but not what a good CTR is.

That’s where we come in. We’ll explain what to expect as a good CTR so you can start setting benchmarks that matter.

What is the Average CTR for a Facebook Ad?

Before we talk about what makes a good CTR for Facebook Ads, let’s find out what an average CTR looks like. After all, if you’re doing better than most advertisers, that’s a great start.

Wordstream estimated an average CTR of 0.90% across industries in their 2017 survey of 256 businesses. Of course, the numbers they got varied by industry. Legal (1.61%) and retail (1.59%) had some of the highest CTRs, while employment/job training (0.47%) and finance/insurance (0.56%) had the lowest results.

What Does a Good Facebook Ad CTR Look Like?

It’s promising to have a higher-than-average CTR for your industry, but just because a CTR is average doesn’t mean that it’s good. So, what makes a good CTR? Let’s see what the experts get from their ads to learn what a professional expects.

Databox asked more than 30 marketing professionals about their average CTR to understand what a good Facebook Ads CTR is. They found that industry experts tend to get at least 2-5% — over half of the respondents said they had a CTR between those percentages.

Average CTR Facebook

You can think of that CTR as a floor, not a ceiling. Almost 15% of the marketers had a CTR of 10% or greater. CTRs can go far beyond the average if you know what you’re doing.

If you have a CTR lower than 2%, look at these results as an opportunity. These professionals can earn high CTRs, so you can, too.

How Do I Get a Good Facebook Ads CTR?

What can you do to improve your CTR? Regardless of your CTR, you can aim for a higher number by looking at your ad’s:

  • Targeting: Do you target people who will actually want to click on your ad?
  • Visuals: Does your ad have an image or video that catches viewers’ attention?
  • Copy: Does your ad copy make a compelling point?

Knowing the right direction to take these ad elements takes two actions — research and testing. Research your customers and market to guide your targeting and creative, then test different components against each other to learn what works best.

13 Jul 2025

Matt Tomkin

How do Digital PR and SEO intertwine?

When John Mueller tweeted about the importance of digital PR in January 2021, #DigitalPR Twitter went wild. Finally, we had gotten a very clear nod from the brains at Google about how important telling your brand’s story is.

John Mueller, from Google, praises Digital PR
This caused a bit of confusion in the community about what digital PR actually is. So, we’re here to explain!

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR means to build your online presence and brand awareness. Essentially, create something worth linking to – whether that’s a study you’ve done about your industry, an interactive map, data sorted by region, fun content, a case study, etc.

These links, in turn, increase your domain authority (moz.com) or domain rating (ahrefs.com) – AKA how authoritative your site is. This is typically rated on a scale from 0-100 by different tools that us marketers use. The theory is, the more authoritative your site is, the better you rank on search engines as they want to show the most trusted voices first in the results. (Yes, it’s a theory – Google would never reveal all its secrets!)

Digital PR and SEO: how are they linked?

Digital PR and SEO are intrinsically linked. As mentioned above, links built to your site will boost your domain authority, meaning your rankings will improve. You could have the most informative pieces of content in the world, but if your domain rating is low, you won’t see the traffic you deserve.

The domain rating of the sites that link to you is also important. Those with high domains tend to only link to other reputable sources, again showing search engines that you’re a thought leader. Think about this in real life situations – if you get a product recommendation from someone you know and trust, you’re more likely to believe it is good quality as it has their seal of approval.

Digital PR can also improve your keyword visibility. For example, if you’re a recruitment agency and you create a campaign about the most popular month for job searches, the sites that use your content will help you to boost your rankings for terms relating to this. Obviously, this is relevant to your industry and will therefore help boost your overall rankings too.

Campaigns have to be relevant to what you do already – journalists will be confused if a pet shop creates a campaign about the rise and fall of mortgage prices! Plus, search engines can potentially penalise you for creating far-fetched and irrelevant content.

What are the benefits of Digital PR?

The biggest benefit you will see from digital PR is an increase in domain rating/authority, but don’t underestimate the additional benefits of brand awareness, traffic to your site and even more business coming your way. For example, an SEO case study we did for Moz about our work with Fleetcover lead to the following:

Referring domains for Fleetcover almost doubled from 74 to 163 within a week, boosting the DR from 13 to 20…

According to Buzzsumo, the piece became the 6th highest trending content WORLDWIDE in the SEO community the day it went live…

And we got various shoutouts from Moz on their social media – our Twitter went a bit crazy after being showcased in front of their half a million followers!

We also had an international enquiry about working with us, so not only did this work wonders for our site and brand recognition, we could potentially be getting work out of it too. Watch this space!

Moz has a domain authority of 91, making them one of the highest-rated sites online. Many marketers would burn money trying to get featured on there, and all we had to do was tell our story – the magic of digital PR.

Digital PR and outreach

Outreach is essentially how you get your digital PR campaigns out there. Once the story/study/graphics are live on your site and ready to go, you then create an outreach list full of journalists you want to email the story to. This can be done using a simple Excel spreadsheet to track details and progress or by using helpful tools such as Buzzstream.

Different experts will tell you different ways of outreaching pieces to achieve optimal open rates and replies, but the truth is, we don’t believe there is a perfect time (unless it’s a Friday afternoon – don’t bother!). Different journalists work to different times, and if your subject line is interesting enough, they’re likely to click through. Plus, if you have already established a relationship with a journalist, you definitely get more leeway in terms of when you can send it as they already know who you are.

What is ‘newsjacking’?

Newsjacking, or ‘reactive PR’, is the most fast-paced form of digital PR and involves providing an expert comment to news or trending topics. For example, we have outreached various comments from business brokers Hilton Smythe in reaction to various Government changes to business rates, the extension of the furlough scheme, news about Boohoo acquiring Debenhams, etc. Essentially, it’s all about providing that expert voice. The exchange works both ways – you provide journalists with an expert voice, and in turn, they *hopefully* link to your site.

The question of how quickly you should do this is something that varies depending on who you ask. Some would say anything over 30 minutes of the news breaking is too late, but we have had success with sending a comment a couple of hours later.

How does data tie into digital PR?

Data heavily ties into digital PR. If you are not releasing a special, limited-edition PR-stunt product or creating an interactive quiz, you’ll likely be using some form of data. In order for the data to be newsworthy, it has to relate to a mass audience, or else news outlets just won’t cover it as it’s too specific.

How can you make your industry-relevant to a mass audience? If you’re an insurance broker, can you look to popular TV shows and films and quote how much it would cost to insure certain items? Or, can you incorporate one of the following emotions into your data?:

  • Funny – will the data make people laugh – is it a bit out there?

  • Shocking – can you reveal something people don’t know about where they live across the country, e.g. crime rates?

  • Gross – this is perfect for cleaning brands (did you know your work desk, where you are sitting right now, contains 400x more bacteria than a toilet seat!?)

  • Scary – can you reveal something rather worrying?

  • Love – can you make people go ‘aww’, or feel a sense of pride or joy?

When sending out a PR campaign, it’s really important to contain notes about your methodology, AKA how you went about getting the data, how you organised it, how you split it up to calculate certain aspects, etc. If you miss this out, journalists will be a little suspicious of your data and can ask questions, or even ignore your outreach if you aren’t transparent from the get-go.

How to improve the success of your digital PR campaigns

There are several factors that can make or break your PR campaigns. After outreach, it’s important to reflect on each of these aspects and see what you can improve:

  • Timing: Yes, we know, we mentioned that timing isn’t as important as some say, but if you’re sending them out all at once on a Friday afternoon, maybe reconsider your methods. Some programmes, such as Buzzstream, allow you to schedule outreach for a certain time, or break it up across a period of time so that you can see when your emails are getting the most opens.

  • The angle: The angle can change everything. If you notice your campaign isn’t really getting picked up, change the angle a bit and see what happens.

  • Make sure your landing page is worth linking to: if a journalist can describe your data without you needing to see it to understand, they will! Make sure it’s something interactive – e.g. type in your postcode to find data for your area, play with the graphics on the site, etc.

  • Don’t waste time: if you’re doing a reactive PR campaign about how much certain things in a trending TV show would cost, make sure you get it out there while the show is still trending. We know, it can sometimes be hard to cut through approvals tape, but the sooner you can get it out there, the better. A few days late and you’re better off waiting until the next season.

  • Think, would I actually share this?: if you wouldn’t click on it and read it, why would anyone else? It has to be interesting. If you’re finding ideation hard, sit on it for a while. Our team finds that PR ideas come up at the most random times.

How is the success of digital PR measured?

There are various ways of measuring the success of your efforts depending on what your goals are. Common ways of measuring success include:

  • The number of links you get: you could have a goal of a certain amount, but it’s important to remember that coverage is NOT guaranteed each time.

  • Online readership: what is the total combined online readership of the sites you got coverage from?

  • Social media shares: how many people have shared your content on social media sites?

  • Average domain authority: what is the average DA/DR of the sites you got coverage on? The higher, the better.

  • Increase in domain authority: this goes hand in hand with the above point – hopefully, you want to see your rating improve over time as a result of coverage.

  • Web traffic: how much traffic came to your site from the coverage? (Referral traffic)

  • Conversions/goal completions: if you’ve made a new PR-stunt product that people can buy, how many people bought it and how much revenue did this bring? Or did people simply sign up for your newsletter?

This will vary from client to client and depends on other factors such as budget, timescale, existing relationships with journalists, etc. The more experience you have with digital PR campaigns, the more realistic your goals will be as you understand what can be achieved on a certain budget or time scale.

Digital PR for startups

Digital PR can be both a costly and time-consuming process. If the industry data doesn’t exist publicly and you need to submit a Freedom of Information request to those who have the data, you can be held up by weeks. Or, if you’re doing a survey, prepare to let go of a couple of thousand pounds in the process.

Analysing data also takes a lot of time, as well as creating infographics or an interactive page on your site. This can put a lot of businesses off investing in digital PR until they have more money. But it’s a bit of a double-edged sword – to get more money through your site, you need to rank better and invest in those authoritative links, AKA digital PR!

The key to having a news-worthy campaign, then, is using your own data. When you’re so involved in a business day to day, you can forget certain aspects or interesting statistics you can get hold of. Again, if you’re an insurer, do you have any funny claims stories you can tell? Or are you starting to see new trends in your industry? This unique content can be a great starting point for a campaign.

If you need help with creating ideas or want to chat more about digital PR, get in touch with us via hello@taodigital.org or call us on 01204 920 096.

How to use Answer the Public to boost your SEO

 

There are absolutely loads of helpful SEO tools out there, but when it comes to helping with content marketing, we do have our favourites.

One such favourite is Answer the Public, which is the holy grail for our content writers. Not only does it make coming up with content ideas so much easier, it shows you what people are searching for in real time. Responding to these searches and providing useful content is a sure way to move yourself up the pages on search engines such as Google.

In this blog, we’re going to explain what Answer the Public is, why it’s useful and how it can help you to boost your online presence.

What is Answer the Public?

Answer the Public is a long-tail keyword tool that shows you questions and autocomplete searches around a certain topic. This can help you to understand what people are searching for so that you can provide content featuring relevant, in-depth answers that people are actually searching for and looking to find answers to.

Is Answer the Public free?

Answer the Public is free, but only for a few searches per day! Otherwise, you’re going to run into this guy…

The downside of this is that it works off your IP address, so if a colleague is also using the tool they can hit the day’s limit for your whole team. Not good news for those needing to churn out content consistently.

If you’re stuck for content ideas and want to improve your SEO, it’s definitely worth investing in the tool, which costs $99 per month, or $79 per month if you pay annually. This lets you have unlimited searches and users, as well as allowing you to compare data over time.

Looking for help with generating more sales leads?

Speak to one of our team today about our SEO services

How does Answer the Public work?

As mentioned above, the site shows you what people are searching for. We’re going to use the example of one of our clients, Complete Koi & Aquatics, here. Through another SEO tool, Ahrefs, we saw that ‘Ghost Koi’ was being searched for around 1,900 times per month with a keyword difficulty of 0 – what a goldmine!

If you don’t have another SEO tool to help with this, simply note down some topics that you think potential customers would be interested in reading about.

We then headed over to Answer the Public, typed this phrase in and had a look at the results. There are two ways which Answer the Public will display results, the first is through a visualisation wheel. Although the tool will never tell you the exact amount of searches for each question, the darker the dots on the wheel, the more they are searched.

Be warned, though – it can also mean that the particular question or phrase is trending at the moment and actually has relatively low search terms in comparison to others. You’ll never get 100% accurate numbers as search engines like to keep this information top secret.

The screenshot above is just the ‘questions’ section. As you scroll down, there are more wheels for prepositions (i.e. ‘ghost koi for sale near me’) comparisons (ghost koi vs goldfish), and finally alphabeticals, which list every searched term from A to Z.

The other way the information is presented is as ‘data’, as below:

This is a bit easier to read than the visualisation wheel, but the downside is that you don’t get hints as to what is searched the most.

This information is really useful, because when you know so much about your niche, you forget the kinds of information newcomers might be looking for. You might be surprised with what people are asking about!

Using Answer the Public for SEO

Using these questions in a piece of content can really help to boost your rankings. It shows search engines that you’re an expert in your field. Generally, the more questions you answer and the more in-depth you go, the better. This is of course dependent on the number of searches and content, as sometimes people are just looking for a small amount of information.

Based on our research, we then created a piece titled ‘Everything you need to know about Ghost Koi’, which answered many of the questions from Answer the Public. This piece was published in July 2020 and naturally it will take a while for search engines to pick up on this content, but at the time of writing (December 2020), Complete Koi are now position #1 on Google for ‘Ghost Koi Carp’ and ‘Butterfly Ghost Koi’, even though their domain rating is 3.7. We expect this to continue increasing!

Similar results can be expected if you follow this process. Ensuring that the questions are formatted as H2s, H3s and H4s will mean the keyword is in the questions too, and that search engines will understand that they are your headings and subheadings.

For an extra boost, add FAQ schema to your content. This means that your questions and answers will appear when people type in related search terms, as below.

This is much more eye catching to users, and they can get their answers without even having to click on a site. Even if you’re not ranking for the term they typed in, you can appear in excerpts on the page as above, which is especially useful if you’re just getting started.

Another way that Answer the Public can help with SEO is the feature that helps you to compare data over time. For example, if we head towards Winter and suddenly spot that people are searching for questions such as ‘Do Ghost Koi hibernate?’, we can add this into the content and keep it up to date.

Also, if a new cool gadget for ponds has been released but there aren’t many searches around this yet, we can get the product page ranking as searches increase and keep an eye out for more questions trickling in as the product gains popularity. This can help us to answer those questions before anyone else does.

Finally, if one of your old pieces of content previously had a lot of traffic but is slipping down in the ranks, it could be that your competitors are answering questions you aren’t. Keep an eye on old content and update it as and when new questions arise.

In conclusion…

Answer the Public is a fantastic tool for any content writers looking for more ideas and to boost their SEO.

If you’re stretched for resources and would like to outsource content research and writing, we’re your people! Get in touch today via hello@taodigital.org or call 01204 282 213 and we’ll see how we can help.

Looking for help with generating more sales leads?

Speak to one of our team today about our SEO services