10 months after the last Google Panda rollout (Panda 4.1), Google has confirmed that Panda 4.2 began its launch in July.

Don’t worry if you didn’t notice… Unlike some of its previous updates, where many brands’ site rankings dropped or rose dramatically, this incarnation is being released much more gradually, possibly over a period of months.

What does the new Panda update mean?

Any new Google Panda rollout could do one of two things:

1. If a website was penalised in the last Panda update, the site can find itself rising back through the search results if it has resolved the issues that caused the penalty
2. Penalise or reward existing websites according to the quality of the content Google finds and assesses.

With several of the previous Panda rollouts, websites knew immediately if they had been penalised. Search-engine traffic could all but disappear overnight, leaving the webmaster with content-quality issues to fix and no assurance of when – or if – they would regain their previous position in the SERPs.

With Panda 4.2, this slow pace of the release makes it harder to tell exactly what has been ‘hit’, but we do know that it will affect 2-3% of US search queries, a total of around 36 million.

What should webmasters do?

The focus of each of the Panda updates has been to improve the quality of website content; Google no longer wanted to refer its users to poor-quality sites filled with unoriginal or nonsensical text, sometimes copied from elsewhere.

Make your content unique and high-quality, avoid having too many ads, especially above the fold, don’t have insufficient, ‘thin’ content that does not provide value, and don’t even think about using content that is ‘spun’.

Matt Cutts’ advice following a previous update is worth revisiting:

The post New Google Panda Refresh: 4.2 is Here appeared first on SE0 Advantage.

Apart from the hysteria about loss in organic search visibility and increases in costs of pay per click (PPC), here are the facts:

• Side bar PPC ads no longer appear for ‘commercial keywords’
• There are now up to 4 top PPC ads, as opposed to 3
• Organic search results have been pushed further below the fold
• 9 – 10 organic search results appear to be shown on page one
• Local map listings are still present where relevant
• Google news stories are still present where relevant
• Bottom-of-page ads are still present

The search engine giant is constantly testing, so there’s no way of knowing whether this is a permanent change, or simply an experiment to shake things up temporarily. However, it looks like a move to a mobile-first proposition which was inevitable; after all Google are long behind the likes of Facebook and Instagram in moving towards mobile-first.

What does this change mean for organic search and SEO?

Organic search space is harder to come by, so yes, the pressure is on to maintain existing volumes of ‘free’ traffic to your website. With an additional PPC ad above the fold, organic listings are one scroll further than they were last week. This could mean a slight reduction in click through rate for a ‘position one’ organic ranking. That said, there are certainly positives on this change for the SEO world. With an inevitable increase in cost per click of search ads, brands may decide to focus a little less on the quick win nature of PPC, and put more of their eggs into the longer term organic search strategy basket.

A blended search strategy has never been more essential. Brands must make decisions about high converting keywords to focus PPC spend into, and those phrases which are best to focus an SEO solution around.

What are the best SEO solutions in light of the change?

It’s never been more important to have a search result that stands out, some quick tips to ensure this is the case:

1. Optimise your page titles (the oldest trick in the book but still a good one)
2. Treat meta descriptions like ad copy – prioritise encouraging click through rate!
3. Utilise rich snippets, schema & microdata – the more real estate the better so add star ratings, breadcrumbs, cookery time – the works!
4. Local SEO isn’t going away – optimise for local listings! (Streamline citations for Name, Address, Postcode)
5. Google News is here to stay (for now) – consider whether this is a relevant platform for your brand.
6. Keep building your brand – the ultimate aim is that your brand is the ‘go to’ search term, so you capture them in the early research stages and they remember who you are for next time. (This TripAdvisor campaign is a great example).

This won’t be the last experiment we see from Google, after all it’s their job to continuously optimise search results for users… (And find ways to create more revenue for themselves?)

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Creating content that is relevant to the time of year can be an effective way to generate ideas for unique, original content. However, this needs to be done with care to avoid clichéd content that tags a seasonal theme onto something completely unrelated to your industry.

As an example, on November 5th, around half of the email marketing I received contained the words “remember, remember” in the email subject line, referencing the famous “Remember, remember the 5th of November” poem. Not one of these emails was related to fireworks, fire safety or celebrations; instead, titles like, “Remember, remember to buy today!” and even “Remember, remember – culinary experiences!” filled my inbox. Brands were tagging their emails with Bonfire Night themes, without thinking about how the celebration could really relate to what they were selling.

We see this with blog post titles too. “What Christmas can teach us about change management”, “What Easter can teach us about health and safety”, and so on. And while there may be great content in these posts, the forced link to seasonality feels contrived and artificial.

That is not to say that brands should steer clear of seasonal content altogether. Not at all! Because, when it is done cleverly, it can be a really useful way to generate ideas and build content that customers flock to.

For some brands, it is easy. If you are a retailer of goods that are typically given as gifts, blog posts about ideal Christmas presents for mums, or great Secret Santa gifts for colleagues, make complete sense and can encourage buyer behaviour, too.

For niches where it is a little more difficult, a useful question to ask can be “How does what we do fit into the season we are writing about?”. Not “How can we fit this season into what we do?”.

Our work at Keytools Media is relevant to e-commerce stores, so we wrote a month-to-month guide to managing Q4 in retail. The stats and advice we shared are timely and relevant to the season, but we kept our focus on serving the needs of our potential audience. A massage therapist might write a blog post recommending ways to reduce stress over the Christmas period. Or a gym could write a series of blog posts throughout January about sticking to New Year resolutions and keeping fit.

Instead of asking yourself how you can shoehorn Christmas – or any other season – into your content plan, instead think beyond the obvious (“Ho, ho, ho!”) and establish what your customer really needs at this point in the year. How can you help them? What can you offer them that they would truly appreciate?

The post Create Seasonal Content (Without the Clichés) appeared first on SE0 Advantage.

However, social sharing is not the only way to boost content on a blog, podcast or video channel.

As new content is indexed by search engines, it will start to show up in the organic search results, too, but this can take time and there are no guarantees that your new blog posts will be at the top of the search results.

This leaves an option that many overlook as a method of content promotion, but that is very valuable in getting the word out: pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

The potential reach of a PPC ad is powerful; PPC ads allow marketers to get their latest news, content and offers in front of as many eyes as possible, with each ad being carefully targeted to the most relevant demographic for the brand. PPC ads can be set up as soon as new content is created, without having to wait for Google to index and rank it.

Get the best results from using PPC to improve content reach

1. Share the benefits of the content in your ad copy and call to action

If you have invested time and money into creating content, such as an ebook to promote your business, PPC ads can be an ideal way of getting the word out.

Make the most of the ad copy and call to action by commending the benefits of the ebook to your prospects, making it clear how someone can gain value from downloading it.

2. Use PPC ads to drive traffic and split test content

PPC advertising can be used to test out new content, sending new visitors to the website and measuring results quickly and simply.

You can feel confident that the people visiting your site are made up of your target demographic, and the measured traffic (along with monitoring via Google Analytics) can help you to test out the relative conversion success of two pieces of content, two different titles or two different presentations.

This is a much quicker process than waiting for organic and social traffic, hoping it fits your target audience, and measuring progress from there.

3. Test different demographics with the same content

As well as offering the ability to test different types of content with your audience, PPC ads can also help you to test out the same content with different audiences, so you can find out which demographic gives you the best results.

Using PPC ads on Facebook, for instance, you can see whether people in different age groups or locations download your white paper or click on your video more frequently.

4. Personalise your content

Using PPC ads allows you to send visitors to specific pages on your website. You can use the data from your ads to personalise the content somebody sees, which – if done correctly – can improve the likelihood of it converting well.

For Marketing experts, click here.

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Making a success of a business Instagram account does involve more than just sharing the odd snap and hoping for the best. Like with all forms of social media, the more attention you pay to it and the more effort you put in, the better your results will be. There are tools that can help you to streamline your processes and understand your results, and important tips to bear in mind when managing your account, too.

1. Know what you want to achieve. Setting goals helps you to focus your attention and get where you want to be, whereas ignoring this vital part of the process will mean that you have no idea how far you have come or whether you are succeeding with your Instagram account. Do you want to build your follower numbers? Showcase your products? Create a brand your customers can relate to? Don’t try to achieve everything at once, choose one or two goals that you can stick to.

2. Be consistent. Sporadic postings will never build a dedicated audience, so commit to posting a certain number of images per day or per week.

3. Use your captions and profile info. The opportunities to input text into your Instagram account should be used as a way to both compel your audience to engage and also to make your images and your profile searchable (and findable). Make the most of hashtags on your images and create captions that make people want to see more from you.

4. Think visually. It seems obvious, but make sure any images you share are visually appealing and suited to your branding. Whether you’re showing behind-the-scenes snapshots, image quotes or product photos, don’t just shoot and share. Don’t forget to look at your profile page from time to time, too, to check that your images complement each other when on show together.

5. Consider your analytics. Instagram analytics can show you patterns and trends in how people are responding to your images. If you ignore this data, you may continue with unpopular approaches and fail to make the progress you are hoping for.

6. Use tools. Services like Buffer and Hootsuite provide a way to schedule Instagram posts without breaking the site’s ToS (by scheduling reminders to post, rather than the posts themselves), while tools like Iconosquare and Simply Measured will enhance your analytics and make them more accessible.

For marketing insights, click here.

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Paid search bidding, as its name implies, is essentially an auction for your chosen keywords and has all the challenges and potential pitfalls inherent in the auction format.

Companies, therefore, have to develop a strategic approach to pay-per-click advertising and the first step in developing a strategy is to decide on manual or automated bidding.

Manual bidding

The basic case for manual bidding can be summarised in one word – control.

In practical terms, that means responsiveness. Cyberspace is a fast-moving world and the danger of automated bidding strategies is that they can easily be overtaken by developments to which a human would have adapted.

One basic example of this is increased competition for keywords. In line with the laws of supply and demand, increased competition will generally push up prices and could quite feasibly take them out of your bidding range. A human would quickly take a decision on whether to increase the budget for the bids or whether to change the target keywords, but automated bidding software will just carry on regardless.

On that note, manual bidding ensures that changes are effective immediately, whereas with automated bidding you either need to remember to update your changes straight after implementing them or wait until the platform is scheduled to synchronise again.

Automated bidding

Before you dismiss automated bidding, however, it’s worth remembering just how useful automation can be. Even SMEs can quickly build up large numbers of keywords on which they wish to bid, particularly if they operate in an ecommerce environment.

That’s a lot for a human to manage but, for a computer algorithm, it’s all in a day’s work.

The other big plus about automated bidding is that it allows for a far greater degree of segmentation. With manual bidding, there are limits on the account structure. With automated bidding, by contrast, you can pretty much do whatever you like in terms of segmenting your campaigns and ad groups according to their similarity.

One final point in favour of automated bidding is that the fact that computers lack emotion removes the risk of them getting caught up in the excitement of bidding and paying more than is reasonable.

So which is better?

In an ideal world, most companies should look to use both. Even though automation is becoming increasingly sophisticated, computers are still a long way from managing complex tasks as well as humans.

What they are good at, though, is crunching lots of data very accurately and far more quickly than any human could.

With that in mind, the most effective use of automated bidding is to keep mature accounts ticking over at an acceptable level. Accounts that are still in the growth stage would probably be best managed by manual bidding until there is a decent level of traffic and an acceptable conversion rate, at which point they can then be switched over to automated bidding.

Meanwhile, humans can oversee the automated bids and, in particular, devote their time to managing the key accounts, i.e. the accounts with the greatest opportunities for growth and/or the highest level of strategic importance.

The post Approach to Bidding on Paid Search appeared first on SE0 Advantage.

Like with Facebook, the videos will be muted as the user scrolls through their timeline. By clicking on the video, the user will be able to watch the full video, with sound. Turning a phone to landscape mode will also prompt the audio to start and the video to expand to fill the screen. This change will apply to animated GIFs and Vines, too, and all videos will be able to be retweeted, replied to or favourited.

According to Twitter’s announcement, this change has started to be rolled out on the web and iOS devices and will expand to Android devices in the coming weeks. Users will be able to switch off this functionality, or opt to only auto-play videos when they are connected through a WiFi network.

Auto-play videos will feature in Twitter ads as well as its organic timelines. Advertisers may be impressed to know that Twitter’s research has shown a7x increase in the number of videos watched to completion via autoplay, compared to others.

The way advertisers are charged for employing promotional videos is also set to change.

David Regan, Senior Product Manager at Twitter, explains, “we’ll only consider a view on Twitter chargeable when a video is 100% in-view on the user’s device, and has been watched for at least 3 seconds. We’re putting this standard of 100% viewability in place because we think it’s simply the right thing to do. If a video is not 100% in-view, we don’t think an advertiser should be charged”.

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Which platform?

I still have a preference for Facebook as the largest and still the fastest growing, but I am also considering using Instagram. These two platforms can be linked quite nicely to duplicate posts. Twitter (X) is now very busy but still a good place to connect with journalists, local businesses, and schools.

Sticking to one platform and consistently doing it well is much better than spreading yourself too thinly. See how the Perfect Smile Studios in Hertford are using Instagram https://www.instagram.com/theperfectsmilestudios/ 

Which profile?

There are still dental practices using personal profiles on Facebook – don’t be tempted to do this, as you’ll miss out on so many of the tools Facebook has to offer the business user. Plus, you risk having the profile shut down when Facebook realises what you’re doing.

Create a professional business page for your business and take time to make it look inviting. Create some personality with it; people love to know who is in the business, so use the profile picture or header to show people.

Stay clear of dental equipment in your imagery; the general public don’t care how fancy all your equipment is, they want to know you’re human and you can be trusted! Canva.com is a great tool to create your own headers and change them occasionally – perhaps make them seasonal or follow a campaign that may be on, like National Smile Month.

What should I post, and how often?

Facebook is busy so to be seen you do need to post regularly and frequently. Whatever you choose I would recommend you’re consistent with it, so if it’s twice a week, keep to that. My preference for a dental business is daily, making sure you have a variety of posts.

I would advise you to use a diary and plan your posting. Creating good content takes time and thought needs to go into how the post will look just as much as the content. What imagery do you have? Is it the right size? Again, Canva.com is quite good for creating images as the sizes are all laid out for the user.  

I like to use 123rf.com to purchase images; you will need good-quality images, so look at some of the image sites. Don’t be tempted to copy images from elsewhere – companies are trawling through the internet to find illegal use of images.

What should my plan look like?

Over a week, I would consider two posts for information and education linking to areas on your website, such as a treatment page or a blog page. Blogs can be reused so a regularly updated blog, twice a month, will start to give you a vast library of content over time.

Then, two posts about something personal to the practice – perhaps introduce a team member or someone at a sporting event, or maybe you’ve had a bunch of flowers delivered. Your last post of the week can be shared from another site, such as the Oral Health Foundation or National Smile Month.

I have a few favourites for shared information and you can either share from a Facebook post or visit their website and choose content. Always give the source credit by tagging if possible, and then add your own website address in too, to help direct some traffic to your own practice too.

How do I know if it’s working?

An easy way is to measure the enquiries at reception and find out where new patients first heard about you. The problem with this, though, is that sometimes patients will say the website because that’s where they ended up, so it’s not fail-safe. More.

Look at your engagement, the number of likes, comments, and reach. If engagement is low, try different content and different posts. That is the beauty of the business tools in Facebook – you can analyse what’s happening and adjust accordingly. You can also see what your competitors are doing and if they are more successful.

There is no doubt that to get a decent reach you will need to pay to get your posts seen on Facebook – what is known as Facebook advertising. The simplest form of this is to ‘boost’ your post to a target audience of your choosing. This is a great tool to launch an offer or an event. Dental advertising can be tricky and there are quite a few rules, but Facebook can help you choose the correct imagery that will be approved.

Social media should also be fun, so jump in, have some fun, be consistent and persistent, and see what works for you. Good luck!

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Marketing your Practice on social media in 2025. appeared first on SE0 Advantage.

What is the RAR?

Some might say the RAR is like the TripAdvisor of creative and digital agencies. You can’t simply buy into the Recommended Agency Register, clients are required to rate their agency based on how satisfied they are with the service they’ve been given.

We’ve scored multiple positive reviews from our clients, and frankly we couldn’t be happier.

“We’re really proud that our clients have rated our work so strongly, and recommended us for our place on the Recommended Agencies Register” says Nigel Muir, Keytools’s MD. “The RAR really matters to us as it is entirely based on client feedback. I’d like to say a big thank you to the clients who rated us, and also to the team here at Keytools for delivering such excellent quality search engine marketing work”.

Here at Keytools, we work really hard to make sure we give our clients 100% all of the time. The fact that our clients have taken time out of their busy days and gone out of their way to give us great feedback means a lot!

Check out our listing on the RAR here. (And if any of our other happy clients would like to recommend us, you can do so here!)

In the words of RAR: “Be brilliant. Get rated.”

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1.Pay attention to voice search

Voice search is more accessible than ever. Apple phones boast Siri, Android phones offer Google Now and Microsoft has Cortana, not just on its phones, but also installed as default on Windows 10 desktops. And voice search is changing the way people search the web.

A few years ago, search phrases were getting shorter. We knew that Google would understand what we meant when we searched for “price driving licence UK” rather than using a complete sentence.

However, since voice search has increased in popularity, searchers are using complete sentences again, because this is more intuitive when we are speaking. So we are far more likely to ask Siri “How much does a driving licence cost?”.

When optimising our websites for SEO, we can respond to the rise in voice search by asking and answering full questions in our content.

2. The increase of instant answers

Google search results frequently answer the questions we ask, using the search results it returns. This reduces the need for searchers to click through to secondary websites.

This, along with the instant answers we receive from Siri, Google Now etc., reduces the click-through rate of certain searches, especially those that are based on generalised information.

So what can webmasters do to continue to get clicks from questions in search?

Remember that not every search provides an instant answer. Aim for more specialised topics and searches that will require further information than a three-sentence summary. This will encourage people looking for detailed information to click through to your website, even when an instant answer is available.

1. Focus on local SEO

The details of local SEO will continue to change and evolve, but its importance will remain key, especially for brick-and-mortar businesses that are not based solely online.

Wearable tech, as well as personalised search results and an increase in mobile searches, will all point to local search becoming increasingly relevant and something all website owners should invest in optimising for.

2. Continuing to follow good advice on content

Whatever changes in SEO, maintaining a focus on the user when creating content will likely always be central to any smart strategy.

Click here for the best SEO company in the UK

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