An important target for most charities are so called hard to reach groups. Within that description are those who do not have a strong command of english and those who have limited reading skills. For both these groups the language used on your web site pages could be a barrier. The vast majority of content [...]

Here are three clear measurable benefits of your Social Media efforts. Despite the best efforts of boffins everywhere, there is no way to measure the overall impact of your social media activity. However your SM effort can result in more visits to your web site as measured by: 1. Direct Referrals: You can be sure [...]

Google`s latest update may bring a drop in the traffic that they send to UK charity sites. Google regularly updates the factors that decide what pages to show for a search query.  The latest version of the algorithm called `farmer` or `panda` will soon be in use here in the UK and is designed to [...]

Thanks to those who came along  to see this presentation at the CharityComms event in London in Nov 2010. These are the slides I used -  with a few small amendments. You can access two other presentations that I have made on Introduction to charity Search Engine Marketing and Introduction to Google Grant AdWords. Increasing [...]

Google have again updated the search query data that they are providing in Webmaster Tools. The data can be found in WMT under the tab `Your Site on the Web`> `Top Search Queries`. ( The posting below titled `Webmaster Tools data for Marketing` gives more info on WMT layout) . This update shows many more [...]

Less than .5% of web site traffic was driven by social networking sites based on analysis of 6 UK charity web sites for the period 1st Oct 2009 to 28th Feb 2010. The sites examined had monthly Visits between 20k and 800k. Social Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are now major sources of traffic [...]

Google`s new search engine produces, as expected, a range of results when tested with top keywords from UK charities. Announced last week the beta version of Google`s search engine, codenamed caffeine, with the same interface as the existing search is available for testing now. To see how it may affect UK charities I compared the [...]

Google recently updated Webmaster Tools making it easiser for  marketing and business types to find great data to improve site performance.  The good stuff is under the tab Your site on the web.  Top Search Queries tells you the number of times your site appeared in Google search results ranked in order plus the percentage [...]

In the Keyword Tool Google has modified the Search Volume columns. The two columns are now labelled `Global Monthly Search Volume` and `Local Search Volume: `. Note that Local here means regional eg UK, France, etc. A quick test indicates that the data in Local Search Volume is good but the lack of historic `Local` [...]

Google Trends allows you you to check and compare how popular a particular search term, or collection of search terms, is. Very useful when deciding which are the most popular terms in a selection you are looking to use in your campaigns. A while back Google extended the functionality to allow comparison of websites. Google [...]