Shivvyt

Got the first installment of Google Analytics benchmark email last week. While I love the fact that they’re sending me out info, reading it produced a more of a “why?” than a “wow”. The information is an amalgamation of all those sites which have opted in to share stats anonymously with Google. It therefor  includes all sorts of sites from retail to b2b, from small blogs to large blue chips.In other words it’s mostly pretty useless for real benchmarking. By giving us such of an amalgam... Read Full Story

Down in London over the last few days meeting clients, existing and new. It’s good to have face-to-face time as despite our good use of tech from skype to extranets, a face to face does provide an opportunity to pick up nuances and subtleties that help us do our job better. Being in the room is hugely useful. An extension of this came up with regards to keyword research. This area is really the salt mines of SEO – figuring our audience behaviour and demand. Getting it right is crucial and... Read Full Story

We’re doing some pretty interesting work on mobile search at the moment. Hopefully we’ll be able to share more in the near future, but we’re loving this area. Why are we so interested? Well according to Google 43% of the UK population will have a smartphone by the end of this year. Microsoft found that providing mobile formatted or mobile specific content can increase conversions by 75%. We’re also seeing mobile traffic increase across all clients. 20m people access the mobile web every... Read Full Story

One of Scotland’s leading agencies commissioned Tandem Digital to work on their site visibility. When we won the business they were nowhere to be seen on Google for their services in the Scottish market or the UK.  In the last few months they have launched their new site based on Tandem’s recommendations and over the last two months they are now hitting first page visibility for some pretty competitive keywords. Filed under: Google , SEO Read Full Story

Tandem is working on a very interesting project with a global travel company that you may have heard off (yep that’s the one). The project, which kicked off earlier in the year, is to build a platform allowing the company to roll out it’s affiliate marketing offering across multiple languages. We’ve built a very cool system using our old friend Drupal which will initially be rolled out over 11 languages. Filed under: web development Read Full Story

The OED has released it’s list of 2000 new entries. We thought we’d have a quick look at how these words are performing in terms of Google searcher demand and guess what – social media, as you would guess has come in top of the leader board. Geo-engineering makes an appearance in 2008 and is very driven by press events. Staycation starts getting traction slightly earlier with people making the best of not having funds for those two weeks in the sun. Carbon storage has a steady... Read Full Story

Remember being a gauche teenager going to your first college parties? The network that you’d relied on in school suddenly disappeared and  figuring out how to make new friends and having some fun came at the price of a few uncomfortable moments; trapped in the kitchen with the engineering student who’d learned Monty Python’s Philosopher’s song as his (only) conversation gambit, doing the breaststroke in the punch bowl, dancing like it’s 1999 (and it was only ’91) and someone videoing the... Read Full Story

I truly felt Foursquare Mayorship had finally arrived in the UK today and with style! I had a crown, a cake, and magazine to read (wired naturally) and a coffee!!  Now I don’t expect to get this treatment in the other three places I am Mayor of, namely because one is a child’s play park, AND not to mention this Mayorship is actually of my own work and I’m the only one checking in, BUT the appreciation of my custom is humbly received! A year after Foursquare launched, we are still only... Read Full Story

Yes! Another day, another Mayorship in the bag for me! But honestly, who cares? It’s a sad but true fact, those of us using Foursquare are diligently checking into venues attaining Mayorships, unlocking ‘Local’, ‘Bender’ and ‘Super’ badges, for nothing! Currently no venue is fully utilising it. With a reputed 1 million check-ins a day and growing , I can’t help but wonder why businesses are missing the opportunities to attract and reward customers that are practically being served up on a... Read Full Story

Really interesting article over at econsultancy about the retraining of online consumers to use means other than search to find deals. In these recessionary times, now more than ever people love a bargain. I’ve lost count of the homes and offices I’ve gone into in the last year who’s bathrooms are stocked with those telltale brands that are only found in the low price foreign chain supermarkets. We’re all well past the no thought of price consumerism (are we?) of the early naughties and now... Read Full Story