If you embrace them, the digital marketing agency you choose to work with can play a pivotal role in your business growth plans. That's why it's a great idea to build a trusted partner style relationship.

I'm going to tell you a story. It's a true story and it has a happy ending. So... are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

A good mate, Steve, asked me a question today about a previous blog post I'd written. I was talking about SEO, for a change, and he said the post made it sound like SEO wasn't cheap and it was far from guaranteed to work. His point was, if, as a digital marketing agency, we wanted to attract clients why would I be so brutally honest.

Every week we have conversations with potential new clients that don't go anywhere. The reason for this is, primarily, cost. They think hiring us is going to cost circa £150/month when the reality is our SEO services start at 10 times that amount. There's no meeting halfway with this kind of differential.

There are many website visitor tracking tools on the market such as Lead Forensics and several others that help you identify the companies looking at your website. However, there's one company who offer this service, for FREE!

If you've read any of our blog posts in the past you'll be well acquainted with the importance of understanding your potential customers' problems, and researching what they search for, and creating useful content to attract them to your website. Unfortunately, that's not the end of it. How do you turn them into customers?

Everyone is talking about GDPR. There's a growing sense of panic as the 25 May 2018 deadline approaches. Clients are contacting us about their privacy policies and lawyers are busier than ever, advising on compliance with the new legislation.

Although it's 2018 business owners are still confused about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Being a little controversial, it's also clear to us many web design agencies are equally as confused, or perhaps they just don't care, bless 'em.

I read a very interesting anecdote on social media recently. A former expert had been heard to say that "SEO doesn't work any more - we can't trick Google any more".  While we totally agree about the latter statement, we definitely don't agree with the first one. It's still working for us and for our clients.

We're all busy. We know customers come first and it's normal to give priority to the people who pay the bills and focus on the work that brings in revenue. However, what if a small investment could make that work much more profitable?

I'm sure you get lots of spam emails, we do. About 90% of them start with the hackneyed term "Greetings of the day!" followed by "Hope you are doing well". If our email service allowed us to block emails based on the content I could cut out a ton of unwanted emails simply by looking for those phrases, but it doesn't.

Marketing is one of those industries that's packed full of jargon and buzzwords. Not least of which are the phrases marketers use to describe what we do. There's digital marketing, online marketing, content marketing, inbound marketing... but what's the difference?

We've got a track record of explaining SEO using simple non-technical language, we've even created a comic strip where our own super-hero SEO Man, outlines the basics of SEO. With this post, I'm going to put all that advice into the context of small and medium-sized or SME business owners. So if you're a business owner this one is for you.

Inbound marketing is the art of attracting potential customers, engaging with them and converting them into leads. It's a structured process which involves careful planning and a long term view.

Being part of a digital marketing agency is fantastic way to earn a living. We meet many interesting people and get involved with some amazing businesses. However, during some of the conversations we have with prospective clients, we hear the phrase "Please keep in mind I'm a startup", which is code for "we have no money" #awks.