Northern DMO Digital Group

11 April 2023

6th February

Search marketing through content creation

• Background to our past activity• How Google is changing Panda and Penguin updates • Using content to attract visitors – onsite content and offsite

content

To state the obvious…

• Clear that digital has become more important and the website is the primary source of the majority of people’s information.

• Logical to spend money to attract people to the website • How do people find websites…Google

Where to put the money?

• Google pay per click advertising– Guaranteed traffic– Targeted traffic– Instant– Flexible with expenditure and targeting

• Value for money? It depends– Expensive – hotels– Cheap – event names

Budget

– £20k spend per year – Around 6k visits a month– Cut down by running in-house (10k)– Higher levels of clicks, more targeted, lower cost and flexible

• Next steps– Keyword research, split testing adverts, text, keywords– Could possibly double the traffic for the same money? – Sounds

good!– What about the bigger picture, where is our traffic coming from?

Organic Google traffic

• We now get well over 100k unique visitors a month• Over 70-80% of the traffic is from Google organic searches• Traffic increased by over 60% from previous year

• Why is this?– SEO friendly site, no technical issues, title structures, headings, internal linking– Great content : 300+ events on at any one time, blog, ‘My Kind of Toon’– Panda and Penguin updates – changes to Google’s algorithm , hurt sites with ‘thin

content’ and using ‘spammy’ techniques – rewarded genuine sites with good original content.

How to continue to increase traffic?

• PPC or SEO?– Focus on the 6% or the

80%??

A few examples :Quayside Restaurants

House of Smith

Team Valley Retail Park

3k unique visitors a month arrive on this page!

Have a guess??

• Correct!• Onsite or offsite?

– Our onsite is good, offsite needs work– Backlinks - we have a lot of good ones but dominated by

“NewcastleGateshead Website” “NewcastleGateshead Initiative”– Need to look at ways of building links – lots of ways, can be time

consuming and potentially run us into trouble.

Good links

• Anchor text – e.g. “hotels in Newcastle”• From a high ranking quality website• From a relevant website• Proper original content • Not overdone!

• Chosen blog/article content with SquareDigital

SquareDigital

• Network of websites covering a huge range of topics

• Publish articles and blog posts on these sites - 6 articles a month

• Link back to newcastlegateshead.com

• IT’S DONE WELL!Matt Cutts approves!

The Process

• Aims of the project– Increase of traffic to Hotels/accomodation pages (4 pages targeted)

• Keyword selection– 1 main keyphrase for each page, plus 5 variations

• Assessment of NewcastleGateshead.com• Content plan (monthly)• Suggestions/Proofing – all must be approved (monthly)• Publishing (monthly)

Anchor text rotationRotation A Rotation B Rotation C

Delivers exact and partial match anchor text to a landing page. For landing pages that already have a diverse mix of links and thus can tolerate a higher proportion of exact match anchor text.

Our default anchor text rotation, this delivers a blended combination of exact and partial match, long tail, brand and untargeted text. For landing pages with few existing links, or those that already have a decent proportion of exact match in anchors.

Avoids exact match anchor text altogether. Designed for websites that need to reduce the proportion of exact match anchor text to their landing pages while continuing to optimise.

Exact Match Exact Match Brand

Partial Match Long Tail Long Tail

Exact Match Untargeted Untargeted

Partial Match Partial Match Partial Match

Exact Match Brand Brand

Partial Match Partial Match Long Tail

Content plan

Some examplesMust visit museums in Newcastle

Where to find Newcastle's best nightlife experiences

Top free attractions and activities in and around Newcastle

In conclusion - What to look out for

• No false promises– Long term– Guaranteed first spot!

• Quality content– Ask to see examples– Who writes it?– On what websites?

• Avoiding running into trouble– Keyword rotation – Anchor text overuse– Frequency of articles– Original content – that is interesting to read!