I frequently hear to lot of small talk and voodoo about SEO, things like “hyphenated domain are better for high rankings”, or “getting high rankings on Bing is easier than Google”. There may be an element of truth in these statements, but they lead people to forget what’s important. They might have worked for a particular site (or group of sites) at a particular time, but they aren’t universal principles.
At ProspectSoft we think there are only two universal principles – traffic and conversion.
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Do you spend hours planning email campaigns as a method to generate new business opportunities; only to find that they continuously deliver the same poor response rates?
You may start to think that you are wasting your time, but with a little bit of help you could be capitalising from one of the most lucrative forms of direct marketing. To do this, the answer is often to stop persevering with the same unsuccessful emails and simply start testing them!
Email testing has been a hot topic for marketers; and in my experience has been an effective and cost-free way to show how small alterations to your emails can have a surprising influence on their success.
The easiest way to start testing your emails is to run an A/B split test – divide your contact records into two even lists and send two slightly different versions of the same email to each. Features of your emails which you can begin testing are:
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Why set up conversion tracking?
Okay, you’ve set up your initial Adwords campaigns, and you’re up and running. You log in a week later, and find that your initial efforts appear to have been a roaring success – you’ve got a number of clicks on your ads and reasonable clickthrough rates. Unfortunately though, the cash register hasn’t been ringing – so what’s going wrong?
The first step is to make sure you are tracking conversions. Google allows you to add a script to your conversion pages, which recognises when a website visitor has taken an action valuable to your business, and tracks this back to a particular Google ad and keyword. That way, you get to see how well your ads are working in terms of real, revenue generating actions.
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Most businesses are aware of Google Adwords as a tool for getting paid traffic to your website. At ProspectSoft we put a lot of time and effort into our own adwords campaigns, and over the next few articles I’m going to share some of the top things we have learnt.
Tip 1 – Keep your search and content campaigns separate
When you create a new Adwords campaign, the default settings are to display your ads on both search and content networks. The search network is the side of Adwords most people are more familiar with, where your ads are displayed on the right hand side and at the top of the Google search results – when someone searches for a term you are looking to target.
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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is big business, and a whole industry has sprung up around getting your website to the top of the search engine rankings. Today, I want to share an SEO insight that very few people are talking about… one that might turn your current idea of SEO on its head.
The Personalisation of Search
Google has, for a while, provided customised search results for users logged into their Google account. Effectively, if you have been logged into Google Mail or a similar Google program then gone and performed a search, Google stores a list of your previous search history. Customised results are then presented, reflecting what Google thinks you are interested in based on your past searches.
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