How Much Do Internet Marketing Companies Charge?

E-consultancy have published their annual Digital Rate Card Survey, and it makes for interesting reading both for clients purchasing Internet services, as well as for agencies looking to benchmark their fees.

Small and medium sized businesses still dominate the digital marketing sector, with more than half of all agencies having fewer than 10 employees:



A relatively small proportion of digital agencies are located outside of London, with the Midlands being relatively poorly represented:


The daily rate for Directors of online marketing businesses outside the South East averages £802 per day:


The report includes daily rates by agency size for a number of different roles. For small agencies the average daily charge out rates seem to be averaging around the £575 mark:

Technical roles: £577
Online marketing strategists: £575
SEO consultants: £588
PPC consultant: £572

And finally, digital marketing remains a high growth sector with agencies projecting to grow their turnover by 28% year on year in 2008.

Ashley Friedlein, CEO of E-consultancy, comments: "With 11% of UK agencies reporting growth of 100% or more, year-on-year, optimism within this thriving sector is well-founded.

Can Google Index Flash? Yes!

At long last, Google has announced that it can index Flash content.

Until now, websites built in Flash were notorious for being invisible to the search engines. Flash content was a "roadblock" - a big black hole that the search engine spiders couldn't index.

All that is changing with Google's new algorithm that finds textual content in your Flash SWF files. That means Google will be able to index textual content in your Flash files, as well as see and follow URLs and links.

And as a result Flash results will start to appear more commonly in the Google search engine results. In particular, the "snippets" of text that appear in the Google search results are likely to be more relevant and compelling.

Yahoo! will also be taking advantage of this new development, but poor Microsoft is once again Billy No Mates and hasn't been let in on the indexing party. Silverlight, and all that....

In principle, existing Flash sites do not have to make any changes in order to start the indexing process. But with regards to search engine optimising your Flash files, Adobe's press release says, "As with HTML content, best practices will emerge over time for creating SWF content that is more optimized for search engine rankings."

Keep in mind that Google will not be able to index images in the Flash, nor text that is displayed as an image.

Read more in Vanessa Fox's overview of this new Flash development.

EMNET Ceases Trading

What would happen if your web designer/developer went bust?

Nottingham based web company EMNET is no longer trading. Initially the website said "Following a number of difficulties EMNET has ceased trading," whereas the website now describes their status as "restructuring."

EMNET's difficulties serves as a timely reminder to consider what arrangements you have in place with your web developer.

Communication at stressful times like this can be difficult; phones are unlikely to be answered, and information may be restricted to email.

In an ideal world there will be an orderly shut down of the business, with the hosting of your website continuing until you can make alternative arrangements.

In addition to web design, hosting and Internet connectivity, EMNET managed initiatives like the Anubis project which has very recently awarded £10,000 to each of 10 small businesses in the East Midlands, including GreenEnergy360. The Anubis project was funded by EMDA and the European Regional Development Fund.

What are the main issues do you need to consider in the event your web designer ceases trading?

1. Who owns your domain name registration?
Was your web designer helpful, and registered your domain name for you? If so, the ownership and contact details may be in the designer's name, including logon access and renewal reminders. It can be very difficult to get your name transferred at stressful times, so get the details sorted now. And if you forget to pay your domain name renewal then you risk losing your domain name.

2. Do you have a backup of your website?
Your web designer's decision to shut up shop may come quickly, so do you have a secure backup of your web pages that you can get access to if necessary?

3. Who owns the intellectual property of your website?
The intellectual property of your website should be yours, but that probably excludes any applications such as shopping cart software or other applications. If you are running web applications such as e-commerce shopping carts, content management systems, or forums then establishing ownership might be problematic. If you are using open source software, or industry standard packages then you might be able to move your applications to a new company.

If it is a bespoke solution, then the intellectual property might belong to the web developer and you should have a legal agreement in place stipulating what happens if the developer ceases trading. And at the very least, you need to have a utility to extract your data for the worst case scenario of having to create a new website.

4. What are your hosting arrangements?
Your web designer may have their own web servers, or may be renting space on your behalf on a shared hosting service. Do you have passwords, copies of invoices and other information that might help with the continuation of your services.

Plural vs Singular Keywords

Is it better to use the singular version of your keyword, or is it better to use the plural version? For example, will I get more traffic for the word "laptop" or "laptops?"

The answer, of course, is it depends. There is never a one-size-fits-all answer to selecting your key phrases.

Hitwise produced a very interesting analysis comparing the top 10 key phrases containing the word "laptop", excluding branded terms. And they conclude that the use of the singular or plural versions might indicate different buying behaviours.

Phrases like "cheap" and "free" appear prominently on both versions, but Hitwise identified that for the top phrases:

• the singular version was more commonly used when looking for laptop accessories like batteries, bags and cases
• the plural version contained stronger buying singles, like "laptops UK" or "pink laptops"
• the singular version also contained plural qualifiers like "laptop computers"

And when analysing which phrases then resulted in searchers going to a shopping website, Hitwise concluded the plural version generally drove more visitors to ecommerce or buying sites.

You might conclude that the plural version would be best for your search engine optimisation strategy.

But if we look at the Google Trends data comparing laptop vs laptops, we see that more than twice as many people in the UK are searching for variations of the singular as compared to the plural versions:



So what is going on? This, of course, is the Long Tail, users searching on literally thousands of variations of your keywords, for example "light weight laptop" or "finger print recognition laptop."

So what might we conclude from all this?

• compare the search volume of your specific phrases, for instance "laptops uk" vs "laptop uk" and build your content and linking strategy accordingly
• but do not overlook the broader keyphrases that encompass the high quality detailed searches your propsects may be using.

Planning for a Domain Name Change

Changing your website domain name is a big deal.

Changing your domain name will result in immediately losing your rankings in Google, even if you keep the same content on the new domain name.

Cold Hanworth Forge teach blacksmithing courses, and found that their website was generating lots of course bookings. But the site was old, and the time was right to have a new website that the business could be proud of.

As part of their web makeover, the business owners were advised to get rid of their successful www.teachblacksmithing.com domain name, and use a brand new domain name with their company name in it instead.

And when the new website went live, their site disappeared from the Google results. Whereas they were previously in the top 10 for all their keyphrases, they now languished way down on pages 9 and 10 of the results.

And most importantly, they discovered their training bookings dried up.

The disaster was all down to changing their domain name.

We had a very quick discussion, Bob reverted back to his old domain name, and straight away he was back to getting bookings on his lovely new site direct as a result from regaining his high rankings in Google.

The mistake Bob made was not to plan for his domain name change. But to his credit, he spotted the problem, and quickly tried to figure out where things went wrong.

Google has provided a useful checklist for changing your domain name and they readily acknowledge that domain name changes are not easy.

And even when you have a member of staff dedicated to managing the changeover process, it will still take months (potentially) for your site to regain its rankings in Google. Take a look at TKG's blog where they document their domain name changeover process.

There are times when domain name changes are desirable or inevitable, and just like any change in your business marketing, success is all in the planning.

Google Documentation

Want to understand how Google works? Want the information straight from the horse's mouth?

Google have just produced a very useful PDF booklet called Making the Most of Your Content: A Publishers Guide to the Web.

It's excellent. Read it. Even if you think you know it all already, read it.






Warning: Geek Alert

I found this on Matt Cutt's very useful posting discussing Google's improved documentation. Lots of Google goodies in there of a technical nature, including robots.txt, IP delivery, nofollow, and quality guidelines

Google AdWords Trademark Restrictions

In May Google AdWords lifted the restrictions to bid on your competitors' trademarks.

What this means is that you can legitimately use AdWords to buy your competitors' company name, product names, and trademarks with a view to siphoning off their traffic.

The strategy is to recommend alternatives to their products, and acquire new visitors to your website.

And it could be a great way to get well qualified visitors to your website. Self-selected visitors, giving buying signals, in marketing terms this might be called "low hanging fruit."

For example, AsdaFinance are busily buying the keyword "Egg", our lovely Derby based online bank and credit card company:


Little companies are piggy-backing on big company reputations, with what appears to be a small Gloucestershire conservatory company cleverly buying up the Wimpey brand:



I am also aware of some tit-for-tat bidding going on, where you will find that the MoneySuperMarket website is bidding on the phrase "confused.com", and confused.com is bidding for the phrase "moneysupermarket."

Google AdWords, of course, is laughing all the way to the bank.

Keep in mind that you are NOT entitled to use the trademark in the ad text itself, and that Google will require the advertiser to remove the trademarked term and prevent them from using it in the future. They will not investigate advertisers using the trademark in the keyword list.

What if you are on the other end of the stick, with competitors buying your branded keywords?

There are a number of different strategies if you want to protect your brand against AdWords raiders. One would be to crowd out the competition by utilising multiple AdWords accounts, multiple websites, and creating multiple ads, like MBNA are currently doing. The risk, of course, is that your ads are competing against yourself, and visitors like me might click on everyone of your ads, and burning your budget.


Alternatively, you can give affiliates free reign to buy your trademarked terms, letting them pay the advertising costs and again dominating the advertising space.