1. Northern DMO Digital Group
6th February
14 February 2013

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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?

6. 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.

7. 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!

8. 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.

9. 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

10. 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!

11. 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)

12. Anchor text rotation
Rotation A Rotation B Rotation C
Delivers exact and partial match anchor Our default anchor text rotation, this Avoids exact match anchor text
text to a landing page. For landing pages delivers a blended combination of exact altogether. Designed for websites that
that already have a diverse mix of links and partial match, long tail, brand and need to reduce the proportion of exact
and thus can tolerate a higher proportion untargeted text. For landing pages with match anchor text to their landing pages
of exact match anchor text. few existing links, or those that already while continuing to optimise.
have a decent proportion of exact match
in anchors.
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

13. Content plan

14. Some examples
Must visit Where to find Top free attractions
museums in Newcastle's best and activities in and
Newcastle nightlife experiences around Newcastle

15. 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!