Contracts still in demand

According to KPMG, and the REC engineering, construction, IT, temporary nurses, medical and care workers are still in high demand. Grainne Martin our contract experts advised in early 2011, for companies to invest in their IT contracts desk to yield strong returns on the back of strong growth in March and after these recent figures it seems her advice was spot on!

Middle managers are feeling the squeeze

A recent report out by the CIPD stated that almost half (49%) of middle managers say that they’re under excessive pressure either everyday or once or twice a week. Their employee outlook survey of 2,000 employees also revealed that middle managers are particularly unhappy with their work-life balance.

Here are just some of the headlines that came out of the Winter 2011/12 report: (click here to read full report)

Keyword yourself to the top

Monitoring the keyword function in your Google Analytics can really help you to refine your websites search engine rankings.

As I touched upon in “Where does my traffic come from” you can utilise this information to refine your keyword list.

To refresh:

• Make a list of your ideal keywords for your business
• Cross reference this list with your analytics
• Which words appear?
• Which don’t?

Tip: I also put the keywords into Google to find where my website ranks

So now you have a list of keywords you need to improve on. You can invest in PPC campaigns which can be quite beneficial if you have a budget to do so. Yet there are some effective tips you can do yourself to help improve SEO that don’t cost a thing.

The Case study: After doing the keyword analysis and checking our Google rankings, I discovered that one of our core courses was not only non-existent in our keyword list, but it couldn’t be found on a 100 pages of Google!

My course of action:

Where does your website traffic come from?

An essential question you need to be able to answer when analysing your website is: where is your traffic coming from? Answering this will help you make more informed marketing, PR, social media and website design decisions.

Some factors you can track through website analytics to help you answer this are:

Discover how visitors navigate your website

Understanding your customers’ thought processes when on your website, takes you one step closer to refining the effectiveness of your site and your marketing strategy.

Every page is as important as the home page, meaning there are many ‘moments of truth’ on your website and it is hard to get it right for every customer. One valuable tool from Google Analytics helps you understand what your customers are looking for.

Discover your ineffective website pages

Surprisingly knowing how people exit your site is just as important as knowing where they came from.  By using website analytics you can discover if any pages on your site aren’t as effective as they should be. Visitors do have to exit your site at some point but if there are particular pages that have a bigger percentage of exits than others, take an objective look at that page to see why this may be.

How website analytics can help improve your business

Learning about how visitors use your website is a vital step in maximising its effectiveness and getting that essential return on investment, as well as generating new leads. An ineffective website not only damages your brand image but can lose crucial custom.

The great thing is that monitoring your website doesn’t have to be hard work or even cost you a thing! Over the last 6 months I have implement and monitored Google Analytics on our website and found that this free web analytics tool really does go beyond expectations.

Social media: Can’t keep up, won’t keep up!

I don’t know about you but I find the daily emergence of new social media trends can leave you a little overwhelmed and more to the point scrambling to keep up! Using social media in your organisation doesn’t have to be this way, think quality not quantity. There is no advantage in having every trend going only to be unable to keep up with it all or, more importantly, keeping up a high standard of quality. Think about what is important to your company and what will help you to achieve your goals. Take a look at the technologies and mediums you are currently using and asses their relevance to your business and your social media strategy.

Look at your current social media strategy and each individual tool you are using and think about issues such as:

•  How does it represent your company’s brand?
• Is it beneficial to your strategy?
• Can you keep up with its demands? If not will the quality suffer?
• Are you using it to its full potential? If not is it because it’s not as important in your list of social media priorities or could it be beneficial but you need the time to invest in it?
• Asses your networks to see if you are reaching the people/customers that you want to reach and if this approach helps you to develop a relationship with them
• Are the new trends you are considering going to be complementary to your existing strategy?

Once you have filtered out what isn’t working, you will be left with what truly matters to your business. Focus on these trends and use them to their full potential and you will see more benefit in keeping that quality, rather than trying to ‘keep up the with Jones’.

Posted by Rachel Gould