Happy New Year, everyone!
I know my lack of blogging is starting to really show, but January has kicked off majorly and work just doesn’t seem to stop.
The next few months won’t be boring that’s for sure. And hence I need more staff for the Edinburgh office. So if you know anyone looking for a junior SEO job or Link Marketer role, please pass them my way.
For more info on current openings, please check out our SEO jobs section.
This post about how to promote an Etsy shop online, is inspired by my friend Mairead, who decided after 10 years working in the financial sector to pack it all in and dedicate all her precious time to her real passion – making handbags!! I really admire her dedication and guts to leave her job and just go and be her own boss at Breagha – Handmade bags.
Now Mairead doesn’t have her own e-commerce site and sells her bags on Etsy, a website, which allows anyone to create their own shop within the site and sell their handmade goods, like handbags, jewlery etc. It pretty much works like Ebay, where it’s possible to create a shop and Etsy will take a cut of any sold item, with two significant differences:
1) Etsy takes a smaller percentage of the sold goods
2) There is no auction-style selling.
My friend has not the option of having her own website at the moment, now, how could she still utilise the web to promote her Etsy shop with other means?
The site offers the option to sign up for an RSS feed, so it’s possible to keep up to date with any new products a certain seller puts up, but Mairead at this point wants to spread the word.
Mairead shared the link to her Etsy shop on Facebook. Another option to show this link at all times is to add it to the information, which appears on the right-hand side on below the profile picture.
These are all valid ways of reaching a very small group, only direct friends. If looking at the Facebook Advertiser tool, the following statistics are pretty interesting. In the UK alone, there are 6,860 females interested in handbags, in the US 5,720 and these are just two examples, as Etsy is used world-wide.
Further options are:
During my brief research for this, I’ve also seen that there are many shop and fan pages on Facebook for people who are interested in handbags. Mairead could also be cheeky and invite these people with her Facebook shop page, however, this could be seen as “unethical”, as it could be perceived as spam or unwanted contact by Facebook users. I’d be intersted to hear your comments on this.
Anyhow, I hope that Mairead’s business succeeds and as I can see she’s already been making a few sales, which is great! Good luck, Mairead! 
There is now a second part to this “How to promote an Etsy shop online” series called How to promote an Etsy shop online – Part 2.
It’s always nice to wake up in the morning and check your Google Analytics account- and WOW – there are new custom reporting features.
Bizarrely enough, sometimes new Google Analytics features may have been live for a while in the US or in the UK but not here in Spain or vice versa. Therefore I had already read and heard about these features but my account hadn’t been updated with them until today.
So what are these new features, still residing in Beta?
1) Custom reporting
2) Advanced segments
The custom report can be set up using a combination of metrics and dimensions. It is vital to verify first which combination of metrics and dimensions can be used together and should be checkedin the chart here.
Metrics can be any of the following:
Dimensions are divided as follows:
Creating the reports is very easy. There are already colour-coded fields for “metrics” (blue) and “dimensions” (green) and once you click on the respective fields, a variety of buttons unfold themselves, which can easily dragged and dropped onto the predefined fields. Once you’ve chosen all the metrics and dimension combinations you would like to appear in one report, you can preview it and if you are happy with it click on “create report”.
I’m very excited about these custom reports, as it enables to get more specific information without having to create filters in a variety of profiles.
Have fun with these new Google Analytics reports!
After almost 3 months of juggling 2 jobs (or more like 1 1/2), I have finally handed over my responsibilities, as SEO Manager at Dog Digital to Richard Shove, a talented, like-minded SEO. I´m glad that I could pass my clients confidently over, not something I´ve always achieved in the past. SEOs can be very protective over their clients, as over the course of a project strong relationships are built.
I´m quite sad, it´s almost an end of an era, however, I just need to look out of the window where even in October the sun still shines. Yep, Barcelona has it´s benefits for sure! So whilst trying to get my head round the Spanish language, I will have enough time to finally get this blog prospering and Barcelona will hopefully give me the inspiration I need!
Thanks to everyone who has been given me a lot of encouragement over the past 2 months. It´s good to know that there are actually some people follow my views and thoughts on SEO and online marketing.
Hello,
My latest project is a multi-lingual SEO project for the German based personnel development and management consultancy Actus Purus. I’m working in collaboration with Ruaridh Currie CSS webdesigner in Barcelona.
I’ve started off with the German site, as this is where the client’s main target market comes from. We are at the end state of building the site, the main content is being finalised and imagery is to be added.
I’m currently establishing a SEO strategy, which I will also apply to the English site.
There will be a more extensive case study and I’ll keep this blog updated to let you know how the site is doing.
I’m also setting up Google Analytics for the site, so I’ll be using this site as my example for the step-by-step user guide.
At the moment I’m planning a big re-vamp of the site, adding SEO and Google Analytics case studies, a Google Analytics user guide, and a general resource for SEO, PPC and Google Analyics related topics.
Bye for now
A Robots.txt file is a simple file containing information for search engine crawlers visiting your site. You can exactly what parts of your site should be out of bounds for certain bots. This also ensures that page content is indexed faster and more accurately. This has been around for a while now.
Well, breaking news… Google has tightened the way it looks at robots.txt files, if not validated, a lot of site owners could face getting their websites banished from the Google index.
You can easily validate your robots.txt file with robots.txt validator offered in Google’s webmaster console
I found this really interesting thread on these latest robots.txt developments, called “validate your robots.txt, Google might deindex your site” by Sebastian’s Pamphlets.
Anyway, I better double-check my clients robots.txt files now.