Marketing Matters has just completed a new, WordPress-based website for one of Edinburgh’s leading public relations consultancies – Acumen.

Working closely with clients to identify the right target audiences and the correct messages for those audiences, Acumen delivers innovative and intuitive PR strategies that generate the results their clients require.

Their service offering includes public & media relations, media training, online PR & Social Media, Crisis Management, Event PR & ExpoPRess, internal communications, communications audits and Public Affairs  & Parliamentary Monitoring

Find out more at www.acumen-pr.com – and make sure to check out their blog – The View -  it’s all good!

..full of award winning companies – this year’s Scottish Awards for Business Excellence brochure was designed by Marketing Matters.

On a very tight deadline and production timetable the brochure was put together as quick as you could say “3 course meal with coffee and a small mint”. OK, it  maybe took slightly longer than that, but it was a rush of adrenalin, some late nights and early mornings to get it all put together from initial meeting to final printed brochure (10 days).

The project was fun, fast and furious. And the client is delighted with the results “I was really pleased with the outcome of the brochure and got lots of great comments on it.” Anne Sutherland, Quality Scotland.

Our web designer, Nadin Dunnigan, doesn’t say much about her past successes! But we may as well use this blog to tell everybody about it!
She did not only win Best Web Designer West Lothian in 2005, she also won the Runner-Up Prize of the Shona Sibbald Award in 2006!

This is what the news story said then:

At the prestigious annual awards ceremony on Thursday 25th May 2006, West Lothian Women in Business announced the winners for this year’s Business Awards.

At the sell-out event, 120 guests witnessed the 10 nominated business women receiving their awards. Awards were presented in three categories:

• Business Woman of the Year
• Best Female Employee of the Year
• Shona Sibbald Award for Best New Business

The three nominees for Best New Business in West Lothian were

• Patricia Mavor (www.mavorproperty.co.uk)
• Claire Don (TLC Health.co.uk Ltd)
• Nadin Dunnigan (then www.creatweb.co.uk).

Congratulations to Claire Don who won the Shona Sibbald Award. Both Patricia Mavor and Nadin Roth received the Runner-Up awards for Best New Business. This is the second award Nadin has won since the start of business in 2004.

And here is the story about Best Web Designer West Lothian

CreatWeb.co.uk wins “Best Web Designer 2004″ in West Lothian E-Business Awards.

West Lothian Council, in conjunction with BT Scotland, organised the E-Business Awards 2004 for West Lothian Businesses.

With these awards, businesses in West Lothian are recognised and rewarded for their excellence through the use of the Internet and other Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

Businesses in West Lothian could enter one or more of the following four categories:

• Best New Business Site (1 – 3 Years)
• Best e-Commerce Site
• Best Web Designer
• Best Use of Broadband

CreatWeb entered the “Best Web Designer” category and was shortlisted for first or second place. On 24 th February, w inners of the categories were announced at a gala award dinner, and CreatWeb won the “Best Web Designer” category.

We are particularly proud of having achieved this, as we are a very young web design business in West Lothian.

We will continue to provide excellence in web design, and further improve our services to our clients.

According to Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. SEO could be considered a subset of search engine marketing.

Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages, such as paid advertisements, and organic search results. Search Engine Optimisation, however, is primarily concerned with improving the position of a website on a search engine result page when certain keywords are entered and a search is performed. If a website achieves a good position in a search engine, both the number and the quality of visitors to a website may be increased.

Marketing Matters offer Search engine optimization as a stand-alone service in West Lothian. If we have developed your website, we provide initial search engine optimisation as standard to make sure that your website is indexed in the major search engines, such as Google, MSN, Yahoo. SEO is a lot more effective when the optimisation is incorporated into the initial development and design of a website.

My website is indexed… What does that mean? It simply means that Google, MSN, Yahoo has listed your website, i.e. these search engines have created an entry on their search pages. Indexing simply means a search engine knows about you and might show your search engine when a very specific search is carried out – for example a search that includes your company name. Not many people will know your company name though.

A listing does not determine the position in the list though – i.e. the Ranking on the Search Engine Result Pages. If you enter a generic search phrase and your website comes up amongst the first 10 results, then your Ranking is very high. But if you only appear between entries 1000 and 2000 – your ranking is very poor, not many people go through so many search engine result pages until they arrive at the page where a link to your website is listed.

Search Engine Optimisation works mainly on your Ranking and regular SEO should improve your ranking when your most important search terms are displayed.

What do I need to optimise my website for?

• What website visitors are you after?
• Do you want to raise awareness about your product?
• Do you want to sell online?
• Do you just want to be found if someone looks for a business like yours in your area?

You need to have a goal for your Search Engine Optimisation. What do you want to achieve? For example, if you are a wedding photographer, you might want your website to be displayed in Google when someone enters “wedding photographer Edinburgh” or “portrait photographer Scotland“. Click on the two links to see where his website is currently listed. If you provide a local service, you can use this to your advantage by simply optimising your website to include lots of mentions of the local area, such as Edinburgh, Dundee, Fife, etc. By optimising his website for local searches, you are likely to receive a lot of local enquiries.

How long will it take until my site is No 1?

We are asked this question often when we develop or re-design a new website. No-one can give you a time frame for this. No-one can give you any guarantees. There are a lot of companies out there that claim they get you to No 1 in Google within a week. What they don’t tell you is what keywords they use and baffle the unknowing person with. If your company is called “EazyPeazy” for example, and is located in Dundee, then this company will get you to No 1 in Google within a week and they will enter the words “EazyPeazy Dundee” and Voila you are No 1. That does not help you though, because a) you are a new business – no-one knows your company name, b) it does not take any of your website content into consideration, c) all they have done is indexed your website, but your ranking is really non-existent.

If you offer some obscure thing only people with specialist knowledge know about and if you don’t have (m)any competitors, your Google ranking can be very good within a very short time – because there are not so many pages to compete with. But if you offer something that is well-known and where there is a lot of competition, it might take you a considerable amount of time until you appear anywhere in the first 10 pages of a search engine. “A considerable amount of time” can mean anything up to 6 months or even longer.

The trustworthiness of a website is increased when visitors can see that your website is updated regularly. Websites that are updated frequently attract more visitors and these visitors keep coming back. Frequent web updates can also have a positive effect on your search engine rankings. Your website should therefore be up-to-date and display relevant information.

Depending on your choice of maintenance plan, web maintenance can include any of the following:

• Adding pages, text, and/or photographs
• Adding new content to your site
• Editing, revising, or updating your existing content
• Updating links, inserting new links
• Removing or archiving current content
• Adding new email accounts, email account setup
• Adding functionality to your site such as forums, contact forms
• Site Statistics Reports
• Search Engine Ranking Reports

Objectives

Marketing Matters offer web maintenance/content management for websites either developed by us or for externally developed websites.

Benefits

We can guarantee timely, scheduled updates while maintaining the quality of your website. During maintenance work, your website will always be live and changes are simply released once you have signed them off.

Website Maintenance Options

We offer a number of website maintenance options that can be amended to suit your requirements.

From simple Search Engine Optimisation to more complex regular content updates – just get in touch and we can discuss which maintenance option would be best for you.