Resources
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A Guide to Writing Better Business Documents
One of our core values at Distilled is that it’s not our job to deliver reports, it’s our job to effect change. However, in order to effect change, it clearly sometimes is our job to deliver reports, and we want to get as good at them as we possibly can and make sure we are as effective with them as possible. To that end, I thought I’d collect a few links I’ve seen and thoughts I’ve had over the years on how to do this. Read more
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How to Make Award Winning Creative Content - Part 1
Submitting your content and campaigns for awards considerations seems like an obvious win. Being able to showcase your brand as award-winning is a useful bit of prestige when attracting new business (and reassuring existing clients that they’ve made a good choice). In short, entering awards should be a considered tactic of your agency’s marketing strategy, but work hard on optimising your win rate.
The difficult question is what makes award-winning content exactly that - worthy of winning? Read more -
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What We Learned in June - The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute
June has seen a lot of new products, mergers and updates from many of the big search, technology and social media giants. Google is moving forward with RankBrain, while Pinterest is moving into the commercial space more and more. Microsoft also completed one of the largest tech acquisitions in history, by paying over $26billion for Linkedin. Read on for the essential monthly digital marketing briefing. Read more
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How to Do a Link Audit in 30 Minutes
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As SEOs, there are certain tasks that we should all be able to do for our clients. Sure, sometimes these tasks don’t always sound as exciting as creating a content strategy or developing a piece of 10x content, but they are essential to any SEO strategy. I’m talking about tasks like technical audits, analytics implementation, keyword research, site migrations, and link audits. I’m going to focus solely on link audits in this article because they're an important task that seems extremely time consuming at first, but becomes more automated as you practice. Read more
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Apple WWDC Announcements - What Siri on Mac and Apple Pay for Web mean for SEO
Whether you're a true Apple fan or just a dedicated tech enthusiast, the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is one of the year's biggest events in the technology industry. Announcements were made on all kinds of hardware and software (not least a new desktop OS), there were two announcements that stood out for me as potentially very important for the SEO industry. This post will look at exactly what's being introduced and how that will affect the landscape of search. Read more
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When is a Session not a Session?
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Sessions are pretty arbitrarily defined, all too easily inflated, and far more complex than most realise. It’s possible for apparent step-changes in Google Analytics reports to have little real-world relevance, and common for reports to show numerous mysterious and apparently inexplicable landing pages and traffic sources. It is therefore essential for Google Analytics users to understand what they’re actually talking about when they reference a session, and that’s what this post is all about.
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What We Learned in May - The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute
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It can sometimes be hard to wrap your head around just how big a company Google is. Take our first story in this article; Google now handles at least two trillion searches per year. The search engine giant is also busy making changes to some of its most well-known features, including the ubiquitous SERPs and the Search Console. There’s also news from Twitter, Facebook and here at Distilled. Read more
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Feedback: The Most Important Tool for Building Great Teams
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Here at Distilled, we strive to be excellent at giving and receiving feedback. While this is a lofty goal, its existence places value on our team continually sharpening their feedback skills. With this in mind, I want to share the main principles that have served us here at Distilled so well. I will also discuss common roadblocks, which so often derail teams and progress, along with some tips on how to avoid this. Read more
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Split Testing Titles and H1s: Do They Still have an SEO Impact?
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Title tags and H1 tags have always been at the centre of SEO - no good site audit doesn’t mention them. However, it is tempting to wonder if optimising these things makes much of a difference anymore? At Distilled we have seen that on large pages, getting these things right really does seem to make a difference. Yet, it has always been hard to prove. However, we’ve been piloting our SEO split-testing platform and one of the tests we’ve run focussed on exactly this type of change. This post demonstrates how improving title tags and H1s can make an appreciable difference. Read more
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Future Talk and Timely Tactics: Everything You Missed at SearchLove Boston 2016
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Our first conference of 2016 has been and gone, and what a success it was! Over 200 smart marketers joined us in Boston for two full days of sessions and a suite of parties to boot. If you didn’t make it along this year, or if you did and want a refresher on the key takeaways, we’ve compiled all speaker decks and the salient points to remember now you’re back in the office. Read more
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What The Block? An Exploration of the Future of Digital Advertising in an Ad Block Climate
Ad blocking is one of the topics Distilled covered in Searchscape (which showcases our predictions for the future of search) late last year, defining it as one of the most poignant topics in search for 2016. At their simplest, ad blockers are apps, plugins or browser extensions that alter or block ad content on a page. Read more
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What We Learned in April - The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of April's biggest stories come directly from Google, with the search engine giant trialling a number of new products, along with changes to its Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Other stories come from many of the other tech giants, including a look at their respective financial results (with some seeing better results than others). Read more