Resources

  • Post

    Back to Basics: the Dos and Don’ts of Contacting Journalists

    Jess Champion –

    One of the things I’ve learned over the years, working with smart people in hard-working teams is the tendency to try and run before you can walk. So, with the benefit of new experiences and hindsight, I’m gonna take you all back to the basics of PR and outreach (specifically contacting journalists) with a list of do’s and don’ts. Read more

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    3 Awesome Things You can do with LinkedIn’s New Website Demographics

    Jeremy Gottlieb –

    Recently, LinkedIn rolled out its new Website Demographics feature which allows any business that has a LinkedIn Ads account to better identify who exactly is coming to their site. While Google Analytics has for years shown us aggregate data with sessions, pageviews, and more, we actually don’t know who makes up these metrics. What LinkedIn aspires to do here is provide granular information about your website’s visitors. Because all of you are busy, I’ve taken the liberty of hashing out a couple of the best ways to use this data for good with your company. Read more

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    6 Easy Ways to Discover Your Search Competitors

    Anabella Repond –

    Who hasn’t heard the proverb “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”? This phrase alludes well to a key aspect of good SEO strategies: knowing who your search competitors are. Even if you know who your traditional business competitors are, you need to bear in mind that if they are not competing for the same keywords as your sites, then they are not a “search” competitor. So, how can you easily find your real online competitors? There are many ways to do this manually (using search engines), as well as free and paid tools to help automate this process. Here are six quick and easy tools to help you with your competitive research. Read more

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    Demystifying the Design Process with Sketch

    Vicke Cheung –

    For non-designers, there is often a level of mysticism around the way we work. In your job, it may well be your responsibility to brief a designer, but as for what happens in between that stage and finally seeing the fruits of their labour – well, this may be rather alien. While it’s not necessarily important to know the ins and outs of this, this post aims to demystify the process and shed light on one of my favourite design programs at the moment, and equip you with good reason to convince any digital or web designer you work with to pick it up if they don’t use it already. Read more

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    What We Learned in October 2017: The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute

    Andrew Tweddle –

    This month’s industry includes stories from most of the major tech companies, including Facebook’s News Feed experiments, Google’s ever-growing hardware selection, and Apple and Amazon both falling foul of the European Commission. There’s also the SearchLove London 2017 roundup and the best from the Distilled blog. Read more

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    All the Slides from SearchLove London 2017

    Andrew Tweddle –

    As it always tends to do, SearchLove London flew by in a flurry of top-class presentations, intense marketing chat with fellow digital folks, and lots of caffeine. The 2017 edition was our 2nd sellout crowd in a row and it was really special to look across a packed auditorium as each speaker got up on stage to share with you some really cool stuff. Read more

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    Facebook News Feed Experiments: Threat or Opportunity?

    Robin Lord –

    As Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed at Facebook noted in a post yesterday “There have been a number of reports about a test we’re running in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia.” The test he is referring to is that of moving all content posted by brand pages (not content shared by friends) from the main user News Feed into a separate tab named “Explore”. Read more

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    Proposing Better Ways to Think about Internal Linking

    Will Critchlow –

    I’ve long thought that there was an opportunity to improve the way we think about internal links, and to make much more effective recommendations. I feel like, as an industry, we have done a decent job of making the case that internal links are important and that the information architecture of big sites, in particular, makes a massive difference to their performance in search. Read more

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    The SEO Apprentice’s Toolbox: Gearing Up for Analysis

    Jackie Francis –

    Being new to SEO is tricky. As a niche market within a niche market there many tools and resources unfamiliar to most new professionals. And with so much to learn it is nearly impossible to start real client work without first dedicating six months exclusively to industry training. Well...that’s how it may seem at first. As a fairly new Analyst at Distilled, I know from experience how difficult it can be to get started. So here’s a list of common SEO analyses and supporting tools that may help you get off on the right foot. Read more

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    Blurring the Line Between CDN and CMS

    Jono Alderson –

    Cloudflare recently announced that they’re launching a new feature, called “Cloudflare Workers”. It provides the ability for anybody who’s using Cloudflare as a CDN to write arbitrary JavaScript (based on the standard Service Worker API), which runs on Cloudflare’s edge nodes. The announcement is significant because, unlike tag management platforms, the alterations are made server-side, before the page is sent to the user - Google only sees the final, altered code and content. There’s no messy JavaScript in the browser, no cloaking, and no conflicting logic.

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    What We Learned in September 2017: The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute

    Andrew Tweddle –

    While the main tech headlines have revolved around new hardware, with all the major players showing off their new products to the press and public, there has been plenty of updates all around the digital marketing and tech landscapes. Google is making changes to appease both publisher and the EU Commission and Instagram is becoming an advertising juggernaut... Read more

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    First Click Free is Dead, but is its Replacement Really any Better for Publishers?

    Will Critchlow –

    The publishing industry has been claiming victory recently in a long-running disagreement with Google over how subscription content (i.e. content that sits behind a paywall or registration wall) should appear in their search results. However, there’s a lot of confusion around the new policy which Google has announced, and a lack of clarity in how the media, publishers, and Google itself is reporting and discussing the topic. Read more