FDM Campaigns Earn Finalist Places in the UK Search Awards
Find Out MoreThis weekend, the prestigious UK Search Awards revealed their shortlists for all categories in the upcoming 2025 awards, which will take place in London on December 3rd.
Two campaigns – one SEO and one PPC – were submitted for consideration, and out of the six categories we hoped to be shortlisted in, we’re finalists in all six!
First Digital Media SEO – Escape Campers
Our Escape Campers campaign is nominated for:
- Best SEO Campaign (Small)
- Best Use of Search – B2C (SEO) (Small)
- Best Use of Search – Automotive (Small)
- Best Low Budget Campaign (SEO) (Small)
A lot of the details leading up to this campaign are present in a case study on our history with Escape Campers. Our relationship with the client began as a paid media one, though the client would later move away from us temporarily, favouring an agency in their area with promises of creating videos and media for their social campaigns.
However, late last year their developer launched an updated site. Unfortunately, this site wasn’t fit for purpose. AI-generated text and categories promised products they don’t offer, there were no redirects in place to support a changed URL structure, and several other issues affected the site. As long-term readers will know, we have experience fixing website launch disasters.
We worked with the client to prioritise and make changes, taking over their SEO to restore what had been lost and to bolster the site. We became their SEO agency. Not only did we reverse the drop in organic traffic, we’ve also seen the organic performance of the site rise to new heights, tailoring content and linking strategies to Escape’s Ideal Customer Profiles.
Since the case study was published, we’ve seen the site go from under a thousand visitors a month organically to five thousand. We’ve watched their qualified leads track upwards steadily. And, after supporting them so well on SEO, we were invited to return as their agency for Meta and Google Ads.
In The Client’s Own Words
“Our previous digital marketing company wasn’t producing results and lacked communication, so we went shopping for a new partner. From the outset, FDM asked the right questions, showed a real interest in the business and were knowledgeable in the areas we needed focus. Since day one going live we saw an instant improvement in results. The team we’ve been working with on ad campaigns give great feedback and have regular updates which is crucial and exactly what we require.”
– Andy Burgess, Escape Campers
First Digital Media PPC – Sugarbox Clinic
This campaign was nominated for:
- Best Low Budget Campaign (PPC) (Small)
- Best Local Campaign (PPC) (Small)
As seen in their own case study, Sugarbox Clinic also have a website launch problem in their history; their owner reached out to Tony, our Business Development Manager, after their new website launched with no steps taken to preserve existing site value. The site itself, happily, is beautiful – but Tony advised them to launch a Google Ads campaign while SEO recovery was undertaken.
The results were spectacular and the campaign has never been brought to a close, despite the successful recovery of their organic search. We operated a hyperlocal ad strategy, focusing on key services in a 10-mile radius around the clinic, avoiding any strategies that might stretch the budget for limited returns.
The result has been significant investment back into the clinic in order to cope with greatly increased custom in the area.
In The Client’s Own Words
“Partnering with [First Digital Media] has genuinely changed the way we run our clinic. They’ve helped us reach more people online and, as a result, we’ve been able to do more with the same small team.
I reduced my working week to just 2.5 days last September, something I never thought would be possible while still growing the business. Enquiries have noticeably increased, and we now have the confidence to take on new staff because of the extra demand.
I had actually stopped investing in SEO and Google Ads during Covid and, for a while, I wasn’t sure who to turn to. When Tony moved companies, I’ll admit I was hesitant. But when he called me, I trusted his judgement. I know he has meticulous high standards, and if he believed in this company enough to join them, then I was willing to give them a chance. I haven’t looked back since.
The whole team has been amazing — always responsive and proactive, tailoring our SEO towards the treatments I want to promote, and updating things each time. The results speak for themselves: our monthly turnover has risen from £26k to £42k with the same number of team members and increase our sold services by an additional 130 each month.
I’m so grateful to all of them — they haven’t just improved our search rankings, they’ve given us the capacity to grow with confidence.”
– Chantalle Coombes, Sugarbox Clinic
Contact First Digital Media
If you’d like to learn what our award-nominated team can do for your business, contact us today for a free consultation or fill out the form and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
Surviving the 2024 Google Updates with Better Content
Google’s algorithms are always changing. Most of the time, these are small enough that only a very few site owners will notice a difference – but every so often, Google takes two weeks to a month to roll out something major. If you’ve heard an SEO executive somewhere mutter about Google Updates, it’s these big rollouts we’re talking about.
At First Digital Media, this month’s blog looks at Google’s 2024 updates and whether your website’s content is good enough. For more information, don’t hesitate to call us in Lancaster on 01524 544 346.
Find Out More
Why Update?
Online search is a huge business. In 2023, Google’s revenue from online advertising broke $200 billion. So dominant is their market share that it’s easy to imagine they’ll always have control of the online search market – but the only way for them to stay ahead is for Google search results to have more value to the user than anyone else’s.
This has been the driving force behind every big update to the algorithm, going back years. Lately, they’ve happened more and more often – there were nine big Google updates in 2023. In 2024 we’re a little way behind that pace, with only four updates so far, but they started with a bang.
How Do the 2024 Google Updates Affect Your Site?
Continuing a trend set by the Helpful Content Update in last September, the focus of Google’s updates this year is on improving the relevance and value of the top-ranked pages for any given search. In March, Google did something unprecedented: as well as launching two big updates in the same week, they actively deindexed hundreds of offending sites.
One of the updates was a Google Core Update. Often, Google can be quite vague about these, but in this case, they provided a lot of information. The goal of the Core Update was to improve the search engine’s ranking systems – making it quicker and easier for Google to recognise top-quality, relevant content, as well as making it harder to ‘fake’ high quality content through any of the dozens of dubious tricks employed over the years – including the latest option, creating an AI-driven content farm.
At the same time, they launched the final Helpful Content Update. Remember, Google wants to keep users from changing search engine, so the content users find has to be helpful to them.
What Does Google Mean by Helpful Content?
Tired of your current SEO service provider? Seen a drop in your Google results & positions? We work with you to optimise your website, improve your Google rankings and combat Google’s ever-changing updates.
What is Site Reputation Abuse?
In May, Google launched an update designed to stop content on one site from outperforming content on another site just because of advantages in site reputation. Sound confusing? It is – but let’s break it down.
If you have a successful website, when you add a new page to it, Google will often give the new page a better ranking than it’s had time to earn. There’s good reason for this; your site is successful, so your content to date is probably good, so there’s a better than average chance that this new content will be good too.
So far, so good. But if you have, for example, a site that’s become popular because it has good financial advice content, that doesn’t actually mean your new content talking about reality TV is going to be better than the average – but until May, it got the benefit of the doubt.
A lot of highly successful sites in one niche, adding content for another niche, immediately replicated that success. Some of these sites were repurposing content from smaller sites to create these new sections, then outranking the sites they’d taken content from. Obviously, this isn’t the right way to do things!
Making it worse were two systems for monetising this advantage. Major sites would effectively sell advertisers a subfolder on their site, and the content in that subfolder would get a bonus despite being created to cash in, not even by the people whose quality content made the site valuable. Sometimes this was used to hide advertising by presenting it as top 10 lists on a third-party website.
And just earlier this year, a DJ turned black hat SEO explained a strategy where he bought the addresses of dead websites – belonging to magazines that had shut down, usually. These had a strong reputation so content on them performed well, even though the content he was putting on them had nothing to do with that earned reputation.
By levelling the playing field, the smaller sites producing the most valuable content should have a chance to climb to the top again – so long as their content really is the most helpful available.
The Google Spam Update
Now in June, Google have announced a Spam Update. Very simply, if a site violates Google’s spam policies, this update is designed to make sure it’s penalised.
Some of the tricks we mentioned in Site Reputation are also violations of the spam policy. But so are automatically generated content designed to increase rankings without providing more value, copycat content, and a whole suite of tricks using hidden redirects.
Lastly, thin content – that is, too little content on a page for it to provide value – is also a violation. There’s no minimum word count, so if you have fifty words on a page introducing a series of pictures of work you’ve done for clients, that probably won’t be thin content; on the other hand, five hundred words might be too short for a page explaining how to fill out your tax returns.
Contact UsWhat Does This Mean for Your Content?
For years now, Google have told us the best way to create content to perform on their platform is to produce good content that actually has some value for the person reading it; these changes are a push to make that promise real.
However, standards are higher than ever. You can’t just copy the homework of the next site along, even if you rewrite it; you have to find some way to build on it.
Contact First Digital Media
At First Digital Media, we always aim to produce content that covers everything and makes it clear and simple. We want to showcase our clients at their best, and we’ll help you take your industry knowledge and experience and present it as clearly as possible. Users should come back to a website, knowing they’ll learn something useful and knowing they can trust what they learn.
If you’d like to learn more about where your site content needs to be futureproofed against current and upcoming Google updates, contact us today for a free consultation or fill out the form and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
