SEO Archives | Simul Digital

The UK Agency Awards 2023 – Winners!

05.10.2023

As the days start to get colder and the evenings a bit darker, the Simul Digital Team took a trip down to London for the UK Agency Awards. Our campaigns, results and culture were recognised by an expert panel of judges as a finalist in no less than 3 categories.

Taking place at the Sheraton Grand, London Park Lane, nestled in the heart of London, the hotel oozed grandeur and sophistication, just like the sites that we design and build for our clients!

The night was hosted by the esteemed Jonny Meah, part of the Heart FM family and regular reporter for the BBC on shows including Inside Out, Sunday Morning Live, The One Show and more. With charisma, charm and brilliant timing, his hosting made the night seamless and thoroughly enjoyable for all – taking regular breaks for laughs between rounds.

The Ceremony

Hosted by awards specialists Don’t Panic Events, the night kicked off in style. With a red carpet entrance, bustling drinks reception and a packed out bar, everyone was looking their best with glamorous black ties and ball gowns on show amongst the buzzing finalists.

Once we’d sampled a tipple and caught up with industry friends, everyone took their seats for a delightful 3 course meal. 5 star quality was served up by an impeccable team, starting with Truffle golden cross goat cheese tart followed up with West Country Lamb Rump, and rounded out with a beautiful Madagascan Vanilla Panna Cotta.

We were very pleased to see Poached Yorkshire Rhubarb included with the dessert, no doubt grown in our own backyard directly from the Rhubarb Triangle which is close to our hearts…and our office. Absolutely Delicious!

The Finalists & Winners

The UK Agency Awards is one of the largest and most prestigious ceremonies in the agency awards calendar, and tonight proved it so! There were 39 awards categories in total, and we were nominated finalists in three.

Being such a young agency, all our finalist nominations were for the Small Agency categories, for agencies up to 20 people – we were proud to be recognised and nominated for all three:

Best PPC Campaign
eCommerce Agency of the Year
SEO Agency of the Year

We were over the moon with our nominations, for such a fresh, small team on a rocket path to growth, this would only be our second award ceremony and we were raring to go!

Best PPC Campaign

First came the Best PPC Campaign of the year, and we were up against some tough competition, including previous winners Spike Digital with their campaign for Mighty, alongside Circus PPC, with a strong campaign delivering growth for leading brand Miele.

We saw off all of the competition and scooped a Win in this category, and were absolutely bowled over with the success and recognition for our team! Well done to Nathan and our PPC Team for your hard work, effort and amazing results..a well deserved award for both us and our client.

eCommerce Agency of the Year

Second up, we were finalists in the eCommerce Agency of the Year, reflecting the work done by the team over the past 12 months to bring new client brands to life, while growing our existing ecommerce sites with enhanced functionality, loyalty programs, improved selling strategies combined with responsive and lean ordering processes.

Competition in this group came from the likes of Quickfire Digital, Heur, GPMD and Brave the Skies, agencies that have been well established in the industry for many years.

We were thrilled to find out we were winners in this category too, taking the win for eCommerce Agency of the Year! This is a great recognition of the work of the entire agency, keeping order and revenue growth as a key objective for all our digital activity and client website.

SEO Agency of the Year

Finally, we moved on to the SEO Agency of the Year. This was the first time we had ever been nominated for an SEO award, having been heavily involved in SEO for the last 18 months, and servicing many clients

There were no nominated finalists for this category, and it was a totally open category so the awards could have gone to any of the 34 agencies nominated on the night.

We won our third award, with a clear win in SEO agency of the Year too and were absolutely ecstatic with our win in this category! For an SEO team that has only been established for a little over 12 months, the results Adam and his team have achieved for our clients in this time has truly been record-breaking and it’s brilliant to get recognition for this, for such a small, fresh agency based in Wakefield.

We beat off competition for many well established agencies in this area, those based in London, Manchester and wider all across the UK – an amazing win for our agency!

A Night to Remember

You can find a summary of all the winners and judges remarks over at the UK Agency Awards for more info from the night, along with official photos – I’m sure you can spot us!

We had an excellent night, it was lovely to meet old contacts and catch-up on all things industry, let our hair down and enjoy the fruits of our labour.

We’ll keep pushing our agency forward, driving sustainable growth for our clients, and will be up for more awards soon – we’re currently a finalist for ‘New Business of the Year’ at the Wakefield Business Awards in November, so fingers crossed our winning streak continues!

If you would like to know more about our awards wins, our approach, strategy and results that we can drive for your business, or if you’re interested in joining our award winning digital agency and working with some of the best in Yorkshire, get in touch today.

Is it wise to let AI write your marketing content?

16.02.2023

AI, or ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is becoming a hot topic amongst the world of marketing. With the rise of ChatGPT from OpenAI, it is becoming increasingly popular for AI to be implemented into the content creation process for agencies and businesses.

It’s now common practice for companies to include “Written by a human” or “Written by AI” on their web pages and content. Have you ever wondered about the benefits and drawbacks of AI in a business environment?

AI is also being implemented into wider industries such as healthcare, web development and sports, and presents a lot of opportunities for business and organisations take advantage of.

In this blog we touch on what AI actually is in marketing, and how you could go about implementing AI into your marketing plan for 2023.

What exactly is AI?

The official definition of Artificial Intelligence is :

“intelligence-perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by non-human animals and humans.”

In layman’s terms this means that human intelligence and learning can be placed into machines/robots. This learning is then built upon and acted out for us to benefit from.

We then use the output results for our own gain or expand on them ourselves. The cycle then continues until a satisfactory outcome is achieved.

In the world of AI, currently there are 4 different categories, they are:

Reactive machines
Limited memory
Theory of mind
Self aware AI

How is AI being used in marketing?

AI is being used in marketing and has kicked up a storm on social media sites like LinkedIn and streaming sites such as YouTube. Content creators on these platforms are showing users how to make use of AI, specifically ChatGPT.

If you are a smaller agency or a single-person organisation and you want to get work completed in a quicker, more cost-effective time frame, then AI could be for you.

By simply inputting a general description of the sort of content you are needing, ChatGPT goes ahead and responds back with their idea of what you are after.

We will show you some examples of what people have used in the past.

This 1st example above is showing an introduction of an article that talks about what ChatGPT is used for.

Despite being written by a robot, the end result has a human-like tone and features little to no grammatical errors.

Our second example as seen above is showcasing ChatGPT and its ability to write computer code.

What’s impressive with this example is the inclusion specific industry jargon entered into the request, which has then been understood by ChatGPT.

The response is also well thought out and structured, giving the user reasoning behind their conclusion, rather than just giving the answer.

If you were to have any worries about ChatGPT and its value, we feel these 2 examples above can ease them.

What are the general arguments for AI in marketing?

It’s best to weigh the pros and cons of a new strategy or approach before fully implementing it. It can be a costly mistake if you do not consider drawbacks which can cause problems further down the line.

Here are some of the pros and cons to consider when using AI for content creation and marketing efforts in 2023:

Benefits of AI in Marketing

It can be highly effective at completing Repetitive tasks. If someone has lots of repetitive work to complete, they can sometimes lose interest which can cause unnecessary mistakes. AI will never get bored or tired, and can easily complete large amounts of repetitive tasks with ease.
Can be used 24/7 at any time of day, no matter the timezone. This works perfectly when you have an overseas client, or want to run tasks while the office is closed so they are ready for the next day.
Decisions can be made quicly when using AI. Often when you are in a meeting and have come to a decision, there needs to be others adding their thoughts to reach a conclusion. AI on the other hand can present an answer in a more timely manner.

Drawbacks of AI in Marketing

For article writing you may need to go through and cite/reference points.
Certain parts of the English language are not utilised properly through AI. Makes it easy if implemented often for human’s to notice the machine at work.
It can at times give out generally formal responses. If you are using AI for something like a social media campaign, it can be tough for AI to ensure posts come off as fairly informal and laidback, whilst still addressing points/intent in a coherent manner.
The more popular AI becomes, the more risk there is of business, websites and customers noticing its patterns and styles, which could put them off. Sometimes people simply prefer the human touch when it comes to content and marketing.
There can be a risk of repetitiveness and duplicate continent, if many people are using it to cover the same topics.

So, should you implement AI into your strategy?

If this is the first time you have heard of Artificial Intelligence in a business setting, then we recommend researching thoroughly on the benefits it can bring, particularly for the purpose you’re looking to use it for.

It has become a hot talking point on the web, with many organisations already benefiting massively from it, carrying out trials and tests to see how it could perform for them.

As a digital marketing agency, we believe in fully exploring all new technology that can benefit what we deliver for our clients and how we can deliver it. We will be putting AI through its paces to see what it can offer, and how it can benefit the services we provide. To keep up to date about how we are considering implementing AI into our marketing strategies, follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn, where we’ll be posting our progress.

If you are looking to elevate your business’s online presence, why not book a quick chat with one of our marketing experts today?

What is SEO?

20.04.2022

What is SEO?

SEO, the acronym of Search Engine Optimisation, is a key marketing strategy for any business with a digital presence. A simple definition of SEO can be described as, a set of practises that are set out to improve a site’s organic traffic and visibility on search engine result pages, also known as SERPs.

The purpose of SEO

Before implementing SEO services onto your website, it is important to understand Google’s main goal and how this affects SEO.

An easy explanation of Google’s mission is to organise all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful in one place. With this, you are one step closer to understanding the underlying principle of all SEO work.

The next step of SEO is ensuring higher ranking search results. Algorithms are put in place to rank where a certain website or page will appear on the search engine results page. An important factor to consider is that most customers will not click past the 2nd page of results of a web search, so the higher the rank your website gains, the higher the web traffic will be driven to your website. Recent studies suggest that 33% of search traffic will click on the top result on the first page, this then drops to 18% of search traffic for the 2nd result on the first page.

Furthermore, SEO is highly beneficial for eCommerce sites, as it allows for products to be marketed more efficiently and effortlessly and in turn generate a higher ROI.

What are the differences between online and offline SEO practices?

There are 3 main areas within an SEO strategy that needs to be optimised, these are:

On-site Off-site On-page

On-Site Optimisation

On-site optimisation covers the functions of the website that allow it to work and be used by the consumer which can be ‘crawled’ by search engines to give it a ranking. Website performance – page loading speed

Page errors – broken links to pages within the website

Security – SSL Certificate and malware free website

Redirect – solutions to fix broken links

Sitemap – contents and structure of the website

Off-site Optimisation

This involves external sites and how your brand is shared on them to improve brand awareness and visibility, such as:

Hashtags – hashtags associated with your brand in a social post

Social Media – brand account mentions, products tags or website links

Business directory sites – Google Business, Yelp etc

Backlinks – these add “authority” to your website and in turn increase your search engine ranking. The better the page authority and domain authority, the more weight your website will obtain in relation to search engine algorithms and rankings.

On-page Optimisation

On-page optimisation is specific to specific single pages of a website and how they are optimised to increase web traffic rates. These include:

Headings – sections on a website need to be defined by titles to make it readable

Meta tag – allow search engines to index your web pages

Content – such as blogs, product information and category content. The more content, the better, as the indexing by search engines will be greatly improved and becomes more relevant to potential customer searches

How we apply our SEO service to our clients

Here at Simul, we have in-depth strategy to enhance your SEO practises, from the performance of the website, website structure, website authority, keyword usage, user experience and social media linking.

As this is a general overview, we apply specialised strategies to suit your business and website types, so don’t hesitate to contact us for a targeted plan. A key point to remember is that not all SEO work is visible to the client or user, as many adjustments are made in the background and or offsite.

Measure the benefits

Initially, we will run an audit of any existing site and will provide you with a plan of our workflow with regards to the SEO of your site, including small adjustments and larger changes to ensure complete transparency between the team at Simul and our clients. At the end of each month, we will provide you with a report of our on-going SEO practises which will be discussed during a meeting to analyse the results and plans for moving forward to allow us to continue to build collaborative relationships with our clients.