We are an SEO and PPC agency based in central London with PLC clients and with very interesting projects, and are looking for a high quality SEO expert to be responsible for our growing SEO department.

At Orchid Box we have developed in house search engine tools to perform smart keyword research and competitive analysis. We are the creators of “page rank crawler” and we have developed an SEO dashboard (freeseo.co.uk) and a local listing / directory / review framework (secretsalons.com)

Job Description:

We are currently looking to recruit for a full-time position in our natural search team. Candidates with a minimum of 1-2 years experience in a search engine marketing role are preferred, with a competitive salary offered based on experience.

You must have been a top student at Uni and a confident individual who is comfortable presenting SEO solutions and recommendations to clients, writing actionable reports and working as part of a team. You will need to be a fantastic communicator with a knack for explaining complex technical details in layman’s terms.

Typical tasks include

- Pitches and proposals
- Keyword research
- Site analytics review
- Link analysis
- Link building strategy
- SEO Technical Audits
- SEO Copywriting
- Client SEO Strategy development
- Technical review

You will need to be self motivated, organised and above all have a great passion and enthusiasm for the internet and be able to articulate how SEO can help our clients. You will be expected to participate in client projects, proposals and pitches.

Skills / Experience:

To be considered for this position you will need to have a solid understanding of excel, as this is utilised every day across a variety of your tasks, which will include but not be limited to; keyphrase research, competitor analysis, information architecture, technical site reviews and analytics analysis. You will also have an understanding of the inner workings of the internet and experience of html.

You will love spending time on the internet and be a keen follower of industry blogs, you will constantly be learning about new waves and changes to the industry. You will probably have a great twitter account and be used to promoting yourself across the various social media sites.

• Understanding of search ranking factors
• Experience in both on and off-site optimisation
• Google Webmaster Tools experience
• Excel skills (VLOOKUP & Pivot Tables)
• Report writing skills
• Client facing skills
• Basic HTML skills
• Great spoken and written English
• Understanding web Analytics and experience using Analytics systems – ideally Google Analytics
• A good understanding of website usability

Desirable:-

• Google Analytics Individual Qualification
• Google Adwords Qualified Individual
• PPC management
• Experience with CRO, Split & Multivariate testing
• Educated to graduate or higher level

Please apply direct and not through and agency.

Strictly NO recruitment agencies – if you are a recruiter, do NOT contact us about this post

This vacancy is located in United Kingdom – please ensure you are eligible to work in this location before applying for the role.

We are very excited by our latest SEO and PPC contract, a site we believe is going to revolutionise the way we all think about our cars.

WhipCar is a brand new peer to peer car rental service that offers car owners and those in need of a car a platform to connect and interact. Got a car sitting around days on end in the garage? You can rent your car out for the rates you want – whether it’s £50 a day, £8 an hour or another time scale you want to put your car to work for. And for those in need of a car every now and again but can’t justify the outlay to buy one, you’ve got the perfect site to go and get a temporary rental on your street for a price you won’t get elsewhere...it’s that easy! WhipCar is starting off with hire car in Maida Vale only, but soon will be branching across the country so anyone interested should let them know their interest.

We’ve helped WhipCar get their brand started with pay per click campaigns targeting niche markets and wider scale audiences to ensure they get the best returns possible. Orchid Box have also been in partnership with the site designers to ensure the interface is user friendly and optimised for search engines. Though a site like this obviously thrives on buzz and chatter across blogs, news sites and other online communities (and indeed, offline), it’s still essential that the site is ready to be indexed by Google and targeting the right sort of keywords.

So check out the site at www.whipcar.com and see how you can put your car to work, or rent the car next door – be part of the revolution from the start and save yourself money along the way!

We’ve see it on the news, read about it in the papers, heard it on the radio... Yes, the ubiquitous debates between the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders just can’t be avoided. Not that we’d want to avoid them – what with Cameron’s clumsily applied foundation, Brown’s offensive tie, and Clegg’s boy-next-door eagerness, they’re providing much entertainment (alongside some interesting political discussion, of course).

So what does this mean for SEO? Well, for the next few weeks, there will be some politically-focused keywords that are typed into search engines by thousands of users everyday. A fact which SEO lovers should be well aware of - those canny Tories being one of them.

Type ‘Labour’ into Google and up pops a Conservative PPC ad, entitled ‘Labour Has Failed’. Can’t get much clearer than that. Type in ‘Conservatives’ and, while Labour have failed to cash in on this keyword (surprising, given how adept their MPs seem at cashing in on anything else), Ann Summers, of ladies lingerie fame, have taken the opportunity to advertise their wares through PPC:

This was an opportunity not to be missed by Orchid Box (we spotted this prior to seeing Ann Summers’ efforts, we promise) . When working on the PPC for London boutique spa, Kuno Tierra, we bid on the keyword ‘Labour’. Now, I can see you scratching your head, wondering, ‘How on earth did they manage to link a political party with a high-end beauty salon?’

Here’s how:

And,

Inspired, no?

It can be a great idea to link PPC to current affairs, because even if your ad isn’t clicked on, you are likely to be seen by a very high number of users.

NB: Orchid Box do not affiliate themselves with any political party.

Looks familiar?

We can all be the victims of treachery sometimes, but in all my years I have never experienced anything like this. The Orchid Box blog has been the victim of a horrendous crime, as a mean spammy content thief has stolen one of our enthralling blog posts!

OK, so I might be being slightly dramatic, but really? Who steals a blog post? They got rid of the keywords rather bizarrelym and even gave us an even more exciting name in "Orchid Field"!

Anyway, what this does display aside from a unique take on the English language, is an ever more acute need to keep ahead of the game with monitoring tools to watch out more any duplicating bots across the wild and wide seas of the World Wide Web.

All you have to do is head for the site verification page and you'll find a nice "add user" option, saving you hours of fiddling with verification codes in your metadata! This additional user has instant access to Webmaster Tools too, so it's an easy and immediate bonus. 

This week a court ruling in Italy marked a watershed in Internet communications law, and perhaps a worrying step in online privacy rules, as three Google executives were prosecuted of violating privacy and given six month suspended sentences. Their crime? Allowing a video of an autistic schoolboy to be uploaded and present on their video site for 24 hours, despite the fact that it was removed as soon as Google were made aware of its presence.

But aside from the frankly ridiculous statement and worrying precedent that this ruling sets, it is also increasingly indicative of some slight cracks appearing in the company with motto "Don't be evil".

Having raised their heads above the parapets and taken a lead in virtually all aspects of the web world, Google were always going to face a backlash once they became dominant, but such a recoil is perhaps stronger and more concentrated than they might have hoped. They've recently seen a growing press happy to criticise their actions and movements, and their new Gmail social networking addition "Buzz" was largely ridiculed by web commentators on blogs and in the papers. They've faced lawsuits from companies effective crippled by Google's ranking system suddenly punishing their sites. Now the three executives have been convicted of violating privacy and it's all getting to be a bit of a free-for-all for those wanting to take a swipe.

But are Google going to take a step back and hide for a little while whilst all this simmers? You can pretty much bet your bottom dollar not. For now we're all still slaves to the Google monster, and we can only play our servile role in their arbitrary court.  SEO is only going to get more important in 2010...hurray!

Facebook advertising is a fast growing PPC market which increasing numbers of business are looking at taking advantage of. Though in comparison to Google Adwords the platform has its limitations and the advert options are somewhat limited, the opportunities for demographic targeting are massive and ensure that many companies enjoy a much stronger return from Facebook PPC than they do from Google. 

Though Google allows you to target a specific region, placement site or search term, for many projects these options are somewhat restricting and the ability in to target a group of people you know convert well for your site in Facebook is a great advantage to have. Although it is perhaps more speculative (people are not using FB to find your service), and click through rates are low, traffic opportunities are high (over 20m users in the UK alone) and Facebook ads allows you to target a wide range of options:

• Age range - any exact or age range above 13, or even those users on their birthday
• Geographical region – Google does this by IP address, Facebook by user profiles, so accuracy cannot be guaranteed
• Gender
• Education
• Occupation
• Relationship status and sexual orientation
• Language
• Interests – according to any keyword on a user’s profile

This demographic targeting is hugely useful for aiming for any users you know convert well, and by setting up different campaigns targeting different groups you can track which are the more effective and optimise accordingly. 

Unfortunately Facebook does have its limitations too. As mentioned before, the platform is not hugely user friendly, and the keyword targeting is somewhat laboured – you can only target the keyword options that Facebook gives you, which makes keyword selection is somewhat laboured (though we’ll worry about that). Ad format sizes are fixed, and though you may have an image on the ad it is fairly small and limiting (no banner ads). Having said this, images are a very effective way to improve click rates and it is significantly cheaper promoting image ads on Facebook than Google. 

In terms of costs, Facebook gives no real accurate estimations of what your ads will initially cost, and there are no estimate tools available yet so it’s difficult to predict costs. Create a good ad with good text and you’ll find costs can be cheaper than Google (depending on the subject matter), but it can also more expensive too. 

If that all sounds very complicated but very promising, contact Orchid Box today to see what we might be able to offer you!

Wrong.

That big attractive “call us” button at the top with a great call to action is a bit of an anomaly to your tracking – there’s no click through for users, all they have to do is read what the number is and phone it. These phone calls could be useless to you, or they could be sales coming through that aren’t being measured into the website’s effects. Orchid Box have just the solution for you.

Our brand new phone tracking system allows our clients and customers to set up a number of specialised phone numbers that can display either in different areas of the site, or indeed when a user comes through to the site from a specific keyword. All these numbers will forward users on to the same number, but will also retain that essential tracking data that lets you know which areas of your online business are bringing those enquiries.

And if that isn’t enough for you, there’s several additional features that makes this the best call tracking option online.

• By asking your call centre to record which calls lead to direct sales, you can have a fully measurable conversion rate to compare to other areas of online marketing.

• We can measure geographical data – so you know where these calls are coming from in the world.

• You can track missed calls, so you know if whoever is answering the phones is having a nap or indeed if you could be missing many potential sales on a Sunday when no-one is in.

• You can even record the calls for training purposes, ensuring you build the best phone sales team with the best conversion rates around.

So contact us today to find out more about our great phone tracking systems and you could be boosting those phone sales quicker than the speaking clock will actually tell you the time!

Aside from the attractive appearance, SEO- and user-friendly copy, and navigation framework, our hard work extends beyond the immediately visible, to phone tracking, lead generating, and split testing. While this might sound like jargon from a particularly complex episode of Spooks, they are in fact three new tracking practices that will vastly improve how we gauge the effectiveness of keywords and SEO methods.

While we haven’t received any actual massages (yet), there’s nothing to stop us massaging our own egos... 

We built the website from scratch over the course of 3-4 weeks, carefully tailoring it to the client, to users, and, of course, to SEO. The elbow grease was a-flowing – and it paid off. We’ve nurtured the website as we would our own baby (no, really) – we even built a fabulous spa gallery to showcase the beautiful decor!

The first of our newly installed devices is our phone tracking system. We assign a number of different phone numbers to different types of keywords and phrases. Each phone call is recorded and then directed to our capable hands to analyse. By linking the phone enquiry to its source, we can see the conversion rates of different keywords, allowing us to increase or decrease usage of effective and ineffective keywords and apply real, measurable metrics to the data.

The second device we used for Kuno Tierra is lead generating. We have created an enquiry form system on the website so that when a customer fills in their details, we and Kuno Tierra’s managers receive an email containing information on the enquiry within minutes.

As if that isn’t enough innovation, we have also enabled split testing within the content management system to really up our game. This means we can build multiple pages that are served to users by equal measure. By tracking enquiries from each page, we can measure which performs better – which allows us to improve the quality of the website and its traffic.

Phew! I’m positively breathless following all that trumpet-blowing. These new methods really are cutting edge, and demonstrate Orchid Box’s dedication to providing a truly innovative and ultimately successful SEO experience.

You’re probably feeling the need to wind down after all that exciting news. See our beloved newborn – sorry, the Kuno Tierra website - for yourself and treat yourself to a luxury spa treatment!