The 30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

The 30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

The 30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

the internet is and oldy, but a goody, right?

This week, the world wide web we have all come to love and hate in equal measure turned the big 30.

Wow, 30 years eh? Instead of moving out of its mum’s basement, getting a job and settling down, it’s been constantly evolving and changing almost all areas of our life.

From changing how we communicate with each other, to helping us quickly settle arguments with a few taps on a phone screen, we here at Giant Campus thought it would only be right to take a look back over those 30 years to see just how much has changed. For better and for worse…

Communication across the nation

If there’s one thing the internet changed more than anything, it’s how we communicate with one another.

Gone are the days of picking up a phone (or god forbid) meeting someone in person. Now with the internet and social media, we can simply comment on each other’s posts and have a quick chat with the promise of “we should meet up sometime!” – even though you secretly both know you never will.

There is an argument to be made that the world wide web has encouraged us to devalue face to face conversations, but it’s not all doom and gloom. For families and friends who live in different cities or even countries, the internet has provided an easy way for people to keep in touch that isn’t going to end up costing them the world in phone bills.

And on the topic of communication, it’s opened up entirely new avenues for businesses to communicate with their customers. With social mediaPPC advertising, not to mention email and content marketing, businesses now have a multitude of additional options to explore to help get people interested in their brand and buying their products/services.

 

“Hang on, let me Google it”

The world wide web has a lot of information. Like a lot of it. There are over 1.5 billion websites to explore, which according to Google, equates to over 60 trillion web pages. It’s easy to take it for granted these days, but the unique ability to access practically limitless information is perhaps one of, if not the biggest change to come out of the world wide web.

Of course, with so much information out there, it can be difficult to separate the good, the bad, and the just plain weird. That’s why search engine optimisation (SEO) is so important. With the right knowledge, you can ensure search engines know your site is great, meaning they rank higher in search results.

 

Jobs jobs and more jobs

When we think of what the internet has done in terms of jobs, it’s easy to blame it for the death of the high street. Yes, it’s true, the internet has made purchasing things so easy that physical shops are struggling to keep up, with no signs of it slowing down.

But while it has limited jobs in that respect, it’s also opened up a whole new world of job opportunities that simply didn’t exist beforehand. The rising popularity internet required whole new hosts of trained people to build sites, fix them, and help draw people to them in the first place (that’s us btw!).

Yes without the internet, the whole idea of digital marketing simply would not exist, so thank you internet for allowing all of us here at Giant Campus to have our job in the first place. Here’s to another 30 years.

We may be the digital marketing experts, but we’re eager to share our knowledge with those that want to learn more. Check out our other exciting blogs, or browse our range of digital marketing courses.

 

Ben Hawkes

Ben Hawkes

Digital Creative

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Looking back on a year in search

Looking back on a year in search

A Year In Search

what a jam-packed, confusing and exciting twelve months it has been…

2018 is coming to an end and rather than get all soppy and emotional about what’s gone on, we’re going to look back at all the weird things you Googled instead.

The end of 2018 is fast approaching, which means that people are beginning to look back on what’s happened over the past 12 months. And what a jam-packed, confusing and exciting 12 months it has been. So, we thought now was a good time to look back on all of the weird and wonderful things that have impacted the digital world – from the top trending news events to the stats of the year.

A year in search

Each year, Google Trends releases all of the top searched questions and phrases of the past 12 months, offering a snapshot into the minds of people across the world.

2018 was, after all, an interesting year. Turn to the top searched news events of the year and you see GDPR sitting neatly alongside Spice Girls in the top 5, with the Royal wedding topping the chart. Things got a bit more telling over in the “What is…?” searches, with “what is bitcoin?” beating “what is GDPR?” to the top spot; the appearance of “what is a nerve agent?” is a slightly more worrying representation of the year’s events.

 

Image result for social media

The changing face of social media

A snapshot of the “How to…?” searches paints an interesting portrait of the face of social media in 2018, and perhaps highlights the changing mood towards these platforms. “How to delete Instagram?” was the fifth most searched “How to…?” question of the year, with the same question about Facebook coming sixth. “How to get the old Snapchat back?” came in fourth – highlighting that the major redesign of the interface back in February really did have a huge impact on how people interacted with the app. This was backed by a figure from the Royal Statistical Society’s Statistics of the Year announcement, which showed that $1.3 billion was wiped off Snapchat’s value within a day of one Kylie Jenner tweet – where she asked: “does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore?”. Brutal.

Largely, though, people wanted to hear about the good things in life. Good things to watch, acts of kindness, and how to be better at everything from dancing and kissing to being a better role model. We could all do with a bit more good – or, as Google said: “Good things are worth searching for”.

The Statistics of the Year announcement also highlighted some positive changes, including that the percentage of all electricity produced in the UK due to solar power peaked on 30th June, at 28.7% – making it the number one electricity source for a brief window. Although there has been a 16.7% reduction in the number of Jaffa Cakes in the McVities’ Christmas tube, so it isn’t all good.

 

Image result for 2018

Taking a moment to reflect

One thing’s for sure – 2018 was a year of ups and downs. We gained a new Royal baby, but we lost one of the world’s greatest minds in Stephen Hawking. There were some incredible highs, with unexpected World Cup success bringing the country together for a few glorious sunshine-filled weeks. And there were some fun moments, like new ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ host Jeremy Clarkson realising he didn’t know what an Ibex was – causing a massive peak in searches at the time of the episode. The real question is, do you know what it is?

Searching for good

You can also check out some of the awesome highlights of the year’s searches in Google’s full video compilation. It’s a heart-warmer for sure:

 

Liz Quinn

Liz Quinn

Digital Creative

Follow us on social media for blog updates and more kick-ass learning content to grow your digital skills!

Organic vs Paid search – who comes out on top?

Organic vs Paid search – who comes out on top?

Organic vs. Paid Search: Who Comes Out on Top?

where should I concentrate my time and efforts?

For businesses making their way into the modern world, getting to grips with online marketing has become essential. This means finding out ways to get your website in front of the right people at the right times, and appearing in search engine results when they’re on the hunt for answers.

 

Simple, right? Well, not always. When it comes to digital marketing, there are tons of different avenues you can take to get to that final destination in front of your customers – and not all routes are born equal. With these different avenues, you can boil them down to two key areas – organic and paid search. But which ones better? And where should you focus your efforts?

 

 

Wait, what’s the difference?

Let’s start by talking about what they actually are. When we talk about organic we don’t mean chemical free – we mean results that are decided based on the quality of the site, as determined by search engine algorithms. With paid search, these results are bought rather than earned, and appear alongside their organic counterparts.

Now, you may be thinking “well, one’s free and one isn’t – so that’s the benefit” – and while that is in some sense true, it’s not quite that simple. Organic marketing is a long-term strategy based around getting traffic through to a site, thanks to great content, awesome testimonials, and other white hat tactics that focus on simply making a great website. As a result, it can take months before organic marketing has any major impact on a site’s rankings – meaning you need to be in it for the long haul in order to get the most out of organic SEO.

With paid search, the opposite is true. This tactic is all about getting your message out there and getting people to convert. Paid search is all about the quick wins – the instant gratification. While that’s always appealing, there are costs attached. The success of a paid campaign is largely down to how much money you can funnel into it, meaning higher upfront costs – and a potential blocker for small or start up businesses. Plus, you need to take the time to optimise your ads; once you’ve got it right, your CPC will decrease, your CTR will increase, and everyone will be happy. But getting to that point isn’t always easy, particularly if you’re new to the paid world.

While some stats show that PPC visitors are 50% more likely to buy than organic visitors, 70% of clicked search results are organic – so if your website is super optimised and enticing, it doesn’t mean investing budget is the only way to get people to pay you a visit. Plus, when it comes to paid search, the second you stop investing that budget and fuelling the fire, your traffic will drop. Stop bidding, and people stop clicking. With other organic tactics – like SEO and content marketing – you should still see a trickle of traffic to your site even if you take a break, although they’re definitely not ‘set and forget’ strategies – you’ll need to give them some TLC to keep them working well.

 

To pay, or not to pay?

So, which one do you invest your time and money in? Well, the short answer is both. The sweet spot for businesses online is finding a way to use paid and organic search in blissful harmony. Paid tactics are great for getting your digital activity off the ground, while investing in a long-term organic strategy means that, as your site authority starts to improve, and your success metrics start to rise, you can reduce your paid budget and rely more on the organic activity.

With search engines moving slower than your Mum’s one-finger typing, PPC can give you the boost you need to get moving ASAP – with your organic activity building momentum in the background, getting ready to take over and snowball away.

93% of online experiences start with search engines, so making your mark on those all important SERPs is essential. Whether you were planning on splashing the cash, or thinking about investing in a long-term content-led strategy to bring you digital glory, taking the time to consider how paid and organic search can support each other is a sure-fire way to get the best out of both worlds. You see, in the digital world, you can have your cake and eat it. Now you know why we love it here.

Want to know more about organic SEO, or getting started with pay per click ads? Well, you’re in luck. Check out our upcoming Intro to SEO and Intro to PPC courses to find out how you can use these techie tools to your advantage. There might even be cake…

Liz Quinn

Liz Quinn

Digital Creative

Follow us on social media for blog updates and more kick-ass learning content to grow your digital skills!

Optimise your webpage

Optimise your webpage

Optimising Your Website For Search Engines

pimping your webpages for the benefit of search engines such as Google and Bing

Got a super sexy webpage taht’s not getting the traffic it deserves? Poor webpage 

Sometimes it just needs a helping hand to make it that bit more appealing to a search engine, and we’re here to help you pimp your page.

Known as on-page optimisation, there are changes you can make to your websites individual pages that can help search engines understand what it is you’re trying to say. It’s like texting each other with no context and hoping the other one gets it. (Spoiler alert, no one ever gets it!)

The things we’re going to quickly cover in this blog are; meta tags and title, headings and the page copy. Let’s break them down so you can help each webpage smooth talk a search engine.

Meta tags and title

These two things, you’ll never see on the page unless you were looking at the code (don’t, it’s scary!). Essentially, they’re embedded messages that’ll help the search engine determine what is on the webpage.

The title and the meta description are the bits you see on a search engine results page, quite literally the title of the page and the little description that lets you know what sort of thing you’re going to find on the page.

If you were selling digital marketing training, you’d want to make sure the phrase ‘digital marketing training’ is in both the title and description, placing it within the copy to make it fit and describe what the page is about.

The title should be short, sweet and to the point. Use the description to explain what the page is about. The description should be able two short sentences/150 characters and reinforce the title by using the keyword/phrase again – in this instance, ‘digital marketing training’.

Considering these are the things that appear in the search engine results pages, you need to consider both Googles algorithm AND the way a searcher will see/read/digest the result. Don’t just keyword stuff in the title, remember it’s got to draw in a potential customer.

excited new girl GIF

Headings and copy

Let’s start by remembering that primarily, you’re writing for people. Keyword/phrase stuffing into the copy of your webpage in an attempt to make search engines understand what it’s about won’t work! They’ll find you a bit clingy, not so cool anymore, and mark you as spam. Website traffic will see it as an instant turn-off, not really wanting to investigate further due to your obsessive use of the word/phrase.

A great rule of thumb would be to stick between two to five mentions of your keyword, dependant on the length of the copy of course. Length of your copy is subjective and varies depending on the business, product, and intention – but no one likes a mass of text!

To maximise the value and relevancy of your individual webpage, you should include your keywords/phrases in <H1> heading tags. Using title tags is a great way to provide a page hierarchy for search engines and also a great way to break up the copy of your page, provide structure and make it easier to digest for website visitors. It’s kinda like the bigger it is, the more Google wants to look at it…

There’s no limit on the amount of <H1> headings you can have on your page, Google said so. That sounds super appealing from an SEO point of view, yeah. But it won’t look nice to the user, will it? And remember, they’re your primary audience!

google GIF

Introducing elements into your webpage to make it all that more appealing to search engines will involve you using a little bit of creativity. That caring touch that everyone can enjoy, mixed with the important bits that Google desires of your webpage.

It’s easy peasy to pimp your page and make search engines like them. Let us know how you get on but if you have any other questions, pop us a message on Twitter or Facebook.

Want to learn more? Check out our WTF?! series.

Amber Vellacott

Amber Vellacott

Content Marketing Lead

Follow us on social media for blog updates and more kick-ass learning content to grow your digital skills!

Closing the digital skills gap

Closing the digital skills gap

Closing The Digital Skills Gap With Giant Campus

we were quite literally bred to do this

Giant Campus was started with the intention of personally helping to close the digital skills gap identified by the UK Government in 2016. And, well, we reckon we’ve definitely assisted in attempts to do so.

Following the release of a big project we’ve been working on over the last year, we’d like to share with you some of the ideas Campus was born from. More than anything, we’re quite proud to have achieved what we have so far as a startup business, so it’s nice to reminisce.

Having been set up in response to the UK government’s Digital Strategy released in 2016, we’ve since worked tirelessly with Google on their Digital Garage e-learning platform, a project mentioned in the business-led digital skills section of the report. The strategy recognises the importance of digital skills, addressing a gap in digital education for many generations, as well as a gap in positions for those digitally-minded looking for jobs that require their specific skill sets.

“If we want to increase our overall prosperity, to enjoy higher real wages, and if we want more opportunities for young people to get on, we have to raise our productivity. In a digitally-driven economy, that means ensuring that everyone has the skills they need to flourish, with nobody left behind.” Source: UK Digital Strategy 2017

The work we did with Google’s Digital Garage gave us a great outlet for sharing our passion and know-how of all things digital and online business-like. 

It was found that it was 24% more likely that unemployed adults lacked the basic digital skills than high earners. And, that in order to satisfy the future skills need by 2022, an estimated 1.2 million new technical and digitally skilled people are needed. That’s a lottttttt.

A survey conducted for the UK Digital Strategy found that of 1,000 UK-based businesses, having digital capabilities helped boost revenues by 4.4% and reduce costs by 4.3%. So, as a business, our digital marketing training courses, delivered to businesses and individuals, aim to help other businesses become giant. Invest a little in our training and, if you implement what you learn, you’ll see a return on investment.

As you may have seen, our courses range from using search engines to help your business be found online, using analytics to monitor results as well as give your business actionable next steps, to using social media to increase brand awareness and help towards your sales and marketing strategy.  

Danny Windsor, who heads up Giant Campus, said:

“Giant Campus is such an exciting project. It’s a business unlike any others in Kent. We have a mission to achieve and that mission is everything to us. The digital skills gap may sound like a problem we can ignore, but realistically businesses are going to be at a disadvantage against those larger in scale unless companies like ours take digital skills seriously. Formal education providers, such as schools and colleges, struggle to keep up with the ever-evolving digital agenda. By the time a curriculum is designed most of the knowledge in it is out of date. It’s hard to teach digital unless you live and breathe it day in and day out. And that is exactly what our professors and Giant Campus do.”

A year after we began, we have seen learners in the hundreds attend our workshops and enquire after bespoke training for their business. This has seen the formation of relationships between countless Kent businesses, as well as the opportunities for us to deliver digital training across Europe and the US.

As the digital landscape evolves, so do we. No two courses delivered are the same as digital grows at an exponential rate that we pride ourselves on being able to keep up on.

We don’t just do this in an attempt to make a profit either, we have a pure education first focus. We understand the value of learning, with members of our team holding a strong background in both the education and digital sector.

We believe we’re the only training business in Kent with this approach, with our trainers being practising experts in the subjects they teach. We believe the skills gap can be closed with efforts from both parties, the educators and the educate-ees. The work we’ve done with Google provides free and certified education to millions of learners, so it’s now down to them to get learning.

The future is digital, so it’s time to embrace it and get educated *mic drop*.

Amber Vellacott

Amber Vellacott

Content Marketing Lead

Follow us on social media for blog updates and more kick-ass learning content to grow your digital skills!