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Quad Digital is a content marketing agency. We blend creative, SEO, social and PR to build profitable audiences for brands.
Our content strategies drive engagement and nurture clients' customer relationships from prospect to sale, and on to return purchase.

Quad Digital is a content marketing agency. We blend creative, SEO, social and PR to build profitable audiences for brands.Our content strategies drive engagement and nurture clients' customer relationships from prospect to sale, and on to return purchase.

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by Ben Dickens

Using our skill-set to help the National Literacy Trust

October 9, 2014 in Content Marketing , Design , Quad , Search , Social

This is a bit of a departure from my usual blogs, which focus solely on the industry and Quad’s perception of the challenges that brands face. But, this time around I wanted to take a look at a piece of work we were involved in through 2014 with The National Literacy Trust (NLT), an amazing charity which works tirelessly helping to raise literacy standards in the UK.

As an agency that values content so highly, including the editorial variety, it seemed like an obvious fit to offer our services for the Books about Town campaign. It involved digital, installations, and a good deal of participation from famous authors and artists to create book benches, which you may well have seen dotted around London as part of four trails. On Tuesday, with summer and prime outdoor reading weather having drawn to a close, the benches were auctioned off. In total, over £250,000 was raised for the charity, funds that are vital for the NLT to be able to continue its good work in the UK. Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: Books about Town , digital marketing , National Literacy Trust , , , social media , strategy No Comments »

Profile photo of Ben Dickens

by Ben Dickens

Why artificially building links is a tired and risky strategy

May 20, 2014 in Content Marketing , Quad , Search , SEO

I’ve written a number of posts hoping to demystify content marketing and hopefully highlight what brands should look for in a content marketing agency, writes Ben Dickens , Quad’s managing director. But I thought it would be valuable to take a good hard look at the notion of links and why both brands and agencies seem to equate content marketing with link building. Read the rest of this entry →

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by Lola Olson

Measuring social media engagement

March 25, 2014 in Search , SEO , Social

Last week, our CEO Ben Dickens wrote about engagement via web traffic , highlighting some of the basic principles of how to analyse user visits on websites. However, while most businesses grasp the importance of measuring on-site interaction and engagement, when it comes to social media, much is forgotten.

For example, it’s good practice to filter out your office IP address from your Google Analytics account. Visits to your website from employees or computers in the office aren’t the kind of visits you’re trying to measure. At Quad , we have to filter out our office and some of our regular freelancers to ensure our traffic numbers reflect our actual audience.

But this is a principle that frequently goes out of the window in social, especially among the many companies who consider likes, retweets and shares from employees to represent bona fide engagement with the brand.

Read the rest of this entry →

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by Matt Read

The Importance of Quality Online Content: Why Keyword Stuffing Doesn’t Work

July 30, 2013 in Content , Content Creation , Content Marketing , Search , SEO

Keyword stuffing used to be an effective tactic used by SEO agencies to improve content ranking. Now, this tactic doesn’t work. The world of SEO has completely changed and only the highest quality content makes it to the top ranking positions in search engines.

Google’s new algorithms, brought into play on 24 April 2012, have demanded that online content ranked in the top Google spots be of the highest, ethical quality. Their filtering systems, Penguin and Panda, weed out the designated ‘immoral’ content from the honest and quality content by penalising sites that use old-fashioned marketing tactics to draw traffic. These tactics include low quality link building, over-optimisation of anchor text, cloaking pages, over-publishing poor quality digital content and of course, keyword stuffing. Any content featuring these faux-marketing strategies will no longer rank at the top of a Google search. And in the future, these filters will become stricter.

Keyword stuffing is essentially packing as many keywords as possible into content with the aim of making it more appealing in search rankings. At some point, we’ve probably all done this. But, you have to acknowledge how tedious this kind of content is to read. Other than rankings, stuffing adds little value to the content and doesn’t help to build a loyal readership.

Who would want to read a clearly sales-driven piece of online content featuring the same phrase repeatedly throughout over a well-written, engaging article incorporating organic links that are relevant to the topic.

While stuffing may have worked on previous audiences, in today’s online realm, readers and search engines both demand high-quality content that delivers an informative and entertaining read.

Online content needs to be promoted using real digital marketing skills, rather than taking shortcuts. This means recognising the audience, catering to their requirements, generating desire, encouraging action, measuring, analysing and improving. Modern SEO practices are much more targeted and direct in their approaches to improving search rankings. And it is this approach which is going to produce long-term and enduring results for your business.

At Quad, we pride ourselves on being a digital content marketing agency that only delivers the best in online content. If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your brand excel in the search rankings then don’t hesitate to get in touch and head down to Quad HQ on the HMS President for a chat.

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by Katy Latta

Is The Homepage Dead?

July 29, 2013 in Content , Search , SEO , Social

Did you know that less than half of the visits to NYTimes.com start on the homepage? The question is where are they all coming from? The answer: search and social.

Instead of coming in via the front door, more and more people are accessing websites (in particular news sites) through the back gate.

The fundamental reason is that people use the web to gather information differently to any other medium. When you go online you know what you want and you look for it directly through a search engine. Let’s focus on newspaper here.

Rather than going to the virtual front page of a paper and clicking through it from there, you use a search engine to find a particular article and enter the site through that page.

Unlike the traditional print newspaper model, people using digital news sites don’t sit down and read the whole paper. For that reason, the editorial layout of an online newspaper probably has less importance than in a print version. In a broadsheet or tabloid publication, pages are laid out in terms of lead stories and newsworthiness, guiding the reader through the news. This is in complete opposition to how most people access news online – free to search a giant database of information for exactly the story that they want.

But, this doesn’t mean the homepage is altogether unnecessary. For general news consumption, the front (home) page still has meaning. Despite changing habits, audiences continue to enter news sites via the home page to find out breaking news, lead stories and major headlines. Also, there still seems to be a loyalty to publications digitally like there is in print versions of newspapers. Plus, there are sites which specifically attract readers because of the content on their homepage – Mail Online for example.

There’s also another kind of reader to consider. The ones who enter a site through the back door and then click through to the homepage to see what the site is all about, or what else it has to offer. In that sense, the homepage on a news site acts more like a magazine cover than a front page. It gives a teasing glimpse of what’s inside, but nothing more.

So, while the homepage isn’t dead, it has definitely changed in its appearance and purpose. Instead of killing it off completely, you need to look at your homepage with a fresh pair of eyes. How does your audience use your site, what do they go to the homepage for, or what would attract them to the homepage? Perhaps you need to view it as more of a central page than a traditional home page.

Quad Digital are a Digital Content Marketing agency with a wealth of experience. If you think we may be able to help you, then get in touch  and head down to Quad HQ aboard the HMS President for a chat.

 

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