Google Trends provides online marketers with a great little tool for conducting some basic market research and competitor analysis. Google have updated the functionality to allow users to compare websites (up to five at a time) to indicate traffic volumes and search behaviour. This allows you to benchmark your own website against your competitors and gauge the level of online market share in your region or territory.

The main interface for Trends does not make the website comparison functionality

We want to do a series of posts that outline the pros and cons of various types of online marketing; these posts will help explain when and how to best use the right online marketing channel to meet you specific needs.

We thought we’d start with the bedrock - search engine optimisation (SEO) and give you a quick run through of the advantages and the disadvantages an SEO strategy has for your online business.

Creating an online marketing strategy uses much the same planning process one would employ in the off-line world; namely examining and adjusting product, price, place and promotion to meet consumer demands. The difference online is how the environment and mechanisms at play affect the way we choose to approach the four P’s. There are certain areas where a sea-change is present between the online and off-line worlds and others where the changes are hardly significant at all. In this article we will seek to explore the various elements that affect the online marketing mix and influence the planning and execution

Welcome to our blog – it’s taken a long time to get off the ground. This hasn’t been a question of whether it’s a good or bad idea to start an agency blog – it’s just been a question of getting through the multitude of clients projects to finally focus on launching it.

According to Universal McCann (March 2008), there are 184 million blogs on the internet and 77% of online users are reading blogs, so as a communications channel it holds considerable potential.

We’ll try and keep our posts concise and to the point, cover a wide spectrum of online marketing