Our Blog

Take a look at what we have been talking about

24 Jul

Four Ways to Reduce Abandoned Baskets

Posted by Lorna Casswell

It’s a known fact not everyone who puts something into their basket is going to end up buying, but even a small decrease in the amount of people who abandon their baskets could make a big difference to your bottom line. In today’s post we’ve got four ideas on how you can reduce the number of people who abandon their basket. 1. Make all delivery, returns and pricing information clear If delivery information is not clear at the product or category level it’s likely people will put items into their basket just to find out information, such as the cost of delivery. Avoid this kind of activity, which will skew your basket-to-sale conversion rates, by presenting all necessary information at the right time. Make it easy for people to see how much their item is including VAT, sho...

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22 Jul

Recent goings on at Star Digital

Posted by Lorna Casswell

It’s been a while since we posted to our blog, so we thought we’d give you a quick update on what’s been going on. There’s been some fantastic achievements amongst the team, as well as some new faces that have joined the family, in the last month or so. New Faces Leanne Town joined the digital marketing team in June. She is working with us three days a week over the summer, whilst she completes her Masters, before joining us full time in the autumn. Despite having only been here for a month, Leanne has managed to gain her AdWords certification after passing both the AdWords Fundamentals and Advanced Search exams. We also have a new apprentice, who came on board in the spring; Richard McCauley. He is learning and working on both email and web development. He has already bu...

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09 Jun

Four Reasons Why Your Business Needs Email Marketing

Posted by Lorna Casswell

Whether your business is purely online, or whether you have bricks and mortar premises, increasing leads and sales is a constant challenge, as is encouraging customer loyalty. Email marketing is an excellent way to use the customer and client data you already store to drive up conversions, quickly and easily, in a measurable way. Today’s blog post discusses some of the main reasons why email marketing should be an essential element of a business’s marketing activities: Increase Sales or Leads This is the obvious one, but we had to mention it. If you have a database of existing customers or clients then tapping into them can lead to more sales and leads. Sending them details of any special offers you are currently running, or perhaps offering them a bespoke offer, can encoura...

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30 May

Star Digital Nominated for Prestigious RAR Award

Posted by Lorna Casswell

We’re really excited to have been nominated for the RAR award for Ecommerce this year. What makes the RAR awards so special is finalists and winners are selected based on ratings and references from clients, as opposed to being judged by a panel who have no experience of working with us. We’re over the moon to be recognised and nominated for this award, and we know it is all down to the hard work the team puts in day after day. The winner of the Ecommerce category will be announced on June 10 2014. You can find out more here.    

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22 May

Google Releases Algorithm Update – Has Your Site Been Hit?

Posted by Lorna Casswell

Google is currently in the process of releasing what looks to be a relatively big update to the way it ranks websites in its organic results. This update (to the Panda algorithm) could see websites with low quality content be pushed down in the organic listings, thus impacting on traffic levels of the affected sites. Early reports suggest some big players, like eBay, may have been hit by the update this week. Other Google Panda algorithm updates that have happened since 2011 have targeted websites with the following: Lack of original website content Thin content Low quality links Duplicate content Low on-site engagement levels (such as high bounce rates, low amount of time spent on pages etc) It’s early days at the moment, with the affects of this Panda update not...

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09 May

Roadchef Launch New Smartphone APP and Website

Posted by Lorna Casswell

Roadchef, the well-known motorway service station brand, approached Star Digital to pitch for their digital marketing towards the end of 2013. The Star Digital team won and were appointed to work on a smartphone deals app, and also to redesign and build a new website for the brand. In April 2014 Star Digital launched the app on both Apple and Android, and an all-new responsive website. Roadchef needed a smartphone app that would drive footfall into their service stations by promoting daily deals and offering easy-to-access brand and location information. The website needed to be easy for travellers to use, as well as it using consistent branding to that used in the app. Knowing Roadchef’s potential customers were likely to be on the move we recommended a responsive website. A...

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07 May

Make Your SEO Listings Stand Out with Schema Markup

Posted by Lorna Casswell

You may have noticed some listings in the organic results include a variety different stand-out elements such as star ratings, images, videos, author information and even dates and times. All of this is thanks to Schema markup. Here are some examples of Schema markup in action: You will notice how eye-catching these selected listings are, and how much they probably stand out compared to other regular-looking Google results. If your SEO listing stands out in comparison to others you're likely to see increased click through rates, which means more organic website visitors and potentially more conversions. To get your website listing to display these stand-out elements you will need to use Schema markup. This is simply code that is added to your website that search engines, like G...

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25 Apr

Four Things to Consider When Getting a New Website

Posted by Lorna Casswell

Whether you’re looking at having your first website built or your tenth, there are some things you need to consider before signing off designs or builds to ensure once it’s launched your new site really works for you. In today’s blog post we’ve listed a few things you should consider if you’re about to have a new website designed or built. Will it work for your customers or visitors? This sounds obvious we know, but the thing is many websites sites look great on first view, but when crunch to comes to crunch, they just don’t work in the real world. For example, an image-heavy website may really showcase your products or services, but if text and information is on the thin side, this will have an impact on a person’s buying decision. If you have a website already you...

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16 Apr

A Handy Guide to AdWords Ad Extensions

Posted by Lorna Casswell

Implementing ad extensions in your AdWords PPC ads can mean you not only occupy more of Google’s search space, but you can also improve the user experience by offering additional links or a phone number, which might be useful to potential customers. As of October 2013 Google factors in the expected impact ad extensions will have on ad performance (such as improved CTRs) when calculating your quality scores. This is an important change as better quality scores mean lower CPCs (and vice versa). In today’s blog post we run through the ad extensions available to advertisers using AdWords at the minute... App Extensions Send users to an app store, or initiate an app download, with these ad extensions. Call Extensions Show phone numbers as part of a desktop ad (image to the ...

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04 Apr

Spring Clean Your PPC Account

Posted by Lorna Casswell

We can’t believe it’s April already, and with the landing of spring we thought we’d give you five ways in which you can spring clean your PPC account. Review Ad Text Performance Take a look at the performance of your ad text over recent weeks to see if you can find some room for improvement. Keep your eyes peeled for ads with good click through rates and good conversion rates. Review these ads to see what it is that is driving the good results and see if you can replicate this in the other ads across your PPC account. Check Your Search Query Report Run a search query report as a way of seeing if there are irrelevant searches that are leading to impressions in your PPC account. Consider adding negative keywords to your account as a means of reducing irrelevant ad impression...

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28 Mar

Reclaim Lost Visitors and Missed Sales with Retargeting

Posted by Lorna Casswell

We are all aware that not everyone who reaches a website converts, in fact we’re lucky if we get just a few percent of visitors to convert, but are those who leave without converting lost forever? The honest answer is “yes, some of them will be, but not all of them”. If you want to recapture some of that ‘lost’ traffic you should consider remarketing as a means of getting that highly interested traffic back. How Remarketing Works Remarketing works by using a combination of tracking code and cookies. This code and cookie combo lets you track the people on your site who don’t convert. You can put these non-converters into a ‘pot’ (so-to-speak), and you can show them your ads as they move around the web. Showing them the products they’ve recently viewed will hopefully...

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19 Mar

Five Ways Reviews Help Your Online Presence

Posted by Lorna Casswell

If you’ve spoken to us recently about SEO or improving conversion rates it’s very likely we’ve mentioned increasing the number of online reviews your product and brand receives. In today’s blog post we list five ways in which reviews can help your online business fly… Customer Confidence This is the obvious one, but we have to mention it because it’s so important! Having reviews on and off your website will do wonders for instilling trust in potential customers (assuming they’re good). If a customer is a nervous shopper, or is not familiar with your brand, having a host of positive reviews may reassure them enough to lead to a purchase. Better Looking Google Rankings If your site has lots of reviews then some relatively simple changes to the code could see your sta...

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