Well thought out timelines for each client can certainly help with project management, but as an account manager of several different clients, there is sure to be an overlap. And client work is not the only thing which takes up precious time during the working day. Reading, keeping up to date with industry news, strategies and techniques is essential to anyone working in such a fast moving industry. As well as this, Twitter and other social media platforms are constantly pushing through information and articles. I often find myself fighting to resist the urge to check every two seconds whether I have missed any important or useful information.

On top of this, there are many things we as SEO’s have to keep track of day to day, including rankings, link activity, brand awareness, micro tasks etc. For this reason I think organisation plays a huge role in this industry. Therefore I was curious to see how top SEO experts choose to organise and optimise their productivity and workflow. I decided to ask several experts in the industry via a small questionnaire about how they manage their time and workflow, to gain a better understanding of what tools are out there and what tactics are best for increasing organisation and productivity.

Here were the questions:

• How do you allocate your time during a typical work day?
• What tools do you use to manage your projects and workflow?
• What SEO tools do you use or recommend?
• What is your main focus when you are working on SEO?
• How do you track your time spent?
• How do you allocate your time for personal branding and company branding?

And here are the answers.. enjoy!

Justin Briggs

@justinbriggs

How do you allocate your time during a typical work day?

This has changed a lot recently. I just moved from in-house to full time consulting, so I’ll talk about my last job. When I worked in-house, most of my time resolved around and was structured by others.

An example day might look like:

-Wake at around 8, turn on some Netflix and catch-up on Twitter
-Get to office about 9:30. Go to marketing managers meeting – review customer numbers and pacing, product releases, game releases, major sales, strategy updates, and round robin updates on various channels.
- Take team for coffee out of office. Chat mostly about ideas related to some new project we’re considering.
- Catch up on emails.
- Meet with product and UX teams to help define the Business Requirements Document for a new project
- Sit in on meeting with SEO agency to discuss on-going link building efforts
- Lunch with a team member
- Meet with PR about upcoming press announcements
- Generate some SQL to get statistics about forum usage
- Meet with community manager to review data, discuss strategy, and define new ranking algorithms for forums.
- Interview prospective marketing web developer.
- Swing by VP of Customer Acquisition’s office to chat about candidate, catch up on the day, and waste about 10 minutes chatting about something ridiculous / funny.
- Weekly 1:1′s with my team.
- Fire up TextMate and Versions to build a new microsite, backfilling work until I can hire a new webdev.
- Go home, turn on a movie / tv show, fix dinner. Chat with friends on IM / text.
- Spend about an hour or two catching up on work email I didn’t get to during the day.
- Catch up on Twitter and Hacker News. Skim personal email for anything that looks important.
- Switch to a personal project, blog post, or upcoming presentation
- Go to bed about 1:30 am

What tools do you use to manage your projects and workflow?

While working in-house: Basecamp for some agencies. Trello for my team. JIRA for company-wide product launches. Email and my calendar. I relied heavily on my calendar. I used Exchange / Outlook at work, but Google Apps for personal.

What SEO tools do you use or recommend?

Excel, Screaming Frog, SEOmoz, email client, telephone, whiteboard, Google Chrome (Developer Tools), TextMate, headphones and coffee

What is your main focus when you are working on SEO?

My main focus was organizational effectiveness. Knowing the product problems to solve was never an issue, it was moving a 700 person organization in unison towards a goal defined by our team without having direct authority to drive product. When I worked agency side before moving in-house, being effective was always a focus. It’s easy to deliver a report or give a recommendation, it’s hard to get things done, especially in a larger organization.

My other focus was my team. I’d work with them on education, philosophy, and strategy. Most importantly, I’d do my best to make my team somewhere they wanted to come every week.

How do you track your time spent?

Tasks and projects via Trello with my team.

I’d do bi-weekly 1:1 with the VP of Customer Acquisition. Our process was for her to outline my work and our conversation in an email, then the next 1:1 we copy the last 1:1 into a reply and modify it with updates and completions, and send it. At the end of the year, we’d both have a long email thread of everything I worked on and we talked about.

How do you allocate your time for personal branding and company branding?

I try to keep my personal branding separate from work. Other than tweeting, I’d do all personal branding work at home. This usually means I’m writing blog posts, reading, and researching in the middle of the night. They didn’t cover conferences, so I pay for those out of pocket. I try to speak as often as I can, to help save costs. It is a hard balance at time, because work priorities come first. When you work in an agency, the objectives of the company align with building your personal brand better than when you work at a company where the product is very different.

I try to put out something of value (blog post or presentation) at least every 2 months. It’s not as frequently as I did two years ago. I’ve put more focus on learning new skills outside of SEO in the last year, like management, leadership, and finance.

Richard Baxter

@richardbaxter

How do you allocate your time during a typical work day?

As far as our agency is concerned, we allocate time based on the size of the contract we have with each client. We’re in a fortunate position where we’re lucky to spend a lot of time on typically fewer clients than most agencies – this has been enormously beneficial to our client retention levels, and it gives my team the time, space and creativity to be great at what they’re doing. I manage my time based on priority – I tend to work from a task list, obviously things crop up and I have a lot of meetings and a lot of international travel between our US and UK offices. I also work as close to inbox zero as possible!

What tools do you use to manage your projects and workflow?

SEOgadget has it’s own in house task management and workflow platform (internally known as Zorg) – it helps us interface with our copywriters, clients, helps us report on time spent – it’s pretty awesome!

What SEO tools do you use or recommend?

We’re heavy users of SEOmoz’s Mozscape API, Majestic SEO’s API, aHrefs, Uservoice, Qualaroo, Clicktale, Visual Website Optimiser, Advanced Web Ranking, Searchmetrics, and of course we have a growing internal platform of API services, reporting and task management systems.

What is your main focus when you are working on SEO?

Marketing to the right people in the right place. First and foremost, I’ve always been extremely technically inclined (as are many of our team) but in reality, 80% of our business is in content marketing, and has been for a long time. Ultimately I think we all care about getting the right eyeballs on the right content in the right places. Do that, and you’re doing SEO the right way.

How do you track your time spent?

That’s the same answer as Q2

How do you allocate your time for personal branding and company branding?

Not brilliantly. The company has come first for a long time, but as a start-up, this has been our biggest challenge. We’re extremely dependent on our blog, industry recognition and conference speaking (which are all really important marketing tools for us), finding the time to be everywhere at all times is a little challenging to say the least. With that said, as we grow we seem to be spreading naturally. Today (for example) Jon and Dan are running a Mozinar for SEOmoz, while Laura Lippay’s speaking at Pubcon in New Orleans. I’m taking the day off!

Pete Campbell

@petecampbell

How do you allocate your time during a typical work day?

I get into work early each-morning, and using my own SCRUM-like system, review the backlog of work and plan the day ahead while drinking a badly-made cup of tea (as I’m still half awake).

First, I sit with my team to review yesterday and help with today’s work. Client/internal meetings take up the rest of the morning.

I use afternoons to get the ‘real’ SEO work done and complete same-day turnaround tasks. With emails, I deal with them straight away if they need a quick answer, or flag for later.

What tools do you use to manage your projects and workflow?

After fluttering with a ton of different apps, I’ve settled down to using a mixture of Trello and excel-based to-do lists for each of my clients.

The big problem with these tools is none really fit the typical lifestyle of an SEO. Each day is a mixture of long-term, reactive, personal and collaborative tasks. Most of the good apps (i.e. basecamp, remember the milk) are designed to just solve one of those problems really well.

Trello comes pretty close though, it’s like a useful pin-board, I have four cards covering today’s work, this weeks, one for team tasks and the last for ideas that I’d love to do, but never seem to get round to it!

What SEO tools do you use or recommend?

Excel, excel and excel. I use a ton of different tools, but always end up exporting the raw data and analysing it to get the answers I’m looking for.

If I had to pick an SEO Tool dream-team, I’d pick Screaming Frog and Chrome Developer tools (just right click, choose inspect element in chrome) for on-page/technical analysis. For link analysis, it’d be Majestic SEO and NetPeaks, a relatively unknown tool that let’s you pull any off-site metrics in bulk, rounding it off with AuthorityLabs for rank tracking.

What is your main focus when you are working on SEO?

Just to get stuff done, and do it better than I did before. I work across everything SEO or content related, so I do find it pretty tough to not get distracted.

The lesson I’ve learnt is to set myself big-picture goals for what I want to achieve each week, month and do my best to work towards those each day, whether it be coming up with & delivering an awesome new bit of creative content, or just doing a good job for a challenging new client.

How do you track your time spent?

I tend to do the opposite! I’d say after working in SEO for a few years now, I’ve got a good feel for how long a task will take, dependent on the scale of it. So I’ll plan in advance my time most days.

There are a few time-tracking apps, but their both a little creepy and usually a nuisance. oDesk Team is the best one I’ve experienced, which will take regular screenshots of your desktop (or even their webcam! eeek..) combined with simple work diaries.

It won’t shock you to learn I am currently 7 weeks overdue on my company time-sheets. Let’s just say I’m too busy getting results for clients (right?)

How do you allocate your time for personal branding and company branding?

The secret is just put a strict routine in place. I tend to get up early at weekends to work on personal projects. During weekdays, I tend to have SEO brain-freeze after work, unless I have something on my mind I just need to reactively blog/rant about (usually when Google makes my life harder with an animal-themed algorithm update).

Seb Mower

@sebtheSEO

How do you allocate your time during a typical work day?

I do more technical work first thing in the morning whilst my brain is fresh. Reporting and client liaison I try to save for the afternoons. Being a one-man-band, days are often very long. Invariably complicated work can end up being done until the early hours. I try to spend at least an hour a day reading – usually in the evening – in such a fast-paced industry you can fall behind very quickly.

What tools do you use to manage your projects and workflow?

I use good old Excel as a dashboard for my various campaigns. From here I can record progress with on/off page content strategies, rankings, on-site optimisation, traffic etc. I also treat my inbox as a to do list – mail doesn’t get filed until it has been dealt with satisfactorily.

What SEO tools do you use or recommend?

I use Majestic and SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer for back link research. SEMrush for keyword research is pretty good. Outbrain for outreach on bigger projects. Resources like Bloggerlinkup are pretty tremendous too.

What is your main focus when you are working on SEO?

I like to set a flawless foundation – i.e. get the technical performance of a website nailed and ensure the site is optimised for suitable terms. Without the foundation, all other work is futile.

Once the foundation is in place (or at least ready to be built on), I concentrate on what the client actually does. What are they good at? What do they offer that’s different to their competitors? Who do they work with? I then try to leverage these assets. SEO to me is about setting a solid website foundation then finding reasons for the related to community to interact with it.

How do you track your time spent?

Tricky question. I occasionally find that I go over the hours I’ve allocated because an issue required a lot more research. This is where I happily work late into the night because I’m learning something new which will benefit future clients. The longer I work as a consultant, the more accurate my quoting has become.

How do you allocate your time for personal branding and company branding?

I try to do a good job and build relationships with everyone I come into contact with. As a result, my reputation has improved and people talk about me on their websites.

My own website is testament to this strategy, with tons of converting traffic I’ve done absolutely nothing underhand to achieve.

Joe Griffiths

@B3Joseph

How do you allocate your time during a typical work day?

Usually I have meetings and calls every day so it’s just a case of fitting client tasks and internal management in between those. I tend to be quite strict with my task management and allocate 30 minutes on a morning and 30 minutes at the end of the day to make sure everything is in order and evaluate the day’s work. This usually means coming in a little early and living a later in the day but it’s worth it to have control over my own workload.

What tools do you use to manage your projects and workflow?

I tend to use a combination of Outlook and Excel to organise my day when I get in on a morning. In Outlook I flag and categorise the emails that come in and I organise my tasks in Excel when a bit more information is needed.

What SEO tools do you use or recommend?

The main tools I use are a lot of the SEOmoz tools (their crawler mostly!) and Searchmetrics for quickly diagnosing problems on new sites. We actually have some really smart guys internally that have created most of the tools I use on a day to day basis, so nothing I can really share here

What is your main focus when you are working on SEO?

An overall strategy for my client. Both off page, on page and where to prioritise and allocate resource in order to produce the best ROI. It’s a bit of a hard one to answer because my clients have different focuses depending on what will give the best results.

How do you track your time spent?

I have a timesheet in Excel at the moment that I update throughout the day. I’ve tried to monitor timings closely with desktop stopwatches but that just takes too much time out of my day when I could spend that time focusing on client work.

How do you allocate your time for personal branding and company branding?

It’s hard to justify personal branding when I have client work that needs completing each day but Company branding is a bit different and I’m allowed to use time to contribute to the Branded3 blog which is pretty awesome.

I would love to hear everyone’s comments below on how you manage your workflow. What tools you use, strategies you implement for increasing your productivity. Or if you are really inefficient and useless at organising yourself, then hopefully this blog post has helped a bit!
By Lucy Kirkness

CC Image from martinak15.

Below is a simple and awesome way to look back on the progress of the race for the current US Presidential Election, using Google Trends, mixed with news headlines.

The graphs show – quite simply – a normalized representation of worldwide data for the search queries “barack obama” and “mitt romney” over time. Normalization of the data allows for easy comparison of the two data sets.

You will also notice, when you use Google Trends, that any line graph generated will hit the value ‘100’ once. This maximises the value of the data by respecting the time period to which it applies (there will always be a maximum volume of search queries within any given dates, which is represented by the value ‘100’).

So why are search query volumes important? Well, they are a barometer of public interest in any given subject… perhaps one of the most useful. As our real and virtual lives become increasingly intertwined, and our technology allows us more opportunity to search anywhere and anytime, so this barometer’s accuracy will sharpen over time.

According to a white paper hosted on the University of Michigan’s website, the size of the Surface Web (Visible or Indexable Web) was estimated to be around 19 terabytes, whereas the size of the Invisible Web was estimated to be around 7,500 terabytes – and this was back in 2001. Mind boggling.

Because search engines only explore a very small proportion of the World Wide Web, the Invisible Web seems like a very tempting resource, especially if you are searching for something abstract or ambiguous. Google alone covers around 8 billion pages, but this pales into insignificance when one includes all this unseen information.

There are many tools and resources you can use to search the Deep Web, for example The WWW Virtual Library (started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web). Another great resource is Complete Planet, which calls itself “the front door to the invisible web”.

Searching the Deep Web can be fun and interesting for any extreme searchers out there. In reality, however, most businesses do not want their website to be stuck in the invisible web or for any of their pages to be inaccessible – even temporarily! To ensure that this doesn’t happen, it’s important to optimise your site and to ensure that it is visible to search engines and the public.

For more information regarding Search Engine Optimisation, Link Building, and ways to ensure your content is visible contact us today!

The problem is to do with Audition’s panning settings…

Navigate to Edit > Preferences > Multitrack (tab) and change your ‘Stereo Panning Mode’ to ‘Left/Right cut logarithmic’.

Then select OK.

Now select ‘Mulitrack’ view.
Navigate to View > Advanced Session Properties (or just press CTRL + P).
Again, change the panning mode to ‘L/R Cut Logarithmic’.

Save the session and restart Audition.

Now try and export a mixdown. You should be good to go – with no drop in volume!

Hope that helps!

by Sean, Motion Graphic Designer

Want us to make you a cool animation for your website?… Get in touch, we’re nice

Video editors suffering from a lack of time in the day will benefit from our After Effects close shave below; perfectly designed to shave extra seconds here and there – which we all know add up considerably over time…

Working with Properties

• A   Anchor Point
• P   Position
• S   Scale
• R   Rotation
• T   Opacity

• U Show all animating properties
• UU Reveal modified properties
• SS Solo selected properties
• Ctrl + D Duplicate a layer
• Ctrl + C Copy a layer
• Ctrl + P Paste a layer

Controlling the Timeline

• Ctrl+N Create a comp
• Shift+# Place a comp marker
• Alt+Home Move a layer to 00:00
• Alt+End Move a layer to end of comp
• Ctrl+I Import a file
• Ctrl+K Open composition settings
• Ctrl+/ Add selected source to top layer in current composition
• Ctrl+/ Add selected source to top layer in current composition
• Open Interpret Footage dialog – Select footage in Project window and type Ctrl+F
• , Zoom in comp
• . Zoom out comp
• F2 Deselect all layers
• Home Return to 00:00
• End Return to end of comp
• Control+G Bring up Go to Time dialog
• [ Move In point of layer to CTI(Current Time Indicator)
• ] Move Out point of layer to CTI(Current Time Indicator)

by Sean, Motion Graphics Designer


We hope you found that helpful… If you’d like us to create you a cool animation for your website or online marketing campaign, then get in touch right now!

Back in the day, whilst Hex Digital’s Google-obsessed Managing Director was still working from Google themselves, he was lumbered with the unenviable task of attempting to persuade me to migrate from the old school, client-based heathen of an email system, Outlook, to the lightening fast, cloud-based future of email, Gmail. See what they did with the ‘G’ there.

Having grown up on a diet of Microsoft, Microsoft & more Microsoft, the idea of cloud computing was not always a winner in my eyes. Which is strange, considering my 10 year long love affair with the Compact Disc was brushed aside in an instant when the mp3 came on the scene. The CD’s younger, sexier, more elusive offspring that wouldn’t let you hold its hand in public. And I even uninstalled Internet Explorer with gay abandon as soon as Chrome was unveiled in all its bug-riddled glory. Yet I clung on to my desktop client for dear life. No one would put my emails in the cloud!

Looking back, god knows why. I’ve recently spoken with a number of relatively tech-savvy people that are still, in 2012, in that frame of mind. And in a way I can see why, familiar shortcuts, familiar layout, Bill Gates, blah blah blah.

App Support

 
Enter App Support. In two minds as to whether to make the jump? App Support will take you gently in its arms and walk you down the cozy path to enlightenment, laughing knowingly at you as you delight in every one of Gmail’s intuitive features. From basic setup to advanced shortcuts and functionality, you’ll be flying through your emails at the speed of light before you know it.

Need some tips on what to do with your external hard drive now Google are kindly hosting your data for you? How about a retro style book end, or a fancy coaster for all the extra cups of tea you’ll be able to drink now you’ll receive 30% less spam?

Check out App Support for all the latest tips, tricks and help guides on Gmail…

by Matt, Technical Director

Image CC: The U.S. Army

Google Alerts is a simple and free tool used to monitor anything on the Web; for example blogs and news articles. It sends you an email every time it finds new results dependent on your settings. The scope of Google Alerts is only limited by your imagination, so think creatively, and (if you are not already) start taking full advantage of it!

Here are a few ways you can use Google Alerts to influence your brand, site traffic, and sales.

Monitoring your Brand

You can set up various alerts to notify you of activities relating to your brand online. You could monitor where your brand has been mentioned in online discussions, or where these mentions have not resulted in a link back to your website. In the case of the latter, you can set up email alerts to notify you automatically every time this happens. This opens up opportunities for your business to ensure that you are getting links where they are due, and the ability to address any feedback you may find in online discussions.

Monitoring your Competitors

Just as you can monitor your own brand, it’s also extremely useful to monitor your competition. Keep a close eye on their online activity, positive/negative feedback, news, or new links, as all of this is useful information which you can use to your advantage. In particular, consider using this information to find link building opportunities, and to see which of your competitors’ online marketing strategies have been successful.

Monitoring Online Shoppers

If you are an eCommerce business, you can use Google Alerts to target shoppers in your niche. By using various search queries you can set up Google Alerts so that you get an email every time a shopper is ready to buy online, but hasn’t yet made that step. For example, you could seek to monitor potential customers in online discussions comparing the best prices, or the cheapest products. This way you can directly target potential customers.

Finding Guest Blogging Opportunities

You can use Google Alerts to monitor blogs in your niche which have guest posting opportunities. Most of these blogs have a page stating how to submit a post. So by using various common footprints, for example, “submit a post” * or “write for us” * you can monitor blogs for new guest blogging opportunities.

by Lucy, SEO Account Manager

For more information regarding Search Engine Optimisation strategies, link building and online reputation management, contact us today!

We have recently added a new and wonderful service to our arsenal: animation and video production for the web. We’re hugely excited about video, and in particular its ability to transform user engagement.

Take a look at our showreel!

Of course, there’s some fantastic work out there already on the Web. We had a good long look through (which was an absolute pleasure) and produced this top 5… Enjoy!

1. Sitting at number one “The Backwater Gospel”

   
2. In close 2nd “The Tale of The Three Brothers”

   
3. In 3rd with this amazing use of CGI “The Third & The Seventh”

   
4. Next up, an entertaining motion infographic “Irritable Bowl Syndrome”

   
5. This funky old school animation came in a respectful 5th “Creativite”

   

To be honest, there is no way of picking 5 top animations with the vast amount of unbelievable work out there, but at least you got to see some tasty visuals.

Know of anymore incredible animations? Why not leave a link in the comment section below?…

Do you want an animation made? Check out our web video production service!

Google Analytics has announced a new feature called Shortcut to find your favourite reports in a more efficient way. This Shortcut feature allows you to save changes made to your reports, as opposed to reconfiguring them each time you open Google Analytics. Any standard or custom report can be added as a Shortcut, and all report settings and customisations are saved except the date range (so remember to ensure that the range you are looking at is accurate!). Shortcut reports can be exported or emailed, just like any other standard or custom reports.

Shortcut reports which have been created appear in the menu under the “Home” tab in Google Analytics. If you want changes made in the report to be there next time you view it, simply save them by clicking the button in the menu bar. You can also manage your Shortcut reports from the Overview page, allowing you to view or delete them. Bear in mind that any scheduled email will also be removed once your Shortcut report is deleted.

If you need help with any aspect of Analytics, why not get in touch with us?

Now, Mac crashes are rare, but they do occur. If anything, third party software may crash.

Once the flashbacks of Windows have subsided and you’ve recovered from the initial shock of a genuine problem occurring, you may need to close the culprit program that has stopped responding.

If you can’t access the Apple menu, then here’s a quick tip for all you mac users out there…

(So press the Apple Command Key, the Alt [options key] and the Escape key [top left] simultaneously*)

It is effectively the equivalent of hitting ‘Ctrl + Alt + Delete’ on a Windows machine and allows you to access the Force Quit Applications panel.

We hope you find this useful!

*Hint for computer novices: When executing keyboard shortcuts involving multiple keys, it’s worth holding down the first two keys one at a time then tapping the last key. If you try and press them all simultaneously in one go, you will probably miss one!