Blog

A new Government-led programme designed to support and grow small enterprises has proven a huge success with two Shropshire businesswomen. Helen Culshaw, director of Ascendancy Internet Marketing, based in Shifnal, has been working with Egyptian mezze connoisseur Marina Ibrahim, of Cooking Like Cleopatra, as a Growth Voucher advisor providing strategic advice on digital marketing. The work has enabled Marina Ibrahim, who offers authentic…

If you’ve spoken to anyone in the web industry recently on the topic of search engine optimisation, you may well have heard of some big changes that have happened over the last couple of years that have affected how websites are ranked on Google. You may also have heard talk of “SEO doesn’t work any more”, “Links – we shouldn’t be building those any more should we?” and so on – particularly,…

A Shropshire internet expert is warning businesses to be aware of invalid certification badges when choosing a marketing agency to manage their Google advertising. Helen Culshaw, Director of Ascendancy Internet Marketing in Shifnal, says many online agencies offering Google AdWords services are displaying out of date accreditation badges. She said: “Many internet marketing agencies are still displaying certification badges from the previous…

Recently I was lucky enough to be invited to a Google Partners event in Manchester – bringing Google Partners up to speed with the latest AdWords product announcements, and giving agencies useful guidance on business development. What did I learn? Here’s my rundown of the key issues covered: Continuing emphasis on mobile Following on from 2013’s introduction of enhanced campaigns, the focus at Google AdWords is still very much…

On Bank Holiday Monday, Radio 4 listeners were treated to the sound of Ascendancy’s very own Helen Culshaw. Helen was invited to chat to Woman’s Hour about the challenges faced by women in rural enterprise, and went off to BBC Radio Shropshire to record her piece alongside Polly Gibb, Director…

If you’re shopping around for a new website, you’re probably finding it difficult to choose between the myriad providers out there in the marketplace. All web agencies tend to say the same thing – that they have fantastic customer service, unparallelled technical skill, etc, etc. Rather than just SAYING we do all those things, we thought we’d start trying to prove it – so we’ve started surveying our web design…

On March 26th we celebrated our 10 years in business with a party fit for a 10 year old! With balloons, birthday cake, and a host of party games, including giant Jenga, Scalextric and Nerf darts, many of our clients and suppliers came to celebrate with us, and get to know each other better too. We’d like to thank all those who came and enjoyed the party with us, and special thank yous go out to Patshull Park Hotel, who hosted our event so…

As anyone running a Google AdWords account to promote their business knows, it’s usually relatively straight forward to track online enquiries that the campaign generates – using goals to track enquiry forms or clicks on mailto links, or using ecommerce tracking on ecommerce sites. However, many enquiries  – in the case of some businesses, the majority of enquiries – won’t come through online at all, but via a…

We’re delighted to announce that we’re now officially a Growth Vouchers Accredited Adviser. This means that those who’ve been awarded a Growth Voucher may be able to claim up to £2,000 funding on a match funded bases towards strategic digital technology advice from Ascendancy! The Growth Vouchers programme is available to small businesses in England who have been trading for at least one year, have 49 employees or fewer, and…

At Ascendancy we’re hugely proud of our Google Partner status – but what does it mean, and why should you work with a Google Partner to run your Google AdWords campaign? Google Partners replaced the previous ‘Google Advertising Professional’ scheme in November last year and…

I’m delighted to tell you all that as of January 4th, 2014, Ascendancy Internet Marketing has been helping businesses with their digital marketing needs for a full 10 years! For those of you who’ve not been with us for the full 10 year journey, here’s a recap of what the last 10 years have brought us: How the business came about There were so many reasons for starting the business. I’d only been out at work for about 6…

Recently, we’ve had quite a few questions from clients about Google Authorship – specifically how to go about setting it up. For the uninitiated, Google Authorship markup is a bit of code that links the content on your website (articles or pages you have written) with your Google+ profile. The result of this is that your Google+ profile picture and a link to your Google+ profile appear next to content you’ve published in…