James Gurd
Background in marketing & business development, working in both IT services & consumer retail. Expertise is in developing & implementing eCommerce strategies for SME's within retail - Robert Dyas & Betterware.
Following nearly 2 years as an Ecommerce Consultant at EIBDigital, a UK ecommerce agency, I now run Digital Juggler, an ecommerce and digital marketing consultancy. I specialise in planning, implementing and managing commercially sustainable ecommerce programmes. I am also experienced in people management, both teams I have directly managed and business partners/agencies.
I am a guest blogger for Econsultancy and Postcode Anywhere and Expert Editor for Smart Insights. I'm also the co-host of #ecomchat - a weekly industry Twitter chat for ecommerce professionals that takes place every Monday.
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It was about time we had another buzzphrase to obsess over, and Google Search, plus Your World (so concise) fits the bill perfectly.
Here is a social search algorithm update that ticks so many boxes it's like SEO bingo heaven.
I’ve read a lot of articles (some brilliant, one of which is Russell McAthy over on Freshegg, and some have no substance) about the implications of Search+.
After I let all the info sink in, a penny dropped. The conclusion I came to was that Search+ will inevitably be a new source of link spam...
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by James Gurd
24 February 2012 10:35am
8 comments
Is your web team using Webmaster Tools to improve site performance? If not, they should.
This post is for owners of e-commerce websites who don’t get involved in day-to-day operational trading/site optimisation and web managers/admin staff who aren’t using Webmaster Tools daily.
Ok so this isn’t new thinking, it’s not going to blow your mind with its creativity or innovation. But it’s important; the basics are essential.
I still meet Client teams (and occasionally agency staff) whom have either never heard of Google Webmaster Tools (yes I am going to focus on the mighty Google as it still dominates global market share, stats here.), or don’t really know how or why they should use it.
They really should use it as part of the overall site management toolkit.
Read on to learn why and see how easy it is to use the data to help inform your planning process.
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by James Gurd
06 February 2012 10:53am
0 comments
Whether you’re in B2C or B2B,
product data influences buyer behaviour. The quality and clarity of your data
will influence the decision making success of website visitors.
Good decisions require high quality data. The more complex the purchase
decision, the higher the demand for detailed product information.
There is a direct cost to
poor product data; someone has to retroactively go back and make changes, which
can be incredibly time consuming.
In previous roles, I have spent long evenings
correcting data mistakes because it wasn’t done properly in the first place.
Not a good use of anyone’s time.
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by James Gurd
28 November 2011 12:26pm
5 comments
It's an emotive debate this long vs short landing page one. I have read a lot of tirades against annoying sale
pages that scroll and scroll forever.
However, I have seen enough of these
long form pages (Here's Econsultancy's landing page) to know that people are using them
for a reason. It can't be coincidence.
And some of the companies using long
form are respected brands (e.g. Amazon) with digital pedigree, so why would
they contravene the basic tenets of usability and user experience?
This blog looks at the approaches and tools you can use to optimise your landing pages and take the emotion out of design and decision making.
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by James Gurd
22 August 2011 12:26pm
22 comments
In an interesting though at times over-excited Marketing Manifesto ebook Velocity proposes six B2B Staples, the first of which is content marketing.
Content has always been important to B2B, so why all of a sudden am I writing a blog post about it? For the simple reason that the business audience mindset has been shifting and digital content is the new brochure.
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by James Gurd
13 July 2011 10:31am
2 comments
It’s a long road this
path to digital enlightenment, and it involves many crossroads and epiphanies.
In
the past 10 years I’ve been implementing digital campaigns, defining e-commerce strategy and I’ve been agency-side responsible for a challenging set of retail
accounts. I’ve been on both sides
of the fence when dealing with agency relationships.
This blog takes a peek
at the wonderful mistakes I’ve made that today put me in a position of strength
and confidence. You might well recognise some of these from your own
experience, you might be able to suggest some more; we’re human after all.
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by James Gurd
08 April 2011 11:01am
10 comments
When I was a boy, I thought like a boy. It's true. When I first managed people in e-commerce, I didn't really know what good management was.
I had some good and bad experiences with my own managers but had never stopped to think what my team thought of my leadership style. Ironically it took the worst Director I've ever worked for to show me how to improve my management skills.
This blog offers nine techniques that, from personal experience, I know to be effective in managing and motivating a team. Management is about people, pure and simple. Forget the numbers; if you can't lead, motivate, support and inspire, those targets are history. Please take a read and then share your thoughts.
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by James Gurd
31 January 2011 10:01am
14 comments
I’ve been working with small charities and have been struck by the struggle they face when planning what do to with their websites. The big brand national charities have the luxury of employing web managers but smaller local charities don’t have the budget and there is often no in-house experience. So what should they do?
A website is essential to get mindshare even if it’s not driving direct revenue, so I started to think of a hit list small charities could work from to get their websites beyond the purely functional.
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by James Gurd
04 January 2011 12:03pm
15 comments
Content is king for many reasons but principally because content helps satisfy your visitors’ information needs, driving conversion, and it enables search engines to include your webpages in SERPs for relevant keywords and phrases.
So why do many web owners fail to keep their websites fresh and leave old content hanging around waiting to be put out to pasture? The common theme I’ve picked up on is that web teams struggle to know what content to produce and how to prove that the time invested has an ROI, so it becomes their bete-noire.
This blog tackles the first dilemma and sets out simple rules that will help structure the creation of relevant content.
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by James Gurd
24 November 2010 11:53am
10 comments
Web analytics is still a missing art in many businesses, not just retail. Analytics is the last station on the investment train ride and is often compromised to pump more money into direct revenue generating digital marketing like PPC.
But why would any sane person put more money into something they don't fully understand and for which KPIs may not be optimised? It seems a strange decision.
My gut feeling is that there are too few optimisation specialists Client-side who really get web analytics 2.0. Dashboards are created and reports circulated to tick the analysis box yet limited insight is provided.
If conversion for referral traffic has dropped off the cliff, is that good or bad? I don't know. Even your data doesn't know but hidden within are nuggets of insight, you just need the focus and perseverance to find them.
This blog looks at a few examples of how data can be turned into insight to drive commercial decisions.
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by James Gurd
02 September 2010 10:36am
7 comments
