It’s the most wonderful time of the year… Our Specialists have been on their best behaviour in 2018, helping clients boost their online success and optimising their digital sales campaigns.
There’s not a lot that Team Tillison asks for, but seeing as it’s Christmas, we’ve written our letters to Santa and wished for a few things that would make our lives that little bit easier in 2019.
Mark Tillison – Head Elf / Managing Director
Dear Santa,
I’ve been really, really good this year and deserve a few small gifts. Nothing too significant, but they’d really help me and my fellow humans.
- I’d really like descriptive error messages in Google Ads – something helpful that might indicate why an ad is disapproved other than ‘it contradicts one of the 58 ad policies in this document, but we’re not going to tell you which one’.
- Whilst we’re on the subject of Google Ads, it would be amazing if we could have a method of proving conversion tracking without having to spend money clicking ads and completing a ghost transaction.
- I’ll leave you extra cookies on Christmas Eve, if you could find it in your heart to have WordPress change the link function back to how it was – having to click three times to add a link might sound trivial, but when you’re doing it 30 times a day, every day, it gets a bit irritating.
- For 2019, I’d really love it if all developers planned migration to new websites with their clients, rather than just deploying and killing all of the page equity and rankings. I’ve mentioned site migration planning before, but if you could just put my checklist in the stocking of every website designer and developer, it’ll be a great Christmas gift for the Internet.
- And some socks… Yes, really.
That should solve peace a goodwill to all, at least for a little while!
Antony Potts – PPC Strategist
Dear Santa,
What I would like more than anything in the digital marketing world – and I have been a very good boy – is some decent support from Facebook on their paid ads platform. A contact system, where a customer support rep answers 24 hours later, having not understood the question that you’ve asked, does not constitute a resolution to my problem.
I would elaborate, but it’s Christmas…
David Dunbar – Digital Marketing Campaign Manager
Dear Santa,
My biggest digital marketing wish is for Google Search Console to make its move from the old to the new. The new Search Console is a great piece of online software but it lacks in the features department compared to the old version, and dropping in and out from old to new slowly starts to become annoying.
To summarise, my biggest wish for 2019 is for the new Google Search Console to become complete.
Millie Grant – Digital Marketing Analyst
Dear Santa,
If I had one wish for Christmas, it would be for Google ads to give you suggestions on how to improve your quality score. A tool like this would help me out a lot when it comes to improving clients’ Google Ads accounts.
While Google already give you a vague insight as to why the quality score is low it would be very useful if they would show me what I can do to help improve it – whether that means increasing or decreasing a bid by a specific amount, updating the ad copy with a certain phrase, or suggesting a different landing page to send the ad to…
Ellie Ferguson – Content and Outreach Specialist
Dear Santa,
I have been really good this year, so I have a few wishes that would really help me and the rest of the team.
- Please could you put a stop the spammy links?! We all love a link but we are finding more backlink profiles flooded with unnecessary links from spammy domains which are not only hindering our clients rankings, but are also putting us at risk of being penalised by Google.
- Talking of spammers, if you could please have a firm talk with the SEO agencies who contact our clients, suggesting they can ‘fix’ SEO overnight, that would be great. It really doesn’t help with setting more realistic expectations that SEO is not a quick fix.
- A tall order, but worth an ask. If you could have a word with Google and convince them to release the details of the upcoming algorithms – or at least amend them in favour of our clients – we would be eternally grateful!
Danny Randon – Marketing Assistant
Dear Santa,
To quote the most overrated Christmas song of all time: ‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas, there is just one thing I need…’ – Surely it’s about time Twitter brings in an option to edit tweets? There’s nothing that makes me cringe harder than finding a typo too late, or noticing that the meta of a link preview hasn’t been properly pulled through.
If you could spare me the shame of having to take down a tweet when it’s already attracted likes and retweets, I’ll try to be on my best behaviour throughout 2019 – although I can’t promise anything…
Finally, when our SEO Strategist Jackie Wakefield sat down to write her letter to Santa, she went one step further and wrote a whole Christmas carol instead. Ladies and gentlemen…
SEO-nta Baby
SEO-nta baby, slip SEMrush under the tree for me,
I’ve been a digital whizz,
SEO-nta baby, make my downloads speedy tonight
SEO-nta baby, a DA50 inbound link too, that’s two,
I’ve waited a whole year,
SEO-nta baby, please increase my rankings tonight
Think of all the meta that I haven’t missed,
Think of the content that I have writ,
Next year I could be also good,
If you’ll check off my workload list.
SEO-nta baby, I want to rank for lots at the top, with my shop,
Been a winner this year,
SEO-nta baby, send my website traffic tonight.
SEO-nta honey, one thing I really do need, is speed
For my mobile site,
SEO-nta baby, Google my keywords tonight.
SEO-nta cutie, fill my stocking with PPC clicks and fix,
Broken links all the time,
SEO-nta cuite, and site crawl errors easy to find.
Come and trim my Christmas tree,
With rankings and traffic from Google please,
I really will link to you,
Let’s see if you will link to me.
Santa baby, forgot to mention redirect chains, a pain
I don’t mean to moan but
Santa baby, and hurry down the chimney tonight…
