As you may, or may not be, aware, WDL employed a new Digital Marketing Specialist at the start of December 2011 to look after new and existing clients’ Internet Marketing accounts. That new employee is me, Emma.

I wanted to write a company blog post to introduce myself and explain more about my background, the work I do, and the work I will be doing, at WDL.

Colchester, here I come

Life in Colchester began for me when I was 18 and I moved from a very small town in the West Country – Devizes, in Wiltshire, is famous for its castle, the Wadworth’s Brewery (famous for its 6X ale sold across the UK) and having one of the most impressive set of canal locks in the UK.

‘Why did I leave the gorgeous countryside to come to Colchester?’ I hear you ask; I moved to study a degree in Linguistics at Essex University and hopefully start a new life in a bigger town with more opportunity than the small town I was leaving.

During my stint at Uni, I specialised in foreign languages (Spanish, Portuguese and Italian), how people learn foreign languages, the hidden meaning behind what people say (Pragmatics) and the neuroscience of language (how it is stored and recalled from the brain), including language disorders (e.g. Specific Language Impairment and Aphasia).

I graduated from Essex University in 2007 with a 2:1 (Hons) in Linguistics and moved into my first job five months later as Online Editor of Compareandsave.com.

What on earth is SEO when it’s at home?

Initially, I was employed solely to write the content (e.g. news, blogs, guides, etc.) for compareandsave.com but, to do this well, I first had to get to grips with how the internet can be used to increase the visibility of products, services and opinions.

So, it was here that I was introduced to the world of Digital Marketing (I define this as ‘communicating to your target audience about something, using the internet as the medium in which the communication takes place’), including Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, Email Marketing , PR and, most importantly, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which I’d never heard of before.

Within the first few days of my new job, I started to learn that a degree in Linguistics was actually going to come in handy in Marketing and SEO, much to my surprise.

After all, in my humble opinion, Marketing is about communicating to others and my knowledge of the language used to communicate was going to help. Plus, search engines need to be ‘linguistically trained’ in order to understand what a searcher intends to find when he types a query (a word or phrase) into Google or Yahoo so that the most relevant results (web pages) can be returned. What’s more, search engines need to know how queries/words relate to each other in case other results/pages might be helpful to the searcher (i.e. synonyms).

Being fresh out of Uni, I could write – I’d done nothing but write essays for the last 4 years (there was a bit of partying in there too, though) – and the search engines love content so it was a match made in heaven.

Oh yes, the worlds of SEO and Marketing are all about the Linguistics.

What does this mean for WDL’s current and prospective clients?

I have the training, tools and experience to help you achieve increased online visibility and get your site in a better shape to rank well in the search engines – and it’s something I love to do.

For example:

If search engines love content then, so do I.

After solely managing all the content for one of the UK’s biggest comparison sites, I bring with me the tools to advise clients on tailor-made content strategies for their website(s). Once the content is planned out, I can write (or commission someone else to write) content that meets your customer’s demands and those of the search engines.

If search engines like looking at your site(s) in minute detail then, so do I.

Search engines rank websites based on hundreds of relevancy factors. I have the understanding of these (publicly-available) relevancy factors and the keen eye to find elements on your site(s) that need to be fixed in order to have a better chance of appearing for the queries that your potential customers make in the search engines. I can also look at the wealth of information provided by analytics programs to find areas where your site is and isn’t performing optimally for your users.

Of course, my experience can mean a lot more to you than the above two examples so, if you are looking to improve your website, not only for the search engines but to give your customers/users a better experience on the web, get in touch with me and I will do my very best to help you on the way to Online Marketing success. I look forward to working with you in the future!

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