FDM Campaigns Earn Finalist Places in the UK Search Awards

First Digital Media SEO – Escape Campers

Our Escape Campers campaign is nominated for:

• Best SEO Campaign (Small)
• Best Use of Search – B2C (SEO) (Small)
• Best Use of Search – Automotive (Small)
• Best Low Budget Campaign (SEO) (Small)

A lot of the details leading up to this campaign are present in a case study on our history with Escape Campers. Our relationship with the client began as a paid media one, though the client would later move away from us temporarily, favouring an agency in their area with promises of creating videos and media for their social campaigns.

However, late last year their developer launched an updated site. Unfortunately, this site wasn’t fit for purpose. AI-generated text and categories promised products they don’t offer, there were no redirects in place to support a changed URL structure, and several other issues affected the site. As long-term readers will know, we have experience fixing website launch disasters.

We worked with the client to prioritise and make changes, taking over their SEO to restore what had been lost and to bolster the site. We became their SEO agency. Not only did we reverse the drop in organic traffic, we’ve also seen the organic performance of the site rise to new heights, tailoring content and linking strategies to Escape’s Ideal Customer Profiles.

Since the case study was published, we’ve seen the site go from under a thousand visitors a month organically to five thousand. We’ve watched their qualified leads track upwards steadily. And, after supporting them so well on SEO, we were invited to return as their agency for Meta and Google Ads.

In The Client’s Own Words

“Our previous digital marketing company wasn’t producing results and lacked communication, so we went shopping for a new partner. From the outset, FDM asked the right questions, showed a real interest in the business and were knowledgeable in the areas we needed focus. Since day one going live we saw an instant improvement in results. The team we’ve been working with on ad campaigns give great feedback and have regular updates which is crucial and exactly what we require.”

– Andy Burgess, Escape Campers

Why Update?

Online search is a huge business. In 2023, Google’s revenue from online advertising broke $200 billion. So dominant is their market share that it’s easy to imagine they’ll always have control of the online search market – but the only way for them to stay ahead is for Google search results to have more value to the user than anyone else’s.

This has been the driving force behind every big update to the algorithm, going back years. Lately, they’ve happened more and more often – there were nine big Google updates in 2023. In 2024 we’re a little way behind that pace, with only four updates so far, but they started with a bang.

How Do the 2024 Google Updates Affect Your Site?

Continuing a trend set by the Helpful Content Update in last September, the focus of Google’s updates this year is on improving the relevance and value of the top-ranked pages for any given search. In March, Google did something unprecedented: as well as launching two big updates in the same week, they actively deindexed hundreds of offending sites.

One of the updates was a Google Core Update. Often, Google can be quite vague about these, but in this case, they provided a lot of information. The goal of the Core Update was to improve the search engine’s ranking systems – making it quicker and easier for Google to recognise top-quality, relevant content, as well as making it harder to ‘fake’ high quality content through any of the dozens of dubious tricks employed over the years – including the latest option, creating an AI-driven content farm.

At the same time, they launched the final Helpful Content Update. Remember, Google wants to keep users from changing search engine, so the content users find has to be helpful to them.

What Does Google Mean by Helpful Content?

Tired of your current SEO service provider? Seen a drop in your Google results & positions? We work with you to optimise your website, improve your Google rankings and combat Google’s ever-changing updates.

A Brief History of Google Updates

Google Florida was the first big Google update, and in the SEO community it got its name because it was rolled out just before Pubcon Florida that year and became the main topic of conversation at the event.

More importantly, Florida was Google’s first real attempt to combat search engine manipulation; it ignored links to your site from irrelevant pages. This changed how linkbuilding had to be done and eliminated one of the early, straightforward ways to cheat your way to the top of the rankings.

Two years later came the Big Daddy update, which adopted a nickname from one of the Pubcon attendees. Google slowly replaced all its old data centres with new ones which processed information differently.

Big Daddy wasn’t designed to combat spam but simply to better push good websites – websites that actually answer the user’s questions and give them what they need to know. Google was looking to whittle down the number of pages it needed to care about, eliminating low quality pages and sites designed to manipulate rankings.

However, this didn’t prevent people from carrying out ‘shortcuts’, tricks which would artificially boost a website’s rankings without making it more valuable to the end user. There are still a few agencies like that in our industry, but the balance tipped in 2011 when Google Panda was released.

Google Panda dealt with webspam and other dubious tactics, and one aspect of how it worked was to introduce penalties. Before, updates had just rewarded sites that gave users a better experience. Panda allowed Google to actively suppress sites from results if they were obviously operating in bad faith.

Panda was later joined by Penguin, SpamBrain, and the Helpful Content Updates, among many others, all of which significantly reduced the web presence of many websites which were using shortcuts to get to or stay at the top.

And that brings us back to AI Search.

What Works to Improve Your Performance in AI Search?

This blog is being written at the tail end of September 2025. It seems likely that at least some of what we discuss in this section will be outdated within twelve months, and possibly even by the end of the year.

You may well have seen people on LinkedIn promising a secret shortcut to the top of the AI search results, and you’ll have seen others say that there isn’t any such thing.

Actually, there have been some very successful experiments. At the moment, posting links to key pages in the middle of essays on LinkedIn, Reddit, or other UGC (User Generated Content) sites can be effective in some fields – but we don’t recommend doing this heavily.

Why not? Because AI search is in its infancy. When search engines were in their infancy, shortcuts and cheap tricks still worked and weren’t penalised.

It’s hard to imagine that the engineers of AI search won’t learn from history. The equivalents of Google Panda – where overusing a technique that doesn’t add value get the site penalised – will not be a decade away. They might be less than a year away.

Alternatively, analysis of pages that are successful in AI Search suggests that most of the websites that are referenced most often also dominate their rankings in traditional search.

This means that, at least for the time being, one of the best ways to perform well in AI Search is to focus on what works for SEO – or rather, for a part of it. It’s been shown that Schema structured data, for example, is not currently used by AI systems. (We still recommend Schema be maintained on your site, however, for the 90% of searches that don’t go through an AI – and the same is true for other technical issues that could affect regular search. It’s not over yet!)

Agentic Behaviour and the Future of AI Search

Before you dismiss the above as not having faith in AI, we do recognise that the field is growing, and that means AI search can have value to our clients.

As such, we keep a close eye on developments – we’re just not going to use techniques for our clients that will see them penalised in the future. It might be easy to pump our numbers that way, but planting a ticking timebomb on a client’s website isn’t how First Digital Media operates.

As such, we keep a close eye on the state of AI search, new experiments, and also on plans the big names have announced. Something to watch for in the near future will be trials of agentic search.

What is agentic search? It’s asking AI agents to handle a multi-step process for you. You might say “Give me four different methods to get a poorly, crying child to sleep, and compare their pros and cons”. In that situation, you probably don’t have time to do that kind of deep research, but the results could make your life much easier.

Once agentic search is performing properly, the likelihood is that we’ll also see agentic commerce.

It might be as simple as “buy me tickets to a Chappell Roan gig in Manchester, don’t spend more than £150”, or as complicated as “Order all the ingredients I’ll need for a red velvet cake, make sure it’s all next day delivery”. The AI will then run through all the steps needed to make the order.

Our prediction is that running paid ads that target agentic commerce will be an extremely effective (if highly competitive) option. It’s easy to see Google, Microsoft, and Meta Ads agencies getting very involved in this. Our eCommerce team are watching developments carefully; whatever reservations you may have, the odds are good that it’s something we’ll have to contend with.

So while we predict that the renamings won’t stick, and that the gurus offering shortcuts will be storing up future damage for their clients, we keep our eyes open. If you’d like a sensible approach to search (AI and otherwise), why not get in touch?

Why is Content Marketing Important?

A well-defined content marketing strategy puts you in front of your competitors. It helps businesses attract, engage and retain their target audience with valuable, relevant and consistent content. By aligning your content with your business goals, you create something that has value.

Over time, you will build trust with your audience, so they will likely choose your brand over your competitors.

Getting Started with Content Marketing

A successful content marketing campaign doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Below are some tips to get started:

Identify Your Audience

As a company, you need to ensure you understand your audience and how to engage with them. Segmenting your customers allows you to identify the types of content that will best resonate with their persona.

Determine the Right Format

The correct format matches which stage of the sales cycle you are creating content for. Consider which format best helps you to showcase your value. For example, for some, it will be infographics, for others it will be email marketing.

Establish KPIs

As a business, you should establish content marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to help you to understand how your content is performing. The KPIs you choose depends on your goals. Some businesses track conversions; others track content engagement.

Create Engaging Content

Professional content needs to inform and entertain your audience. Ensure it is clear and well-written, and that it works with the channel you are using.

Set a Schedule

You need to be consistent to attract regular traffic and search engine crawlers. By creating a posting schedule, you can release content regularly and timely.

Why Use Infographics?

There are plenty of good reasons to use infographics as part of your marketing.

• They’re great for visual learners
• You can lay facts and figures out clearly
• They’re eyecatching
• They get shared

The first two are important in offering value to social followers and site users; you’re giving them information (hopefully information that’s useful for them to know) and making sure it’s easy to process and assess that information.

The second two are valuable for marketing. Scrolling through your social feed you might skip a text post with the same information but a brightly coloured image with good composition gets you to linger long enough to notice the content is relevant, and if you want to send that information to someone else, it’s visibly branded.

That ten-year-old trend in infographic blog posts was built on that fact. You couldn’t copy/paste the relevant section, you had to send the image, and that meant the branding came with the information. At a time when a common direction to content creators was “go viral”, infographics offered a powerful tool for doing just that.

Their focus on key information presented in a clear, friendly style is also a useful way of thinking in this new era of AI-powered search engines.

SEO for AI?

No doubt you’ve seen the AI Overview summaries that appear at the top of Google searches for more and more queries these days. If you’re an early adopter when it comes to tech, you may also have moved on to one of the AI-powered search engines, like SearchGPT and Perplexity. There’s no question that AI is going to be part of how search works going forward, possibly not at the level some are currently predicting but it’s going to be a factor.

However, as yet strategies to build your performance in AI search don’t look very different from what’s been proven to work in mainline SEO. There are two things that seem even more important than before; brand mentions and content.

What is a Brand Mention?

At its simplest, a brand mention is any time your brand is referenced next to a key piece of information that’s relevant to searches for your field. For example, if after reading this blog you chose to pass on this information saying “According to the team at First Digital Media, good content is even more important in optimising for AI search”, that’s a brand mention for us (and thank you!)

As you can imagine, this means big name brands have a huge advantage, being named in connection with their products and services constantly all over the internet. You may also recognise that the example above would be a great place for a link to this blog, and from that you might start thinking about backlinks.

Here at First Digital Media, we think that the way backlink best practice has changed over the years is a good indicator for how things will change in AI search. At first all backlinks counted. Then they were monitored for quality.

Then, as quality metrics were identified and people started selling links, they added checks for relevance, and screened out paid backlinks. We predict the same things will happen with brand mentions as AI gets better and dubious agencies take shortcuts. And yes, it’s very possible that the people who already took those shortcuts will get penalised.

The Changing Role of Your Website

There was a time when the only thing that mattered was the number of backlinks to your site. Then backlinks needed to be of a certain quality. Then they needed to be relevant. (We went into a lot more detail on backlinks recently, if you want to know more.)

In recent years what’s mattered a lot more is the value your website adds. Put another way, you want your ideal customer to find the information they need on your site, feel comfortable that they can trust you, and reach out to do business with you.

For some industries, especially for eCommerce websites, a single visit might take them from discovering you to buying from you. But the more expensive your products and services, especially if you sell to other businesses, the longer it might take between them discovering you and becoming a lead.

But things are in the middle of changing again.

AI’s Impact on Search

Whether (like most people) you still search on Google or you’re now using Bing, Perplexity, Claude, or even some other AI-driven search engine which hadn’t entered the market at the time of writing, you will have noticed AI has a much bigger presence than it used to.

Summaries drawn from the content on different websites seek to answer simple questions within the search engine itself, without anyone clicking through to your website. Recent studies show that Google’s AI Overviews section reduces clicks by anywhere between 15 and 35%.

And really, that’s common sense; if my question is answered in the search screen, I’m probably not going to visit the website that the answer was originally taken from. (Of course, sometimes these answers include AI hallucinations, making their information flawed or even outright wrong – but if you’re asking basic questions because you don’t understand the topic yet, you’re less likely to spot that.)

What Good SEO Can Do for You

The good news is that very little of that lost traffic was going to become a customer. The type of searches that AI summaries are best at answering aren’t commercial in nature. And despite the growing market share of Bing (backed by ChatGPT) and the emergence of many other AI-powered competitors, Google still processed more than 5 trillion searches in 2024.

All of this means your website still has a huge role to play. But as more questions end before clicking through to a webpage, and as more users refuse cookie-based tracking in favour of privacy, traffic becomes less and less useful as a metric.

As we mentioned in that earlier blog, the only real measure of a digital marketing agency’s success is the extra revenue coming in from sales they helped make or their lead generation services.

Attributing those to specific channels is tricky when it’s Google or Meta Ads, very difficult when it’s organic search optimisation, and even email marketing can be surprisingly difficult to track with modern tools (what we wouldn’t give for the previous version of Google Analytics back) so we’ll always be looking at visitor count – but it’s even more important now to consider conversion rate, also known as the percentage of your visitors who convert. (Of course, the longer it takes a potential customer to decide to reach out, the lower conversion rate will be – but these tend to correlate to higher-value conversions)

We’ve given this example before (and we surely will again), but would you really rather have 5,000 visitors to your site every month but sell to only 50 of them, or would you prefer 1,000 visitors but you’re selling to 100?

What Not to Do

As we pointed out in a recent blog, the amount of traffic to your website doesn’t matter if they aren’t interested in your product. If you sell precision-engineered components to manufacturing companies, your target customer knows exactly what components they need.

A blog talking about the history of that component doesn’t appeal to your ICP. Even worse (from an SEO perspective) would be if the main pages of your site have that kind of content.

If you sell a lifestyle product, you will see benefit from blogs talking about that lifestyle – but you should be planning a few more targeted pieces in among them. Lifestyle blogs build brand awareness, and that might convert into a customer in the future, but the lead time can be measured in years for some purchases. On the other hand, they also help build trust and show off your experience once people are on the site.

By their very nature, paid ads are more targeted. A hasty set-up for your campaign could spend a lot of money on search terms that don’t convert of leave in demographics who won’t be buying for you. Even if you built your campaign carefully, you should monitor it over time.

And, of course, you’ll want to pay close attention to your cost per lead (CPL) or cost per acquisition (CPA). Your marketing causing you to sell at a loss only works if your customer lifetime value and retention rate are high enough.

Understanding Your Ideal Customer Profile

Speak to your sales team – they will be able to tell you a lot about the inquiries you’re already getting. From there you can form a clearer picture of what they do the rest of the time. Would your target customer spend more time on LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, or Pinterest? What other topics are important to them?

Managing Paid Ads Successfully

Part of good Microsoft and Google Ads management is managing negative keywords; as your campaigns continue, you’ll see what your ads show for. Some of it will be highly relevant. Some will be obviously irrelevant. By using negative keywords, you can cut out a lot of that irrelevant spend in future.

In the same way, good Meta ads management designs campaigns to target specific demographics.

Understanding Website Traffic

It seems like a no-brainer, on first glance, to say that if traffic is up that’s good and if it’s down it’s bad. After all, the more people you have on your site the better, right? And this is mostly true.

The thing is, mostly true isn’t the same as completely accurate. If you increase organic traffic by bringing in visitors who don’t fit your customer model, there probably aren’t going to be any more sales out of it.

Page URLs and Redirects

If your favourite café moves from one business address to another, they’ll spend a huge amount of effort making sure their customers know they’re moving and exactly where to find them. This includes a big poster in the window of the old address telling you where to find them now.

The digital equivalent of that poster is known as a redirect. If you had a subfolder on your website called /pizzas/ and on the new site, the same subfolder is now /pizzas-and-calzones/, your site needs to have a redirect in place. If not, the organic rankings the old page had will be lost, but with the redirect you can keep that valuable ranking history.

Put like that, it sounds very simple, but it’s amazing how often these redirects aren’t in place. And it’s not just about site subfolders and individual pages; it can be about whole site subdomains too.

If your website was at, say, www.examplecompany.co.uk and your web designer decides to switch to examplecompany.co.uk without the www. prefix, every single page address has changed. Using redirects to handle this should be done before the new version of the site goes live. That way, when search engines crawl the old page addresses, they find your forwarding address and you keep the ranking value you’d built up over years.

Earlier this year, Google reduced the amount of time they’ll ‘keep’ link equity when a page is removed without a redirect. That means that if this happens, the clock is ticking to realise it’s happened and get redirects into place before all that value is gone.

Staging Site Issues

Your developer will have built the new version of your site elsewhere, on what we call a staging site. A lot of the addresses will have been slightly different, so for example your page examplecompany.co.uk/pizzas-and-calzones/ will have been built on stagingsite.com/examplecompany/pizzas-and-calzones/, and when the site is put live, these links will be updated.

Very occasionally, there’s an issue with this, and some key pages still link to the staging site. When that happens obviously it can create issues, especially as the staging version is usually unpublished.

However there’s another kind of problem that can come from staging sites, which happens when the staging site was both left live (so the pages are still up) and where the pages were not set to noindex (so the pages could be included in a search engine’s results, if they were crawled).

When this happens, you can find yourself in competition with your own staging site for some keywords. If you’ve run into other site launch problems as well (sadly not uncommon as a combination) you can even realise you’re losing to your own staging site.

The best tool to identify leftover staging site links is a website crawler, and the most popular crawler tool is called Screaming Frog. (The free version will only crawl 500 addresses, so if you’ve kept all the blogs from an old site or you’re running an eCommerce site, you’d definitely need the paid version.) Crawl your site with this and look at its external link report. If you see anything pointed at the old staging site, Screaming Frog can even give you a list of the pages with those links, which can make correcting this faster.

Backlinks 101

Most basic answer first: a backlink is a link that takes people to your site from somewhere else on the internet. If someone writes a blog and links to your business, that’s a backlink. So is the link to your site in a newspaper article about your recent charity activity. So is a link on Facebook, Reddit, or anywhere else online.

Obviously, this is one way people can find your site. But it can also affect where you rank on search engines.

What Makes a Backlink Good?

When Google was getting started, search engines used links to your site as a trust signal. The theory goes that someone linking to your site as a resource must have found value there.

You’ll sometimes still encounter people who think it still works like it did then; that the more links to your site, the better. That hasn’t been true for more than a decade. Search engines very quickly realised that people were creating hundreds or thousands of low-quality, low-value backlinks, and they developed ways to tell a backlink’s quality.

The first big breakthrough was authority.

Authority and Backlinks

Google keeps its algorithms secret, giving us only general advice, not wanting people to game their systems. When you hear people talk about authority, or domain authority, or DA, they’re using a term invented by SEOs who’d made a breakthrough studying the data for hundreds of sites.

Simply put, a site that’s been around for a long time has good authority. A site that ranks well for a lot of keywords has good authority. A new site that doesn’t rank well has very little authority. And links from high authority sites seemed to perform better than links from low authority sites. We didn’t have access to Google’s algorithm, but we’d reverse-engineered a metric that seemed to match it.

The race was on to land links from high authority sites. Even today, this isn’t always a bad form of digital marketing. The problem you can face is that people who owned sites with high authority started selling links.