NEVER EVER USE EUROPCAR Europcar Fiat Panda Reg No. 3324 JFG WARNING!

I had the unfortunate experience of using this company during our trip to Spain last week.

We were charged 95 Euros for a broken door lock which I suspect was already broken.

If you read their reviews my initial cynicism actually seems fully justified.

PLEASE READ https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.europcar.co.uk

When we booked the car through the easyjet website everything seemed fine and the car worked out around 130 euros for 6 days.

On arrival at Malaga Airport we went to the Europcar reception and initially I was asked if we would be doing much driving. I indicated that we would not. I was then asked if I would like to upgrade to a higher quality car which was on a “good rate”. I said “no thanks”

I was then asked if I’d like to pay another 22 euros per day for better insurance cover with no excess I said “no thanks”

We were then given a black Fiat Panda Reg 3324 JFG

I duly checked the car in the car park and did not see any visible damage.

The car has a remote key fob. My only mistake was to use the remote key fob and not try the lock on the driver’s door.

On returning the car to the airport full of fuel (we only used 20 euros of fuel during the time we were there) a lady quickly looked round the car. Bear in mind it is in a poorly lit underground car park and its 11pm.

Having quickly looked round she asked where the keys were which were still in the ignition.

Moments later she walks over to the office and tells the office lady something in Spanish along the lines of “it’s the black fiat panda with a broken lock”

We were then told by the receptionist the lock had been broken and we must pay an additional 95 euros.

Looking back I do not recall the lady who checked the car even trying to put the key in the lock...if she did she didn’t try twice as I would have noticed.

I returned to the car to check the lock myself an there was no sign of damage to have spotted the lock wasn’t working before picking up the car is pot luck especially if you have a remote key fob.

I asked to see the paperwork for the last person who hired the car to see if they had also been charged but this was dismissed out of hand as somehow impossible even though she photocopied our contract/invoice

Reading the reviews for Europcar I am convinced this is not an unusual occurrence. There is even a review from a former employee which says:

First they will try to sell you an upgrade...check

Second they will try to sell expensive insurance ...check

Third.. they will give you the worst car they can...check

Judging by the reviews I have little hope of receiving a response from customer services never mind getting my money back.

Basically we were robbed by Europcar on the last day of an otherwise pleasant break.

Therefore I shall advise everyone I know not to use this company. If you are unfortunate enough to hire Fiat Panda 3324 JFG and you are charged for a broken lock please contact fraser@pickseo.co.uk and I can pass the matter onto the Police.

Hopefully within a few hours google will pick up this reg no. 3324 JFG and we can see if Europcar actually attempt to fix this car.

Wooden greenhouses a google search challenge

Cabin Living have now added Wooden Greenhouses to their product range and although they do well for search terms such as garden cabin, residential log cabins and log cabin kits as with any new product launch they won't show up for "wooden greenhouses"

Our challenge is to see just how long it takes for them to appear in what is a arguably a very competitive sector.

So PickSEO have checked their rankings simply by adding searches for the phrases "Greenhouse" and "Wooden greenhouses" to the wonderful position checking tool over at SESCOUT

As you can imagine Cabin Living do not show in the top 500 positions on google for either search phrase.

Over the course of the next few weeks we'll watch the rise of their position hopefully just like the young plants that spring up in these wonderful wooden greenhouses

As a start we have loaded a tab delimited spreadsheet of products to google so that these greenhouses appear in shopping results.

Plus with an additional 50 pages or so we have revised the xml sitemap and resubmitted that to google also.

Next we will begin a process of link building from other websites, blogs and social media links including facebook links.

The clock is ticking and we'll post updates of improvement here!

Wedding Singer Sisters - Website Design

Recently completed Sisters in Song. Features include the fantastic j player which is great for cross browser compatibility including I phones and Ipad.

Quite a nice looking jquery gallery help complete the look.



Sisters in Song are a professional and versatile female singing duo committed to making your special day memorable and remarkable with outstanding live vocals.

Sisters Tracey and Maria specialise in singing at weddings and corporate entertainment events in the North West of England covering the Greater Manchester and Cheshire regions.

Sisters in Song have a built up a vast repertoire of songs which allows you to create a playlist that is personal to you.

Tracey and Maria sing everything from classic love songs and well known tunes from West End shows to modern pop hits. Popular songs which are sure to appeal to your audience and ensure your entertainment event is a resounding success.

Sisters in Song offer superb value for money so call today to secure these sensational singers for your special day.

Golfing Holidays in Scotland

We've successfully launched the new Golf Vacation Scotland website. As well as creating a new website using the old url we have launched a sister site on the new golftourpro url. To avoid duplication we will gradually merge the two sites making Golf Tour Pro the driving force moving forward.

Initially having created sitemaps for both sites nearly all the pages have been indexed for GVS and only a few appear to be indexed for GTP.

This is the difference between a brand new domain and a domain which has been round for years. Our challenge is rebranding the business without losing this value. There is a third PR3 website for golf which we intend to merge using 301 redirects. This may prove to be the best solution for GVS also but we would prefer a situation where all the sites pages are indexed before taking this step.

Golf Tour Pro - New website!

PickSEO are delighted to announce the launch of a new website for Golf Tour Pro using url www.golfvacationscotland.com

A very interesting project in that the company St Andrews Associates had several domain names and had tried to create a different image for each url. Although the keyword rich urls are effective for a particular phrase they fell down with any variation on that phrase.



Our primary goal was to create a new brand identity, we sourced a new url name including the creation of a new logo and brought the old websites into the 21st Century with a complete redesign. Now compatible with I phones and I pads and full of useful information the new website is well on track to transform their visitor numbers and enquiries.

Our intention is to run both Golftourpro.com and Golfvacationscotland.com to establish the dominant domain name.

So for Golf Vacations and Golfing holidays in Scotland take a look at the Golf Tour Pro website.

We will be working on their SEO over the coming months to ensure they hit a wider range of keyphrases relating to golf tourism

Commercial property to let - Scotland

We are pleased to have agreed a contract with Uphall Estates a company specialising in commercial property in Scotland to manage their gold seo package. We will be working closely with them to improve their rankings on a number of search engines including Google.




With FTP access and admin level access we will be able to do all we need to do to get this site created by another company using a varaition on a wordpress template ranking highly on google and other search engines.

We have already created their google places listings and have started modifying meta tags and body text to optimise their online presence.

Biomass Heating Specialists

PickSEO are delighted to have agreed a contract with Scot Heating Company Ltd to develop their website profile using our gold seo package.





As a company specialising in Biomass Boilers and renewable energy their installations can be of great benefit to commercial operations looking to reduce the carbon footprint of their heating systems. As an ESCO (Energy saving company) grants are available to cover the costs of installation.

Using wood pellet burners these highly efficient heating systems make use of waste wood material and burn material easily available as a renewable resource.

We look forward to working with them to improve their google rankings and promote their green energy solutions.

Garden Office competitors - Article Madness

Competition remains high for Cabin Living in the top 10 spaces for the search term garden offices

Looking through the competitors the proliferation of article submissions for inbound links is very clear. Disappointing really as we cant help but feel the quality of content is never in any great detail and therefore often lacks value for the reader.

But when you are faced with the fact that competitors have hundreds more links than your sites it seems there is little alternative than to start submitting article after article with slight modifications. It would be great to have the time to create 200 different articles all with their own valued content but the reality is few companies have the time to devote to this activity especially as the results may take months or years to pay any dividend.

The question is then how long before the google algorithm picks up on almost duplicate articles to clean up the web and starts dropping sites with no value making the whole exercise redundant?

Only time will tell. In the meantime we would advise where possible keep your articles unique , consider you customer each time and try where possible to provide content which is enlightening and informative. This is bound to win the confidence of both your customers and google.

Google page rank

What is google page rank?

Many confuse this with a websites position in natural search results. This is not necessarily the case.

It is google's opinion of the value or importance of the content of the site. That is not to say page rank and results positions are unrelated and clearly sites with a higher page rank are probably likely to appear higher in the search results. The two go hand in hand.

It had appeared that page rank was something websites built up over time possibly taking years to generate a rank of 2 or 3. Infact in the past year or two we were beginning to wonder whether google was going to bother ranking sites with a pagerank at all. Many web designers were trying to make a fast buck out of any blog, or website, selling them due to their pagerank rather than any inherent value and we got the impression that perhaps google wanted to discourage this.

Recent developments with one of our clients Toy Design Lab specialising in everything relating to toys has made us change our minds.

To our genuine surprise in the course of less than a year both their main website and blog (with blogger) have reached a pagerank of 3. Not 1 not 2 but straight in at PR3.

Suddenly getting Toydesignlab reciprocal links from the bigger names in toy design, manufacturing and retailing should not be so difficult.

You can add google's page rank tool to most browsers i.e. internet explorer, google chrome etc simply google for it!

It should only take a few seconds to add it to your browser and then you can monitor googles value of the importance of potential link partners who want to link to you.

Link building is a key part of any succesful SEO campaign.

Links from high ranked websites are great. But don't get us wrong we think there are lots of good sites out there still struggling to get any pagerank at all which could still make potentially good link partners. We work on the principle of good quality content sites first and pagerank second when we are looking for new link partners.

Graphic Design Rochdale update

A quick update for Graphic designers 4PD based in Rochdale, looking to compete for the search phrase Graphic Design Rochdale

A competitive market for graphic designers anywhere but it seems particularly so in the Manchester area. We have recently established a position bottom of page 2 (20th) for this search phrase and will be continuing our efforts to push them up to page one when traffic and enquiries will really start to take off. We would anticipate at least a fivefold increase in traffic when page 1 is achieved.

Porsche Specialists head for Page 1

As our campaign continues with SP Autobahn their rise through the rankings continues. Now firmly on page 2 for the search phrase Porsche specialist in position 14th as we write this. We are still confident we will hit page 1 before the end of August.

Porsche Specialists Scotland - SP Autobahn

Working with SP Autobahn, Porsche and German marque specialists in servicing and repair in Scotland, we are aiming to achieve a page 1 ranking for "Porsche specialist"



Although we have not built the site which uses the zoomla template format we have been able to alter the meta tags, add analytics code and google verification for sitemap upload. CMS sites can be difficult to manage as a third party but with the co-operation of the designer we can get access to achieve what we need to make search engine optimisation a success.

Cuurently we have added SP autobahn to google places in an optimised listing, so they now come top for "porsche specialist Scotland" and obviously "porsche specialist Stirling" where they are based.

But clearly our long term target is "Porsche Specilaist" which gains a significant amount of traffic each month.

We anticipate page one for this phrase by September.

Garden Offices

Following an extensive campaign of SEO for Cabin Living we have secured page 1 for "Garden office" a position they have not held for three years. They appeared briefly in this position as a "new website" but since then google clearly devalued the website compared to older established content and has only just started to value what is a very informative site with in excess of 500 pages. Natural link building has helped to secure its value in google but it has taken a lot of hard work from both our team and the the Cabin Living team to secure its current position.

Graphic design Rochdale - 4PD

Outstanding graphic designers at 4PD contacted us to get higher listings for the search phrase "Graphic design Rochdale". So from not being in the top 100 a few days ago they are currently listed 26th following our recent changes to their website. As our link building process continues we expect them to enter the first page within the next two months.

Coxwell Court - Holiday Cottage in Cirencester

The holiday let and holiday cottage business is a very competitive market depending mainly on your geographical location. The emphasis here has to be on the effective use of your google places listings which we can optimise for best performance.

In the case of www.coxwellcourt.co.uk as well as doing our usual on-site optimisation we focus on getting the listings to appear highly in the places results. Our challenge at the moment is to get Coxwell court appearing highly for "holiday cottage Cirencester" and "holiday let Cirencester". This can be achieved through optimising google places then concentrating efforts on the traditional seo skills of keyword density on site and link building through articles and reciprocal link building with related websites.

What links do your competitors have for top google positions?

A good tool for checking links is Yahoo's site explorer. Once you've done the basic groundwork ie regular blog entries, a nicely designed website, keyword optimised content on every page, optimised meta titles and descriptions then its time to focus on links.

Ofcourse we specialise in link building services but if you are looking to add links yourself this is a good first step.

If your starting out looking for links chances are your competitors have a lot more.
But who exactly? and would the same sites link to you? If your competitors content is deemed valuable enough to get a link then quite possibly so will yours.

First step visit site explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/



Then select the inlinks tab and see who exactly has links to this site according to yahoo.

Some may be internal or clearly linked (sister) sites but if you spot any good third party links contact them yourself and see if they'll reciprocate links.

Happy link building!

Toy design lab page one!

The toy design labe website is now doing very well in natural search results on google.

9th for "toy design"
1st for "toy designers"
4th for "toy designer"
1st for "toy design consultantts"

Ahead of most of the competition this toy design consultancy with its experience working with leading toy manufacturers is bound to go from strength to strength thanks to PickSEO

Toy design company - seo strategies

Toy design lab continue to rise through the rankings for the phrases "toy design" and "toy designers". Currently showing 19th for "toy design" and 4th for "toy designers"

Toy designers

Recently, following the advice of the PickSEO team, Toy design lab have started their own blog which will help by producing relevant content with embedded links back to their main site.

Visit the Toy design lab blog

Toy Design lab 21st for "toy design"

Our toy design campaign for toy design lab is starting to pay dividends having previously not shown in the top 100 they can now be found top of page 3 on Google for the search term toy design

Toy design lab have now set up their own blog to cover various aspects of toy design and this should help to promote their main site over the next few weeks.

Toy Designers TDL rise through the rankings

Toy design lab, UK based toy design consultants are using our services to gain a greater percentage of web traffic and potential customers with focussed seo campaigns on a variety of keyphrases. Having achieved position 1 for "toy design consultant" on Google UK the sights are now set on "toy design" and "toy designer" which will generate over 3000 combined searches a month if they are in the top 3.

Toy design