Category Archives: SEO

Google Results In 140-Characters Or Less

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If you’ve made a Google search on your phone in the past week, you might have noticed a some interesting new results pop up. The “Popular on twitter” section debuted last week and is the first project to come from Google and Twitter‘s new partnership. Google will now show relevant tweets on some of it’s most popular mobile search results.

Displayed just below Google’s own “In the news” section, this new feature will allow searchers to see the most up-to-date information on the subject they are searching for, and help them gauge the public conversation around that subject. The prominent placement of the tweets on the search results page highlights the relevance and importance of social media by prioritizing it second only to “news.”

This innovation is just one of a few that Google has introduced this year to help make their mobile search tool as user-friendly as possible. Earlier this year, Google changed it’s mobile search algorithm to prioritize mobile and responsive websites. They’ve also created new ad experience options for brands advertising via mobile search.

Google and Twitter’s partnership enables social media commentary to become an even larger part of the information-gathering process for search users. And while tweets will only appear on certain search results with enough popularity, it is easy to see how this integration of facts and commentary could potentially help brands. By seeing non-affiliated tweeters talking about a brand, consumers can get a better, more organic sense of the brand’s personality and benefits to them.

What Sparks Our Fire:  Elevating the credibility of tweets as a source of real time information

Google Changes the Game.. Again

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You’ve probably heard that at it’s AdWords Performance Summit this week, Google confirmed that the inevitable has occurred: mobile search have overtaken desktop search in ten countries, including the US and Japan.  Why does this matter to you and your brand? We’ve put together a list of the five most important takeaways and how they will effect businesses everywhere.

1. Google has unveiled new ad experiences in three distinct categories– automotive, hotel, and mortgages– in order to streamline convenience. The automotive ad experiences, for instance, will feature a photo carousel allowing users to swipe through photos both inside and outside of the vehicle. They’ll also have a link directly to dealerships selling the vehicle in their area. Similar relevant features will be built into the hotel and mortgages ad experiences, as well.

2. A new store visit predictor is available in the US, Canada and Australia. This tool will help marketing managers understand how their digital campaigns are driving in-store sales, and subsequently, will allow them to have better insights into their ROI.

3. Google’s beefing up their automatic advertising offerings, including giving marketers more transparency in the programmatic bidding process, and introducing dynamic search ads. Vice President of Product Management for AdWords, Jerry Dischler, says that this will be a “powerful way to automatically show timely and relevant ads based on the content of your website– without the need to manage keywords.”

4. Going along with new automatic advertising offerings, Google will integrate cross-device conversions into automatic bidding. This will allow marketers to capitalize on search activity that begins on one device and and ends on another.

5. The understanding that more users now search on their phones as opposed to their desktops (as well as the new tools Google has introduced) only reinforces Google’s decision to overhaul it’s mobile search algorithm, which went into effect last month. By designing new ad experiences, and giving marketers new tools in AdWords, Google is incentivizing businesses to keep pace with the shifting desktop-to-mobile landscape.

 

#Mobileggedon Is Here

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All day, the internet has been abuzz with talk about #mobileggedon.  Don’t worry, it’s not as apocalyptic it sounds, the hashtag simply refers to Google‘s changes in mobile ranking policy. We want to make sure our friends and clients are aware of what these changes are and how they will impact businesses everywhere.

In response to the shift away from desktop to mobile devices, Google announced in late February that it would be making changes to it’s mobile ranking algorithm in order to become more mobile-friendly. Starting today, websites that are optimized for mobile will be given priority in search results, when the user searches from their phone. This means that websites must either have a responsive design or have a second mobile version of their website, in order to maintain their mobile rank.

We make a point to always recommend responsive and mobile-friendly design to our clients, because we understand how this can add value to their brand in the long run. And with Google’s incredible reach, we believe #mobileggedon will usher in the widespread adoption of mobile-friendly best practices.

You can check if your website is optimized for this change here: Mobile-Friendly Test

What Sparks Our Fire: The shift of policies to match consumer behavior