Tag Archive for: Google

New Study Confirms Consumers Want Mobile Friendly Sites

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While I’ve written extensively about why you should have an optimized site for mobile, I’ve rarely directly mentioned the two most obvious points for why you should. Websites that aren’t mobile friendly annoy visitors and it’s bad business.

Mobile users have more immediate needs, and they look for content that is designed to fit their needs.

A recent Google survey of mobile users says that 72% emphasized the importance of websites that are mobile-friendly. However, as important as mobile optimized sites are to users, 96% said they have visited a site that doesn’t work properly on their device.

The survey had 1,088 US participants who own smarphones and use them for internet browsing, and the survey was performed by independant groups.

Roughly three-quarters of respondents said they are more likely to visit a mobile optimized site than one that isn’t mobile-friendly, and they are five times more likely to give up on their task if the site isn’t optimized for mobile needs.

Following with those numbers, most customers said they are more likely to buy online when the site they find meets their mobile needs. Unfortunately, 61% are more likely to leave if the site isn’t mobile friendly. Even worse, when visitors find sites that aren’t mobile friendly, they are disappointed in the company itself.

So what are the needs of mobile users? They want sites that load in less than 5 seconds, big finger-friendly buttons and quick access to business contact information. They also want the pages to be designed to fit their screen, and links to the company’s social media profiles.

Basically, they want pages that work easily on a mobile interface, with easily accessible information and efficient designs. Mobile users want to be able to act immediately and most aren’t doing research on their mobile devices. They want ways to make contact and take action.

If your page isn’t meeting these needs, you are probably losing customers.

If you want to read the actual list of what the survey says mobile-users want, read Miranda Miller’s article at Search Engine Watch.

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3 Reasons Google Remarketing is Great For Your Site

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Google Remarketing was recently updated to make it easier to set-up and easier to use. In case you aren’t familiar, Google Remarketing allows you to present users, who were previously on your site, with relevant ads as they continue browsing the web.

Marc Weisinger, of Search Engine Watch, has three key reasons you should be using one of the most powerful tools available to online marketers.

1. It’s Simple and Easy

Previously, implementing the remarketing code was a several step process. Now, you install one simple code in the footer of each page of your site and get on with your day. You can’t get much easier than one step.

2. The Possibilities are Endless

With the universal tag in place, you can use the Adwords interface to target specific groups. How specific? Well, that is up to you.

Want to target only those users who landed on a promotion page? Done.

Want to target only users who added a product to their cart, but didn’t end up buying? Done.

Plus, each new target group you set up gets the benefit of the cookies already stored by your universal tag.

3. Target Positive or Negative Audience

Before starting your next email marketing campaign, use the Adwords interface to target users who click through from your email to your site.

Alternatively, you can instead choose to exclude those users because, afterall, they sound pretty loyal and engaged already. That way, you don’t bombard them with your ads and are sure to instead target those users that may have seen your email but weren’t convinced right away.

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How 2 Factors Play a Role in Mobile Search Behavior

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We’ve talked quite a bit about the quickly growing use of mobile devices to search the web. The latest reports show between 10% to 20% of all traffic on the web, and some popular websites, claim that roughly a fourth of their traffic is coming from mobile devices, if you include tablets.

Of course, this all shows that ignoring mobile web use at this point is not a good decision. Those that are innovating in the field of mobile optimization will have a much brighter future than those that continue to resist the mobile shift. The sooner you optimize your site for mobile use, the better chances your company will do well in the future.

There are two factors that differentiate mobile devices from other traditional computing devices. They both are obvious, but both factors have undeniably huge effects on users’ web experiences. The first is portability. Since mobile users are accessing the web on the go, their current location and activities become important to what they are accessing online. The second factor is screen size. Mobile screens do seem to be getting larger, but they will never go anywhere near standard computer screen size. Take advantage of screen size limitations of mobile users, rather than fight it.

With between 15-20% of all searches on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. coming from mobile users, how does that change search behavior?

Search Behavior Due to Location

Microsoft’s research has found that 30% of all mobile searches are related to their location, and 61% of searches end in a phone call. Like I said, a person’s locations and activities are clearly important to mobile user’s.

Of course, the recent changes to search engines have made great strides to customize search results based on user’s locations, but you should still make an effort to specify your business’s location on search engines using their web master settings.

The major search engines also look for location signals from the title and text present on a website. If you own a local business, make it easy for them to find these signals. Emphasize the location on the site so search engines prioritize your website in search results around your area.

Can you still take advantage of mobile users’ locations even if your business has more than one location? Of course!

If your business has multiple locations, you should be creating internal pages for your different locations, with a present hierarchy starting from the homepage so that search engines will notice the location specific pages too. You will still have to deal with standard issues such as speed, relevance, and backlinks, but taking advantage of location will help get individual pages ranked based on where your users may be.

Search Behavior Due to Screen Size

Screen size contstraints are a more physical limitation, but it strongly effects how people search and visit pages. The clearest difference between mobile and desktop search is the number of paid results and advertisments. On most search engines, there are far less paid ads on mobile because of the screen size. That means organic results on mobile are more important than on desktop.

Screen size also limits the number of results you recieve at any given moment. On a typical smartphone you can only see a few results at a time. Desktops give users a broad range of results immediately, but on mobile the top three results are key. Mobile users are not prone to research, and they rarely go past the first page of results, so it is important to get your page as high in the rankings as possible.

Search behavior on mobiles are certainly unique from their desktop counterparts, and mobile requires a similarly unique SEO strategy. Of course, desktop is still important, so the best way to approach the issue is by creating a seperate mobile site that is optimized for mobile user experience. The longer you wait to optimize, the more trouble you will have later.

For more, read Paras Chopra’s article at Search Engine Land.

 

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Google Survey Reveals What Mobile Users Want

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Want to know what features and capabilities consumers are wanting from mobile websites? Google has released the results of a recent survey and, while the findings aren’t anything earth shattering, they also included data that could be beneficial to you.

The results have reaffirmed that smartphone users want sites to be optimized for their smaller screen, and they will leave those that aren’t, but Google also took the time to collect data on what users want in their experiences with mobile sites. Google used two independent research firms to survey over 1,000 adults in the US, who were also involved in focus groups and required to keep journals of their mobile activites throughout the third quarter of this year.

So what are users wanting from mobile sites? According to Google, users expect websites to load in less than five seconds. They also want mobile websites to allow them to act immediately. Seventy-six percent of smartphone owners want to use their phones to get locations for businesses and sixty-one percent like businesses to allow customers to contact them at the time.

Most want information available within a few clicks, with buttons large enough for their fingers. Other widely desired features were conveniently placed search bars, “click to call” buttons, unidirectional scrolling (up-down or left-right), and interestingly many desire the ability to go to the full non-mobile site. Google even gathered data on what users are looking for in sites for specific industries. Greg Sterling at Marketing Land has a break-down for these individual industries, if you’re interested.

Most of these findings are inline with what you would expect, but they also show how the expectations of mobile users are quickly getting higher. If you don’t raise your own standards to meet those of your customers, your business will not fare well in the future.

 

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You Should Be Tracking These Social Media Goals

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Want to know how to evaluate your buisiness’s performance in social media? Is your time and effort getting acceptable returns? Andrew K. Kirk, of Social Media Examiner, has 4 goals you should be tracking to ensure a positive social media ROI.

1. Brand Recognition

Obviously, you need people to be aware of your business. But the more people know, the more likely they will become active members of your online community.

Track your growing popularity with Klout, which gives you a social influence score based on your performance across multiple social media sites. Log your score each month and think about what actions you took during that time frame. Soon, you should be able to pinpoint what positively and negatively affects you online presence.

2. Traffic

Just as people need to be aware of your business, people also need to visit your website. Visitors will likely learn more about your business directly from your site than from anywhere else.

With Google Analytics, you can easily track visits and discover what is affecting those.

3. Repeat Business

Any business needs repeat customers to thrive. For your online presence to thrive, you need visitors to return to your site and stay longer.

To track loyalty, you can customize Google Analytics and then do a little math. Well worth it in the end.

4. Conversions

The previous steps don’t necessarily translate into an improvement in your bottom line. Afterall, the effort you put into your online presence better be worth it. You should know the ratio of overall visitors to your site to conversions. You should also know the correlation of social media activity to conversions and the source for the majority of your traffic that converts.

Again, Google Analytics has you covered. By setting up some goals and tinkering a bit, you’ll soon have all the data you need to measure your goals and get the most out of your time on social media.

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How Google’s Changes Should Change the Reports You Use

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Google’s algorithm changes over the last decade have really made huge shifts in the way we search things. They also really help developers stay on their toes.

Initially, the SEO business was all about rankings. You told your client how you would get their keywords to the top of the search, and then showed them how high they were coming up in searches. Of course, it took a while to get their site to the top, but once you did, they were content.

Now, thanks mostly to Search+, it is the job of SEOs to get their clients to stop thinking about ratings. What Search+ has done is customize the results for every search you make based on search history, location, social media usage, and other criteria. That means everyone gets results catered to them, but it also results in your client’s site not appearing high in the rankings for some people.

Sujan Patel offers some other methods of tracking how your websites are performing, all of which can be found in Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

There are simple reports like “visitor growth” that show how your site is trending quickly and clearly, as well as old metrics that have risen in popularity. Such measurement tools like Impressions give you ideas of how your pages are appearing for similar search terms.

Another old metric that has become much more useful is your site’s average ranking. In January, Google announced changes to how they score site’s average rankings and now it gives a much closer average of “how a link’s position in Google search results should be important.”

While the older ways of Google made it easier for you to see how your site is performing, the changes in recent months have actually been an improvement for marketing towards target demographics. Unfortunately, this means improving your analytic skills is essential if you want to succeed. You may not be able to give your client keywords to search to see their performance, but if you know your analytic tools, you can still quickly show them how your SEO path is helping them grow their business.

 

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How To Dominate Search With Content Marketing

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Google has made five recent SEO changes that will make most content marketers, writers, and bloggers quite happy. They play to your strengths. Some users may be less happy about these changes, however.

The changes were mostly made to keep more people on Google products, which isn’t a bad idea from a business perspective, but some may find the changes effect searching negatively.

The good news is, the changes were also made so that your results would be more personal by monopolizing on the fact that people are more likely to purchase something if they know their friend also likes it.

The even better news is these changes are great for anyone who makes content for a living. I will walk you through all of the changes and help you to take advantage of them.

1) Optimize personalized search – One of the biggest changes Google has made completely changed SEO by making search results personal. The results you get for a search will be different than mine, based on factors like your browsing history, the content you create and content shared by your social circles. People are finding their content more and more through social media networks and searching less.

So how can you optimize your content for personalized search? One option is you can increase your Google+ circles. Google is actively trying to get people to sign up for Google+, and in this instance, using Google+ and connecting with more people on there helps improve your search. The more people you have in your circles, the higher relevant content will show up in your searches. This also means that your circles can see your content when they search.

2) Increase social sharing – As a content creator, getting shares on social media is a great way to get your content high in the search rankings. According to a study by branded3, the more tweets leading to a URL you can get, the higher you will appear in rankings. For example, anyone that gets over 7,500 tweets (not an easy task) will appear in the top five results almost always. This type of logic most likely also works for Facebook.

As a content creator, capitalize on social sharing and you can beat your competition in the rankings. Just make sure to make the social sharing buttons obvious so that readers can find them, encourage your readers to share and try to court others with influence in your target social circles. Interview them or offer to do guest posts. Anything to establish a connection.

3) Employ semantic keyword research – Google is improving at segmenting search results, which gives you an opportunity to rank higher in verticals. This is a surefire way to get higher conversion rates because your prospective visitors are better targeted.

To take advantage of this, you’ll need to look for “advanced search” keywords. When you search, there is a way to refine results with a tool hidden in “show search tools”. Within this advanced search tool, you can look at “related searches”. Now you have semantic options you can test for the highest search volumes. There are also ways to improve your keyword list such as Google Insights for Search, which lets you narrow keywords down via categories.

4) Play with the Panda update – Google’s Panda update finally made life hard for spammers and content farms by harshly punishing sites with low quality content. This is good for all of the content creators who put hard work into long blog posts with useful content. Google even offered questions to determine the value of your content.

5) Implement the Google Authorship Mark-up – A search marketing firm proved rich snippet will increase SERP CTR and traffic. It’s that simple. Their analytics show a 150% increase when rich snippet was implemented. You might not get results quite that good, but it’s almost certain you will benefit if you implement the Google’s authorship snippet. It can be complicated, and it is slow to show results, but if you invest now you’ll see results in the not too distant future.

All of these Google changes have radically changed the SEO game, but they have made it a wonderful moment to be a content marketer. Those that put out shoddy content are being penalized, and there are all sorts of opportunities to really get your content out there.

 

For a more in depth look at author rank, read Neil Patel’s article at Quick Sprout.

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AdWords Unveils Shared Budgets

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If you’re using AdWords to advertise your business online, you’ll definitely want to look into their newest option, Shared Budgets, which was announced Monday on the Adwords blog.

Shared Budgets is exactly what it sounds like. Adwords let’s you set a daily allowance for how much you’d like to spend across any number of campaigns. Let’s say $100 total. You can then allocate a portion of that to each campaign. With Shared Budgets, any money that one campaign doesn’t use in a day gets automatically reallocated to another campaign that is seeing increased use. This way, you get the most out of the campaign that’s currently getting the most attention without having to constantly tinker with the budget allocation yourself.

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SEO Budgets Rising, Google Offers Warnings

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Google’s changes to their SEO policies have made optimization more and more difficult over the past few years. Chris Crum at WebProNews suggests that a new study from the world’s largest search marketing-specific nonprofit trade organization SEMPO reports that SEO spending is still going strong in spite of all of the free information available on the Internet.

The 72-page report, published by Econsultancy, looked at almost 900 companies and agencies and found that, “overall, the report depicts a stable industry, without making dramatic changes.” Despite significant changes in practices through the inclusion of new tools and algorithms, the survey reports that SEO has “very much the same goals in place.”

Most survey respondents increased their SEO budgets over recent years, and as low as 2% of those responding said they did not spend money on SEO. Meanwhile, the amount of agency billing for SEO services is on the rise. SEMPCO says “a significant rise in those spending less than $100k corresponds to higher numbers across the board, with the greatest increase in the $1 to $5 million range.”

One change that is particularly interesting is the statement by SEMPCO that “survey responses show a drop in the blunt objectives of driving traffic.” However, the amount of agencies citing brand reputation as their primary objective has consistently doubled annually. This is especially clear in the paid side of the industry.

What can’t be denied after the report is the value of the search marketing industry is only rising, even when faced by the rise in popularity of social media and Google algorithm updates that force sites to be less reliant on Google.

The report makes clear the “changes to the Google algorithm affects a large percent of marketers, or at least has them concerned,” and SEMPCO also notes “87% call the updates of the last 12-18 months ‘significant or highly significant'”. Most find the changes to be positive, but some legitimate brands have felt the backlash of the hunt for spam sites. Meanwhile, there are rumors of more Google updates in the future.

Thankfully, Google offers some advice on SEO, especially when beginning to look at hiring someone: “Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site.”

Google does emphasize the benefits SEO agencies can provide, such as technical advice on website development, content development, keyword research, and expertise in specific markets and geographies.

They advise “before beginning your search for an SEO, it’s a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work.” Of course, they recommend their Webmaster Guidelines and Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web as starting points. Google also recommends hiring an SEO early in the development process. They even offer a list of questions you can ask SEOs during your hiring process.

Google’s assistance with SEO doesn’t come without it’s warnings, however. “While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEO’s have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways.”

It’s Google’s suggestion to be nervous of any SEO firms or agencies that contact you out of the blue, or one that asks you to link to them. “You should never have to link to an SEO.” They also warn that no firm can guarantee you a #1 ranking.

And if Google hasn’t already made you worn out from lists of recommendations, they also offer a list of deal-breakers when investigating an SEO, such as if the SEO owns shadow domains, puts links to their other clients on doorway pages or offers to sell keywords in the address bar.

Just because Google offers lots of advice, doesn’t mean they are making it easy to get on the first page of test results. But, they are offering resources to give your site its best shot and SEO doesn’t look to be going anywhere.

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Google’s Bacon Number: Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon

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Someone at Google has had a bit of free time. Most people know about the famous “six degrees of separation” and how it applies to actors and Kevin Bacon. Well now you can worry no more about calculating that value yourself! Simply go to Google and type in “bacon number” followed by a celebrity’s name and you’ll get the full path to the person.

I had to try it myself and put in the following:

Now it’s not perfect, no results showed up for “Dalai Lama” or “Adolf Hitler”, but this is still something to use if you’re in a rush in a trivia game.

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