Mobile searches have grown 500% over the past two years.

Every day, more and more smartphone users search for products and services on the go. It goes without saying, in this day and age it’s vital for every business to have a mobile-friendly web site.

Does your business have a mobile-friendly site? If not—or if you’re not sure—checkout GoMo, a new tool just launched by Google to help you ‘mobilize your site now’. You can learn why mobile sites matter and why you need one, and see what your current site looks like in mobile.

http://www.howtogomo.com/

If you wish to explore and discuss your mobile strategy, contact Bloom Digital Marketing now. We work in collaboration with several partners to build mobile web sites and applications for our clients.

Parked Domains

Parked domains are no longer a safe haven for ad-ventures. Parked domains refer to the places which seldom offer users anything of significance, and are stuffed with different kinds of ads. Google has announced significant improvements in their ranking algorithm for detecting parked domains.

Original Content

Originality and uniqueness are deemed as the prime requisites for worthwhile content. But unfortunately, in the past, many times the sites that simply scrape away the original content without the site owner’s consent outranked the original sites. Google has vowed to counter such acts strictly. They have added new and improved signals that can help them detect the most original content if they come across multiple pages containing the same kind of data.

No More Roadblocks in Search Results

Google’s latest mission is to ensure that not a single site occupies too much space in top search results. By altering the ranking algorithm this way makes sure they will not only be able to stay away from host crowding, but this would make sure that competitors also get some more space to spice up the competition even more.

If you have any questions about these changes, feel free to contact us at 778.300.1387.

(Article Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-changes-%E2%80%93-also-changing-the-web-marketing-norms/38883/)

Here are a few of the core findings:

Importance of Google Places Presence

Rosetta found that local search plays a significant role in those search queries lower in the purchase funnel. Specifically, their study found that queries with local listings rarely resulted in clicks on location links, though most users said they interact with the map when looking for a specific place. They warn that a missing or incorrect listing could entice users to opt for competitors instead.

Universal Search Results Attract User Attention

Rosetta found that image results captured and held the attention of searchers. Users also reported that they prefer to look at results pages with images, especially when shopping online. They recommend optimizing with visual elements to win more real estate on the results page and potentially prevent competitors from owning this space.

Google Autocomplete Most Widely Used Search Feature

Rosetta found that participants used Autocomplete more than any of the other tested features. It was used to correct spelling mistakes that could have led to different results, and to drill deeper into certain subjects.

Though companies can’t control or influence which terms show up in autocomplete, Rosetta recommends that marketers revisit keyword strategies frequently and use data on which terms appear in Autocomplete to address potential relationship management concerns. It may also be an opportunity to identify new keywords and terms.

Google’s Instant Previews Pane Unfamiliar But Interesting to Participants

Though most of Rosetta’s participants had not used the Instant Previews pane before, the majority said they would now that they knew about it. Landing page design is an important consideration, given that users can see it before clicking and are therefore influenced to click – or not – based on this visual preview.

As for Google Instant, the study found that users simply didn’t engage with this feature. Eye tracking showed that they were more focused on completing typing their search query into the search bar than viewing the results appearing lower on the page. In the instances in which Google Instant was used, it was because the user could not remember the exact name of the brand.

Rosetta concluded that organic and paid campaigns are therefore not affected by Google Instant, though they do recommend ensuring high rankings for brand and brand modifier terms.

(Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2128218/Google-Searchers-Use-Autocomplete-Most-Ignore-Google-Instant-Eye-Tracking-Study)

Another Google eye tracking study was conducted by SEOmoz in October 2011 that you might find interesting. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eyetracking-google-serps

To create charts…

You don’t need any technical skill to create charts with the Google Chart tool. Simply read the Getting Started pages, look at the gallery to get an idea of what type of chart you want to create, then go to the Google Chart Wizard.

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

To create infographics…

Google chart tools infographics are static PNG images that you can customize with a single URL request. Just use the tool, copy and paste the URL into your web page. It’s that easy.

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/infographics/

• Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
• Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already the practice in English.
• Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
• Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
• Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
• Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
• Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
• Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

Before you go wild tuning your anchor text or thinking about your web presence for Icelandic users, please remember that this is only a sampling of the hundreds of changes we make to our search algorithms in a given year, and even these changes may not work precisely as you’d imagine.

Localized paid search is becoming the most popular, with the study finding that 22% of respondents’ budgets were spent locally on targeted paid search.  In the US the same question was asked to companies and it found that a greater proportion of company’s’ pay per click marketing budgets were being allocated to local search, with actual figures being 37% for agency respondents and 23% for clients.

Some other key findings from the study include the following:

• The rise of the mobile internet is the trend which is regarded as having the most impact on search marketing, with more than three-quarters of companies (79%) deeming it as ‘highly significant’ or ‘significant’.
• The use of social networks for marketing continues to grow. The percentage of company respondents who say they use Facebook for marketing now stands at 84%, up from 73% last year.
• More companies are outsourcing search and social media. Only 44% of companies are now carrying out search engine optimization in-house, compared to 51% last year. Only 55% are doing social media marketing in-house, compared to 62% a year ago.
• Companies and agencies are increasingly using third party bid management technology for paid search marketing. Just under half of responding companies conducting search engine marketing rely on basic tools.
• Google’s dominance as a search engine is clear from both advertiser and agency results, with the vast majority of companies (95%) paying to advertise on Google AdWords.

(Source: Mobilemarketingwatch.com, May 2011)

• online shopping cart abandonment rate is between 75 to 80%
• 96% of visitors to a website leave without completing the action that marketers want them to do
• Google network reaches 80% of the world
• YouTube’s TrueView video ads deliver more than 18 years of video each day!

How it works

Today we’re introducing the broad match modifier, a new AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords that have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today.

To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer’s search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren’t considered close variants.

The graphic above illustrates the relative reach of different keyword match type strategies. As you can see, modified broad match keywords match more searches than the equivalent phrase match keyword, but fewer searches than the equivalent broad match keyword. Match behavior also depends on the specific words you modify. For example, the keyword formal +shoes will match the search “evening shoes,” but the keyword +formal +shoes will not.

If for some reason you cannot find your web site in Google when you type in www.example.com. Try example.com instead. Google may see the non-www version as the preferred domain.

So how can you set a preferred domain? You can set a preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools. This is usually the first thing we check for our SEO clients. Here’s how to do it:

To specify your preferred domain (Source: Google):

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Settings.
3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.

You may need to reverify ownership of your sites. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other using the original verification method. However, if you’ve removed the file, meta tag, or DNS record, you’ll need to repeat the verification steps.

Note: Once you’ve set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.

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