7 things marketers need to know about the impact of Google’s latest change on SEO
Importance: [rating=5]
Recommended link: Google announcement - Helping users find mobile-friendly pages
1. Google will now give more prominence to mobile sites in the search results (SERPs). More prominence will occur thanks to a ‘mobile-friendly’ label:
2. This label will only appear in mobile search results. Which is what we would expect.
3. The change has been rolled out. We didn’t see this yesterday, but it is now visible, e.g. for a brand search for this site:
4. This isn’t a ranking factor change. Google has previously stated that mobile sites with errors may lose ranking, but this announcement just relates to the label. However, we can expect that this change will increase clickthrough rates on sites that have this label and decrease…
Using Google's 'Fetch as Google Render" feature to assess mobile SEO suitability
63% of today's mobile phone users use their cell phone to go online and 34% of mobile phone Internet users only go online with their cell phone rather than any other device, according to the latest Pew Internet Mobile Technology Fact Sheet. Numbers like these demonstrate the power and importance of the mobile experience, and some big names have taken notice - including Google.
Google research has shown that 61% of users would not be likely to return to a mobile site if they had problems accessing the site on their mobile phone the first time. Because Google is committed to ensuring the best possible experience for its users across the web, these lackluster mobile experiences may have an effect on SEO and where a website ranks in search engine results pages. Google has also stated that…
Examples show why you should avoid the cultural pitfalls of over-simplistic keyword research
When working on keyword research, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that tools will do the job of brains. Let’s clear that out from the outset: they won’t. Tools are only as good as their handlers. Give a spanner to a monkey, it’ll find ingenious ways to use it. Give the same spanner to a dog and it goes from tool to toy. We should use tools wisely!
There are countless tools dedicated to the daunting task of keyword research and there’s a growth in tools for multilingual keyword research. A promising trend, but we should never believe tools can replace the work of a native expert in a given market.
So often is the case a client will already have an English-language keyword list that they use and generate through translators into a target market’s 'language'. These translations are…
Affiliate Website Marketing Tips
Many smart marketers and businesses today are taking advantage of affiliate marketing, but is it right for you? In order to get the most from it, you need to understand how affiliate marketing works and what you should do to make it a success. The best way to do this is to develop a solid plan that includes strategic steps, so you don’t waste your time, effort and money.
In this infographic we’ve compiled some smart, actionable advice to help you get your feet wet in the affiliate marketing pool. With the right game plan for affiliate marketing, you can dramatically increase sales and traffic, adding incremental, profitable sales to grow your business.
The infographic on Affiliate Marketing from WhoIsHostingThis shows how affiliate marketing can help you connect commerce and content. Here’s the big picture to hopefully get you excited by the potential of affiliate…
Free Twitter Analytics service and self-serve ad platform rolled out [@SmartInsights alert]
Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Twitter SMB impact research
2014 has seen some great new opportunities for smaller businesses to use Twitter to expand their reach, generate leads and understand the effectiveness of Twitter.
We previously alerted readers to the rollout of the free Twitter dashboard/analytics and the self-serve ad platform. Both updates removed the need for big budgets (minimum $10000) or verified accounts. These updates were great if you were in the right countries, but were limited to the US, UK, Ireland, Canada and select other countries initially.
So this update is simply to share the news that access is now available to many more countries - so do share the word!
A big welcome to @TwitterAdsNord! Self-serve Twitter advertising is now available to businesses in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark.
— Twitter Small Biz (@TwitterSmallBiz) November 5,…
Why is attribution modelling important?
Ever since its birth in the mid 1990s, online advertising has been lauded as the most accountable advertising medium ever, but it has taken a while to live up to the promise... The early days of measuring online display campaign effectiveness based on click-through rates alone seem excruciatingly painful to recall for example!
Fast forward to 2014 and the latest online media spend figures show that digital media spend has increased dramatically, with predictions that Digital media will account for 75% of all marketing spend in 5 years. With this kind of money comes a responsibility to ensure media spend isn’t being wasted, or at the very least to find ways of explaining how just much value is being derived from it.
More advanced digital marketeers have started looking towards attribution modelling to help better understand what their budget is doing for them and how it can be made to…
Analysis of content CTRs shows the impact of video and images
BrightEdge has reviewed the types of content that perform best in delivering organic traffic. These charts show the desktop click through rate (CTR) in the search results (SERPs) for different ranking positions compared to classic written web content. The text results compare to other research on clickthrough rate on organic results with position. However the results for images shows that clickthrough rates are higher overall for different tanking positions.
The effect is less evident for video where the CTR with position curve is more similar to that for classic text result.s
You can download the full report Cracking the Content Code from Brightedge.
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It looks cool, but how should you use insights from attribution to improve media spend?
With the growing maturity in analytics tools and the geniuses at Google and other analytics services working to improve them, it is great to see attribution modelling data and insights now widely available. But availability of these tools doesn't equal use, indeed the Smart Insights Customer Experience Management report shows that while we're pretty good at reviewing engagement with websites, email and social media through hurdle rates, the use of attribution is languishing way down at the bottom of methods of assessing engagement.
[Editor's note: To help shed some light on the what-why-how of attribution modelling and as part of our mission to make analytics more actionable, we asked Hugh Gage to write a…
Visuals and Videos win if you want more ReTweets
We thought this research worth sharing since it's completed by Twitter's own data scientist Douglas Mason. It suggests which types of content marketing via Twitter may be more effective. Mason examined millions of Tweets from verified users (that's big brands and celebs) to see whether some types of Tweets receive more engagement than others.
So, what impacts Twitter engagement?
Is it the hashtag, video, tweet containing a digit, a quote or photo? His findings discovered that there are differences by industry and as expected, they do boost retweets. Though which are more impactful than others? on average, sharing photos boosts engagement more, followed by videos and quotes.
Access the full research via Twitter's blog where you can select the effect for different media sectors.…
My top 10 tips to help you secure your digital marketing graduate job
There’s something nostalgic about looking back at your time at University – especially when looking to offer advice.
Like that one time you were stranded in the library preparing for your last exam. Or the time you were rushing to print your coursework and realised you had run out of print credits. Frustrating at the time, but when you look back, there’s always a lesson learnt.
University offers so much, yet it’s often under utilised by students. This is sometimes only realised by graduating students when it’s too late to seize those opportunities.
So this is me, who has been there, done that, passing the baton of advice on to any Under-grad or Post-grad students who may be considering their future in digital marketing. The following tips are lessons I…
