Category: Search Engine Watch

Google reportedly has spent $400 million to buy a London based artificial intelligence company called DeepMind. Neither firm offered up more information, but reports indicate DeepMind’s team will be working with Google’s search team.

The Search Agency released its quarterly State of Paid Search Report for Q4 2013. Two sectors: business services and ecommerce show varying results in paid search; however, cost per click for mobile devices was down when compared to desktop.

Not all keywords are created equal. Some drive more traffic, others have higher intent, and still others may be more profitable for your business. Here’s to determine which terms deserve more of your time and which deserve less.

Understanding how users reach your website is fundamental to planning your marketing activity and increasing relevant traffic to your website. The place for all of this wonderful information is within the Acquisitions section in Google Analytics.

Enhanced campaigns, image extensions, third party reviews… Fantastic features that have improved performance for search marketers. But we always want more, don’t we? What do we hope that 2014 will bring from Google to make us really happy?

Says Cutts: “As far as doing special specific work to say ‘you have this many followers on Twitter’ or ‘this many likes on Facebook’, to the best of my knowledge we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms.”

SEO technology company Conductor has published research that looks at how many search results had a healthy number of “blue links,” what percentage had universal search results, and how many ads were common for 1.5 million keywords.

The best headlines are ones which marry SEO with emotion. They are the ones we want to click on but they are also the ones that convey the essence of the article and follow through on the promise of the headline. So how do you do this? Read on…

A good analytical organic search tactician should do their homework in year-over-year by month analysis and not simply in month-over month ongoing review. It is only over a long run of time (yearly) that we can assess for true success.

Brands have begun building momentum around their Super Bowl ad campaigns. So what are the keys to being successful in a pre-launch and throughout the Super Bowl, and what can all search advertisers learn from these brands? Three simple things…

Expect to start seeing the impact of Hummingbird in full force, significant additions in natural language search capability, the impact of Google+ grow, guest posting take more hits, and sites with no mobile implementation take some rankings hits.

Cannabis dispensaries want to be able to advertise their products using the same online channels as every other business and website. However, they’re finding few opportunities to do so and Google, Twitter and Facebook aren’t budging.

Users on the go looking for a business’s phone number in the search results expect to be able to access that number and call with a couple clicks. Is your brand leveraging the options for click to call in the search results like this top retailer?

If you’re still suffering from Google’s Penguin update, it’s important to realize that link removal isn’t enough. It’s time to focus on referral traffic, build up a following, and design SEO campaigns that are smart enough to weather any storm.

Google is changing the user-agent they use when crawling content for smartphones. Ensuring mobile searchers find relevant and usable pages is an absolute must do. If you’re not already, time to start creating special mobile reports in 2014.

The new crawl error reports will make it easier for webmasters to track down crawl errors, why they are happening, and how to fix them without having to do a lot of back and forth checking with tools to determine what exactly was going on.

Using Knowledge Graph data, Google has made a change that gives searchers extra information about websites listed in the search results, such as when it was founded, who owns it, what type of site it is, and awards it has won.

Facebook is making some changes to how users see updates from individuals and pages in the news feed. This change will definitely hurt businesses running branded pages on Facebook that don’t want to pay for Facebook advertising for visibility.

This week, Google announced AdWords will have a new look and feel that’s more consistent with other Google products. Updates included more white space, softer colors, and less scrolling to access important information.

Pinterest news this week includes an announcement for a new recipe search for special dietary needs like gluten-free and “paleo,” and a couple features spotted by users that are in testing: personalized home pages and functional GIF images.