Category: Search Engine Watch

The tools available for mining and identifying keywords that will drive the highest ROI are extensive, but often the best place to start is at the search engines. Here’s how to discover new keyword opportunities for local businesses using Google.

If you have multiple domains, should you link them altogether, or will this look spammy? Google’s Matt Cutts says to keep everything within the same domain to prevent mass cross-linking, and prevent any massive cross-linking schemes between sites.

Baidu is in the process of making one of the largest ever Chinese Internet takeovers, with a $1.9 billion purchase of 91 Wireless, an Internet app Store, from NetDragon.

When users click on a newly featured arrow beneath the PLAs, Google expands the results from five products to 16. This presents a huge opportunity for advertisers. Also: AdGooroo reveals which brands are seeing the most PLA impressions so far.

Paid clicks jumped 21 percent and the average price per click slid 8 percent. Yahoo’s display business generated $423 million, an 11 percent decline from last year. The number of display ads sold and average price per ad sold both declined.

Foursquare has begun rolling out a new style of advertisement which is displayed once users check-in at specific locations. Captain Morgan is one of the first brands to sign up for the new advertisements, which will be running for 4-6 weeks.

ComScore’s latest data for June indicates Bing and Yahoo are merely swapping market share, with Bing as the favorite for June 2013. Google held steady as the top U.S. search engine, but its market share was down slightly from this time last year.

Google Analytics has announced several changes to segmentation are starting to roll out. Updates include segmentation based on users (not visits), cohort analysis, six new segment templates, and a new interface. Here’s a rundown of what’s new.

Planning a website redesign can be an extremely exciting process. While having a great looking website is awesome, technical SEO, content, and functionality can’t be an afterthought. Here are some key considerations to avoid a redesign disaster.

Facebook recently announced a change to reports that is slowly being rolled out to accounts. Wondering where to start and how to pull a basic ad performance report? Here’s a walk-through of how to set up your first report.

Want to establish competitive benchmarks that inform best practices for content marketing within Facebook and Twitter? Use these insights to influence your own framework with respect to competitive awareness, goals and associated tactics for content.

Google has issued a special warning regarding a practice where a website inserts new pages into a user’s browsing history. Rather than returning to Google’s search results, some users are being taken to a spoof page that is all advertisements.

The White House announced that an agreement with several of the largest Internet ad networks – including AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo – has been reached to curb advertising on websites that peddle copyright infringing content.

Staying mobile is important to smartphone and tablet users, and findings released by Telmetrics and xAd show the gas and convenience store industry has a huge opportunity to capture mobile searchers nearby who are ready to purchase immediately.

Reports from Covario, IgnitionOne, and RKG show that PPC advertising on mobile devices continues to grow significantly – and is up 100+ percent compared to this time last year. Meanwhile, Bing Ad traffic and costs are up, but ROI is stable.

A new Pinterest study from Semiocast finds that users from the U.S. are far more active than international users. In June, 79 percent of Pinterest users who pinned, repinned, or liked an image or video were from the United States.

The Chinese search engine space just got a lot more interesting with Qihoo 360 reportedly purchasing Sohu’s Sogou search engine. This deal would effectively combine the second and third largest search engines in China and pose a challenge to Baidu.

Today Google AdWords released a mobile research study that concluded 88 percent of ad clicks from mobile search are incremental to organic clicks. In other words, the paid clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when search ads are paused.

For many SEO affiliates, the last year was a very tough one, especially because of the two Google updates: Panda and Penguin. Here are two strategies for affiliates to develop and sustain success heading forward, by applying the AIDA model to SEO.

Do you know how many times users come back to your website over time? Have you considered how this information could help you plan your marketing campaigns? It’s time to take a look at the Frequency and Recency Report in Google Analytics!