Four of the most interesting search marketing news stories of the week
It’s Friday, so welcome to our weekly round up of search marketing and related news. This week we have the 16 companies … read more
Infographic: The ultimate guide to SEO-friendly URLs
Having an SEO-friendly URL structure can help search engines and users alike navigate your website more easily, potentially giving you an edge over the competition. To explain the basics, contributors John Lincoln and Brian Dean have put together this …
Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Algorithm, Hillary Clinton, SEO, Bing Ads & More
This week in my search video, I try the new microphone one more time – let me know if it is good or bad and Iâll switch it out if it is bad…
The big picture guide to local SEO: ranking in 2016 & beyond
Columnist Marcus Miller provides a comprehensive look into ranking factors for local search, including negative ranking factors and ways to differentiate yourself from the competition.
The post The big picture guide to local SEO: ranking in 2016 &…
Another Rough Week for Google
A class action lawsuit about AdWords can proceed, the U.S. Supreme Court says. Well, really they declined to hear the case.
read more
Google Wants To Make Spam Reporting Easier; Let Them Know How
Yesterday afternoon, the Google Webmaster channel posted on Google+ a request for webmasters to give feedback on the Google spam report process. They said…
Google: No Plans For Disavow Link Testing Tool
Yesterday we covered some tips on managing disavow link file issues with syntax issues, encoding issues, etc of the URLs. So after, as I expected…
Google Manipulating Hillary Clinton’s Search Completions?
I hate politics because we always have people come in and claim how Google is taking sides one way or another…
Google Zombies Or Likely Buyers? Does Google Show Them Different Results?
We’ve been covering the Google zombie phenomenon for some time now. There is actually a spike in discussion around it in the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread right now…
How to prepare for AdWords’ expanded text ads and device-based bidding
Columnist Matt Umbro provides some advice for advertisers who want to be ahead of the game when Google’s recently announced AdWords changes go live.
The post How to prepare for AdWords’ expanded text ads and device-based bidding appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
10 grin-inducing stats we’ve seen this week
For more stats, as ever, we urge you (all together now), ‘check out Econsultancy’s Internet Statistics Compedium‘.
US app downloads down 20% YoY
May 2015 saw downloads for the top 15 app publishers drop an average of 20% in the US.
Globally, these 15 apps are faring better, with an average growth in downloads of 3%.
The research from Nomura and reported by Recode shows the extent to which Snapchat and Uber are exceptions to the rule of negative or minimal growth (see chart below).
Both more than doubled their downloads last month, year-on-year.
Globally, the mobile phone market is still growing, so the app market is as well. But not by much.
Time in app also stuttering
The bad news for apps doesn’t stop there. People are spending less time in their social media apps overall.
SimilarWeb looked at Android apps, comparing Q1 2015 to Q1 2016. Across the four major social platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, time in app for Android users has decreased.
The chart below shows this phenomenon for the Facebook app, likely influenced by spending more time in Messenger.
The mobile display advertising landscape
IHS and Facebook produced some research on this back in March, but I’ve only just come across the results.
The charts are compelling, so I’ve reproduced two of my favourites here.
The first shows Facebook’s domination of mobile display advertising (44%) and the second shows how much of overall display is on mobile (76%).
Vote Leave beating Stronger In for website visits
VoteLeaveTakecontrol.org has seen 373,000 visits to its website in the past 28 days from the UK, compared to 185,000 visiting Strongerin.co.uk.
The information comes from more research by SimilarWeb.
EU referendum top searches
Sticking with the UK’s lengthy referendum debate, Hitwise has studied the online behaviour of 3m Britons, across the four weeks ending May 28, 2016.
The results show top keywords included in searches for relevant referendum terms.
Top keywords included in searches for ‘EU Referendum’ and ‘Brexit’
Top keywords included in searches for ‘EU Leave’ and ‘EU Stay’
Football brands
Brand Finance delivers an annual study that calculates the brand value of the world’s top soccer clubs.
You can check out the top 10 below. Other headlines as follows:
- Leicester’s brand value is up 132%, making it the fastest growing football club brand.
- Manchester United remains the most valuable football brand, worth £1.17bn, despite failing to qualify for the Champions League.
Keep social honest
A growing number of people cannot distinguish between marketing and non-commercial content.
That worrying finding comes from the CIM’s intriguingly titled study ‘Keep Social Honest‘.
3,000 social media users were surveyed and had the following to say (some of these stats seem like they’d be difficult to prove):
- A quarter (25%) have seen a brand fake an online review (compared to 17% in 2014).
- 21% have seen a brand pay or incentivise customers to share positive comments on social media without making this clear to other users (up from 14% in 2014).
- 16% have seen brands pay someone to promote a product or service without disclosing the payment (also up from 14% in 2014).
More stats from the study can be seen in the infographic below.
SEO in financial services
40% of the top five rankings in Google’s organic search results for financial services are aggregators, according to new research by Equimedia.
Over 3,000 keywords were analysed across the main financial services markets.
Across most categories, aggregator sites such as MoneySuperMarket occupy the top two positions in organic search.
Consumer advice services are second in prominence, as shown in the table below.
To understand the value of the rankings, Equimedia calculated a score for each site based on search volume and using a click bias weighting to account for higher ranking getting better clickthrough.
The results of this scoring are shown below (for the current account and mortgages category) – as you can see, moneysavingexpert.com tops both of these tables.
Effectiveness of media spend
Display advertising doesn’t come off too well, looking at the chart below taken from the Econsultancy Media Budgets Index, in association with Datalicious.
TV and point-of-sale are out in front as the most effective channels as regards return on media spend.
These results are caveated with the fact that 34% of respondents said they did not use attribution to track the value of marketing channels.
A further 22% said they didn’t know if they attributed success or that it wasn’t relevant.
Most popular iOS apps
A last piece of app news, from research by App Annie.
Facebook Messenger, Amazon and Snapchat top the charts of quickest growing iOS apps in the US.
With Snapchat’s number of daily active users recently overtaking Twitter’s, the platform seems well poised.
Facebook Messenger, too, is set to grow further, especially on Android, where Facebook has recently removed Messenger from within the main Facebook app, to encourage users to switch.
10 grin-inducing digital marketing stats we’ve seen this week
For more stats, as ever, we urge you (all together now), ‘check out Econsultancy’s Internet Statistics Compedium‘.
US app downloads down 20% YoY
May 2015 saw downloads for the top 15 app publishers drop an average of 20% in the US.
Globally, these 15 apps are faring better, with an average growth in downloads of 3%.
The research from Nomura and reported by Recode shows the extent to which Snapchat and Uber are exceptions to the rule of negative or minimal growth (see chart below).
Both more than doubled their downloads last month, year-on-year.
Globally, the mobile phone market is still growing, so the app market is as well. But not by much.
Time in app also stuttering
The bad news for apps doesn’t stop there. People are spending less time in their social media apps overall.
SimilarWeb looked at Android apps, comparing Q1 2015 to Q1 2016. Across the four major social platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, time in app for Android users has decreased.
The chart below shows this phenomenon for the Facebook app, likely influenced by spending more time in Messenger.
The mobile display advertising landscape
IHS and Facebook produced some research on this back in March, but I’ve only just come across the results.
The charts are compelling, so I’ve reproduced two of my favourites here.
The first shows Facebook’s domination of mobile display advertising (44%) and the second shows how much of overall display is on mobile (76%).
Vote Leave beating Stronger In for website visits
VoteLeaveTakecontrol.org has seen 373,000 visits to its website in the past 28 days from the UK, compared to 185,000 visiting Strongerin.co.uk.
The information comes from more research by SimilarWeb.
EU referendum top searches
Sticking with the UK’s lengthy referendum debate, Hitwise has studied the online behaviour of 3m Britons, across the four weeks ending May 28, 2016.
The results show top keywords included in searches for relevant referendum terms.
Top keywords included in searches for ‘EU Referendum’ and ‘Brexit’
Top keywords included in searches for ‘EU Leave’ and ‘EU Stay’
Football brands
Brand Finance delivers an annual study that calculates the brand value of the world’s top soccer clubs.
You can check out the top 10 below. Other headlines as follows:
- Leicester’s brand value is up 132%, making it the fastest growing football club brand.
- Manchester United remains the most valuable football brand, worth £1.17bn, despite failing to qualify for the Champions League.
Keep social honest
A growing number of people cannot distinguish between marketing and non-commercial content.
That worrying finding comes from the CIM’s intriguingly titled study ‘Keep Social Honest‘.
3,000 social media users were surveyed and had the following to say (some of these stats seem like they’d be difficult to prove):
- A quarter (25%) have seen a brand fake an online review (compared to 17% in 2014).
- 21% have seen a brand pay or incentivise customers to share positive comments on social media without making this clear to other users (up from 14% in 2014).
- 16% have seen brands pay someone to promote a product or service without disclosing the payment (also up from 14% in 2014).
More stats from the study can be seen in the infographic below.
SEO in financial services
40% of the top five rankings in Google’s organic search results for financial services are aggregators, according to new research by Equimedia.
Over 3,000 keywords were analysed across the main financial services markets.
Across most categories, aggregator sites such as MoneySuperMarket occupy the top two positions in organic search.
Consumer advice services are second in prominence, as shown in the table below.
To understand the value of the rankings, Equimedia calculated a score for each site based on search volume and using a click bias weighting to account for higher ranking getting better clickthrough.
The results of this scoring are shown below (for the current account and mortgages category) – as you can see, moneysavingexpert.com tops both of these tables.
Effectiveness of media spend
Display advertising doesn’t come off too well, looking at the chart below taken from the Econsultancy Media Budgets Index, in association with Datalicious.
TV and point-of-sale are out in front as the most effective channels as regards return on media spend.
These results are caveated with the fact that 34% of respondents said they did not use attribution to track the value of marketing channels.
A further 22% said they didn’t know if they attributed success or that it wasn’t relevant.
Most popular iOS apps
A last piece of app news, from research by App Annie.
Facebook Messenger, Amazon and Snapchat top the charts of quickest growing iOS apps in the US.
With Snapchat’s number of daily active users recently overtaking Twitter’s, the platform seems well poised.
Facebook Messenger, too, is set to grow further, especially on Android, where Facebook has recently removed Messenger from within the main Facebook app, to encourage users to switch.
Search in Pics: SEO robots, Google fish tank & a koala
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. A Google fish tank: Source: Twitter YouTube Kids furniture: Source: Google+…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
The importance of quality content for SEO
Writing high-quality content should be a key aspect of every SEO strategy. Content writing requires some of your creative writing skills, though. And let’s be honest, many blogs are hardly readable and not at all informative, entertaining nor inspiring. Now, we can’t all be Hemingway, but you should make an effort to write well. Why? In this […]
Why and how to comprehensively test the mobile usability of your site
Testing with Google’s mobile-friendly and page-speed tests is a good discipline, but if you really want competitive edge on the mobile web this is just the starting point.
Eight most important PPC tips for online retail
With the share of digital ad spend at 29.9% in 2015 and expected to increase to 39.3% in 2019* the digital advertising marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive for ecommerce retailers.
Android launcher and search engine Evie “reimagines” the mobile homescreen
Company wants to offer a better homescreen and help users get things done across apps and the mobile web more efficiently.
The post Android launcher and search engine Evie “reimagines” the mobile homescreen appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
SearchCap: Google shopping ad filters, Google maps speeds up & Yandex algorithm update
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
The post SearchCap: Google shopping ad filters, Google maps speeds up & Yandex algorithm update appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google testing filter buttons for Shopping ads: Filter by local availability, top rated and more
The new test offers more opportunity for ad exposure beyond the product listing ad box and mobile carousel.
The post Google testing filter buttons for Shopping ads: Filter by local availability, top rated and more appeared first on Search Engine Land….
RankBrain Survival Guide
This is a guide to surviving RankBrain. I created it, in part, because there’s an amazing amount of misinformation about RankBrain. And the truth is there is nothing you can do to optimize for RankBrain. I’m not saying RankBrain isn’t interesting or important. I love learning about how search works whether it helps me in my […]