Why Create a Microsite About Yourself?
Someone found SEO Theory for an interesting question that I haven’t really addressed in the past. And, in fact, if I had addressed it in the past the topic would probably need a refresh by now anyway. The question concerns creating microsites for one’s self. Why do that? Search engine optimization is about obtaining the best possible performance from search referral traffic. That means you want the traffic to be interested in your content and you want the people searching for your content to be able to easily find your content. So when YOU are the topic of the query, having a microsite does sometimes make sense. In fact, every Web searchable social media profile you create is a microsite; your Twitter account, your Linkedin profile, your Pinterest board, your Facebook page — these are all little sites that tell people something about you. Google+ gives you the ability — through its (now drifting) Authorship markup — to create a hub for your microsites so that people can see where your content may be found. You can link to social media profiles or blogs where you contribute content. But Who Really Needs a Microsite? So, with all these social media […]
Demystifying Viewing Patterns
Lately I’ve been intrigued by something called the ‘viewing pattern’ of people. This is a pattern in which people view, in this case, websites. There are really a lot of ideas about this out there. Now I’m wondering: is there one right pattern? In other words: is there one pattern we should follow when designing our product…
This post first appeared on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!
How to Build Your Own Mass Keyword Difficulty Tool
Posted by MartinMacDonald
Despite keywords being slightly out of fashion, thanks to the whole (not provided) debacle, it remains the case that a large part of an SEO’s work revolves around discovering opportunity and filling that same opportunity …
Don’t get stuck in a content rut, this week’s DistilledLive video
When you realise something works in the online world, it’s easy to keep at it and get stuck in a content rut.
For this week’s DistilledLive, Jess and Britt maximise the perks of being in the same office (and time zone) by taking a look beyond competitor’s borders when it comes to approaching your content.
Value Based SEO Strategy
One approach to search marketing is to treat the search traffic as a side-effect of a digital marketing strategy. I’m sure Google would love SEOs to think this way, although possibly not when it comes to PPC! Even if you’re taking a more direct, rankings-driven approach, the engagement and relevancy scores that come from delivering what the customer values should serve you well, too.
In this article, we’ll look at a content strategy based on value based marketing. Many of these concepts may be familiar, but bundled together, they provide an alternative search provider model to one based on technical quick fixes and rank. If you want to broaden the value of your SEO offering beyond that first click, and get a few ideas on talking about value, then this post is for you.
In any case, the days of being able to rank well without providing value beyond the click are numbered. Search is becoming more about providing meaning to visitors and less about providing keyword relevance to search engines.
What Is Value Based Marketing?
Value based marketing is customer, as opposed to search engine, centric. In Values Based Marketing For Bottom Line Success, the authors focus on five areas:
- Discover and quantify your customers’ wants and needs
- Commit to the most important things that will impact your customers
- Create customer value that is meaningful and understandable
- Assess how you did at creating true customer value
- Improve your value package to keep your customers coming back
Customers compare your offer against those of competitors, and divide the benefits by the cost to arrive at value. Marketing determines and communicates that value.
This is the step beyond keyword matching. When we use keyword matching, we’re trying to determine intent. We’re doing a little demographic breakdown. This next step is to find out what the customer values. If we give the customer what they value, they’re more likely to engage and less likely to click back.
What Does The Customer Value?
A key question of marketing is “which customers does this business serve”? Seems like an obvious question, but it can be difficult to answer. Does a gym serve people who want to get fit? Yes, but then all gyms do that, so how would they be differentiated?
Obviously, a gym serves people who live in a certain area. So, if our gym is in Manhattan, our customer becomes “someone who wants to get fit in Manhattan”. Perhaps our gym is upmarket and expensive. So, our customer becomes “people who want to get fit in Manhattan and be pampered and are prepared to pay more for it”. And so on, and so on. They’re really questions and statements about the value proposition as perceived by the customer, and then delivered by the business.
So, value based marketing is about delivering value to a customer. This syncs with Google’s proclaimed goal in search, which is to put users first by delivering results they deem to have value, and not just pages that match a keyword term. Keywords need to be seen in a wider context, and that context is pretty difficult to establish if you’re standing outside the search engine looking in, so thinking in terms of concepts related to the value proposition might be a good way to go.
Value Based SEO Strategy
The common SEO approach, for many years, has started with keywords. It should start with customers and the business.
The first question is “who is the target market” and then ask what they value.
Relate what they value to the business. What is the value proposition of the business? Is it aligned? What would make a customer value this business offering over those of competitors? It might be price. It might be convenience. It’s probably a mix of various things, but be sure to nail down the specific value propositions.
Then think of some customer questions around these value propositions. What would be the likely customer objections to buying this product? What would be points that need clarifying? How does this offer differ from other similar offers? What is better about this product or service? What are the perceived problems in this industry? What are the perceived problems with this product or service? What is difficult or confusing about it? What could go wrong with it? What risks are involved? What aspects have turned off previous customers? What complaints did they make?
Make a list of such questions. These are your article topics.
You can glean this information by either interviewing customers or the business owner. Each of these questions, and accompanying answer, becomes an article topic on your site, although not necessarily in Q&A format. The idea is to create a list of topics as a basis for articles that address specific points, and objections, relating to the value proposition.
For example, buying SEO services is a risk. Customers want to know if the money they spend is going to give them a return. So, a valuable article might be a case study on how the company provided return on spend in the past, and the process by which it will achieve similar results in future. Another example might be a buyer concerned about the reliability of a make of car. A page dedicated to reliability comparisons, and another page outlining the customer care after-sale plan would provide value. Note how these articles aren’t keyword driven, but value driven.
Ever come across a FAQ that isn’t really a FAQ? Dreamed-up questions? They’re frustrating, and of little value if the information doesn’t directly relate to the value we seek. Information should be relevant and specific so when people land on the site, there’s more chance they will perceive value, at least in terms of addressing the questions already on their mind.
Compare this approach with generic copy around a keyword term. A page talking about “SEO” in response to the keyword term “SEO“might closely match a keyword term, so that’s a relevance match, but unless it’s tied into providing a customer the value they seek, it’s probably not of much use. Finding relevance matches is no longer a problem for users. Finding value matches often is. Even if you’re keyword focused, added these articles provides you semantic variation that may capture keyword searches that aren’t appearing in keyword tools.
Keyword relevance was a strategy devised at a time when information was less readily available and search engines weren’t as powerful. Finding something relevant was more hit and miss that it is today. These days, there’s likely thousands, if not millions, of pages that will meet relevance criteria in terms of keyword matching, so the next step is to meet value criteria. Providing value is less likely to earn a click back and more likely to create engagement than mere on-topic matching.
The Value Chain
Deliver value. Once people perceive value, then we have to deliver it. Marketing, and SEO in particular, used to be about getting people over the threshold. Today, businesses have to work harder to differentiate themselves and a sound way of doing this is to deliver on promises made.
So the value is in the experience. Why do we return to Amazon? It’s likely due to the end-to-end experience in terms of delivering value. Any online e-commerce store can deliver relevance. Where competition is fierce, Google is selective.
In the long term, delivering value should drive down the cost of marketing as the site is more likely to enjoy repeat custom. As Google pushes more and more results beneath the fold, the cost of acquisition is increasing, so we need to treat each click like gold.
Monitor value. Does the firm keep delivering value? To the same level? Because people talk. They talk on Twitter and Facebook and the rest. We want them talking in a good way, but even if they talk in a negative way, it can still useful. Their complaints can be used as topics for articles. They can be used to monitor value, refine the offer and correct problems as they arise. Those social signals, whilst not a guaranteed ranking boost, are still signals. We need to adopt strategies whereby we listen to all the signals, so to better understand our customers, in order to provide more value, and hopefully enjoy a search traffic boost as a welcome side-effect, so long as Google is also trying to determine what users value. .
Not sounding like SEO? Well, it’s not optimizing for search engines, but for people. If Google is to provide value, then it needs to ensure results provide not just relevant, but offer genuine value to end users. Do Google do this? In many cases, not yet, but all their rhetoric and technical changes suggest that providing value is at the ideological heart of what they do. So the search results will most likely, in time, reflect the value people seek, and not just relevance.
In technical terms, this provides some interesting further reading:
Today, signals such as keyword co-occurrence, user behavior, and previous searches do in fact inform context around search queries, which impact the SERP landscape. Note I didn’t say the signals “impact rankings,” even though rank changes can, in some cases, be involved. That’s because there’s a difference. Google can make a change to the SERP landscape to impact 90 percent of queries and not actually cause any noticeable impact on rankings.
The way to get the context right, and get positive user behaviour signals, and align with their previous searches, is to first understand what people value.
Categories:
How to Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by lenawest
Visual assets like memes and truly informative infographics have always been (and will continue to be) effective ways of driving traffic and generating conversations. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Lena West walks us through some of the more effective examples, proving that it isn’t difficult to create visual assets that get people talking.
Whiteboard Friday – Lena West – How To Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard:
Video Transcription
Hey there, everyone. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. My name is Lena West from Influence Expansion, and I am here today to talk about how you can swaggerjack the power of visual memes to really boost your traffic and your SEO results.
So first, a couple of things I want to talk to you about is a couple tactics. So we’re going to kind of get into the nitty-gritty a little bit here, so tactics that I have used with our clients that I know work. So first let me also say that I am not an SEO expert, and I don’t play one on TV.
I’m a social person. But one of the things that I’ve noticed in our work with clients is when we are really heavy handed using a lot of images, you would think that it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t be effective, but it is. I notice that not only do they get better search engine rankings, but they also get a lot of traffic and a lot of social signals. So all that’s good stuff. So I’m going to show you a couple of things that we do to get that done for our clients.
First thing I’m going to talk to you about is Wordless Wednesday. If you don’t know what that is, I’m going to go into it. Infographics, and do not laugh at me when I say infographics because I know everybody might be tired of infographics, but there’s still some life there and there’s still an opportunity for us to get it right and get some visibility going with infographics and get some juice out of it still.
Then I’m going to talk about quote graphics. So you’ve seen these probably on Facebook, a lot on Pinterest. It’s a really nice background, and then on top it’s got some text that kind of makes you feel good about yourself and good about your soul. So I’ll talk about that in a minute.
So first, let’s talk about Wordless Wednesdays. So what is Wordless Wednesday? I was first introduced to Wordless Wednesday when I started doing some work with BlogPaws, and complete disclosure, I’m on the board, but they are a great organization. BlogPaws is a pet organization, and they help pets with blogs, people who blog about pets, and that sort of thing.
What they do is they’ll post pictures of dogs and cats and ferrets, and it’s really interesting because they just post the picture, no words, hence Wordless Wednesday. They post it on a Wednesday. Because they don’t force the content on the reader, what will happen is people will start to comment like crazy about what they think that particular animal is saying or what they think the scenario is about, etc. It really boosts engagement, and it gets people talking.
The thing that I learned the most about Wordless Wednesdays is, if you Google it, like right now if you Google it, you will see that there is about 7.7 million, and it will probably be more as you’re watching this video, depending upon when you watch this, 7.7 million search results. If you look at the top five results there, you’re going to find that not a lot of them are big brands. They’re small companies. So there’s really room to grow and participate in this particular meme. I’m going to talk to you about how to do that in a second.
So that’s what Wordless Wednesdays is about. It’s about slapping up probably an innocuous looking picture and getting people to comment and share. It works. It’s super effective. Something creative happens when you don’t force content on people.
So how do you swaggerjack the Wordless Wednesday? The easiest thing to do, number one, is just chime in on Wordless Wednesdays. Just start tagging your blog posts as Wordless Wednesdays. Now that you can use hashtags on Facebook, you can do it on Facebook. Start really getting in on Wordless Wednesday.
The other thing that you can do is make your own meme. So one of my clients has, I believe she calls it, Scarlett Says Saturdays. So that’s the alliteration thing going on.
I’ve also seen Throwback Thursdays. You guys have probably seen that. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re consistent. If it’s Throwback Thursdays, it’s not Throwback Thursdays once a month. It’s Throwback Thursday every Thursday. That’s the thing that makes the difference. That’s where you get the juice from this Wordless Wednesday type meme is being consistent and doing it every single week without fail.
The power of the visual meme is amazing. Some brands that get this right, and you guys probably have seen some of these ads, it’s the folks at Old Navy. Oh, they are amazing with the retro thing that they’ve done. They’ve brought back some ’70s stars, Mr. T and The Brady Bunch people. It’s just amazing what they’ve done with graphics. They’ve got that whole retro meme, that visual meme going, and it is working for them. Old Navy does more sales than Gap even does. So it’s been really effective for them.
Another brand that gets it right, our friends at Dos Equis. So what’s the saying this guy? He’s the most unforgettable man in the world or the most interesting man in the world. “When I’m busy I drink Dos Equis.” We know this guy. He’s like the Old Spice guy. He’s always around. He’s this distinguished looking gentleman with white hair and a white beard. It’s not Santa, but it’s the Dos Equis guy. But they’ve used the power of the visual meme so that every single time you see this guy’s face, you don’t even have to see the Dos Equis logo. You don’t have to see anything. All you know is something cool is going to come out of this guy’s mouth, and they’re going to make him look like James Bond meets MacGyver in this commercial.
So a couple tools that you can use to figure out which memes are hot so that you can jump on the bandwagon, KnowYourMeme.com, QuickMeme.com, and MemeCenter.com. So check those out. Those are really good places for you guys to get a start.
Second thing I want to talk about, infographics. Now I know that infographics have been overdone and overused, but I’m going to talk to you about something a little bit new in a minute. The first thing that we have seen work for our clients, in terms of getting more traffic and definitely more social shares, is going to Google images, doing a search and also going on Pinterest and doing a search for whatever industry they’re in plus the word infographics.
So if your client is in wellness, let’s say, so they’re in healthcare. Maybe it’s a vitamin company or a supplement company or something like that. Go and search for vitamins plus infographic, wellness plus infographic, healthcare plus infographic. You’d be surprised at the infographics that come up. Some of them are going to be crappy, and some of them are going to be really well done. All you have to do is copy-paste. Grab that infographic.
The beauty of infographics is, at the very bottom, mostly what you see is the attribution. So it’s whoever created it has their logo at the bottom. So you usually don’t have to worry about that when sharing infographics. Always make sure to give attribution though, because you don’t want to be steeling anybody’s stuff and trying to pass it off as your own. You don’t want any problems like that. But copy-paste. Share stuff. It doesn’t have to be your content or your client’s content for you to share it. Fill that editorial calendar with some infographics.
So for those of you who are tired of infographics that are already existing, I’ve got something for you too. Design your own. You can make your own. Your clients are sitting on tons of data. All you’ve got to do is ask them: “Hey, have you ever done a survey? What were the results? How many results did you get?” You’d be surprised at what clients reveal when you start asking the right questions.
Great way for you to design your own info-graphics, here are a couple tools, visually, Piktochart.com and Infogram. I am partial to these folks because they have a really nice pictogram. They have a really nice user interface. It’s very easy to kind of figure out what’s going on and it’s highly customizable, and what — free. So I like that.
Brands that get the infographics game right think outside of the box. So there’s this company called Warby Parker Eyewear. I’ve got to really slow it down with that — Warby Parker Eyewear. What they’ve done is they have done an annual report for I think the past two or three years. There’s one for 2010, 2011, and I think 2013 maybe, or 2012. They’ve done an annual report for their company using an infographic format. You’ve got to publish the annual report any doggone way. You may as well make it sexy. I think it’s great. Google it. You’re going to love it. You’re going to love how they’re used the infographic format to get that content out there and to share that content with their audience.
Another company who blew it out of the water, folks called LunaMetrics. You may not know who they are, but I guarantee if you work in the social space at all, you have seen their infographic. Google it. I promise you. It’s an infographic. It’s a white background, and what it does is it gives you all of the standard sizes for every single social channel layout. So it tells you the ideal size for your profile image on Facebook, your cover image for your Facebook page, your cover image for Twitter. It gives you all of those graphics all in one really long infographic. I know I have used this for us in my company. I’ve used this for our clients. I know other pros in the social space use this all the time. Who gets the credit at the very bottom?
The folks at LunaMetrics. It’s been passed around thousands and thousands and thousands of times. So really check that out.
The last and third thing I want to talk to you about in terms of swagger-jacking the power of visual memes is quote graphics. Say that three times fast. So quote graphics, you’ve seen them on Facebook and Pinterest. They’ve got that nice background, and usually it’s like a lake or some flowers or something, or maybe even a watercolor background. Some of them are bright, kind of in your face. They have some sort of saying or quote on top in very stylized text.
What I love about these images is it doesn’t matter the size of your company or your client’s company. You can use these. Here’s how. If you’re representing a bigger brand or if you work at a big brand, you can use these quotes because you get to choose what the quote image says. You get to pick which quotes you use. You can use these quotes to really humanize a big brand to bring it down, to make it connect with people in a very real way. So using words and images, you can use it connect with people.
If you’re representing a smaller brand or a smaller company or if you work at a smaller company, you can use quote graphics to develop that know, like, and trust factor with your clients and the people who are visiting your Pinterest boards or visiting your Facebook page.
Again, based on the quotes you select and the backgrounds you select, we’ve had custom backgrounds made for our clients. So we’ll create, I don’t know, a suite of like five or six custom backgrounds and just throw different quotes on the top of those various backgrounds and swap them in and out and get them up on Facebook and get them up on Pinterest. It’s been really amazing in terms of the sharability and the traffic.
Always, always, quick tip from Lena, at the very bottom put your URL or your client’s URL so that people know exactly where to go to if they want to find more information about this company that shared this great quote with them.
As always, just like with infographics, you can search, copy, paste. You can find them on your own. I think there’s a really good one on Facebook. If you go and search for quote graphics on Facebook, you’ll see it. There’s a whole Facebook page devoted to these.
The other thing you can do is create your own. I like these tools to do that. You’ve got to have your own background with most of these tools. But Pinwords is great. We use Pinwords a lot, especially if you have your own background. If your designer has done a custom background for you, Pinwords is awesome. So I’m going to circle the one that I like. Pinwords. Oops, I don’t think you guys can see that. Pinwords. I like Pinstamatic as well and Quozio. So those are three options for you to create your own.
Brands that get this right, I’m going to save Peugeot Panama for last because I love what they’ve done, and it’s like OMG. But LL Bean and HGTV. It’s very tempting when you’re on Pinterest or when you’re creating these graphics to smack products in there and use it as a sales channel. Could you do that? Yeah. But that’s like complete cheese-ball.
You want to be creative. So what the folds at LL Bean have done, so okay what’s the energy of LL Bean? What are they about? They’re about camping and outdoors and being in the wilderness and that sort of thing. It’s got that outdoorsy vibe to it. So every single board on their Pinterest board, their main Pinterest board, every board is about outdoors or animals in the wild. People are pinning this stuff like crazy. You would think, “Well, why don’t they just put pictures of their jackets?” Because nobody cares. People want to share pictures of animals and really cool tent set-ups and outdoor, what do they call it, glamping. So there’s loads of pictures of glamping on LL Bean Pinterest boards. They really get it right. Check them out.
HGTV does something very similar as well. So HGTV is all about DIY and renovating and painting your house and that whole bit. So they’ve got some boards.
But Peugeot Panama, they take it for me. What they did, you have to see it. Please Google it. What they’ve done is they’ve taken pictures of their cars, and Peugeots are kind of small cars. So what they’ll do is they’ll take pictures of the car, and they’ll chunk them up into nine or six different images and they’ll put them back together on the Pinterest board so that when you go to the Pinterest Board, it’s almost like a puzzle. It’s the coolest effect. It’s a very cool way that they’ve deconstructed the images to reconstruct the bigger picture. It’s absolutely amazing.
So I hope that you see that images are not our enemy, and images are actually our friend. We can do so much with images. It’s not just about alt text and trying to cram text in there and only use text. You can get a lot of social signals. You can get a lot of traffic and really great search engine rankings, because if you’re doing well on social, you all know that you are going to come up high on those search engine rankings.
So feel free to chat me up in the comments below. Let me know what you’re thinking. Ask me any questions. If I speak too fast and I left something out, let me know. So thanks so much for listening. See you online.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
A Round Up Of Today’s Thanksgiving Themed Search Engine Homepages & Logos
While’s Google’s Thanksgiving Day logo may have the best music, it’s not the only site to celebrate the holiday. Here’s a quick round up of Thanksgiving themed homepages and logos from a few popular search engines: Bing’s Homepage: Yahoo Thanksgiving Logo: Ask.com:…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google in breach of Dutch data protection law
Today the Dutch CPD concluded that Google’s privacy policy violates Dutch data protection laws. This is the latest European privacy set-back for Google.
Post from Barry Adams on State of Digital
Google in breach of Dutch data protection law
How to hit the headlines
Hailing from a traditional press office background (local government, Charity, Law), I’m often asked what specific PR tactics can be used to build links online. For a while I pondered this question as if it represented a separate challenge to the work of my previous roles in which, if I’m honest, Search just wasn’t in the forefront of my mind.
Happy Thanksgiving 2013 – Here Are Logos From Google & Others
Happy Thanksgiving (and Hanukkah – rare overlap) to all our readers. Today I wanted to share with you the logos, doodles, themes, designs and animations from the search industry…
“NORAD Tracks Santa” Is Back With Bing For 2013 & Will Santa Tracking Match At Google?
It’s official. NORAD Tracks Santa, the annual Santa tracking effort run by the joint US-Canadian air defense organization, will be using Microsoft’s Bing for the second year to map Santa’s route. But will Google be mapping Santa on a different route, as happened when it ran its…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Thanksgiving 2013 Google Logo Wishes Everyone A Happy Holiday With Banjo Music & Dancing Animals
To celebrate the holiday, today’s Google homepage includes a Thanksgiving themed logo complete with a banjo-playing fox, a dancing turkey and slew of forest animals building their very own vegetarian holiday meal. Clicking the play button in the middle of the logo starts a brief interactive…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Why I Hate WordPress Websites!
Do you hate WordPress? Are you getting constantly frustrated with picking up a WordPress site which someone else has developed? Well this post is to something you can point those developers to.
Post from Neil Walker on State of Digital
Why I Hate WordPress Websites!
Fifth Most Turbulent Day in Google This Year
Algoroo measured an extremely high level of SERP flux in Google last night indicating that something significant has changed in the way search results are displayed. This may reflect internal changes such as ranking or search quality algorithm updates. The jump happened on the 27th of November, following an unusually quiet fortnight between the 3rd and 19th and a rather active weekend just days before the big SERP flux.
…
The post Fifth Most Turbulent Day in Google This Year appeared first on DEJAN SEO.
SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 27, 2013
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Google Keyword Planner Now Shows Trademarked Terms At some point recently, Google started to indicate terms that ar…
Google Keyword Planner Now Shows Trademarked Terms
At some point recently, Google started to indicate terms that are trademarked in the Keyword Planner with the TM mark. Dan Shure of Evolving SEO tweeted about the new feature, noting that McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” tagline is not marked as trademarked while…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google Wants to Write Your Social Media Messages For You
A new Google patent describes a comprehensive social media bot, one that can analyze your past messages from social networks, email, text messaging, etc., and then suggest suitable yet seemingly personalized responses for various social platforms.
Google moves towards a fully-subscribed search service, to detriment of advertisers
Advertisers are required to sift and make sense of customer data coming in from dozens more channels than they ever were before. Social and mobile usage has quickly begun to play a huge role in changing advertisers’ landscape, and the marketer’s day job.
We know from working with global ecommerce advertisers that Google is the dominant analytics player.
- According to research carried out by Econsultancy in 2013, 90% of advertisers use Google Analytics (GA).
- 86% use the service to analyse site traffic and conversion KPIs.
- 75% rely on it to track online campaigns.
- Paid search is an important part of the equation for advertisers without doubt, with 61% reporting that they use GA for pay-per click optimisation.
This is where Google can capitalise profitably on the control it has over the analytics marketplace.
This month Google showed its hand by taking action that should have rung alarm bells loudly within the advertising community when it switched off sharing organic search keywords referral data.
The very marketers who have worked their way out of the ‘blind SEO’ optimisation days have now been sent right back to square one with the introduction of secure organic search.
Allegedly done for privacy reasons, the move will conveniently render increased investment in paid search as the obvious next course of action (where the privacy reasons don’t apply).
In a similar move earlier this year Google stopped ‘device level’ keyword targeting, meaning that advertisers had to buy mobile search words if they wanted to buy desktop search.
This means the advertiser has to invest more in search if they want to maintain their desktop search activity. In doing so Google has effectively handicapped marketers and will have pushed more brands towards a fully paid-up subscription model.
This quarter, we saw Google’s revenue figures leap 12% on last year’s figures, with consolidated revenues for Q3 at $14.89bn at the end of September.
Google is the only player in the digital space with the power to raise its revenues as rapidly as it has done in the past quarter. These strong arm tactics ensure that its stock soars, to a record high of nearly $1,000 per share.
As other media owners such as the New York Times have struggled to keep ad revenues at a steady rate, the search giant has made it clear to all advertisers that it values paid search much more highly than organic search.
Looking from my vantage point of 16 years worth of digital media and technology experience, it’s clear to see that Google’s revenue is boosted by its global dominance in advertising analytics.
For advertisers, the challenge will be to gain true, unbiased information about which channels work best to reach users online.
Right now, I’m left still searching for an advertiser who saw a Google Analytics report extolling the virtues of Facebook ads and Yahoo! keywords.
As Microsoft Moves to Encrypted Search, Webmasters Could Lose More Keyword Data
Microsoft is reportedly looking at encrypting their Internet traffic, which would include their search results, in response to the NSA spying controversy where it is believed the NSA was able to gain access to Microsoft’s global communication links.