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Posts Tagged ‘mobile search’
Thursday, November 1st, 2012
Internet marketing is not only about chasing SERPs for that coveted No. 1 spot. Nor is it all about driving traffic and conversions with pay per click advertising. Savvy Internet marketing is all about taking advantage of every opportunity and using multiple channels to promote your website and business.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t use one channel to learn about marketing through another. Pay per click advertising can teach online marketers how to be better search engine optimizers.
For starters, you can use PPC for keyword research. Create your ads and see which ones get the best click throughs and conversions. Use that information to strategize your organic search campaigns.
Mobile/Local Search Dominate Organically
Mobile search presents a great opportunity for search engine optimization specialists. If you market to mobile customers, and you should, you’ll find that the click throughs on mobile PPC ads are lower than the click throughs on organic search. That’s likely because mobile searchers are on the go and looking for information fast, especially when searching for local businesses.
Retargeting Leads To Greater Results
Retargeting means using PPC ads on network websites to reach the same market prospects you reach in the SERPs. It has been a well known marketing principle for many years that the more touch points you have with prospects the more effective your marketing is going to be. It is traditionally expected that you must put your message in front of your prospect seven times before they act on it. PPC display networks provide the perfect opportunity for that. Search engine results pages represent another opportunity.
Retargeting a great opportunity for marketers in both PPC and SEO channels. Don’t miss out on it.
Tags: mobile search, PPC, retargeting, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
The Panda and Penguin Google updates have certainly spooked a lot of people. The slightest move in website traffic volume is now being blamed on either one (or both) of these updates, and whilst significant drops in traffic are a worrying sign, a closer inspection sometimes shows the opposite to be true. I recently looked a website that had seen a 50% drop in traffic, and that drop coincided with the Google Penguin update.
Google Analytics is a great tool when used effectively. Using this tool, I could drill down into the various statistics for the both the day before the Penguin update, and for the day after when there was a significant drop in traffic. What I found to be interesting was that Google’s Webmaster Tools showed there was not a significant change in the average search rankings for the targeted keywords. So why the huge drop in traffic? Surely people didn’t suddenly stop using those search terms?
In this case, the drop in traffic came from two sectors, mobile, and Europe. For some reason this website had been ranking highly in search results in Europe. It was also ranking highly in mobile search. Neither of these two sectors were important to this business. They were not geared to provide a service to European customers, and being net based business, mobile traffic had tiny 0.01% conversion rate, so the loss of that traffic wasn’t harming the business.
Whilst there was a distinct drop in traffic numbers to this site, the number of sales were the same both pre and post Penguin. In fact, the post Penguin conversion rate as a number almost doubled – and so it should, half the traffic for the same volume of sales. When looking at traffic numbers from search results, it’s important to dig to find out exactly where you have lost traffic. Is it one page, is it site wide, is specific to a region or connection method?
If this business had kept a closer eye on their search analytics, the fact that almost a third of traffic was coming from Europe may have opened doors for new business. That window has closed now, however, they can look at much improved conversion rates.
Tags: mobile search, search rankings, search results
Posted in SEO for Small Business, Tracking & Analytics | 4 Comments »
Friday, April 20th, 2012
If you’re a local business and you rely on walk in customers, then an online presence is becoming a must. Mobile search is growing at a phenomenal rate as consumers discover how easy the process is. With a good mobile device, a user can search the web in exactly the same way as a desktop computer. The results include maps, reviews, and local businesses that match the search term. According to Navneet Kaushal on SearchNewz:
Google pays huge importance to snippets in search results. Rich snippets can influence local search listings this fact has been highlighted upon by Google many times.
Does Google really pay any attention to rich snippets? The answer is an undoubted yes. In fact, Google has recently expanded product rich snippets coverage to the global market. In the past, it was quite restricted and hardly worth looking at for most businesses. Google has comprehensive information on rich snippets in their Webmaster tools help pages.
What are snippets? Snippets appear below a webpages search result. Every page has a snippet, often, one created by Google based on what it thinks the page is about and how it relates to the search query. You can influence what appears in that snippet by telling Google what the page is about. This done using Rich Snippets, a short piece of HTML code that can be added to each page. Rich snippets can be written using Microdata, Microformats or RDFa code. Google recommends Microdata.
Rich snippets are useful for local search, however, they are restricted to that area of the Internet. They can be used for reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events, music and videos.
Tags: local search, mobile search, Rich Snippets, snippets
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 7 Comments »
Thursday, March 15th, 2012
A post on the Bing Webmaster Central blog is well worth reading if you optimize your website for both desktop and mobile users. The post discusses Bing’s preference for a single URL no matter what device a visitor is using to access your website. There are several points worth noting on the post, and while this post relates specifically to Bing’s approach, one wonders if the same issues exist with Google? Those points include:
- Mobile specific URLs rarely rank in search results since there are insufficient indicators to give the URL any value. This could actually be a negative and work against your website.
- The more URLs you have, the more search engine crawler you’re going to receive. A large site could see a lot of bandwidth being used, just by the search engines. If your website has only the one URL per item of content, then that will have less of an impact on your bandwidth.
- Single URLs are easier to manage. If you have multiple URLs for the same content, then that will create more work.
Bing’s preference is for websites to perform client browser detection and delivering content based on the outcome of that detection. If you must use separate URLs for the delivery of pages to mobile devices (particularly the popular m.website.com), then Bing suggests a search engine crawler block through your robots.txt file. Bing’s point about mobile URLs not appearing in search results is well noting, especially if separate URLs have the potential to harm your search engine optimization efforts.
The question that website owners and SEO specialists now need to look at is whether or not Google will follow suit, and whether or not some of these issues already affect current websites. Do your mobile specific pages appear in search results? If not, you may want to consider a different approach to delivering content to these devices.
Tags: bing, google, mobile search
Posted in Mobile Marketing for Small Business | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
Trends come and go, but not all trends end up going. Some end up sticking around for a long time. I predict that the following trends are here to stay and that you should seriously start thinking about following them now that you’ve brought your business online.
- Mobile Search – Seriously, mobile phones have hit the market big time. People are buying on their phones, reading blogs on their phones, and updating their social media on their phones. Mobile search is big and I predict it will get bigger.
- Facebook and Twitter – If you thought social media was a trend that would go away, you’d better face it. Not only is it not going away, but it’s getting bigger and better. Today, if you have an online presence with your business, you’d better be on Facebook and Twitter – at a minimum.
- Blog Marketing – Blog marketing came on strong, then it dipped. I mean, it slowed down. Businesses lost interest. But it appears that blog marketing is experiencing a surge again. I think this trend will continue for a long time.
- Local Search – Local businesses have discovered the Internet. Whether you are in a large metro area or in a small rural town, local search is going to be huge.
- Longer Content – It seems that the search engines are favoring longer content. Can you blame them? I think longer content is in, and to be truthful, longer content will always have great benefits.
Catch the wave of these five trends right now. They’ll be major influences to online marketing for a long time.
Tags: blog marketing, content, internet marketing, local search, mobile search, Social Media
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
Google has rolled out a new program for local business called Favorite Places. At first glance, the program looks promising. But I can’t help but wonder about the implementation.
Google has picked 100,000 local U.S. businesses to be “favorite places.” They sent these businesses a decal to place on their store windows. It is expected that mobile phone users will scan the decals to learn more about the the businesses and to leave a review of them. Question: How serious do you think mobile phone users will be to take advantage of this moment? Mobile searchers already have that capability with other websites.
This looks like another Google attempt to move into an area where someone else is already doing a better job and where Google thinks it might pick up more advertising money. It is, after all, a Google Maps program. Google clearly wants to add your business to its database. What then? I suspect you’ll start getting snail mail from the company, and possibly e-mail, offering you opportunities to advertise through Google AdWords.
What do you think? Is this a slick advertising move on Google’s part or do you think it will actually attract support from businesses and mobile searchers alike? Would you do it? You can.
Tags: Favorite Places, google, mobile search
Posted in Mobile Marketing for Small Business | 4 Comments »
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