Each month the dedicated Search Marketing team over at Verve HQ will bring you the biggest news in the world of Search. The term ‘search’ covers both organic and paid search industries and the objective of this new monthly blog is to provide you, the business owner, with an insight into new revelations that could change the way your business is marketed and provide you with that vital edge over your competitors.
You may already have an agency who manages your search marketing requirements. If so, you will understand the importance of digital marketing and have probably taken steps to ensure that the online presence of your business is being looked after. However, is it moving forward? Is it evolving? Is it changing to suit search engine environments?
Your digital agency may already be proactive by making suggestions to you each about how they can get more from your digital campaign. As a business owner with a digital presence, it certainly helps to keep an eye on search marketing news.
Following in the steps of Google Adwords, as is often the case, Bing Ads is piloting a higher level control for device bidding. A change to the current model will mean that users have the ability to adjust bids on traffic from desktop and tablet devices independently. Mobile will still be a separate device bid adjustment.
Although WordPress is considered very SEO friendly as a content management platform, webmasters have often needed to install additional plugins to aid in the optimisation of on page SEO elements. This month WordPress announced, much to the excitement of us search marketing geeks, that a new tool will shortly be released and this will assist in the creation of meta descriptions for blogs. It will also offer the ability to create custom title elements for posts and a previewer tool that show the user how a particular page looks in google search results and social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
During a conversation between Google’s Gary Illyes and Search Marketing Guru Barry Schwartz a revelation was made regarding a categorisation system, that according to Gary Google adopts when crawling website links. Gary only revealed three classifications for these link labels which were penguin real time (associated to the recent penguin update), footer links and disavow links. Speculation is now rife in the search community about what other possible classifications Google gives to links and more importantly what importance it gives to a link label class. If a link is in the footer will Google see this link as less important than the header or body content? Food for thought!
A new partnership between New York tech giant Yext and the online transportation network company Uber has paved a way for search marketing agencies to track ROI from website to brick and mortar store visits. A task that to date was extremely difficult to do and relied upon a handful of ‘difficult to measure’ techniques. The service will allow users to request an Uber ride directly from the website to the store! The closest web owners have come to measuring something similar in the past is by measuring requests for directions in Google. The downside was that this never proved whether the user would actually visit the store.
September 23rd 2016 will be a date that firmly sticks in the minds of search marketers around the world. It was the date the long awaited algorithm update, Penguin 4.0, was rolled out. That roll out has now been fully completed across all Google data centres. This means that if you believe you were affected by Penguin you should have now seen some level of recovery, as long as you took steps to repair the damage in the first place.