It’s been just over five months since Google announced that it would withhold referrer data for signed-in users who click on organic search results. The result of that decision is that marketers who look at analytics (Google Analytics or otherwise) won’t be able to see what keywords were searched to generate a certain percentage of […]
Do you get 80% of your leads from your top four markets? Is your franchise aligned to service only certain zip codes? Do you know what directories (if any) your customers are using? Successful local search campaigns are built through targeting specific local market areas and ensuring that your message reaches consumers in that area. […]
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of social media activities has always presented an issue for marketers. How do you prove to your client or company that all those hours spent chatting online with fans and followers will lead to money back in their pocket? That’s what the new features in Google Analytics are trying […]
Matt Cutts, Google’s sheriff of all things SEO, caused quite a stir among search folks when he let slip at SXSW that Google is essentially rolling out an official algorithm update that will penalize sites that engage too vigorously in search engine optimization. To paraphrase, Cutts said that, as part of Google’s ongoing effort to rank the […]
There are lots of questions to ask yourself when planning your social media strategy for the year, but spending time focusing on how your social media efforts will affect your search results should be top of mind. What does that “like,” retweet or +1 mean for your business or client? How is it affecting the […]
I distinctly remember reading Nicholas Carr’s cover story in The Atlantic a few years ago that asked the question, “Is Google Making us Stupid?“. At the time, I was pretty dismissive of Carr’s hypothesis that the way we process the scads of information available to us in the digital age is actually changing the way our […]
Fromholzer’s 2011 study on Generation Y’s usage of PYP and IYP offered some great insight into how twenty-somethings are searching for business information. However, although the study claims 9% of 18-24 year olds use IYP every month, as a member of Generation Y, I believe that number to be much higher. It is my hypothesis […]
Ever notice how most social media campaigns are so… pedestrian… middle of the road… safe? Maybe that’s why we expect so little from them in return. I suspect the issue begins with what we call this channel. I’ve always found the term ‘social’ to be rather lukewarm. It’s like ‘nice’ or ‘cute’. Social implies a […]
As part of Google’s new monthly series on algorithm changes, Google announced earlier this week 40 search updates that are happening or have happened in the month of February. Not to discount the 37 updates that relate to sitelinks, related searches and indexing others, but the following three are the standouts marketers should be particularly aware of: […]