Monthly Archives: March 2012

Google: Less Datalicious, More Nutritious?

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 […]

How to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Local Directory Ads

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. […]

Is Google the 500 Pound Gorilla in Social?

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 […]

SEO is Dead. Long Live Content.

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 […]

3 Ways to Optimize Google+ Features to Increase Your Search Results

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 […]

Wading through the Shallows: Is the Internet Really Rewiring our Brains?

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 […]

A Generation Y’s Guide to the Many Uses of IYP

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 […]