Displaying items by tag: Google Insights

If you know much about Google search algorithms, then you probably know they’re never static. On the contrary, Google makes adjustments and revisions to its algorithms on a fairly routine basis. Their goal is always to provide the end user with a better search experience; naturally, these changes have an impact on marketers and SEO professionals, as well.

For years, Google has provided website owners with access to wide-ranging data to help monitor, measure, and quantify the site’s performance. Much of this data is available for free, using the Google Analytics dashboard. Recently, Google has launched a new innovation called Google Smart Lists, which takes some of the stats from Google Analytics and converts them into usable data for an advertising campaign. Essentially, Smart Lists take what’s available to you in Google Analytics and uses it to build custom remarketing lists, based on people who have come to the site and are perceived as likely to return to the site and convert.

Google dominates the consumer search experience. That’s hardly new information, of course, yet it’s an important scene-setter for this discussion of Google My Business. When seeking information about a particular product, service, brand, or local company, the average person is going to use Google as their primary tool for data collection. It’s obviously important that your local business have a strong presence.

That requires you to have more than just a good, optimized website. It also means having a Google My Business listing.

When Google first announced its entry into the social media space, it seemed like a sure thing. There was even speculation that their social platform would give Facebook a run for its money. After all, the social space was a bit less crowded at the time, and Google is one of the most successful companies in the entire world. What could possibly go wrong?

Fast forward a few years and you probably already know how the story ends: Google+ never quite caught on with the general public, and now Google has announced that the platform will officially be retired.

One of the many perks of AdWords is that it allows you to claim more of the search engine results page (SERP) than you could ever claim through organic reach alone; paid ads buy you access to corners of online real estate that SEO simply cannot penetrate. It stands to reason, then, that anything you can do to make your paid ads bigger—that is, to expand them to further corners of the SERP—is ultimately going to be worthwhile. And as it happens, there are some effective ways to do exactly that, specifically by including AdWords extensions.

When consumers need to locate a new business, product, or service, they typically turn to Google. What they find there often determines how and where they spend their hard-earned money. The implication for businesses is that maintaining a robust search engine presence is critical—but it’s not just Google visibility that matters. It’s also important that your brand be portrayed as positively as possible to potential customers and clients. Specifically, it means maintaining a high Google star rating if at all possible.

Most business owners take online reviews fairly seriously—as they should. Consumers are increasingly turning to sites like Google+, Facebook, Yelp and Angie’s List to help inform their purchasing decisions. In this consumer landscape, online reviews can carry a lot of weight, and can have a significant impact on a brand’s public perception and ultimately its bottom line. That’s not where the significance of reviews ends, however. They don’t just shape consumer behavior, but also search engine rankings. The question is how.

You don’t have to be a search engine optimization expert to understand that SEO is important; after all, without optimizing your posts to show up in search engine results, your visibility will be diminished, the chances of a reader discovering your content through a search next to nothing. In writing, formatting, and publishing your company blog posts, then, it is important to think not just about the end reader, but the search engine algorithm as well.

In our last blog post, we provided some background into the Google Search Analytics Report—a handy set of data that we recommend to anyone looking to better understand their website performance and search engine optimization success. What we said at the time, was that Search Analytics can actually provide some useful direction for your content marketing campaign. In particular, there are three ways in which it can be helpful; it allows you to:

When Google first launched its Webmaster Tools panel, some years ago now, it was met with a decidedly lackluster response. Though Webmaster Tools was fine in theory—providing information about particular keywords and connecting them to real leads—it never actually panned out the way it was supposed to. Simply put, the keyword research Google provided was never particularly good, and there were much better tools on the market that did the same thing more effectively.