The image below shows the mobile traffic for one of our client sites over the last 12 months. Does your business have a mobile version of your site, or does your CSS provide a mobile-friendly view to visitors on smart phones? With all the emphasis on mobile it is still surprising how many sites don’t render well on iPhones, Android phones , or blackberries. If your site isn’t mobile friendly its time to have it upgraded now.
On 18th October Google announced that they would be encrypting search results for logged in users. What does this mean for website owners? It means that a certain percentage of your keyword data that you are currently using to track your conversions, identify your most valuable visitors, and plan your content calendar, will now show (Not Provided) instead of the actual keyword phrase that the visitors used to get to your website.
Earlier this year Google’s panda update was rolled out, many sites that were deemed to have “thin” content took a hard hit in their rankings, some losing up to 85 percent of their traffic and revenue. A large percentage of those sites have never regained the traffic they had before the algorithm was implemented despite fixing what was supposedly wrong with their content.
An often overlooked source of great content ideas is your adwords search query report. This differs from the standard keyword performance report in that it shows the keyword search terms that were actually used by searchers to trigger your ads, as opposed to the keyword performance reports which shows YOUR keywords that triggered the ad displays.
Think about it - these search terms are not only actually being used to find your website via your ads but are also deemed relevant to your chosen PPC keywords by Google.
One of the most common problems we see with the websites we audit is a lack of relevancy for the site’s intended main keyword or key phrases.In some cases the primary product/service landing page does not even mention the key phrase it is trying to rank for, in others the wrong keyword is being used repeatedly.
Google has started sending out notifications to Canadian Adwords advertisers advising them of upcoming enhancements to ads that you may be running with your phone number included in the body text.
Bing Webmaster Tools has long been a source of pain for anyone in the Online marketing business. It was missing many of the cool and useful features Google had implemented in their webmaster tools, and it didn’t seem to help much with managing the way Bing sees your websites.
Mike Blumenthal recently posted about an update to the Google places quality guidelines. The guidelines can be found here but for the sake of convenience I’ve posted them below.
If your online advertising efforts online haven’t generated the results you want, a new outlet offers a unique approach to making advertising more productive: CentrSource.
Offered by Canada Post, CentrSource employs a complex of media sources, clubs, public service groups and forums, each with broad and diverse audiences, to help businesses attract customers who are more likely to want to do business with them. Advertising and offers appear only to customers in the specific locations you choose, resulting in an interested audience, able to respond to what you offer.
Rating and Reviews Can Change the Perception of your Business
There’s no doubt about it, online reviews and ratings make a difference when it comes to changing perceptions about the nature of a local business. Local businesses are discovering that word-of-mouth is not only verbal communication, it’s cyberspace communication as well, and the cyberspace communications may represent more credence that the typical “they do a good job” recommendation given verbally by existing or past clients.
