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Author: Team Position Squared
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‘Mobile-Friendly’ Labels in Mobile Search Results and much more…| Best of the Week
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New from Google: ‘Mobile-Friendly’ Labels in Mobile Search Results
To help mobile users improve their search experience, Google officially launched the mobile friendly label on its search snippet. It lets users know whether or not a website is mobile friendly. Not only will this feature enhance user experience on mobile devices, it suggests that Google may soon include mobile friendliness as one of the criteria for ranking sites.
Is Google Experimenting with Mobile Friendly Ranking Factors
We keep track of changes in Google’s approach on various metrics for mobile experience and it shows that Google is testing mobile friendly ranking factors to give a better search result for mobile users. In a recent survey conducted by Google, mobile search queries have found to grow faster whereas desktop search queries have begun to slowly decrease. So mobile adaptability is now highly relevant for optimal search results.
Why Mobile-friendly Labels?
The Google mobile friendly label tells users whether the website they click on is mobile friendly or not. The mobile-friendly label is right there on the search snippet in the mobile SERP and it signals whether or not the website they are looking for is responsive to their mobile device. This saves time and eliminates the annoyance factor when a user discovers a web page isn’t mobile friendly.
How does Google decide to add mobile-friendly labels on the search snippet on mobile SERP? There are guidelines to help websites conform in order to get the mobile friendly label. It is highly likely that this new feature shows Google’s intent to make ease of usability on mobile devices, a major factor in deciding search engine rankings for websites.
Contact us now to create mobile friendly websites to optimize your mobile prospects!
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Digital Marketing in 2015 – Concentrate on Data Quality
As digital marketers we are in the midst of a data deluge that seems to overwhelm us if we are not accustomed to efficiently dealing with it. This makes the quality of data that we collate all the more important. A recent survey by Google has shown that over 56% of its online ads are never seen. Unfortunately digital marketers were never too concerned about data quality. 2015 might just be the right time to delve deeper into data mining.
Big data has been getting all the right attention but there is an overabundance of it (of course that is where it gets its name from!). Getting intimidated by big data is clearly not going to help you in any way. Concentrate on only that portion of big data that makes sense to you. Create personas of your customers using the newfound knowledge. But there are a lot of impediments when it comes to making sense of the data that you collate from various sources.
Consumers are cagey about their social and mobile data falling into the wrong hands. Digital marketers need to provide compelling reasons for users to part with their valuable data. Providing quality content to your users is one sure shot way of achieving this. While soliciting user information do ensure that you have a mandatory email field and the rest of the fields can be kept to only the bare essentials so that users don’t type in bogus information.
High quality data today is any digital marketers’ dream come true. It can be used to create highly sophisticated and accurate customer profiles within marketing software that you deploy. Thus, it is imperative that you ensure the databases are built around reliable data as the first step towards creating better marketing campaigns. This is highly useful in executing targeted and personalized messages to customers.
Remarketing – The Holy Grail
2015 will see a lot of action on this front. All the tools needed to deploy highly effective digital remarketing already exist. For the uninitiated, remarketing lets you show your ads to people who have previously visited your website or used your mobile app. Dynamic remarketing takes it one notch higher by helping you to advertise only those products or services that users have previously viewed on your website or app. But all this needs the underpinning of quintessential data on consumer browsing habits.
Some of the obvious benefits of remarketing are –
- Targeting consumers when they are most likely to buy
- Catering to a tailored list of consumers like ‘shopping cart abandoners’ that provides you insights on what exactly to advertise and to whom
- It is possible to create a greater impact with your advertising the second time around
Now to satiate your quest for remarketing or targeted advertising, you have a range of marketing automation software at your disposal. Take this quiz to find out how effective is you digital marketing strategy and if marketing automation software can actually help you.
Hope you corral, cull and corroborate high quality data to deploy highly effective digital marketing campaigns in 2015!
Contact us now for Integrated Digital Marketing campaigns to get the best ROI for your marketing spends!
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Digital Advertising is the Elephant in the Room for Media Companies
The rise of the World Wide Web that began at the fag end of the twentieth century has since then been dominating people’s attention spans and garnering eye balls unlike anything else the world has ever seen. 2015 will be the year that will see big wars being fought by media behemoths to conquer this space, the last frontier!
People are getting comfortable with the online media and this has got the advertisers excited. Today brands are devising video advertisements tailor made for the online world rather than taking the ads running on the television and serving it to digital users. The advertisers’ switching to the digital arena is not a question of if but more about when, and 2015 seems to be the right time!
The total US TV advertising spends rose a mere 2.6% to $11.4 billion for the third quarter. But the US online advertising spends for the same period rose by a staggering 22% to $8.7 billion! Now you don’t need a rocket scientist to see the writing on the wall, for the TV broadcasters!
If the offline media companies are unable to adapt to the changing dynamics of people’s penchant to view digital content, then they might come up against some harsh realities in the not so distant future.
The Digital Stomping Ground
Hulu, the ad-supported online video service offering TV shows and movies and video clips is doing a roaring business. Though initially Hulu did not find much luck with advertisers, it is now a hot favorite among online advertisers! The owners of Hulu – Walt Disney Co., 21st Century Fox Inc., and Comcast Corp. are some of the biggest media companies on earth. Together they agreed to invest at least $750 million into the business venture in 2013, seeing the potential of online video consumption.
But the billion dollar question to ask here is ‘will that be enough?’. Today it is not a labor intensive or a capital intensive economy but it is a knowledge intensive economy, all the way. All you need to look at, is a three year old photo messaging application developed by guys in their twenties, that is worth a staggering $10 billion dollars today! Yes, we are talking about Snapchat. That is the beauty of the online arena. Start-ups of today can become multi-billion dollar enterprises of tomorrow.
This has got the media behemoths quite worried. What guarantees do they have that tomorrow some wunderkind will not come up with something that rivals Hulu. Now this would thoroughly challenge the old media barons in this new digital stomping ground that is the World Wide Web. Who knows tomorrow a dark horse from Silicon Valley might just challenge the 800-pound gorilla of the media landscape!
Do share your thoughts on this issue!
Contact us now to deploy integrated online advertising campaigns!
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Content Marketing 2015 and much more… | Best of the Year
Content Marketing 2015 and 2014’s top 10 blog’s that garnered maximum attention 
White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn: - SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
- Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
- Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
- How EVA benefits businesses.
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Google Maps, Yelp & Local SEO Insights
Start the New Year with a new search engine marketing strategy that looks beyond your business website. If you think local SEO, Google Maps and directory sites like Yelp can push you to the top of search engine listings then go for it.
The July 2014 Google Penguin algorithm update, provides greater relevance to local maps and directory services like Yelp. This way you get useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals. That means in many cases Local Maps and Yelp listings now rank above the regular business website listing.
Check out this Google screenshot, the top results for the search query ‘bakery phoenix’.
As you can see the top three results are Google map listings. And there are three more organic listings before you see the actual local business website. Thus, it is imperative that you pay attention to these listings on a regular basis and optimize your presence on Google Maps and directory sites.
These are the steps you need to follow to optimize your business website:
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Set up a Google My Business account
By creating and verifying your local business with Google My Business, you get your business listed on Google for free. All your business information will be shown on Google Maps, on the search engine results page, and in Google+. Your customers will be able to post reviews. And, as a Google My Business account holder, you will be able to reply to reviews posted on Google+ directly from your dashboard.
You’ll find that under Yelp for Business Owners. And if there are no matches, simply add your business to Yelp. You can get your Yelp business pages to rank on search engines just like your website. Google’s Pigeon algorithm is now paying close attention to local SEO. So users searching for facts on local businesses can now easily find Yelp reviews.
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Optimize Your Listings
Once your business is listed and your contact information verified, optimize your business information. Adding photos, contact business information, website URL, and such other information goes a long way to optimize. Your business can also offer good deals and you can respond to reviews more often.
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Online Customer engagement
When reviews appear, responding to them shows all your customers that you care. It’s how you build trust. Yelp allows businesses to respond to user reviews either publically or privately. But Yelp frowns on soliciting reviews. Also, not all reviews will be good. But if you respond and work toward a solution in an amicable way, 40% of negative reviews turn positive. Whether good or bad, be upbeat when you engage and reply.
Making Google My Business part of your SEO strategy for 2015 and getting your business listed on Google Maps and Yelp and the like will align you with prospective customers and keep you ahead of competition on the digital playing field. But keep in mind that this is not a onetime effort. It’s more of a continuing process that you need to build in to your search engine marketing strategy for 2015 and beyond.
Contact us to deploy Local SEO for your business website now!
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Content Marketing 2015 [Infographic]
Today relevant, insightful and highly useful content can no longer be sidestepped in your digital marketing campaigns. A stellar content marketing deployment will separate the men from the boys of the digital arena, come 2015. Here’s a primer of all that you need to know in order to have a successful content marketing strategy. Go through the incisive infographic now.
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‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web’ Shuttered
Yahoo Directory that began service under the name ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web’, a brainchild of the co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, has finally shut shop. This guide was a directory of websites that were listed under various headings which started way back in 1994. The way the websites were arranged here was in the form of a hierarchy rather than a searchable index of pages, unlike the prevalent norm today. It was an influential directory then, long before search engines were the de facto gateway to the Internet. Back in the day this directory was what people perused before browsing the Internet for information that they wanted.
But there is no need for such a directory now as search engines can give you information on everything residing on the Internet with the right set of keywords, in a fraction of a second. But still the Yahoo Directory holds an emotional value to some people who want to reminisce of an era when search engines were still part of science fiction.
Image shows the original Yahoo Directory way back in 1995!
Unfortunately, the advertisers serving ads on this nearly 20 year old platform will now have to find a new platform to deliver ads. Yahoo has shut down more than 60 services in the last two years and this is a part of a giant restructuring program at the company. Due to intense competition from the likes of Google, et al, Yahoo has been steadily losing its edge.
Under the charismatic CEO Marissa Meyer, Yahoo is looking for a mobile product strategy, all the way. All the products that don’t fall in line with this new company goal are ruthlessly terminated. This gives the company more resources to focus on cutting-edge technologies of tomorrow. Thus the Yahoo Directory has got the short end of the stick, in an era where tablets and smart phones rule the roost.
Today it is unlike 1994 when the Internet was a novelty and a website directory was a beacon of respite for people trying to get aboard this new information super highway a.k.a the Internet! Fast-forward two decades and people clearly have no time for something like Yahoo Directory, when Internet is ubiquitous and inextricably associated with all things business and personal. Today time is a luxury that people just can’t afford to waste perusing a directory of websites on the Internet. Thus was written the epitaph of Yahoo Directory!
So how do you view this decision of Yahoo to shutter its Directory services! Do let us have your views on it!
Contact us for your website’s improved visibility on Search Engines now!
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Top 5 SEO Trends for 2015 and much more…| Best of the Week
This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world. 
From the Position² Blog This Week: Top 5 SEO Trends for 2015
What do you think are the SEO trends that will attract huge attention from digital marketers in 2015? Well, we have short-listed at least 5 that we think will make it big in the New Year.
Best of the Week Video
Watch this video from PPC University to avoid common ad copy pitfalls. It helps you streamline your advertising strategy for better conversions.White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn: - SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
- Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
- Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
- How EVA benefits businesses.
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