Google Increases Locations Serving Search requirements

The study reports Google improved the number of locations serving search requests from less than 200 to more than 1,400 between October 2012 and July 2013. In addition, they have also stretched the number of ISPs used from just over 100 to more than 850.

As reported in the study:

Over the past 10 months, Google search has noticeably increased the number of sites around the world from which it serves client queries, repurposing accessible infrastructure to change the physical way that Google processes web searches, according to a new study from USC.

Most of this expansion is simply Google using client networks that it already relied on for hosting content like YouTube videos and repurposing them to deliver faster responses to user requests for search queries.

The study’s lead author and USC PhD student Matt Calder explains it by saying:

Google previously delivered YouTube videos from within these client networks, but they’ve abruptly extended the way they use the networks, turning their content-hosting communications into a search infrastructure as well.

Why is this significant?

While you may be reading this and asking, “Why is this news?” it’s significant because it shows that search is still a high priority for Google while it expands in different directions.

Google still values the search knowledge of its end users; otherwise they wouldn’t be making this kind of investment if search wasn’t still a critical part of their business.

The strategy seems to have profit for web users, ISPs and Google, according to the team. Users have a better web browsing experience, ISPs lower their operational costs by keeping more traffic local, and Google is able to deliver its content to webusers earlier.

Rest guaranteed that Google hasn’t forgotten where they came from. Delivering the best search experience to users is still a top priority, as this study indicates.

Shocking Local Search Marketing & SEO Mistakes

Local search marketing is extremely difficult with what often feels like endless tactics to employ in order to improve the visibility of your business online. While business owners employ many of these plans well, a few of them perplex even the savviest business owners or get totally overlooked.

1. Ignoring the Data Aggregators

It isn't uncommon to see businesses optimize their Google+ listing properly or even their Google+, Yelp, and two-to-three other high profile local directories like TripAdvisor or Citysearch. sadly, too many stop there and forget that Google crawls thousands of sites that contain citations every day.

In order to optimize the sites most noticeable to customers, it's imperative that businesses focus on data sources that Google uses to build its understanding of the local web.
Organic Counterpart: Deciding to focus on only one thing in Google's algorithm like title tags. Businesses should accept a more comprehensive local SEO approach to cater to Google and really move the needle with SEO.

2. Not having an entity Page for Each Business Location

More than three years ago, Matt Cutts stated, "If you want your store pages to be found, it's finest to have a unique, easily crawl able url for each store." Since then, organic ranking factors have sustained to become more influential components in Google's approach to ranking businesses in local results.

Even without the increased weight in the local ranking algorithm, businesses should uphold optimized location pages for each location for usability reasons.

Many regional and national businesses only return their business site data through results pages for a business locator, leaving no existing pages to be crawled. These businesses often complex the problem by using locators not optimized for mobile devices.

Organic complement: Trying to optimize a product site without product pages. Businesses need to look past the set conveniences of dynamically generated content and remember that content needs to perpetually exist on a page in order to be indexed by and visible through search engines.

3. sack the Opportunity of People Talking About Your Business

Customers and potential customers talk about businesses whether those businesses like it or want to admit it. It is also more common than ever for that conversation to occur online in the form of a review or social media interaction.

All too often, businesses ignore this chance to engage with clients and customers. A simple, "Thanks for the positive remarks!" for any positive review or a "I'm sorry to hear that! Here's how we are addressing your feedback so it doesn't occur again…" for any negative comments or reviews can go a long way in turning people discussing your company into people evangelizing for your company.

4. Not Using restricted Content

Most businesses know they need to use relevant keywords in their content so their website ranks on the search engines. unluckily, many business owners stop at the types of services or products they offer.

Local keywords, such as neighborhoods, ZIP codes, and nearby attractions can be significant keywords that customers use in their searches to find businesses relevant in both their offerings and proximity. Taking the time to include these can drive incremental traffic for location-based queries in which businesses weren't previously appearing.

Organic complement: Not taking the time to go in and re-optimize your top performing product pages in order to drive traffic for additional, related keywords. The same powerful local keywords that can boost the performance of primary site pages can often do wonders for the local  SEO visibility of these more granular pages dedicated to exact products and services.

3 Strategies to be successful in Today's Mobile Marketplace

Since Google's announcement of improved campaigns, all eyes have been on mobile. Advertisers who have felt the pain of lower ROI are left wondering, "Are improved campaigns going to help me win in Google mobile – or are they designed to help Google win in mobile?"

Let's start by acknowledging that yes, mobile is growing like crazy. People are using these devices at an accelerating pace, and eMarketer has forecasted mobile advertising to be almost an $11 billion business by 2016, up from 315 percent from 2012.

Interestingly, a recent study by IAB reports that "mobile" doesn't mean "remote," as mobile activity happens most frequently in the home. This finding contrasts with the widely held assumption that mobile ads are most viewed by consumers "on the go."

But the IAB findings explain that the period of highest usage of mobile devices occurs during leisure activities at night, somewhat than during the "on the go" errand-running times of the day. That said, time of day and type of activity have implications for mobile performance.

An internal adMarketplace study recently showed that tablets converted 93 percent as efficiently as desktops while smartphones were only 49 percent as proficient. Other reports support this finding, including this one from independent research publication, Marketing Charts, which highlights low conversion rates on phones when compared to tablets and desktops during the holiday shopping season.

Reported revenues per click for each device reflect the disparity in performance on phones as well. The chart below shows us how far behind phone click volume is compared to tablets and desktops.

The good news is search ad providers are acting to give advertisers the tools to stay profitable despite this disparity in performance. Google's enhanced campaigns lets advertisers adjust phone bids as a percentage of their desktop/tablet bids in a single campaign; Bing Ads allows for separate targeting by device type at the campaign and ad group level.

Having this granular control over a rapidly expanding market is great, but it doesn't change the fact that you need to hold mobile to a different standard. As marketers, you're under pressure to guide mobile consumers down the conversion funnel and generate an immediate profit on your investment.

Consumers, however, don't feel the same pressure to convert instantly. Aside from creating mobile-friendly websites and targeting ads with mobile-friendly assets, you can't force mobile users to behave the same way as if they were at their desktop during the day.

So how do you win with mobile? Instead of holding mobile performance to the same standards as desktop and tablets, you should adopt an altered and more realistic set of KPIs. Here are three strategies to succeed in today's mobile marketplace:

1. Relax Your ROI Goals

If your aim is 5:1 for desktop and performance to date on mobile is 2:1, consider setting a target ROI of 3:1 for mobile instead.

With lower ROI expectations, you can continue to connect your target audience on this device and be more likely to achieve your goals given what you know about behavior by device type.

2. Analyze Engagement Metrics (e.g., Time on Site, Pageviews, Unique Visitors)

Invest more time and resources into mobile experience as you do with desktop. Find where users are looking, and more importantly where they aren't looking, to optimize their mobile experience.

While tracking conversions across devices can prove difficult, mobile advertising does get users deeper into the sales funnel. Remember, many of today's consumers conduct product research with their phone, and finalize purchases with their tablets or desktops at a later time.

So consider this a "higher funnel" activity, and consider allocating branding budgets – not strictly direct response budgets – to mobile devices.

3. Think about How You Use Your Own Devices

If you want to show a friend a funny video on YouTube, are you more likely to get together around your laptop or pass around your tablet? Do you tend to make more purchases on your mobile devices during your commute or when you get home to your laptop? My experience on both questions is the latter.

Once marketers and advertisers acknowledge that consumer behavior conforms to device capabilities, they can begin to adapt their expectations and hold mobile to a different standard.

Summary

As the current research shows, phones simply aren't being used as often for purchases. Mobile is a more efficient tool when used for brand awareness and research than direct response. Adapting your marketing strategies accordingly can decrease your likelihood of panicking when you compare mobile to desktop performance and missing out on this critical opportunity to promote your brand.

Broadening your expectations will allow you to stay in communication with your customers throughout the course of the day and enlarge the likelihood that they'll convert.

Until the day when mobile becomes the ultimate purchasing agent, advertisers should take mobile for what it is – a brilliant tool for brands to strengthen relationships with consumers.

Google Talks Back: Conversational Search obtainable on New Version of Chrome

Google unveiled conversational search at Google I/O last week, and began rolling it out on the most recent version of Chrome this week.

Today, I chatted with Google to ask it burning questions like, "How many children does Madonna have?" and "What's the sense of life?" While Google doesn't relatively have the latter down just yet, it was able to comment on the matter, at least seemingly (try it and see).

The "OK Google search prompt we heard about at I/O isn't obtainable yet, so we still have that additional click in the process. To strike up a conversation with Google in the new version of Chrome, turn up the volume on your computer, click on the microphone, and ask away.

The feature is still working out bugs, and just like any search, using the in order available to it on the Web. Often, Google displays its answer to the question in the form of "cards" at the top of search results while it relays the information verbally.

Depending on the way you ask the question, the search results below the card change, just like a usual ol' typed query. Here are the results to the question, "Who are Madonna's kids?":

And here are the results to the question, "How many children does Madonna have?":

Also, Google might be lazy. When answering my Madonna question verbally, Google named two of the four children, and simply said "and others" for the rest.

Some reports show Google is able to understand and respond to a series of questions, even if nouns aren't used.

For example, if a client asks, "How many children does Madonna have?", and in a subsequent search, asks, "Where does she live?", Google should be able to reply both, understanding that Madonna is the subject of the latter question. I wasn't able to experience that in my searches.

Experimenting with searches reveals much. When editing this article, I had a question about punctuation, so I thought I'd ask Google. I asked, "Do you put a comma after a question mark?"

Google interpreted the words for punctuation into actual punctuation, and searched for the following, which didn't produce the results I was looking for:

I played with some local search questions, too, like: "Are there cupcakes in San Diego?", to which Google replied: "There are several listings for cupcakes near San Diego," and then showed me local search results.

Thanks, Google, for making searches a little sweeter.

Have you tried conversational search? Discovered anything interesting? Tell us about it!

Google's Search Market Share Drops as Bing Passes 17%

Google's search market share dropped somewhat once again, with Microsoft and Yahoo slightly edging up, according to comScore's April 2013 search engine rankings.

Google dropped 0.6 percent in April, dropping from March's 67.1 percent to 66.5 percent. However, this is precisely the same search percentage as in April 2012, so their overall search market share in the U.S. has remained stable.

Microsoft's Bing saw the biggest increase with a total search market share of 17.3 percent, making it a 0.4 percent increase in April 2013 over their search share in March 2013. By contrast, it is a very important increase from April 2012, where Microsoft had only 15.4 percent share.

Yahoo has continued a downward slide, despite Marissa Mayer taking over as Yahoo’s CEO and wanting to get Yahoo back in the search game. In April 2012, Yahoo had a 13.5 percent share, but they have dropped by 1.5 percent in the last year, as they are now sitting at 12 percent for April 2013.

While Google is still the huge powerhouse when it comes to search market share in the US, Microsoft / Bing is certainly making its presence known with a nearly 2 percent increase from this time last year. However, when comparing year to year, Yahoo and Microsoft are simply swapping market share between themselves, rather than making a dent in Google’s dominance, something Mayer, sees as a major problem.

Meanwhile, Ask's April search market share remained unchanged from March at 2.7 percent, but AOL's dropped from 1.6 percent to 1.4 percent in April.

Of the 20 billion searches conducted in April, Google led with 13.3 billion, followed by Bing at 3.5 billion, Yahoo at 2.4 billion, Ask at 539 million, and AOL with 290 million.