Thanks to the ubiquity of the smartphone, phone calls are finally getting the respect they deserve as an integral part of the customer journey. Mobile calls now account for 60 percent of inbound calls to businesses, according to BIA/Kelsey, which projects that the number of mobile calls to businesses will climb to 170 billion in…
Google has always given brands preferential treatment. They get better rankings with fewer links. They get “penalized” for improper conduct, only to resurface a few weeks later. Small brands, on the other hand? ADVERTISEMENT Never get the benefit of the doubt. Need to earn twice as many links. And never resurface. Ever. And this is only accelerating. It’s only…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: European press agencies push for licensing fees for their content from Google, FacebookDec 15, 2017 by Greg Sterling It remains to be seen whether European legislators and regulators will pick up…
Google has faced off several times against European news publishers and governments in Germany and Spain, seeking to get the company to pay copyright fees for the indexing of news content. Google has largely prevailed in these instances. However, that hasn’t deterred publishers from continuing to make the case that the US internet giants should…
My wife came to me with a problem. She wanted festive, whimsical, and potentially matching Hanukkah pajamas. But there weren’t enough options coming up in Google under one spelling of the holiday’s name, so she told me she was systematically going through all spellings to compile her list of shopping items. I was pretty surprised…
2017 was a relatively calm year, at least in terms of major Google algorithm updates. In 2016, we saw the advent of Penguin 4.0, Possum, a major Mobile-Friendliness update, and big changes to AdWords, to name a few. This year, Google’s been relatively quiet since the “Fred” update dropped in March. ADVERTISEMENT What we have…
In 1996, DoubleClick was born as an ad exchange provider, acquired by Google, and became known as DoubleClick by Google (aka DoubleClick AdX, aka DoubleClick Ad Exchange). Then along came Google AdSense somewhere in between, which is an ad network, not an ad exchange, confusing marketers and advertisers ever since. AdSense, launched by Google on June…
By now, all of us know online reviews play an important role in brand perception and online rankings. Despite that, studies into online reviews, and how consumers react to them, continue to defy our expectations. To make informed decisions about your review strategy, we need something more concrete than the knowledge that reviews play an…
At Microsoft’s AI event yesterday in San Francisco, the company showcased its vision for AI-enabled computing, as well as its AI differentiation strategy. The latter essentially boils down to three big ideas: making AI-supported software broadly accessible to people to improve “everyday” experiences, the seamless combining of work and personal functionality in the same tools and…
As SEO professionals, we understand how SEO initiatives improve organic visibility and drive revenue, but we need to take this to the CMO as well. For years SEO professionals have battled in the boardroom to convince marketing stakeholders to spend more money on organic search and have had to try to prove the tangible value.…