SEO and Marketing

The FTC is cracking down on brands that aren’t following the rules and regulations for influencer marketing. Where they are and aren’t enforcing these rules, though, has left many confused. To help with your influencer marketing planning, we’ve outlined what you need to do in order to keep your brand compliant with the FTC Guidelines. Include disclosures The important point is for the influencer to get the message across to his/her audience that the brand is compensating him/her for the post. Surprisingly, there is no single correct way to do this. In the FTC guide, the organization outlines these two options for statements as a way of properly alerting audience…

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond. This week, mobile internet use takes over desktop across the globe, Instagram introduces yet more shopping options and Bing reveals search habits immediately after a presidential debate. Worldwide mobile internet use surpasses desktop for the first time ever As we reported this week, mobile and tablet devices accounted for 51.3% of internet usage worldwide in October compared to 48.7% by desktop. Although don’t get to excited, as there is a huge difference from country to country, with the US and UK still lagging behind other territories. …

A trial of Google Home Services (GHS) ads on mobile is the clearest sign yet that Google intends to roll the GHS beta program out to the mobile platform and an insight into how it might look when it happens. Google has been running a trial of Google Home Services (GHS) ads on mobile. GHS results have been spotted – revealed below – in mobile searches for tradesmen in San Francisco and Sacramento, during October. The subsequent disappearance of the ads come November show this was just a trial. But it is the clearest sign yet that Google intends to roll the GHS beta program out to the mobile platform. Plus, if this format is a good indication of the real thing, the fo…

Instagram may be among the most popular social platforms, but this doesn’t mean that the interaction rate cannot be affected by the increasing number of brands joining it. How can you maintain your own interaction rate? Instagram has seen an impressive growth in the past years and its recent addition of live stories provided more reasons for a user (and a brand) to try it out. More than 500k advertisers have already joined the platform and users check the app multiple times during the day. However there has been an alarming decrease in interaction rates by 33% from 2015 to 2016. According to Quintly’s report, the interactions per post from Q1 2015 to Q1 2016 hav…

Look, it’s November. There’s no getting around the fact that for the next 52 days you’re going to be pounded with Christmas stuff. This is your life now. But you’re marketers, YOU CHOSE THIS. It’s an established fact that Christmas no longer begins when supermarkets start stocking up on Quality Street, it begins when John Lewis releases its Christmas advert. And here’s something that may send a shiver down your cynical spine – it’s happening next week. Can you bare the anticipation? There are so many questions to be answered… Which heartstring will John Lewis cruelly manipulate? Last year it was older people, the year before that, bears. This year I predict so…

While ad fraud has become part of every marketer’s vocabulary, attribution fraud – the practice of gaming outdated attribution models to justify self-serving means – has been mostly ignored up until now. As marketers and media owners shift dollars into digital channels, however, serving ads outside of an attribution model’s measurable capabilities in order to achieve financial benefit has quietly been ramping up in response. Attribution fraud is fast becoming the ad industry’s next big quality headache. Attribution fraud includes everything from retargeting users about to convert to knowingly cookie-bombing users with non-viewable ads. And the costs of attribution …

Last week we published the eighth instalment of our complete guide to Google ranking factors. It concentrated on internal links, as well as the best way to use anchor text and hub page or category optimisation. This week, outbound links! 1) An outbound link is a ‘vote of confidence’ to the site you’re linking to, and you will be passing along some of your own site’s ranking power. However try to avoid using anchor text such as ‘here’ as this is worthless to you and the site you’re linking to. 2) Sticking to the website name is a safe bet when choosing anchor text, especially if it’s ‘example company conducted a study’. That way usability and transparency is im…

It’s the moment we’ve been waiting for. All us mobile-first proponents have been sat patiently rubbing our hands and saying “you’ll see, just you wait and see!” to anyone within hearing distance – but now we have the proof. Mobile internet use is now more popular than desktop the whole world over. To be honest, it was an easy prediction to make. Earlier in the year Google stated that mobile searches had already surpassed desktop in 10 countries including the US and Japan. And mobile ad spend has been dominate over desktop since March. So the following research shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. StatCounter Global Stats has found that mobile and tablet devices a…

Online reputation is important for every business and social media has only escalated the need. But how can you filter the noise to maintain a positive reputation? As social media usage increases and people feel more comfortable expressing their opinions through all the platforms, online reputation management becomes even more crucial for every business trying to promote its services. It is estimated that consumers are 92% more likely to trust their peers over a brand when considering a new purchase, which means that online reputation may bring a customer closer to your business. Online reputation management is the process a business follows to analyse and monito…

Are you starting a new online business? It’s always overwhelming! Here’s your ultimate resource list to help. Maybe you have had an idea for a profitable venture for a while, but are only now diving in? Good news! There are quite a few excellent tools and resources out there to help you along the way. From the first steps to the last, these 20 links are must-clicks for the modern small business mogul. Online launch tools 1. Bustaname http://annsmarty.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/bustaname.png One of the oldest tools I am still using as of today, Bustaname lets you check the domain availability on the fly. It’s great for the brand name inspiration! I believ…

There has been an increase of 20% in the YoY growth of Google search ad spending in Q3 2016, while paid search mobile phone spend has increased by 134% from the past year. This is according to Merkle’s Q3 Digital Marketing Report, which covers the latest trends in paid search, social media, display, and organic search. Here are some more useful stats on all the changes that occurred in the past year. Paid Search Google search ad spending grew 20% YoY in Q3 2016, although it’s down from the 22% growth a quarter earlier. Click volume grew 28%, while CPCs fell 6%. Google Shopping (PLA) spending grew 36% YoY on a 59% increase in clicks. Google text ad s…

In the world of search engine optimisation, there are a wealth of tools which produce analytics and SEO reports after changes have been made to your site. But what if you could predict how your site’s ranking would change before you’d made any alterations –and see the impact on traffic, ROI and more? Sounds too good to be true, right? But ALPS, a new platform from iQuanti, sets out to do exactly that. ALPS, which stands for Analytics Led Platform for Search, is a “best-in-class analytically driven platform”, in the words of CEO Sastry Rachakonda. The platform “allows you to set your SEO strategy with a deep understanding of your competition as well as your busine…

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond. This week, good news for YouTubers but bad news for Vine stars and anyone who wants a bit of privacy. Twitter kills Vine Sad news for those with short attention spans, Twitter is killing off Vine, the six second video app it purchased a couple of years ago. According to a statement, despite discontinuing the app in the coming months, your Vines will still be available. “You’ll be able to access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that…

According to data collected in Q3 2016, paid search CTRs have risen 38%, mainly in thanks to Google killing off its right-hand-side ads back in February. More advertisers have also started to use Google’s new extended text ads, accounting for 29% of search spend in September. These stats are taken from Kenshoo’s latest analysis of more than 750 billion impressions, 13 billion clicks and $6 billion (USD) in advertiser spend. One of the major advertising trends in the last few months has seen online retail advertisers increasing their use of specialised product-focused ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google. Video advertising on social media has also increase…

People love their pets, not necessarily their elected officials. And the savviest social media marketers should try to take advantage of this fact. It was absolutely hilarious, if you ask me. It was just a few weeks ago, on a Tuesday night (October 4). Two men vying for the second highest office in the land, Mike Pence and Tim Kaine, were debating each other before an audience of millions and frankly, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. I was looking at a Facebook Live video being broadcast on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s Facebook page that was showing the television broadcast of the event. However, in front of the screen was a large pen full of cut…

In our last column we asked: Has Google killed mobile organic search? In this column we consider what Google’s plans are for those owned properties that get the prime real estate atop mobile search results, such as Google My Business (GMB) and Knowledge Graph (KG). There are five areas/initiatives that should be observed closely, as these could be prototypes for the future of mobile local search. These are: Restaurants in [uS city] – Google My Business (GMB) results. Hotels in [uS city] – GMB results. [uS city] –Knowledge Graph (KG) results. Movies in [uS city] – KG results. Tradesmen (or similar) in [san Francisco area] – Home Services results. Some or all…

Halloween in the digital age involves a significant amount of searching until the right costume is picked. So what can we learn from this year’s searches? Online search is the most popular way to discover a Halloween costume nowadays, as according to National Retail Federation, 35% of adults rely on searching to find their costumes. Bing examined the trends on the searches from September to mid-October and it found that adults are actually more interested in performing such searches, compared to teens. 32% of the searches were made from people aged 35-49 and 28% of them were made from people aged 50-64. This is probably the reason why 72% of the searches occurred…

For companies serving either B2B or B2C audiences, search engine optimization continues to be a priority for driving new traffic. There are many, many articles suggesting the right tactics to help you deliver that traffic. But within this piece, I want to take a step back and offer a few key components to think through before you even begin the optimization process. Understand your audience The first of these preparatory steps is to understand your audience. If your business has not taken the time to develop personas, get started now. Personas are a set of representative profiles that communicate the important behaviors, goals, wants, needs and frustrations of …

Earlier this year, Google made a change to its privacy policy that is now drawing criticism from privacy proponents. As detailed by ProPublica, Google “quietly erased [the] last privacy line in the sand” by allowing for data it collects on its services to be combined with DoubleClick. Previously, Google’s privacy policy read: “We will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consent.” That was replaced with: “Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Google’s services and the ads deliver…

Click-through rates for websites depend a great deal on their position in organic search results. But to what extent are local businesses further compromised as Google pushes all organic results further and further off the bottom of the mobile screen as it prioritizes paid ads, Google My Business listings, Knowledge Graph and/or Accelerated Mobile Pages? And when directories, aggregators, articles, reviews and chains dominate the top organic slots, what hope is there that the mobile user will scroll two, three, four or more screens to find the website of the local restaurant or hotel they seek? This is the first of two columns on the state of mobile search. T…