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Highlights brought to you by Search Lately @SMGSearchUK this week include:
Google Sources Update Draws Near Google Place’s Overdue Upgrade Arrives Creative Link Building Strategies Google+ Hangouts On Air Opens To All Browse last week’s Search Lately for more details and initial reaction from industry experts on recent hot topics
Google Sources Update Draws Near – 10th May 2012 It looks like this update is drawing ever nearer, with an increasing amount of users seeing these changes appear when they are logged into Google. While this update may seem like a time consuming and useful addition to the search result pages, it may create problems for advertisers. As Google increasingly provides more information to users through this ‘Sources’ section where PPC ads used to appear in the 3rd column, the need to click further into results may decrease. With more information such as cinema times and retail opening times being available direct from the search results users may no longer feel the need to delve further into results. This has been the case for weather and time based Google updates in the past that have experienced significant reductions in traffic as a result. Advertisers may see click through rates fall as result of this update as users can get what they want sooner, although conversion rates may actually end up rising. Users that do click through should have a higher propensity to convert with the added information they have received, meaning that less irrelevant traffic will end up on your site. Different clients may see varying result from this update as Google tries to draw more attention away from PPC ads and offers more variety within the results page.
What are your thoughts? #GoogleSources – Kevin Ting More Details: www.stateofsearch.com/google-testing-or-rolling-out-semantic-results-inthe-uk
Google Place’s Overdue Upgrade Arrives – 10th May 2012 A big and overdue update is coming to Google Places with new features that will make advertiser’s much life easier. This will affect advertisers who have physical locations who wish to or do utilise Google Places. The new features include:
Ability to edit multiple listings at once Search facility for listings Adding new listings in the UI
While these features may seem basic, they have been heavily missed until now, and many advertisers will express a sigh of relief. Any company that works with location extensions and needs to update/edit/create new locations such as new shops or locations will now have a much more efficient and smoother usage of Google Places. This will make Google Places more user friendly, helping advertisers to make changes/edits quicker. – Kevin Ting More details: www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/05/google-places-unveils-new-tool-tomanage-bulk-listings.html
Creative Link Building Strategies – 9th May 2012 Creating a long term, cohesive link building strategy for your site is not so easy any more. Google picks up on sites which are over optimized and link building strategies really need to feed into the overall aim of the website, more so now than ever before. According to the latest Census reports, eCommerce retail revenues are rising consistently every quarter. The key to make your eCommerce retail website stand out from that of your competitors is to create a content strategy which ties in with your overall link building strategy. This will really help to set your website apart. They key is to get people not only on your website, but to get them on the pages where products are actually available, making that purchase process one step closer. This would involve redesigning the category pages so that they are more than just another product page and really engage with readers which will result in gaining links naturally due to the nature of the page. That's what link building is all about and that's what Google is bringing it back too. Link building isn't an easy one time process. It's hard work, it is on-going and does need to be refreshed often. But it works. It is important to invest in your link building strategy no matter what kind of a website you have and to make sure these tie in with the content you produce and just remember to give
readers what they want. Google has made a point of saying how much value they give when it comes to content so it’s down to each website owner to take action on this. - Jimisha Lakhani More Details: www.seomoz.org/blog/creative-link-building-for-ecommerce-sites
Google+ Hangouts On Air Opens To All – 7th May 2012 Hangouts On Air is truly an exciting Google+ feature. It has been open to a limited number of broadcasters, letting them go live with their friends and fans all over the world. The feature is now opening to Google+ users worldwide. This means everyone can now stream and record live events on Google+. You can use this to do live presentations and share your recordings with the world. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live. Once you're off the air, your events will be uploaded to YouTube and to your original Google+ post automatically, saving you time in the process. This way it's easy to share and discuss your broadcast after it's over. Google+ Hangouts on Air is quite a lot of fun and should encourage even more people to start taking advantage of Hangouts. – Blair Liu More details: www.plusexaminer.com/google-hangouts-on-air-opens-to-all/ googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/google-hangouts-on-air-broadcastyour.html