Facebook’s News Feed Updates

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Najwa Moses

Facebook’s gradual unveiling of its new single-column News Feed emphasizes the power of visuals and the opportunity brands have to take advantage of this power. Pre-News Feed rollout, 50% of Facebook’s content was completely visual, and the updated newsfeed capitalizes on visual messaging’s prowess. These updates, including visually emphasized stories, News Feed filters and platform consistency, provide a sleeker and more engaging Facebook experience. The company predicts users will respond positively to these design enhancements, as studies suggest that 40% of people demonstrate more proactive responses to visual content than plain text. Although all users will benefit from a visually stimulating Facebook, these Newsfeed updates provide a particularly considerable opportunity for brands looking to increase their social presence.

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Slideshare SEO

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Clay Cazier

SlideShare is the web’s largest document & presentation-sharing social network. As their About Us page summarizes,

With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, it [SlideShare] is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.

Many brands are turning to SlideShare as a way to distribute content, engage with potential customers and generate leads via pro features.  As an added bonus, Google awards many presentations with organic rankings: Continue reading →

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Penguin 4 Update on Its Way

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Clay Cazier

If you follow digital marketing, you know Google’s Head of Search Spam, Matt Cutts, will often announce major algorithm changes before they happen. Years ago, he made those announcements on his blog but, over the past few years, the most useful comments have come during his live presentations. His participation in this year’s SMX West panel session, “The Search Police“, was no different – there’s going to be another “Penguin” algorithm update, and it will likely be one of the hottest topics of discussion in 2013. Continue reading →

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Can Same Day Shipping Recoup Google’s Lost Impressions to Amazon?

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Suzy Sandberg

Google’s announcement that they are launching same day shipping is interesting and strategic given the emergence of Amazon as a likely reason for why impressions may be on the decline for some retailers in Google paid search. This was pronounced in this past 4th Quarter, and it’s most likely due to searchers moving to Amazon and, to a lesser extent, mobile apps to initiate their shopping.

Amazon has been building the infrastructure to offer same day shipping with the goal of eventually making this the norm as a shipping option. It is likely that same day shipping won’t be widely in place for the upcoming Holiday, but it will be in use, for sure, with expansion imminent.

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Google Seller Ratings – SEO Factor? (Part 2)

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Clay Cazier

In part one of this post, we explored how Google Seller Ratings influence SEO.  Here, we will present our baseline data.

Recent comments from Google’s Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts, have re-ignited conversations about the use of off-page factors in organic search rankings:  ”…we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results…”  This makes it clear that merchant quality factors will soon be a bigger part in determining which sites rank well within search results.  While many choose to wait and wonder what impact this change will truly have, PM Digital has decided to take a more pro-active approach by measuring rankings and Google Seller Rating data across multiple markets today for comparison with the same data set once the merchant quality update has been fully integrated.   Our goal is to document the mean and median Seller Rating values for “top” sites in a market today vs. the future. Continue reading →

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Google Seller Ratings – SEO Factor?

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Clay Cazier

There’s a famous story floating around the web about how, in 2010, website owner Vitaly Borker used “negative SEO” to improve organic rankings for his site.  Put simply, when someone would complain about being sold knock-off eyeglasses through Borker’s site, he would harass and threaten the complainant relentlessly until they either gave up or escalated the issue to authorities.  Because of this activity, mentions of Borker’s site on the web grew, building the volume of off-page buzz required to be a top ranking site within Google’s algorithm.   It didn’t matter at all that the buzz was negative – Google rewarded the site with rankings regardless. Continue reading →

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Canonical Tag Best-Practices

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Cory Howell

One of the most common technical issues our SEO team runs into with client sites is the presence of duplicate content. Over the past few years, this problem has been magnified by changes in the search engines’ algorithms, notably Google’s “Panda Update”.

In order to assist webmasters and site owners, a special HTML tag was created to help specify which version(s) of duplicate content should be considered the unique or authoritative version.

Enter the “canonical” tag.

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PM Digital’s Holiday 2012 Recap Infographic

Posted on March 8, 2013 by PM Digital

With 31 days, 2012 had the longest possible shopping season! And during this long season some clear growth trends emerged around key shopping days, including a move towards mobile and a record $1.46 billion dollars being spent online during Cyber Monday.

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Keyword Research Beyond the AdWords Keyword Tool, Part 2

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Clay Cazier

Last week, we began our discussion of keyword research beyond the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. A few suggestions included the YouTube keyword tool, Google Trends and Microsoft’s Ad Center download. Today’s post will continue that conversation by focusing on keyword research using Facebook, Twitter and a few other tools. Our near-term goal is not to replace the AdWords Keyword Tool, it is to complement that tool with ones that better present long-tail and socially-derived results. Our long-term goal is to identify, prioritize and hone an engagement plan for the target audiences revealed by this research. Continue reading →

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Keyword Research Beyond the AdWords Keyword Tool

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Clay Cazier

A fundamental, first step in digital marketing is to define your target audience(s) and learn the language that they use to talk about your brand, products or services. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool is often the first (and only) resource many marketers use to do this keyword research. This isn’t without problems – most notably, the AdWords tool often does not return exhaustive lists of keywords and the tool certainly does not include keywords sourced from social media. With that in mind, many clients and colleagues have asked “Where do you go for keyword research beyond Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool?” Let’s use today’s blog post as the first in a series to outline some of the keyword research tools and tactics PM Digital uses in crafting digital marketing campaigns. Continue reading →

Posted in Natural Search, Online Marketing, Research Tools, Search Marketing, SEO, Social Marketing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment