The growth in Semantic markup for SEO
It’s been almost a year since Google started to encrypt searches and keyword data began to disappear from website analytics reports. During that time, site owners and marketing managers have gone through the various stages of grief.
Initially, businesses were in denial and attempted to grab their keyword data from any available source including using Google Webmaster Tools keyword data, internal site search and other search engines, in an attempt to build up a picture of their referring keyword traffic.
This proved to be less useful than expected and search marketers increasingly became angry at Google, accusing the company of being hypocritical and attributing the decision to a cynical attempt to get more people using Adwords.
However, marketers may have unknowingly benefited from the lack of keyword data in their reports as it allowed them to focus on creating valuable content which would be beneficial…
Have you reviewed the importance of Google Blended results recently?
When considering traffic acquisition tactics and specifically Google as a channel to getting traffic it is easy to get caught up in optimizing web pages & “link building”.
Opportunities with Google extend much further through the blended or universal search. Looking down the left navigation bar "codenamed Jazz" on a search results page its easy to see that to reach people looking for different sorts of content in Google you should be:
Creating news daily
Writing blog posts
Producing videos
Publishing your product feed
Active in forum and Q&A discussions
Active in Facebook and Twitter for Realtime
Each of the areas above have their own section in Google and can often appear on results pages instead of webpages.
In this post I am focussing on the Google product service, which is shown in the search results as "Shopping", but…
How important is it and how well are you using it?
Marketing impact: [rating=5]
Our commentary: Now well into its third year, blended (or Universal) search is now a widely accepted & expected part of search result pages.
But is it really important? Has it improved user experience? Are businesses using it to to improve performance & engage potential customers?
First and foremost for those who are unaware of the term blended search let me explain. Search Engines for the last 3 years (at least) have refined their search results pages to enable different types of content to be displayed within the results. More often than not this will be, news, video or images.
Universal results can however include products, twitter / Facebook, forum discussions, maps & more. A good example, shown in the image to the right (each…
