Yahoo and Bing make inroads on Google’s US search share, but do advertisers care?

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A spike in Yahoo searches has pushed Google down to its lowest search share in almost six years, the result of a change in tact from Mozilla.

According to web tracker StatCounter, Yahoo’s search share has been buoyed by a deal with Mozilla where it became the default search engine for Firefox 34 users in the US giving company the platform for its highest US share since 2009.

StatCounter has reported that Google grabbed 75.2% of US...

14 January 2015 | Organic Search

Is this the definitive marketing technology landscape graphic?

Lumascape kicked off the trend for bringing an entire industry together on a single graphic while others have followed too, but Scott Brinker’s latest offering adds some vastly improved organisation to this bustling industry.

Brinker’s marketing technology supergraphic manages to incorporate almost 2,000 different companies without ever looking too chaotic. It is no mean feat given how his annual project has grown from the 947 companies that slotted into last year’s...

13 January 2015 | Advertising

Could Google for kids do the marketing industry more harm than good?

The news that Google for Kids is now in the development pipeline for the tech giant has generated quite a bit of controversy today. But Google itself was expecting this.

In effect Google for kids - its plan to develop child specific versions of tools such as search, YouTube and Chrome – will create a whole new marketing demographic and enable website owners to better track who is looking at their sites when.

The information this could, in theory, provide advertisers...

5 December 2014 | Organic Search

Google pushed Penguin 3.0 live: What you need to know

Picture credit: iStockPhoto On October 19 Google officially confirmed they pushed Penguin 3.0 live. Even though it’s called Penguin 3.0 it’s actually the 6th iteration of the link spam fighting algorithm update. This is the first time Google has updated Penguin in almost exactly a year, so many site owners have their fingers crossed that the last year of link cleanup and link building is enough to put them on the right side of the Penguin line in the sand. If you’ve managed to sail...

22 October 2014 | Organic Search

Why Google loves a persona-led approach to content

Google has made it very obvious that in order to succeed at SEO you need to be producing high quality content that is targeted to your audience. One of the best ways to ensure that you are creating this specialist content is to write for a specific persona. Logically speaking, this makes sense as you are writing for a tailored group of people who will be interested in your products and services, but why does Google love it? I’ll explain: Google’s Affinity Segments Hang on, what’s this?...

12 September 2014 | Organic Search

Find the amount of content that’s ‘just right’ for your marketing

We’ve all heard the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. She sneaks into the house of three bears and tries their porridge, chairs, and beds only finding one of the three in each instance to be “just right”. The options that were “just wrong” were the extremes. The hot and cold porridge. The small and large chairs. The hard and soft beds. When it comes to content creation we recommend that website owners find the amount that’s “just right”. Unfortunately, it’s easier said...

8 August 2014 | Organic Search

Google takes on eBay: Will other big brands follow suit?

In mid-May a lot of site owners noticed some big changes in the SERPs and traffic back to their sites. There was a lot of speculation as to why that was happening, and a few days later Matt Cutts officially announced that Panda 4.0 was rolled out. Less than an hour earlier, Search Engine Land confirmed that a  Payday Loan 2.0 update was also rolled out at the same time. “Over the weekend we began rolling out a new algorithmic update,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Watch....

2 June 2014 | Organic Search

Even Matt Cutts says backlinks count for something

With all the changes Google has made to the algorithm (Panda and Penguin are just the biggest ones of many) and Webmaster Tools Guidelines in the last two years, many site owners (and more than a few SEOs) are left wondering if link building counts for anything anymore. In a perfect SEO world, the kind Google wishes we all worked and searched in, no site would actively build links. They would instead focus all their energy on content creation and let links come naturally as people found and...

9 May 2014 | Organic Search

Do these 10 skills make up the ‘perfect’ SEO manager?

Last year I promised to dig more into Bubble’s vast wealth of digital job data to try and pin down the latest digital recruitment trends and identify exactly what employers are looking for when recruiting in the digital space… but as avid readers of this blog will know, I’ve not really produced as many blogs as I’d have liked on the topic. Today I thought I’d change that and shine the spotlight on what employers are looking for when recruiting for a particular...

24 April 2014 | Commerce

SEO interview with Screaming Frog’s Dan Sharp

Today, I am interviewing a person whose work speaks for him. He might not be a known name to you but if you are going to count the top 10 SEO tools, one of the names would be Screaming Frog. My guest for today is one of the Directors of Screaming Frogs team, Mr. Dan Sharp. Without further Ado, here are my questions! I followed the clichéd route of university, a year out travelling, before arriving back home with no money and the need for a job. I was lucky that my very first role was...

22 April 2014 | Commerce