SEARCH NEWS – JUNE 2012

Sell SEO Make Money Search News is your monthly source to keep you up to date on the latest trends in search engine marketing. You’ll know about emerging trends in online marketing and we’ll explain how those trends can be put to use in your business.

Google Local Is Going Social

It’s finally happened — Google has integrated local business listings and maps into its social platform, Google+. Google Places is on the way out but the complete transition hasn’t happened quite yet. Google’s latest blog post says this:

If you are a business owner, you should continue to manage your information in Google Places for Business. You’ll still be able to verify your basic listing data, make updates, and respond to reviews. If you don’t yet have a Google+ Page for your business, we encourage you to create one now. And if you do already have one, hold tight for news on how to get it linked to your local listing.

Once you create your Google+ Page for your business, your business can be found across Google search, maps, mobile and Google+. Zagat’s user generated reviews, using a 30 point rating scale, replace Google’s star ratings. The new layout and design put more focus on photos and reviews. Your local listing is no longer “set it and forget it.” You cannot allow your listing to get stale and you must take measures to encourage your customers to review your business. Who has the time for that? We do! We offer a local listings service and a customer review service. Call us for more information.

Which Search Engine Has the Largest Market Share?

No surprises here! The winner is Google. Last year at this time, Google had 65% of the market share and now, 66%. Bing has 15% (up from 14%) and Yahoo 13% (down from 16%). Yahoo has been on a serious decline and at 13%, this is Yahoo’s lowest share ever.

As if Google hasn’t had enough success already, it owns about 95% of market share for mobile search too. If you ever wonder why we focus most of our SEO efforts on Google, well, there you go.

Speaking of Mobile, This is…Shocking!

Based on the sales of smartphones and tablets, mobile marketing has a bright future and is definitely something to consider when devising your marketing strategy. Mobile marketing is still relatively new, so there’s plenty of room for growth and innovation in the mobile space.

What’s shocking? Take a look at this graph that shows how much time people spend on various advertising mediums and the percentage of advertising dollars spent for each medium. Print gets 25% of advertising spend and mobile, only 1%. Some businesses haven’t caught up with the age of the Internet!

Google Penguin and Panda Updates: The Aftermath

The Google updates will keep coming, the rules will keep changing and we will continue to stress the importance of diversification. The best protection against Google updates is diversification of online marketing, to include things like PPC, email marketing and social media marketing. Call if you want more information on any of our online marketing services.