Set aside 10 minutes of your time to read the latest cutting-edge news in SEO, Tech and Social Media that happened this Spring.

Google News

Google has greatly improved its Analytics service. Dated March 9, Google announced a new report in Beta, called User Explorer, which can be found in the Audience section. It provides detailed insight of the number of sessions, bounce rate, revenue, transactions, and your specific goals conversion rate associated with an individual Client or User ID. Once you click a User or Client ID, you get an individual timeline view of this client behavior, including acquisition date, channel and device category, along with the history of activities and interactions with your site or service. The report is a goldmine for those who want to analyze prospects’ behavior and improve an overall customers’ user experience on a website. Learn from Google about use cases of the User Explorer report.

In May, Google made another change in the Google Analytics reporting features. Google made a deep  integration of its Analytics and Search Console services. Now, if you log into your Google Analytics account, you can find the Google Search Console metrics under the Acquisition tab, as the substitution of the Search Engine Optimization. There are 4 sections in the newly added Search Console report: Landing Pages, Countries, Devices, Queries. The Search Console reports are complemented by additional acquisition metrics like Impressions, Clicks, CTR and Average Position which help to analyze your organic traffic performance more effectively.

At the end of May, Google announced the expansion of ad texts and the ability to bid by device, which will be coming to AdWords platform in the next several months. In the new ad format campaigns advertisers will be allowed to compose:

–  2 headlines with up to 30-character limit for each title (instead of one 25-character limit headline);

–  A 80-character description line (instead of two 35-character description lines).

Will this update result in a higher click-through-rate? Yes! Early figures indicate a 20% increase in CTR.

Mobile Search News

A year ago, on April 21^st, Google rolled out its Mobile-Friendly Update, aka Mobile Apocalypse (targeted to the websites which don’t give due consideration of such things like responsiveness, mobile-friendly URLs,). One year on, Google announced that starting from May, they will boost the effect of the mobile specific ranking signal in order to bring more relevant mobile-friendly search results.  But this is not the last change made to the Mobile-Friendly Ranking algorithm. According to Gary Illyes, Google will add page speed as a mobile-friendly ranking signal.

Tip for SEO beginners: If you are a mobile device geek and in search for “FREE SEO tools” for your website from your smartphone, be sure to find our mobile-friendly website and service on the 1^st page of Google and sign up for a FREE forever plan:). Moreover, you can use our Website Audit Tool to check how well your website is optimized for mobile devices.

Bing News

Bing showed dramatic increase of the search market share in April. According to ComScore explicit numbers, desktop searches on Google sites dropped by 0,2%, while searches on Microsoft sites rose by 0,2%. The reason for the change in search market share may be the increase of Windows 10 usage with its Hey Cortana voice search feature. This means that those who bet money mainly on Google should reconsider their marketing strategy and include Bing advertising into their website search engine promotion.

LinkedIn will be integrated into the Microsoft Office ecosystem. The breaking news on Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn for $26,2 billion has caused a lot of discussions. But one thing is clear for sure, Microsoft wants to start positioning itself as a cloud-based software as a service.  In the joint presentation, Microsoft and LinkedIn reveal the following advantages of the acquisition which will make Microsoft users more productive:

• Access to an individual user’s profile data across all apps and programs, like Outlook, Skype, Office etc.
• Intelligent newsfeed that will help users to stay connected with their professional network, industry news and trends.
• More intelligent digital assistant (Cortana) at your disposal that will be help you connect the dots between your professional network connections and help you effectively manage your daily tasks and meetings.
• Deep integration of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM and LinkedIn Sales Navigator for effective sales management on LinkedIn.
• Integration of the LinkedIn Learning hub into the Office programs that will enable users to learn new skills at the right time without having to leave the Office workplace.

Facebook News

Facebook has reinvented itself from a non-profit Social Media network to eCommerce Digital Marketing platform by collecting 500 terabytes of personal data a day and juggling it to commercial ends. Facebook already provides comprehensive targeting options for advertisers, enabling publishers to hit local-specific audiences, retarget website visitor traffic, show ads to lookalike audiences etc. That’s seems not good enough for Mark Zuckerberg & Co.

On May 26, the company officially set Facebook ads float freely across the web. It means that if you are not a Facebook user, you will also be shown Facebook ads anywhere on the internet and 3d party websites. It’s a game changer for those advertisers who have non-Facebook users and want to retarget them outside Facebook.

Facebook introduced Facebook 360, a new option for publishers to upload 360 photo and videos. Moreover, Facebook allows running 360 photo and video campaigns.

We are done! Now it’s up to you to start exploiting the new trends we have shared with you in this post:)

The post Get Reading: Top 8 Internet Marketing Updates for Spring ‘16 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Are you the one who wants to change or the one who wants to fall behind?

It’s time for our quarterly SEO news recap.  WebCEO has carefully picked for you the hottest news and updates that happened in the fields of SEO, PPC and Social Media.

What’s new in SEO and PPC?

Starting from January 23rd, Google made it easier for advertisers to compare the cost of Google Adwords data with other data in Google Analytics with the help of automatic currency conversion.

The Bing Ads platform continues to improve its competitive ad analysis. On February 18^th, Bing Ads released the Competitive Bid Opportunities feature in its ad optimization toolbox for U.S. advertisers. With this new feature, Bing marketers will be able to see the number of keywords that their ads could show up more often for in comparison to their competitors’ ads.

On March 11^th, Google announced a new report in the Google Webmaster tools called the Blocked Resources report. Now, every webmaster can see the list of CSS, image or JavaScript resources that are not accessible for GoogleBots because of being blocked. Besides, now, when you use the Google Fetch and Render tool you are provided two side-by-side screenshots of how your page is seen by Googlebots and by a typical user.

At the beginning of March an SEO rumor started to run that Google is working on a new ranking algorithm based on a site’s truth score instead of its popularity score. This means that in the near future websites that host contradictory or “false” information will be ranked lower than those that have established trust with Google.

On March 16^th, Google announced the release of a new ranking adjustment aimed at better handling of doorway pages in search results. It is considered to be a red flag for website owners and webmasters to build multiple doorway pages in order to maximize their search footprint.

During the last three months, Google has been strongly advising webmasters and website owners to make their sites mobile-friendly for the sake of a better mobile user experience. They have pointed to an upcoming Google Mobile-Friendly Algorithm release. To make mobile optimization easier for us, the Google team keeps on developing its Mobile-Friendly Testing tool, Mobile Usability report and step-by-step webmaster guides. Before it is too late, jump to the WebCEO Mobile Optimization reporting tool and fix all the mobile usability issues you have in order to get your website ready for a mobile-friendly ranking boost.

What’s new in Social Media?  

Facebook is considered to be the most powerful social media platform for communication and business promotion. It continues to walk the talk by adding new features and tools for a better user experience from both personal and business page owners.

One of the latest updates (January 7th) on Facebook, for marketers and business owners, was the incorporation of additional call-to-action buttons at the bottom of business page covers. At the moment, 7 call-to-action options are available:

On January 27^th, Facebook updated its advertising platform by adding conversion lift. Conversion lift works as a kind of A/B testing and helps to measure the impact of Facebook ads on the bottom line of your business. Then, in the middle of February, the ad relevance score and product ads were added to the Facebook Ads.

On March 13^th Facebook informed us about acquiring the top shopping search engine, the Find. Facebook explained that the goal of the acquisition was to improve the quality and relevance of ads for users.

On March 17^th it was announced that those who use Facebook for communication or freelance soon will be able to send or receive money via Facebook Messenger in an easy, no-cost and secure way. Speculations are that the payment system within Facebook won’t become popular among users because of a potential lack of trust of users in the social network. Learn about how marketers can use some of the newly added features on Facebook.

On March 2, Google declared the official death of Google+, sorry, its reorganization (LOL).  Google+ will never be the same again. It will roll into Google’s Photos and Streams product.

Another major event in the social media world is the announcement about a Google-Twitter partnership. On March 20^th, it became known that Google and Twitter reached an agreement about providing the search engine giant with access to Twitter’s stream, Firehose. This means that Google will now be able to index the huge number of tweets (9,000) per second in order to provide users with timely global information. In the past (2009), Google and Twitter used to work together and started the so-called Real-Time search on Google, but the partnership ended in 2011. Let’s see how long their partnership will last this time.

These are the biggest updates of the first quarter of 2015. Remeber, the best way to improve your marketing strategy is to keep up with the changes digital marketing brings.

The post Digital Marketing News Recap: What Is New in SEO, PPC and Social Media? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

While Matt Cutts is on his extended vacation, the Google team kept the SEO community busy. Summer was hot and eventful. Let’s recall some of the most dramatic updates that happened this summer in the world of SEO in order to make some amendments to your online marketing strategy.

It’s been almost two months since the latest Google Pigeon Update release. It caused a lot of business owners to overhaul their local business marketing strategy. Particularly, local business listing sites and review websites are now very much in favor with Google, so being listed there is now a must.

To effectively track how these changes impact your website’s visibility, using WebCEO’s Keyword Rank Tracker can provide valuable insights into your local SEO performance post-Pigeon Update.

We have highlighted the possible effects of the Google Pigeon Update on local businesses in one of our previous posts.

Another major update has been the recent fall of Google Authorship.  First, Google stopped showing author photos in search results in June; then they removed Author Stats in the beginning of August and now it’s been announced that they will stop showing authorship results at all in Google Search, claiming that the authorship markups had no direct impact on CTR… As per the latest Google+ post of John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools, another reason for the author information removal is that Google wants to unify the user experience between desktop and mobile search. However, while Google Authorship is dead, Author Rank is still alive. Google assures that the end of the Google Authorship experiment will not affect authored stories. It highly suggests that you consider bylines as another method to establish authority in the eyes of Google and improve your Author Rank score.

Being active on Social Media is now, more than ever, critically important. Your social activity directly affects the success of your brand in the online world. The sooner you start to measure your Social Media activity, the better. The Social Engagement tool in WebCEO Online is targeted to simplify your understanding of what content is interesting to your customers and help you to outline the content assets which generate more perspectives. Use the Social Citation Report of the Social Engagement tools to fine-tune your content marketing strategy.

At the end of July Bing launched an up-to-date Bing Site Safety Reporting tool within the search results in order to better warn and communicate to both users and webmasters about safety problems on websites. In August, Bing announced the launch of Conversational Search which is still far from the functionality of the Google Conversational search.

Facebook has added a few changes to the Facebook News Feed.  The first change is related to click-baiting links to low-quality content. Facebook started to reduce the reach of posts that have scandalous titles and poor engagement.  The second change is targeted at boosting posts with links in the link format. It is a common practice that most of the companies share photo updates with links incorporated in them.  This is no longer an effective way to increase user engagement. Facebook has found that users prefer to click on links that are in the link format over those in the picture format. It is crucial now to share updates in the following  appropriate form: photo updates strictly as photos, posts with links in the link format with the descriptive text above.

Another much talked-of SEO headline this summer was the announcement of a new Google ranking signal. Google officially suggests that websites with sensitive personal data should consider switching to HTTPS in order to improve their rankings. Google has officially said that this can be a ranking signal. We have studied all the pros and cons of switching to HTTPS and shared them with you in our latest blog post.

WebCEO keeps pace with the latest SEO trends and aims to provide the most up-to-date and helpful SEO tool features, user-friendly reports, useful SEO guides etc. Shortly we will provide you with a Google Pigeon Update Guide to help you keep up with the latest Google Pigeon Update. Users who have local business websites and entrepreneurs who run brick-and-mortar businesses will find a lot of handy tips and recommendations on how to optimize their local business in order to receive good rankings.

The post Summertime SEOness: The Hottest SEO News Of Summer 2014 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Bing announced that a new “Search by License” feature is available now in Bing image search. This feature has six different filters: 1. All, 2. Public domain, 3. Free to share and use, 4. Free to share and use commercially, 5. Free to modify, share and use, 6. Free to modify, share and use commercially. Now you can easily find an image that that will best serve your needs without manual sorting. Moreover, you can easily monitor your rankings in Bing with WebCEO’s Keyword Rank Tracker.

Google Analytics started to roll out a new AdWords integration infrastructure for advertisers. The new integration is laying a foundation for adding new AdWords dimensions quickly – such as Ads – and paving the path for a rich set of reports such as enhanced campaign bid adjustments and Google Display Network targeting settings.

The Bing Ads platform will be available in Windows 8.1 Smart Search which was released last week in the Windows 8.1 preview. Now, with a single campaign setup, advertisers can connect with consumers across Bing, Yahoo! and the new Windows Search with highly relevant ads for their search queries. Bing Ads within Windows 8.1 Smart Search allow advertiser campaigns that are already participating on the Yahoo! Bing Network to automatically be eligible to be shown without any additional setup.

Google has organized the Webmaster Tools features in groups that match the stages of search: crawl, Google index, search traffic, search appearance. Google also finally added the ability to access the administrative functions to a gears icon at the top right of each profile.

And do not forget to help a little alien, whose UFO crash-landed on Earth, to return home in the Google Doodle that marks the 66th anniversary of the Roswell UFO incident.

The post SEO News of the Week: New AdWords Integration, Better Organized Google Webmaster Tools and Bing’s New Image Search Filter appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Bing makes its social sidebar even more useful. Starting today, you will see comments on a relevant Facebook post within the search results sidebar, as well as the ability to add your own, all without having to leave Bing. You can also “Like” a post directly from Bing. Go to www.bing.com and in the top, right corner of the page, connect your Facebook account to Bing to experience these new features.

Google blends both Google+ activity (+1s and shares) and search authorship to determine the best related content to show to users as they browse mobile website content. Recommendations can appear regardless of whether your visitors are signed in to Google. But when they are, they’ll see content that was +1’d or shared by the people in their circles.

Consider using an SEO Content Assistant to ensure your content aligns well with such search authorship trends.

Bing adds People Autosuggest: it works for colleagues that have public LinkedIn profiles and for celebrities, providing a thumbnail image and brief description of individuals related to people searches.

Soon, the Bing Ad Preview Tool will get a new name and added functionality; this was announced in the Bing Ads Blog. They will be updating the name to the Ad Preview and Diagnostics Tool and will help you to identify the reasons why your ads may not be showing on the first Bing Ads search results page.

And a fresh Easter egg from Google: do an image search for “atari breakout,” and you’ll be able to play the classic video game online, right in your search results.

The post SEO News of the Week: Search Engines Become More Social appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

BingAds announced that they are working on adding a Search Terms Report to enhance the user experience when managing search traffic. A Search Terms Report will help you add keywords and negative keywords directly through the Web UI’s Keywords tab. According to the announcement, there will also be filtering capabilities to find specific search queries and to filter out those queries that are already included as keywords in an ad group. For this, a specific launch date has not been released.

Google announced their Q1 2013 revenue; it rose 31% year-over-year to $13.97 billion for the quarter, beating expectations.

Google’s John Mueller asked another Googler Matt Cutts “Should I add an archive of hundreds of thousands of pages all at once or in stages?” Matt said that if a site released hundreds of thousands of pages overnight, it may raise a red flag and warrant a manual review by the Google spam team.

Bing added a “pin to Pinterest” feature to their image search. Users can pin images directly from a Bing image search to a specified Pinterest board without having to install a bookmarklet. The images are automatically linked to the original source with the proper attribution included.

BingAds says, they are preparing to offer a new search ad format in the U.S., Product Ads. It will allow retail advertisers to include product details such as image, price, description, and merchant information within the ad. Just as AdWords now pulls data from the Google Merchant Center for Product Listing Ads, Bing Ads will grab product details from the Bing Merchant Center store for Product Ads. They plan to roll out Product Ads in the U.S. to retail advertisers in early Summer 2013.

To complement the advancements in search advertising and keyword management as announced by BingAds and Google, enhance your campaign’s effectiveness using WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool

The post SEO News of the Week: Mostly Bing News appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.