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More businesses than not know and use content marketing today, as a holistic whole. This year, as CMI’s recent B2B report for the year showed, content marketing was heavily on the uptrend. The problem in content marketing? It remains: documenting and strategizing. This isn’t growing as much both in popularity and knowledge as online content itself is. Content marketing is a beast that’s hard to reign in and maintain efficiently. It’s easy to create content, but not so easy to create effective content that is also high quality. Maybe this is something B2Bs will master more in 2017. Overall, here are some facts about content marketing as it stands today, and as reported by the CMI B2B report: A whopping 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing. Interestingly enough, though, not everyone is using strategy and documentation efficiently – this went down by 8% this year. The most effective marketers allocate 42% of their total marketing budgets to content. … [Read more...] about The 15 Top-Shared Posts of 2016

After three years the great Google Authorship experiment has come to an end … at least for now. Today John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools announced in a Google+ post that Google will stop showing authorship results in Google Search, and will no longer be tracking data from content using rel=author markup. This in-depth article, which I’ve jointly co-written with Mark Traphagen, will cover the announcement of the end of Authorship, the history of Authorship, a study conducted by Stone Temple Consulting that confirms one of the stated reasons for cessation of the program, and some thoughts about the future of author authority in search. Authorship’s Gradual Slide Toward Extinction The cessation of the Authorship program comes after two major reductions of Authorship rich snippets over the past eight months. In December 2013 Google reduced the amount of author photo snippets shown per query, as Google’s webspam head Matt Cutts had promised would happen in his … [Read more...] about The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results

Search and social are increasingly being used in the same sentence. There are two major trends involving search and social: Social media is being integrated into search results, and people are searching on social networks. What do these trends mean for marketers? At the Social Meets Search: Where Are We Now; Where Are We Going? session at SMX West 2014 moderator Danny Sullivan was joined by Duane Forrester, Sr. Product Manager, Bing and Ruslan Belkin, VP of Engineering, Twitter, to talk about this integration and what online marketers need to know. Social Signals Help Define Authority Bing indexes half a billion tweets and two billion Facebook updates every day. Bing also integrates with LinkedIn, Klout, and are looking at Google+ data. That’s a lot of information! According to Forrester, Bing is using all of these social signals to help determine authority. The search engines want to provide the best content from the best people, and social can help them determine who/what that … [Read more...] about The Intersection Of Search & Social

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. “Shortlists,” 360 Degree Product Views, And Promotions Added To Google Shopping As consumers prepare to get serious about their holiday shopping, Google is introducing new features to its pay-for-play Shopping search engine, including 360 degree product images, deals and discounts, and a collaborative shopping list. 360 Degree Views Start With Toys The company has started its effort to get 360 degree images of products with the […] Google Releases Search App For Microsoft Surface & Windows RT Exciting news for Google users who have upgraded to the Microsoft Surface device & Windows RT operating system. You can now download the Google Search App, which is specifically optimized for the Windows Surface and Windows RT. Google announced this on their Google+ page saying: If you just got a new Windows RT tablet and […] Link Building Scam … [Read more...] about The Day In Search, November 13, 2012

On Christmas Eve, December 24th, Facebook garnered 7.56% of United States internet traffic market share, whereas Google had 7.54%. Subsequently on Christmas Day, December 25th, Facebook’s piece of pie ballooned to a whopping 7.81% while Google dropped a bit to 7.51%. The day after Christmas, December 26, Google regained its stature as most visited site in the US with 7.33% share, while Facebook retained 7.12%. The ramifications of these stunning statistics, which truly reflect the massive girth of Facebook’s 350 million users, simply can’t be stressed enough to brand managers. To my mind, failure to consider Facebook PPC might now be considered negligent, analogous to dismissing the importance of using traditional PPC for branding. Let’s analyze reasonable statistics and a case study of a fictional company, culled from an average of moderately large brands we provide services for. We’ll call it “ACME Widget Company.” This post offers a format … [Read more...] about Why Facebook PPC Is Crucial For Branding & How To Sell Your Boss