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For the first time, Yahoo has beaten Google in the annual University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The survey measures U.S. consumer satisfaction across a broad range of business and product categories including “e-business,” which covers search. The survey asks a statistically representative sample of consumers to rate their experiences with portals and search engines according to a number of criteria, which produces an overall satisfaction score on a 100 point scale. The search/portal category has been rated since 2000. Until this year, Google has always lead the ASCI since the first year the index included it, in 2002. Among the top engines, Ask saw the largest gains in satisfaction (5.6%) while Yahoo emerged as the overall winner, beating Google by a single point. But Yahoo and Google were trending in opposite directions, with Yahoo gaining and Google losing a roughly equivalent percentage (see below). AOL saw the biggest decline in … [Read more...] about Ask Jumps, Google Slips and Yahoo Leads American Customer Satisfaction Index for Search

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding. One of our most popular articles of all time is a post entitled SEO Basics: 8 Essentials When Optimizing Your Site. It still does the business for us in terms of traffic, however it was first published in April 2013, so you can treat this as its long overdue and expanded update. What is SEO? Quite simply, SEO is the umbrella term for all the methods you can use to ensure the visibility of your website and its content on search engine results pages (SERPs). The methods vary from technical practices you can achieve behind the scenes on your website (we tend to refer to this as ‘on-page SEO’) to all the promotional ’off-page’ approaches you can use to raise your site’s visibility (link-building, social media marketing). For the … [Read more...] about SEO basics: 22 essentials you need for optimizing your site

Podcast: Download Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts! In this week’s episode of the Marketing Nerds podcast, SEJ Executive Editor Kelsey Jones and Senior Editor Danielle Antosz talk about long form content such as ebooks and white papers, how it can help set you and your brand as a thought leader in your industry, and how you can tie it up with other pieces of content. Big Pieces of Content: Benefits and Getting Started The benefits of doing a big piece is that you can create lots of pieces of content around it. You do spend a lot of time and energy creating one piece of content, which can be hard for brand [marketers that are thinking], “I can’t get a blog post out once a week, how am I supposed to do this?” Breaking it down into tasks is definitely the first step. Break it down into something small and manageable. It doesn’t seem as intimidating if you break it down into … [Read more...] about #MarketingNerds: Benefits of Long Form Content

There is little doubt that duplicate content on a site can be one of the biggest battles an SEO has to fight against. Too many content management systems are designed for and work great with content, but few SEO considerations are included in how that content is implemented throughout the website. There are two kinds of duplicate content, onsite and offsite. Onsite duplication is content that is duplicated on two or more pages of your own site. Offsite duplication is when the content of one site is displayed on other websites. Onsite duplication is an issue you have control over while offsite duplication may be beyond your control. Both are problematic. Why is Duplicate Content an Issue? The best way to explain why duplicate content is bad is to first point out why unique content is good. Unique content sets you apart. It makes you different. It helps you stand out. Why? Because that content is unique to you and you alone. When you use the same text to describe your products as the … [Read more...] about The Complete Guide to Mastering Duplicate Content Issues

Oh, the good old talk about bid management software! Lately we’ve seen the addition of a big new player in automated bidding: Google. With Automated Rules and AdWords Scripts, Google has entered into the bid management software space and they’re doing excellent. I’ve never liked outsourcing the bid management part to a third party provider as I like having my own keyword data in-house and I don’t want to pay an often hefty fee either. However, implementing automated bid management these days is so easy that many advertisers tend to treat AdWords as if it were some kind of passive money making machine. In White Shark Media we’ve been contracted to manage several relatively big accounts for small businesses that had been completely relying on AdWords newly automated tools to run their AdWords campaign. Not understanding why their campaigns didn’t produce results anymore they turned to us. This blog post is a response to what I’ve seen lately … [Read more...] about 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Entirely Automate Your PPC Bid Management