Where is slip and dip

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

These “content thieves” are able to do damage to the original site’s rankings, causing a loss of search visibility, potential sales, and leads. The examples here call into question the effectiveness of Google’s handling of content scrapers. At the moment, Google seems to be unable to recognize the original source of content consistently. This is a real problem for content creators. In advance of Pi Datametrics’ talk at last week’s Brighton SEO conference, we devised a test to see how easy it was to disrupt another site’s rankings by copying their content. In this post, I’ll look at the results of these tests and discuss what publishers can do to combat the problem. Note: these examples are from Google.co.uk. Can Copycat Sites Outrank the Originals? The original idea for the test came when Pi Datametrics noticed the volatility of a client’s search rankings. After some investigation, they found the cause was content thievery. Example … [Read more...] about Is Your Content Working Better for Someone Else?

Google has made stark changes over the past couple years in the way it ranks websites. When one of its most recent algorithm incarnations, Hummingbird, was released in August of 2013, it created a whirlwind in the search landscape and has since continued to have far reaching impact. In its wake, businesses have been forced to modify their web marketing strategies and SEO efforts to regain favor with Google to reclaim their former search rankings. Read on for the insights we’ve gained and what you need to do to thrive in this new environment. What We’ve Learned So Far In keeping pace with the evolution of Google’s search algorithms, reviewing our clients’ sites, and implementing strategies to sync the two, we have gained some valuable first-hand insights. Our SEO program prioritizes the auditing of our current clients’ sites to gain a clear, up-to-date view of what is and is not working and where we need to focus our efforts to achieve ongoing success in … [Read more...] about A Complete Guide To The Essentials Of Post-Hummingbird SEO

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The Most Frequently Asked Questions In Search Retargeting Since we first brought true Search Retargeting to the market several years ago, we have seen a shift in the questions that prospects want answers to. Two years ago, the market was fuelled by excitement and intrigue, ‘how does it work?’, ‘how much does it cost?’ and ‘how do we get started?’. But driven in […] A Look At Cross-Domain Search & Conversion If you are running multiple online marketing programs across multiple websites/domains, then you might have asked yourself the following questions. Are there any interactions between my websites? Are my customers likely to convert across multiple domains? Would those insights potentially alter my customers’ LTV (life-time value) and my goals, as a result? Cross-Domain Clicks & […] Keynoting At Our SMX … [Read more...] about The Day In Search, November 7, 2012

I’ve written often about the dangers of ignoring social media in SEO (and vice versa), but I’m here today to write about another danger: ignoring social benefits in the traditional sales funnel. It’s frustrating that people continue to treat social media as an individual entity, a separate department, instead of a versatile tool. We shutter up our Social Media teams in their own rooms and leave them to their tweets and Instagram photos while the marketing pros hunker down on the big guns: conversions. Landing Pages. Leads, Costs, ROI. Sure, most pros acknowledge the power of social media in terms of brand awareness — it’s the flypaper that holds the customer still long enough for us to shove them down the sales funnel, where we cash them in profit. But we often forget that social media is part of the sales funnel, a crucial element that often clinches the sale or conversion. It’s time to take off our blinders and stop focusing on the short-term … [Read more...] about What You Lose When You Ignore It