5 Things You Should Know About How Mobile has Changed the Way Prospects Use Search Engine Results Pages in 2017

Longest title for a blog post ever. Nailed it. Anyway, moving on to the important topic of the day…

2016 brought many changes in the search engine landscape. We recapped a lot of them, including the arrival of mobile as the dominant search device and the 5 big changes Google brought to mobile search in 2016.

With a new year comes new changes to the search marketing landscape. Today we are going to focus on the search result pages themselves, and how mobile search is changing the ways your prospects interact with them.

Without further delay, here are the 5 things you should know about how your prospects are using search engine results pages!

#5) Mobile Devices are Reconditioning Users

I’ve been around digital marketing long enough to remember the time when making a user scroll in any direction was just bad design. My how things have changed. The advent of Facebook style feeds …

Should You Use Native Web Site Pages as PPC Landing Pages?

One of the great things about collaborating with fellow digital marketers is the variety of perspectives you encounter. When competing opinions arise in the process of creating successful programs for a client it forces you to really think about why you are making a recommendation and to defend your position with facts and reason.

This very thing happened recently regarding a client that hired us to create and manage their paid search marketing campaign, while a second company was hired to build a new web site and handle the search engine optimization efforts.

The discussion boiled down to the following case for using native web site product pages as paid search landing pages.

We believe that building quality pages is the key to a proper web site.
We will optimize the site to rank for relevant keywords and optimize the product pages to be the best they can be.
We believe that …

Google Removes Right Side Ads, Marketers Lose Their Collective Minds

It’s been quite a few weeks in the world of Paid Search Marketing. Google recently announced, and carried out, removal of their right side of the page pay per click ads. In the weeks that followed the intertubes were full of doomsday, the sky is falling predictions. We take a more measured approach, and here is what we think it means for paid search marketing in the near future.

A Little Perspective

The right side and bottom of page results only accounted for 14.6% of the clicks in January 2016. So we are talking about losing only a segment of those clicks. BUT added a listing up top, and are now showing more ad extensions in the results pages. (Stat via WordStream)

Non Technical Users are the Biggest Losers

There is still a large contingent of search engine users that aren’t aware that their are paid ads at the top of search engine …

Is Your Web Site Mobile Responsive, or Mobile Optimized?

Nothing thrusts a topic into the main stream consciousness like a good old fashioned Google algorithm update. This time it was their announcement in 2015 that websites that weren’t responsive would be penalized in mobile search results. The increasing amounts of users searching on mobile devices continues to explode, and so the race was on for you to make sure your web site could be viewed on them. Great. But…

Responsive Does Not Equal Usable

Are you aware that ‘responsive’ does not mean ‘optimized’? In other words, just because your web site re-formats content by re-sizing, re-stacking or moving menu items around does not mean that it is easy and intuitive to navigate and digest information. The core focus of your digital assets for Inbound Marketing is to be sure they move visitors and prospects forward in your conversion funnel. A web page that re-formats for a smart phone, but becomes …