it’s easy to blink and you’ll miss a key development. To ensure your web design and digital marketing stays on point, today we have rounded up some of the most important headlines and presented them in an easy to digest recap. Read to be to totally up to date …
Amazon nipping at Google Ad’s heels
The latest data from Amazon shows the marketplace’s ad business grew a huge 40% last year, with revenue from ads topping $4.8 billion for Q4. This is quite a substantial increase and could mean that by the end of this year, you may well be running an Amazon Ads campaign either alongside or in place of your traditional Google Ads. The marketplace has invested heavily in developing its advertising infrastructure over the last 18 months or so and gives brands lots of scope for creativity and format choice.
Google updates its mobile-first guide
Mobile is now nothing new but, that doesn’t mean it has slumped any in the importance stakes. In January, Google issues a new version of its mobile-first indexing guidelines, providing valuable new insight for web developers and web designers to improve and protect their search rankings.
Key pieces of advice include:
• Present the same volume of content on your mobile site as desktop. Removing content for the mobile version means Googlebot won’t have as much information to crawl as it needs, which could impact ranking.
• Use the same structured data on both versions of your site.
• Use the same image URLs and alt text for images – if you fail to do this, traffic from image search may decline for the mobile version of your site as you’ll essentially be presenting Google with a brand new URL to get to know.
Latest Local Consumer Review Survey gives more insight into importance of reviews for consumers
The 10th annual Local Consumer Review Survey was published a few weeks ago and with it, lots of new insight into how consumers find, choose and interact with local businesses. One of the key findings is that 90% of local consumers search online for local businesses – and over a third do so each day. This means a local SEO strategy is an absolute must for any local business.
Additionally, the Survey revealed that consumers will read an average of 10 reviews before they feel they can trust a business, and most will spend around 14 minutes reading reviews before making up their mind about the organisation concerned. Almost all shoppers also read the business’ response to its reviews – so this is another task that must be allocated and managed during any reputation management activity.