Tag Archive for: google

SEO Performance & Moving Your Website Host

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Here’s a little known secret: many people are afraid to switch their web hosts. But eventually your once state-of-the-art website will begin to lag in performance and speed. However, it is important to be aware of the value of updating your web host and the difference it makes for your site. Read on to find out why. 

When you’re in the process of optimizing your web pages your goal is to have your content rank high on a search engine, like Google. Ideally, you want your content at the top of a search engine’s results for keywords relevant to your product or services.

Changing the location of your website hosting can impact its performance in search results. It may sound a little scary at first when your website hosts are slow but don’t panic – the rankings will come back!

Here’s what you should know about changing your website host location.

Google Slowing Down Your Website

The first thing you will notice when you move your host location is that your website is slow, perhaps extremely slow. Rest assured, this isn’t something that will stay that way for long. Google makes your website slow when they notice a change in host. They do this so Google won’t cause any problems in the future.

Whether you’re moving to a hosting provider in the same location, or a new location, Google will be cautious with how much it crawls the site. Over time, once Google’s systems can tell that going faster doesn’t cause any issues, they’ll speed up again. This is independent of the kind of hosting change you make. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re moving to a different provider down the road, or moving to another country.

Impact on Website Loading Times

There are a couple of different scenarios that are at play if you’re thinking about moving your website. If you’re thinking about moving your website hosting to a new location, this can have an impact on how fast your website will load for your users. If a majority of users live far away from where the website is hosted, it could lead to a slower user experience. 

In turn, that could affect the speed and page experience ranking factors. Depending on how strongly this is visible, that can play a role in speed and the page experience ranking factor for a website.

Hosting Your Website in Multiple Locations

To avoid the likelihood of your website loading time being affected, you could host your website on servers in multiple locations. Content delivery networks, also known as (CDNs) often do this, and depending on the hosting platform you’re using your site may be on multiple servers already.

If you’re using a hosting platform the chances of them already doing this for you is high. With SEO, the server’s location is unfortunately not used for geo-targeting. If you want your website to target users in a specific location, you would need to use either the country-code top level domain, or the appropriate setting in Google Search Console.

A country-code top-level domain is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. The appropriate setting in the Google Search Console can be found in the international targeting report in your settings. 

  • Use the International Targeting report to monitor your hreflang errors, or to choose a country that should be prioritized for your search results. This report has the following sections:
  • The Language section: Monitor the usage and errors of hreflang tags on your site. 
  • The Country section: Set a site-wide country target for your entire site, if desired.

Final Thoughts

Overall, changing the location of your website host will temporarily impact crawling on your website, and has the potential to impact loading time. It’s important to remember that this type of change will not impact SEO when it comes to geo-targeting.

At Onimod Global, our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. Our mission is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. We have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing.

We have a preferred hosting vendor that boosts SEO performance. If you’d like to learn more about our hosting vendor and our services contact us today! 

Google Revamps Search Ads 360

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Google has revamped Search Ads 360, a search management platform, the company announced on February 8th. This update and refresh of this platform includes support for some newer Google Ads features such as Discovery campaigns and Performance Max, search engine support for other brands, a new interface for the platform as well as workflow improvements. The refreshed UI will start rolling out over the next few months. Google plans to share the timeline of migration as the year goes on.

What is Search Ads 360?

Defined directly by Google, “Search Ads 360 is a search management platform that helps agencies and marketers efficiently manage some of the largest search marketing campaigns in the world, across multiple engines and media channels.” The pros of this platform has been streamlined workflow and reporting features that enable buyers to run their campaigns more efficiently, and automated bidding is included as well to improve campaign performance. Built-in integration with the Google Marketing Platform allows buyers to manage and track digital campaigns across a single platform, enabling rich, cross-channel buying, reporting and attribution.

What’s new in Search Ads 360?

Supports new Google features. The new version of Search Ads 360 was redesigned and relaunched using the same technology that powers Google Ads, the newer platform between the two. Having this common technology as the foundation enables support for most new Google Ads features, such as Performance Max and Discovery campaigns.

Support for other search engines. One of the main selling points for the updated 360 platform is the ability to manage your ads across different channels, including other search engines. Search Ads 360 allows Google to add support for more features from other search engines.

For example, the updated platform now supports additional Microsoft Advertising features, which includes responsive search ads, call extensions, and additional Microsoft audience types like customer match. Support for Yahoo! Japan’s Dynamic Ads for Search and sitelink extension scheduling are also now available.

Google will continue to add more features and channel support in the coming quarters.

New advanced features for enterprises. In addition to support for existing features, Google is also rolling out completely new features for Search Ads 360.

“For instance, the new Search Ads 360 takes enterprise workflows to the next level by giving you new ways to centralize and scale your day-to-day tasks and key activities — like campaign management, automated rules and labels — and you’ll now be able to make these changes across multiple advertisers at the same time,” Google said in the announcement.

The company is also making upgrades to existing features: The “Performance Center,” which will become available later this year, is touted as an improved budget management planner with support for enterprise planning capabilities, like improved forecasting across search engines.

And, the existing inventory management and ad builder tools will be unified into one feature, which will be called “Templates.” Templates is also expected to become available later this year.

Refreshed UI. Google also updated the interface of Search Ads 360, borrowing elements from the Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising UIs. This may make navigation more efficient since advertisers may already be familiar with it.

More from Onimod Global

More information on the update can be found in Google’s update. In addition to Google news and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Google Introduces New Search Console URL Inspection API

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Yesterday Google introduced the new search console URL inspection API. This will give programmatic access to URL-level data for properties you manage in Search Console.

According to Google’s news release on the topic, “the Search Console APIs are a way to access data outside of Search Console, through external applications and products. Developers and SEO tools already use the APIs to build custom solutions to view, add, or remove properties and sitemaps, and to run advanced queries on Search performance data.”

Google will be providing a new tool with the new URL Inspection API for developers. The tool will assist in debugging and optimizing their pages. You can request the data Search Console has about the indexed version of your URL. The API is going to then return the indexed information currently available in the URL Inspection tool.

 

How to use the new URL Inspection API

In order to learn how to use the new API, Google also has provided the developer documentation for the API which you can find here. The request parameters are a combination of the URL you are wanting to inspect from yours or your client’s site, and the URL of the property as defined in Search Console.

The response includes analysis results containing information from Search Console, including AMP, index status, rich search results and the mobile-friendliness of the URL.

The Google release also explains how “once you make the API call, you will get a response with all relevant results. If the request fails you would receive an error message instead. If a specific analysis result is missing from the response, it means the analysis was not available for the URL inspected. Here’s an example of the response you’ll get from the API.”

 

Final Thoughts

The entire release of the new URL Inspection API can be found on Google’s blog. In addition to Google news and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Continuous Scrolling Added To Google Mobile Search

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Back again with another Google SEO update, this time regarding continuous scrolling. Google announced they will be updating mobile search in the US with the ability to continuously scroll as more results automatically load.

Continuous scrolling to Google Mobile Search

In an announcement, Google says:

“At Google, we’re always exploring new ways to help people find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Earlier this year, we launched a redesign of the Search results page on mobile for a more modern experience that’s easier to scan and navigate.

Today, we’re making browsing search results more seamless and intuitive with the introduction of continuous scrolling on mobile devices.”

For Google users this is a big time upgrade as it’s now possible to scroll through an almost endless list of results to find right content.

 

Previously on mobile devices, Google’s search engine results page for mobile mainly adhered closely to the ‘ten blue links’ format that was implemented in the beginning on desktop search. Rather than seeing a numbered page list at the bottom of results, users in general would only see a displayed ‘see more’ button. Clicking that button on a mobile device is equivalent to clicking on page two of desktop search results.

The ‘see more’ button isn’t completely disappearing, however Google says that searchers will be able to continuously scroll through “many more” results before finally triggering the ‘see more’ button.

What this means for business

As we all know, CTR rates are extremely low after first page results. This is particularly revealed in a 2020 study that finds the CTR of page two results is less than 1%. The reason behind users not clicking on the page two results is uncertain, but it could have something to do with the perceived quality of content that didn’t make it to page one. With continuous scrolling on mobile, there may be the potential that the bias behind page 1 results is removed.

Think of apps like TikTok, when you’re allowed to infinitely scroll and encouraged to do so. Maybe you’re scrolling for a few minutes, or maybe for several hours. With the same logic being applied to Google Search (okay maybe they won’t scroll through Google for hours), this has the ability to increase content discovery significantly.

Final thoughts

We’ll see as the months go on if this change helps increase traffic for low ranking pages, and provide updates along the way. We will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Google Now Shares What Factors Impact Specific Rankings

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Google now shows why it ranked a specific search result. The new ‘About This Result’ feature shows searchers information about some of these most important factors used by Google Search to connect results to their queries. Read more

Google Launches New Integration with WooCommerce to Expand Ecommerce Offerings

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Google recently announced that they’re launching a new integration with WooCommerce that will allow their merchants to upload their product inventory across all of Google’s search and discovery surfaces. Last week, the extension went live for all 4.4 million of WooCommerce’s merchants.  

The Integration’s Features:

WooCommerce retailers can now sync their store with Google to list products for free, as well as run paid ads and track performance. When a store is synced with the Google Merchant Center, all information about the store and its products will be readily available to users when searching on a Google property. Information is also automatically updated when products are added or removed. 

Like regular search results, retailers can also pay for ads if they wish to be more visible in the listings. Retailers can also run free listing and paid campaigns simultaneously. 

The Benefits: 

The extension focuses on accomplishing three main objectives for retailers: 

  • Seamlessly connecting their store with Google Merchant Center 
  • Reaching online shoppers with free listings 
  • Boosting store traffic and sales with Smart Shopping Campaigns 

Final Thoughts 

As Google continues to work to get ahead of its search competitors, they have been making eCommerce a key focus. Given the integration’s reach and ubiquity, it’s likely to become a key destination for online shopping. This is why it’s essential for retailers to stay on top of these updates, ensuring they can maximize their exposure for those searching for their products. 

More from Onimod Global 

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

How to Improve Your Local Search Rankings on Google

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Do you feel like your business’s visibility on Google is lacking? If your business isn’t showing up for relevant searches in your area, it’s time to reevaluate your local SEO strategy, specifically your efforts on Google My Business. This is one of the simplest tools you can use to improve your local Google ranking and quickly. 

If you don’t already have a robust Google My Business strategy, here are some things you can do to up your game. 

1. Enter Complete Data

Businesses with complete and accurate information are easy to match up with the right search queries. This is why it’s crucial to consistently keep your information up to date, especially if you’re making changes to your business. You want users to be able to easily tell what you do, where you are and when they can visit. Be sure to always have your address, contact information, business category and attributes filled out on your profile and up to date. 

2. Verify Your Location 

Verifying your location will make it more likely you show up in Maps and Search on Google. The simplest way to verify your location is through a postcard. To do this, all you have to do is request Google to send you a postcard to your business address. Before you request, be sure you have the following steps completed: 

  1. You have a standard Google Account for your business. 
  2. You have a Business Profile. 
  3. You have a Google My Business account.
  4. You’ve claimed your Business Profile. 
  5. You’ve verified ownership of your business. 

They usually arrive within 2 weeks. Once you’ve received the postcard, you’ll notice a verification code. You’ll enter this into your Google My Business profile and your location will be verified. 

3. Keep Your Hours Accurate 

Accurate hours let customers know when you’re available and give them confidence you’ll be open if they take the time to travel to you. Accurate hours are also another factor Google uses in determining if your business is legitimate, ranking your relevancy for each query accordingly. Be sure to update your hours regularly, including when you open and close and if you have special hours for holidays or events. 

4. Manage and Respond to Reviews 

One of the most critical factors to online rankings are customer reviews. A large number of genuine reviews lets customers know you’re a real and reputable company. To grow your number of reviews, frequently ask for customer feedback through email, on social and in person. Be sure to link your Google My Business Profile so they know where to leave the review. Responding to reviews can be just as important as getting them. This shows you listen to your customers and value their feedback. Google also highly favors business with a large number of positive reviews when it comes to relevant searches. 

5. Add Photos

To showcase your goods and services, and to tell the story of your business, add photos to your Business Profile. Accurate and appealing pictures may also show shoppers that your business offers what they’re searching for. These images may also appear in Google search results if a user is searching for your products or about your industry. Thus, growing your brand awareness and increasing your overall reach. 

Final Thoughts

At Onimod Global, we’re a trusted Google Partner. Meaning we specialize in all Google Ad areas including: 

  • Search Advertising 
  • Mobile Advertising 
  • Video Advertising 
  • Display Advertising 
  • Shopping Advertising 

If you need assistance in any area of Google Ads, SEO or SEM in general, contact us today. 

More from Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

5 Google Ads Campaign Tips for 2021

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Is your 2021 resolution to improve your Google Ads campaigns and increase your overall business profitability? As marketers, it’s important to maintain control over our strategies and campaigns. Google’s optimizations are not always in the best interests of our business, they also don’t exactly know the context of our brands. To succeed in the upcoming year, we must try new things and change our strategies and tactics. We have to integrate more data, retain control over automatic Google optimizations and fight against increased competition. 

Here are 5 things to do and focus on in 2021 to improve your Google Ads campaigns. 

1. Have keyword intent. 

Google always favors consistency with campaigns. The more similar performance your keywords have, usually the better the campaign will perform overall. When selecting keywords, user intent should be the top priority around which we group our keywords. 

Users who have searched for the name of your brand are obviously more likely to convert once they make it to your website. So, any keywords relating to your brand should be grouped together since they bring the best CPA and ROAS. Any keywords mentioning “price” or “discount” are strong signals of purchasing intent as well. Phrases including “specifications,” “size” or “warranty” are important to bid on, but CTR and CR are likely to be lower, so you want to reduce your bid. 

If you want to improve results, it’s important to visualize and quantify areas in which you can improve things and find new business. The trick is to structure your account appropriately. This can be a tedious and complicated process, but there are a number of tools that can assist you. 

2. Declutter your campaigns. 

Keeping a close eye on all aspects of your campaigns can seem overwhelming, yet it can be key to success. Any underperforming spend represents the portion of your Google Ads investment that either has a low quality score or isn’t converting enough. To reduce waste spend, it’s important to focus on two Google reports: Quality Score and Search Query Report. This will help you analyze the search terms that trigger your ads and identify where to increase and decrease spend. 

3. Identify and double down on your strengths. 

It’s a common misconception that bidding on new keywords automatically leads to increasing sales. While this is sometimes true, it’s more effective to make sure you have the maximum market share on the keywords that are your most profitable, beyond just branded traffic. 

The best way to ensure you don’t miss out on any opportunity is to monitor your impression share on Google Ad SEPRs. Lost impressions relate to missed opportunities on searches related to the keywords you bid on. Best practice includes focusing on your top 10 campaigns and checking the market shares of your competitors, monitoring closely when you’re not shown and identifying why that might be. 

4. Use high quality creatives. 

Ad copy and visuals obviously play a huge role in your campaigns. Users are exposed to more than 6000 ads daily, so standing out and grabbing attention is essential. The quality of creative weighs up to 80% in the performance of Facebook Ads campaigns and the case is similar for Google Ads. Optimizing ads and creatives includes giving in to statistics. It’s impossible to know for sure which creatives will perform best without testing multiple versions. It’s also important to continuously test ads. Even when you identify a clear winner in one test, create new versions to continue to test to ensure you’re always increasing your ad performance. 

5. Spend smarter, not more. 

Spend should be allocated not only on keywords or placement levels, but user profiles also need to be taken into account. Data is gathered from users’ declarative info, when and where they’re active online, as well as Google Analytics shared data and inferred data from previous search queries. It’s important to take these user profiles into consideration and make bid adjustments to your most valuable audiences and criteria. 

More from Onimod Global 

At Onimod Global we’re experts in all areas of Google Ads. If you’re looking for digital marketing assistance, we can help your business reach its full digital potential. Interested in growing digital presence for your company? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Google Core Update December: First Insights

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Google’s December 2020 Core update was a notable change according to several data providers. The Google core update is now completely finished rolling out as of December 16, 2020 and while the December core update is not figured out completely, experts at Onimod Global wanted to share significant first insights that can be made so far based on first data.

What is a core update?

Google changes their algorithm on an almost daily basis.  A couple of times a year, they release significant changes to their core search algorithms and systems that are much more noticeable. Potentially in the past, your website may have experience a decline in traffic following a Google core update. This most likely is related to the fact that Google’s algorithms have determined that there are other pages on the web that are more relevant and helpful than yours. It can be frustrating to SEO’s to not know how Google does this.

How search works

  1. Organize content on the internet:
    As Google crawls the internet and all of the web pages that can be searched in a search engine, they organize the pages in an index. They take note of key signals on each page such as which keywords are on the page, how up to date the page is, and more.
  2. What is the meaning of the user’s search query:
    In order to know what to recommend, Google needs to understand exactly what the user means with their search query. Algorithms determine whether a query is looking for fresh, new content or not. Some words in a query may be easy for Google to decipher. This has become quite advanced with the featured snippets showing you a small graph or snippet of information that is a fast answer to a search query.
  3. What pages are the most helpful:
    Once Google understands the intent behind a query, their goal is to return web pages that are the most helpful to answer this query.

Patterns from the latest update

  1.  Google may have made changes to how they assess alternative medical topics
    According to Search Engine Land, several company sites in the medical industries have performed better after this update. It’s possible that Google may have made strides in being able to understand which of these pages are trustworthy. In the past, SEL says that a lot of alt-med content was simply discounted by Google even though it was the type of content many people were searching for.
  2. UX becoming a factor
    If you declined with this update and have a large number of ads, especially ads that interfere with a user’s ability to read the main content, it may be worth experimenting with showing fewer ads. But know that if Google did change something with this core update in regards to ads, you may need to wait until there is more data about the core update and its improvements.
  3. More attention to headings and content structure
    This allows for faster skimming, and searchers like to skim headings to determine whether an article is one with which they want to engage. One of the questions Google lists in their post on core updates is, “Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?” This is telling of the fact that this update has placed an emphasis on this type of content.

More from Onimod Global

Onimod Global is looking forward to the future and helping your business reach your full digital potential. Interested in growing digital presence for your company? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Top 4 Digital Marketing Trends For 2021

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Many businesses have completely altered the way they operate in 2020. More and more products and services move online and many employees will continue to work remotely or in a hybrid setting for much of next year. What are the most relevant digital marketing trends for 2021 that your business should keep in mind to build customer loyalty and generate more traffic, leads, and revenue? Check out the top 4 areas Onimod Global experts recommend to invest your time and resources into next year. If you’re not sure where to begin, this list is the perfect starting point.

Businesses must embrace the digital transformation

The post-COVID world we will hopefully experience in 2021 will make a digital presence for companies almost mandatory. “Digital transformation” has become a popular buzzword since March 2020, and all types of companies are investing heavily in the migration to digital platforms. This includes platforms such as e-commerce, chatbots, email, apps, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, omnichannel marketing and augmented and virtual reality.

Google listings and local SEO will be a top priority for small businesses

If you own a small business, one of the most important things you can do is ensure your local listings are verified and kept current on various search platforms. For B2C businesses that draw in primarily local traffic, the Google My Business listing provides valuable information about your hours and whether or not they are affectd by COVID, services, and geographical location. It’s one of the key factors in search and business owners are often blown away to learn how many directories there are out there.

One tip you can easily implement today: make sure that you have a geographically-defined service area in your local listings. Doing this will help your business show up in “near me” searches. That’s because Google and other search engines will prioritize relevance in their search algorithms.

Voice search and its power

Voice search queries will often populate different results than if the user had typed in a text-based search. Even though voice search is not a part of Google’s algorithm, it still dictates current search results. This means that businesses should be up to date on voice search components for their consumers who are adapting and switching over to that medium.

Content must be specifically optimized for voice searches, according to experts in voice search. The content needs to be more direct and conversational, and by doing so it will accurately sync with search queries. This will help boost traffic by staying relevant and more visible to consumers.

Influencer marketing a key pillar of marketing for consumer brands

Consumer brands have historically used social media influencers to present authentic unbiased advertising to appeal to prospects and customers. The pandemic amplified the impact influencers have on the purchase of products, due to a limited ability to shop at stores and increased online shopping traffic.

A recent study found that 40% of people reported that they purchased a product online after seeing it used by an influencer on YouTube, Instagram or Twitter. Influencers and their impact are expected to gain even more popularity and followers and businesses to use influencers more than ever before.

More from Onimod Global

Onimod Global is looking forward to the future and helping your business reach your full digital potential. Interested in growing your digital presence for your company? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.