As millions of us are furiously jotting down ideas for our personal New Year’s Resolutions, here’s one resolution corporate communicators and marketers ought to include: adding an online newsroom to their websites. Consider this fact for a moment: less than half of all businesses even have an online newsroom. The intent to develop one is pending, however. And 2012 is almost here. But for now, this means that the majority of PR folks, corporate communicators, and marketers lack any sort of online newsroom presence. Talk about an untapped market! Given the recent Freshness updates – where preference is heavily tilted towards breaking news, such as the upcoming Presidential primaries or Occupy Wall Street, and frequently updated customer reviews on new products, like Amazon’s Kindle Fire – it’s clear that Google is increasingly relying on a website’s online newsroom as the primary source of trending, newsworthy, and up-to-date content. Read more…
Google is nothing if not experimental. This can be a rather large and particularly uncomfortable pill to swallow – especially for search marketers. Normally those of us at SEM agencies love testing. User testing, A/B testing…you name it, we test it. And many of the brightest minds in the field write endless articles on the benefits of testing and experimenting.
But when Google begins rolling out new changes, we tend to collectively hold our breath.
Earlier last week Google announced a new way forward to improve user relevancy and transparency. Read more…
In the midst of congressional hearings late this past summer, Google received steadily mounting criticism and some pretty negative PR from many brick and mortar businesses. It turns out that users, most likely the local competitors, were abusing the open and democratic nature of Google Places by reporting that a business had been closed permanently, when in fact they were still alive and well. Read more…
Ad Extensions in Google AdWords are an immensely helpful tool that provides more useful, relevant ads to your target audience searching for information on Google.
Whereas paid sitelinks extensions allow you to display additional URLs leading to specific and related content deep within your sitemap, location extensions lets you include your business address and phone within your ads.
Of course, this feature is especially useful for advertisers with a local business presence who want to generate brand awareness to users already close enough to visit their location, as well as users who are browsing for related businesses in their area.
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