Category Archives: Google

When you hear about a change to a Google algorithm, the knee-jerk reaction is usually “how will this affect my SEO?” Every day, this reaction is becoming more backwards. SEO, as a product, has been inflated by digital marketers over the past 5 years. The reason is that it’s easy to sell a magic bullet that gets you on the top of the Google results for keywords related to your business.

SEO means Search Engine Optimization, so it’s safe to say that the service should be focused on making your site the first choice when a user searches for something relevant to your site. So an SEO expert should be able to make changes to your site, and take action around the web to take advantage of Google’s search algorithms. Google has changed their search algorithms twice a day on average in 2013. So how can you possibly expect to be consistently “optimized” for them.

As the algorithms evolve, and Google cracks down on link building scams, their focus is more and more on providing relevant content for the searcher. This means that the end goal for Google isn’t to pick the site with the most backlinks, or the site with the best metadata keywords. The searcher has a question, and Google wants to answer it with the site that best covers the topic. This is primarily what the Hummingbird update aimed to do: Give searchers relevant answers.

This is where content marketing comes in. Each topic, relevant to your business, that you can cover is essentially another Google query, you’re prepared for no matter what animal Google names their next update after. Sure, keywords will still be important, but I challenge you to write an article on “replacing spark plugs” without ever saying “spark plug.” Google’s bots have gotten smarter as well, they can better understand the message of a single sentence so you don’t need to inject a ridiculous keyword string to make sure all of your bases are covered.

The future of “SEO” will still include doing the essential steps like submitting a sitemap to webmaster tools, and setting up a GooglePlus account for authorship, but the greater focus will be on having content that is useful for searchers. Having great content that you spread across your entire web presence has a much more powerful effect than just showing up at the top of Google’s search results. Great content gets shared. When your content really helps someone, they’ll pass it along to their network, which gives your content extra credibility. Now you have motivated visitors that didn’t even need to perform a search to arrive on your page.

Want to learn more about how your dealership can benefit from having high quality content?  Content Motive has a variety of products that can build your web presence.

What Universal Analytics offers to developers is the ability to collect data from multiple devices and platforms.

Old Google Analytics would only report website traffic, with Universal Analytics you can track actions in mobile apps, game consoles, and information kiosks. For the automotive industry, the extra device tracking is not a huge perk. However, when an account has Universal Analytics enabled, you can see details about which search engine was used arriving on the site, user behavior details like session timeouts, referral exclusions, and search term exclusions.

Referral exclusions can be useful for providing more accurate data about user behavior. For example, if your site has a sister site at a different domain, and users could bounce back and forth between the 2, you would want to exclude each of the urls so that this behavior is reported as the same session instead of referral traffic.

Excluded search terms allow you to mark organic search traffic from specific terms as direct traffic instead. If you would prefer that when people search for your company name to get to your website, they are considered direct traffic instead of organic search traffic, you could add the company name as an excluded search term.

All behaviors from these exclusions are still recorded, but the user’s intention and process becomes more clear.

Hopefully, this clears up some of the changes in Universal Analytics.

For more detail information about SEO/SEM please contact:

Kevin Drongowski
Senior Account Manager
Integrated PPC
Questions? 425-780-2774 Call or text

You can see Kevin’s SEO/SEM entries @PGI Facebook

NOTE: Universal Analitys is being integrated with DealerLab Websites as we speak and it will be available Q1 2014 on your DealerLab back end.

What Universal Analytics offers to developers is the ability to collect data from multiple devices and platforms.

Old Google Analytics would only report website traffic, with Universal Analytics you can track actions in mobile apps, game consoles, and information kiosks. For the automotive industry, the extra device tracking is not a huge perk. However, when an account has Universal Analytics enabled, you can see details about which search engine was used arriving on the site, user behavior details like session timeouts, referral exclusions, and search term exclusions.

Referral exclusions can be useful for providing more accurate data about user behavior. For example, if your site has a sister site at a different domain, and users could bounce back and forth between the 2, you would want to exclude each of the urls so that this behavior is reported as the same session instead of referral traffic.

Excluded search terms allow you to mark organic search traffic from specific terms as direct traffic instead. If you would prefer that when people search for your company name to get to your website, they are considered direct traffic instead of organic search traffic, you could add the company name as an excluded search term.

All behaviors from these exclusions are still recorded, but the user’s intention and process becomes more clear.

Hopefully, this clears up some of the changes in Universal Analytics.

For more detail information about SEO/SEM please contact:

Kevin Drongowski
Senior Account Manager
Integrated PPC
Questions? 425-780-2774 Call or text

You can see Kevin’s SEO/SEM entries @PGI Facebook

NOTE: Universal Analitys is being integrated with DealerLab Websites as we speak and it will be available Q1 2014 on your DealerLab back end.

It’s interesting how when we think about online advertising, we only think about text ads in search result pages and easily ignored display ads throughout the web. Google is also offering a more engaging form of advertising that makes use of javascript to create an engaging experience for the user: Engagement ads.

Engagement ads appear as a display ad at first, but after the user hovers their mouse over them for 2 seconds, it can expand into a larger ad or a lightbox filled with rich content to engage the user. Inside the lightbox, you can have anything from your youtube masthead to an interactive game.

Google claims users are ten times more likely to engage with these ads than to click on a standard display ad and users spend twice as much time engaging with them.

Google has added a feature to their display network advertising. The buzzword here is “Viewability.” When bidding on impressions (CPM) in the display network, you can now require that the ad is viewable before you’re charged for it. The qualifications for an ad to viewable is that at least 50% of the ad is on the user’s screen for at least 1 second. This is in an effort to prevent advertisers from being charged for ads that are below the fold on the publishers page. This isn’t especially applicable to us, since we currently bid on clicks, and in remarketing clicks are more important than impressions.

Google announced yesterday on Google+ that they have added car/automobile results to the knowledge graph. So now when you search for [2013 ferrari ff] (hint, who is your favorite search blogger, would make for a nice holiday gift) you will get the knowledge graph at the top right of the page:

Google doesn’t say where the data comes from but there are plenty of free data sources out there for Google to use.

As you can see, it shows name of the car, type of car, image of the car, the make, price, miles per gallon, engine sizes, other models, other configurations with a link to other searches related to it. When you click on the other cars under this one, it brings up the carousel effect, which looks like this:

The sad part is that it will take away search traffic from Edmunds, Yahoo Autos and other car sites.

Here is the mobile result, as you can see, you need to scroll to get to the search results:

On Google Glass it is even harder to get to any search results, all you get is this and when you click on it, it shows a snippet of the data as you scroll:

Forum discussion at Google+.

Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-car-knowledge-graph-17770.html

Yesterday’s update to Google’s knowledge graph (The knowledge graph shows up on the right of search results and typically shows relevant information to the search such as a map for a location) makes it so when you search for a specific model, information about the car and its configurations and prices. It appears that the information is pulled from either an internal database or from the manufacturer’s site. There are free data sources that it could be pulling from as well. The images in the knowledge graph also seem like they come from the manufacturer’s site. Prices shown are the MSRP.

The important thing to take away from the update, in terms of strategy, is to make sure we target exact match keywords on individual models and year. Since google’s interface for this feature takes up valuable screen space it becomes very important to be in the first position in both paid search and organic search for specific models. If you do a more broad search for the make, or use an older year, this new feature is not activated.

To Your Success,

Kevin Drongowski
Integrated PPC

Source: https://plus.google.com/+google/posts/Fr1mdsWGhQE