If you’re a business owner and find yourself a little bewildered by all the ‘mobile’ buzzwords out there, you’re not alone. The vocabulary of tech evolves at break-neck speed causing lots of our clients wondering how to filter what’s important to know and what’s not.

First, it’s vital that you understand how important mobile is to the life your business – any business. When people shop for goods or research services, their smartphone or tablet is now their go-to advisor and personal assistant.

Most people now search and research products via their mobile device first. Google reports that people find their smartphone is indispensable.

Major search engines constantly adjust their search results to favor websites that provide the most gratifying mobile-user experiences.  What you need to know is that your business must provide a website looks great, loads fast and functions as well on a smartphone or tablet as is does on a desktop in order to rank competitively in search results.
Understanding a few key terms related to ‘mobile’ will help you better grasp our brave new world and achieve mobile success.

Mobile Devices
A mobile device is a generic term for any type of handheld computer. Smartphones or tablets are the most common examples. PDA’s (Personal digital assistant), e-readers, audio players and hand-held games are other examples.
 If you’re talking with your marketing team about mobile search or website design, they are most likely referring to the smartphones or tablets that people use to interact with your brand online.

Mobile Users
Any person that uses a mobile device is a mobile user. You’ll hear this term used most often when talking about search analytics, user experience (UX) and app or website design.

Responsive Website Design
Responsive design simply means that your website is designed to look great and function properly on any type of computing device: desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.  The website design automatically ‘responds’ to different screen sizes to provide a smooth user experience on any device.
Your smartphone screen is 1/10th the size of a desktop screen. Responsive design is how website designers make a single website look great and function across thousands of different devices and multiple operating software platforms.

Why this is important: without responsive design, your website won’t work properly across mobile devices and it will be harder to find your website online because your (SEO) search results will suffer.
 
We hope this helps you navigate our ever-evolving online world.

Determining your SEO success means more than just tracking Google page rankings.
Marketers and their customers have one thing in common: their eyes are on the first page of Google search results.
With various estimates putting the click-through rate of a number one Google ranking around 20.5%, it’s no wonder that more than half of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.
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But they might be surprised to learn that making it to the number one spot isn’t enough to ensure valuable clicks -- or any clicks at all, for that matter. And focusing solely on improving page rankings ignores the pages that don’t rank in the first place. For ecommerce sites in particular, which spend up to a quarter of their budgets on SEO, technical SEO issues often prevent pages from appearing in search results and therefore, from earning ROI.
Does that mean that keyword rankings are not important? Absolutely not! It means that focusing only on keyword rankings is a terrible mistake. So in addition to measuring SEO success based on page rankings, here are some other metrics that companies might not be tracking, but should be.
Drivers: Revenue and Traffic
Everyone knows revenue is important. What they might not know, however, is that they can track the revenue that corresponds to their SEO efforts. By connecting Google Search Console with Google Analytics, companies can access data about the revenue listed for the organic search channel, up to the page level. Tracking this data is a great place to start, as it gives companies a better idea of how much revenue their SEO efforts are actually generating.
In addition to traffic and revenue, companies can use Google Search Console inside Google Analytics to track behavioral metrics like number of pages visited, bounce rate and time onsite. Coupled with the data provided about conversion rates, these metrics can help companies understand which pages are performing the best and why, and use that insight to optimize existing content -- or create new content.
Comparing this data over time is a great way to measure the evolution of a company’s SEO success. Rather than simply monitoring Google page rankings, measuring changes in a company’s page revenue and traffic can provide more meaningful insights that rankings don’t capture. Sometimes pages are ranked high, but receive very few clicks. Other times, pages receive many clicks, but have low conversion rates. Fundamental drivers such as revenue and traffic, therefore, are stronger metrics to study.
Obstacles: Indexing Errors
Still, these driver metrics don’t paint the full picture. It’s equally important to know where an SEO strategy isn’t working. And there is no better place to start than by looking at crawl errors. These errors are often what prevent companies’ pages from being indexed by Google in the first place -- meaning that unless they are fixed, the pages will generate zero organic traffic, and zero revenue from organic search too. For this reason, we always recommend starting with a foundational SEO approach that focuses on correctly indexing existing content before pouring resources into new content.
Companies can find pages with indexing and crawl errors by using the Google Search Console. Typically, the number of crawl errors is far different between the web version and mobile version of a company’s web pages. Considering that for some industries up to nearly three-quarters of searches come from a mobile device, companies should pay particular attention to their mobile crawl errors and take steps to fix them immediately.
Once the necessary changes are made, companies should also view the total number of pages crawled per day and the Index Status from Google Search Console to ensure that all of their pages will eventually be searchable.
Levers: Optimized Pages and Visitors Per Page
Driver metrics help companies measure progress against goals, and obstacles provide them with specific actions to take. However, they still need to keep an eye on metrics that affect them directly.
In order to properly gauge whether the implemented changes have had a positive effect, companies can monitor two primary “levers” that would point to inevitable traffic and revenue increases: the number of optimized pages (landing pages that rank and drive traffic), and the average number of visitors per page. When these two metrics are multiplied together, companies can see the total SEO traffic to their sites.
To find the number of optimized pages, under organic search traffic, switch from keywords to pages and count the number listed at the bottom paginator. Companies with sites under 50k pages should aim for about 50% to 75% of the total site pages to be receiving traffic; however, this level can (and should) increase with additional SEO improvements, as they are ultimately those which drive the most revenue and return on a company’s SEO investments. How can a company get more pages optimized? An example would be by getting more pages effectively indexed.
To determine whether or not a company is meeting its goals, the second key metric to monitor is the average number of visitors per page, which can be calculated by dividing the total traffic figure by the number of optimized pages. Rather than the blindsided approach of relying only on page rankings to determine SEO success, this approach can help companies more accurately gauge their SEO improvements. After all, high-ranking pages don’t always lead to valuable results.
While these two final metrics are by far the most important, they still work in tandem with the driver and obstacle metrics. By tracking each of these metrics together, companies can ultimately save time and money by leveraging their existing content. And by not shelling out for more mediocre keyword content, they can clean up the internet too.




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By Hamlet Batista, 2/17/18

Two years after Facebook dropped its branded content restrictions and rolled out a branded content tagging system, the number of organic posts that marketers pay publishers and creators to publish to their own Pages to promote the marketers’ brands has swelled. The number of publishers and creators posting branded content to Facebook each month grew fourfold last year, according to the company.  Now, Facebook will bar publishers and creators from using its branded content tagging tool to promote content that they were not involved in creating.

But “branded content” can be a slippery term. In theory, it refers to an article or video that a brand paid a publisher or creator to produce or star in and to distribute to their audience. However, in practice, it can simply be an article or video that a brand paid a publisher or creator to distribute to their audience; it may not even be content but instead a link to a product page on a brand’s e-commerce site, making something that was already closely related to an ad now all too identical to one.
To bar publishers, creators and brands from abusing the loose definition of branded content, Facebook will more clearly define what qualifies as such on its social network, as well as on Instagram.

Facebook is updating its branded content policy to prohibit publishers and creators from being paid to post content that they were not involved in creating, the company announced on Thursday. Specifically, Facebook will add the following parameter to its policy: “Don’t accept anything of value to post content that you did not create or were not involved in the creation of, or that does not feature you.”
When the change takes effect in March, Facebook will curtail the reach of branded content on Facebook and Instagram that violates the policy and, if publishers or creators continue to violate it, may eventually limit or eliminate their access to Facebook’s monetization tools, such as the labeling tool used to tag a piece of branded content and enable a brand to track its performance and run it as an ad.
To identify when a piece of branded content violates its updated policy, Facebook will rely on a system it has developed that uses various signals to recognize a business relationship between two Pages, according to a Facebook spokesperson. That system is designed to be able to distinguish between when, as an example, a creator posts a link to an article from an unaffiliated publisher that features a brand but not the creator (which would violate Facebook’s policy) versus a link to an article from an unaffiliated publisher that features both the brand and the creator (which would not violate Facebook’s policy, provided the creator is quoted in the article, as opposed to simply mentioned). Pages that are found violating Facebook’s policy will be notified and able to appeal the decision.

​AUTHOR: TIM PETERSON
Check out the original article published January 25th 2018 on MarketingLand.com