Monthly Archives: January 2018

Google Has Published Guidelines on Google Assistant and Google Voice Search

Here’s what Google wrote —

“In the past we have received requests to see our evaluation guidelines from academics who are researching improvements in voice interactions, question answering, and voice-guided exploration. To facilitate their evaluations, we are publishing some of the first Google Assistant guidelines. It is our hope that making these guidelines public will help the research community build and evaluate their own systems.”

Google will be evaluating these dimensions for rating voice search responses.

Information Satisfaction: The content should not be irrelevant. It has to be similar to the requirements specified by the user.
Length: As far as the length is in question, the information should not be very little or too much. Unlike a web search, the users cannot scan the results and identify its usefulness, which is why it has to be sufficient enough to fulfill the user’s query.
Formulation: This simply means that the source (e.g. website), language, and of course the content produced should be grammatically sound and easy to understand by the user.
Elocution: Resources such as WaveNet and Tacotron 2 are rapidly simplifying the text-to-speech generation process thereby minimizing the need for human performance.

The full PDF of Google Voice Search Guidelines is available as a download here.

For more information on how people are using this new technology, check out this list by Adculture of 25 voice search statistics.

Google Quietly Updates Its Ranking Algorithm – The Maccabees Update

The Google Maccabees Update

December is when every business owner out there is busy getting the biggest pie from the
holiday cake. So it’s very rare that you see any buzz in SEO forums. But this time, we witnessed
something different. Many people were online, sharing their experiences. Just like an
unexpected tornado caught them off guard, and took away everything they had. Well maybe
it became way too more dramatic, but we would like to inform you that Google has made
changes to their core ranking algorithms. And as a result, many websites witnessed a drop in
traffic as massive as 35%!

Moz reported high volatility in search results through Mozcast as can be seen below

A nonseasonal site owner, who hardly witnesses any fluctuations witnessed a drop of 30%! However, they were not alone and this was not due to any glitch. Many other users started sharing their trauma on webmaster forums. After a thorough research, we found out that Google did make changes to their core ranking algorithms and later on they confirmed the same. The statement Google sent was “we released several minor improvements during this timeframe, part of our regular and routine efforts to improve relevancy.”

We decided to do some number crunching ourselves. Our dataset of 4000+ websites and 350,000+ keywords (local and national) makes it easy for us to get a birds-eye view of how our client campaigns are performing.Not surprisingly, we were happy to find that this update didn’t have any negative impact on our client campaigns. Most probably, the SEO deliverables which we offer saved our clients from this update. This is another example of how our strategies future-proof your business.

So if your organic leads were affected, especially around December 13th or 14th, open
Google Analytics and check whether your site was hit by the MACCABEEs update or not. If you were hit by this update OR want to make sure you’re not going to be a likely victim, we can help. Just connect with us and let our professional SEOs to do the work for you.

GET THE MAXIMUM BANG FOR YOUR BUCK BY AVOIDING THESE PPC MISTAKES

Neglecting your daily spend

Recently Google has allowed the advertisers to go over their daily spend budget. You can almost double the spending. Although they say that they will even the overspending over a 30 day period, it’s not recommended. Closely track the conversion level and spending and avoid exceeding the daily limit.

Using the same ad copy

PPC is all about experimenting. You will have to keep trying something new to get better results. Using the same ad copy, again and again, will make your ads monotonous and drastically reduce the click-through rate. Spend time in crafting engaging & original ad copies. Include numbers, geographies and other factors into the ad text.

Landing pages not reflecting offers

Matching query intent to content is an absolute must. If you notice that your bounce rate is way too high, it’s probably because your landing page is not in sync with the ad copy. Suppose you are offering a 40% discount on some products and that product is nowhere to be found on your landing page, then the visitor will feel betrayed and leave the site immediately.

Ignoring your Google merchant feed

If you are using product listings ads, make sure to push the latest feed with the most precise product attributes. The price, color, model and everything else should be pitch perfect.

Re-targeting carelessly

Re-targeting is considered one of the most profitable marketing practice. But overdoing it can do more harm then good because people are already bombarded with ads during the holidays season, and if you are not carefully crafting your re-targeting campaign then you are annoying them instead of convincing them.