For internet marketers and businesses alike, 2012 promises to be a movin’, shakin’ year for all organic, social and mobile trends! Despite the tough economic climate in 2011, the rabid run toward strategic mobile marketing as a primary retail sales tool continues unabated with updated analytics, tools and apps.

The growth curve and development of retail-focused mobile marketing is huge, particularly in generating  that retail sale in near-real time!  Push marketing and hyper-local ads with a social media support structure, along with emerging apps like Google Wallet make it easier than ever to search, shop and spend on the go. The benefit to consumers? Competition and price comparisons work in their favor in a big way, not to mention ease and convenience.  The benefit to retailers? Buying everything from a new phone to a gift card to a slice of pizza becomes simpler and more intuitive via your phone, providing opportunities to capture both impulse buyers and smart-search consumers.

It seems that social media has now entered the “public trading” stage, with:

• Google Plus giving Facebook a real run for the money this time around
• Social image sites like Pinterest capturing a big chunk of our online enthusiasm
• Linked In becoming the “Who’s Who” of professionals and companies, garnering information on people and corporate profiles that boggles the mind

Oh yeah…and who would have though that cool QR code would be considered old-fashioned or quaint quite so soon?

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For those of you who search in Google regularly, you may have seen some branding changes over the past week or two that offer a stark contrast to the Google that we have become accustomed to – black top navigation bar, the url above the page description on results pages, and no blue in the left nav on results pages to name a few of the changes. All of these will hopefully add to the user experience of Google, but the effects on the results that appear on the page should be minimal.

There is, however, one change we have noticed that has become more widespread for Google and could have a major impact on search traffic for some websites. And it has to do with Google AdWords. (more…)

When Google Caffeine was released, we rediscovered the importance of page load time …among other things. And maybe it’s not as important as content relevance, but Matt Cutts did say, “…Relevancy is the most important [ranking factor]. If you have two sites that are equally relevant… you’d probably prefer the one that’s a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites. But absolutely, relevance is the primary component… That’s not going to change.”

Okay, that much we could probably have figured out on our own, content trumps page speed… great.

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If your business showcases products online, then you should be familiar with Google Merchant Center. If you aren’t, then you should keep on reading, As Google Merchant Center can help increase the reach and impact of your Internet marketing efforts.

So what is Google Merchant Center? It’s an online business tool that lets you provide Google with a feed of all the products you promote and/or sell online (this usually means items you sell through a shopping cart on your website). This allows specific products and product information to show up within Google Product Search, on Google SERPs with images and other Google properties. (more…)

We’re all hyper-sensititive to the importance of local search via those eye-popping local marker tags in the organic listings – as are our SEO and internet marketing clients. Yet  it seems that even the most seasoned SEO’s and internet marketing professionals continue to gloss over the why’s and how’s of  the actual results that are appearing – in a seemingly arbitrary fashion - in “Googletime” as I prefer to call it, within the prime real estate of organic search results.

So, yet again Google is the fickle friend. Always there, ready and willing to help, but (more…)