Five for Friday: Facebook Ads Get a Facelift, Google’s Panda Goes into Hibernation, and More!

December 26th, 2014 by Search Influence Alumni

Photo by Benson Kua

1. Tips For Growing Traffic and Revenue Through Keyword Targeting – Search Engine Land

It is widely known throughout the tech world that choosing the right keywords is important when trying to draw more attention to your website. Trond Lyngbø discusses how to do this by gathering relevant information, prioritizing your targets, and taking appropriate action. He goes through each of these steps in detail and offers advice on which tools to use and how to narrow down your targeted keywords. Finally, he goes through your options on how to take action through content marketing, personalization, and more. Trond Lyngbø offers advice and suggestions on taking action with high search volume keywords and turning those leads into conversions.

 2. What’s Next in SEO Trends – Venture Beat

With the new year approaching fast, people are wondering what’s next in SEO trends. Yoav Vilner discusses how the focus in 2014 has been on honest and well-built link profiles, unique and informative content, and a compatible mobile site.

In 2015, he expects the focus to shift in a number of ways.

  1. Addition of Social Layers: This will include putting faces on visitors and allowing them to get to know other visitors and even the website owners through social profiles like Spot.IM.
  2. Increase of Visual Content: Websites with engaging visual content such as BuzzFeed are showing us that users are becoming more engaged when aided by a visual rather than a plain text site.
  3. Defense Against Negative SEO: In 2015, businesses will need to work harder to protect themselves against negative SEO by securing a healthy link profile and proving to Google that the brand is legitimate.

3. Panda Goes on Holiday Vacation Too – Search Engine Roundtable

photo by Jrwooley6

Panda has been one of Google’s most influential updates. Thanks to the update’s focus on quality content, advertisers have been striving to satisfy this furry animal since 2011. In this blog, Barry Schwartz discusses why we haven’t seen any updates or refreshes from Google’s Panda over the past month. He discusses how Panda has been known to go on vacation (or perhaps hibernation) during the holiday season and goes into more detail about when Panda was last updated.

4. Insight Into Which Products Drive Store Visits – Search Engine Watch

During the holiday season, advertisers are constantly trying to track their marketing efforts, asking questions like “What drives consumers to purchase?” and “How do we get customers to think of us first?” Yuyu Chen discusses a new Google AdWords metric called “store visit measurements,” which is added to its Estimated Total Conversions (ETC). Using data compiled from the company’s search ads, this tool tracks which products drive consumers to the store to make a purchase. Chen discusses privacy concerns as well as whether or not this feature will be available outside of the US.

5. The Redesign of Facebook Ads Yield High Results – Marketing Land

In April, Facebook redesigned its right rail ads by making them larger but less frequent. Ever since then, we have been awaiting the results of this redesign. In this blog, Martin Beck discusses Facebook’s announcement regarding the success of the redesign. He also discusses the success associated with these new ads and explains why they are cost efficient.