Saturday, June 3, 2017

Josephine Baker Google Doodle honors Jazz Age icon & highlights her civil rights work

Google traded out its homepage logo today to celebrate Jazz Age icon performer, civil rights activist and French spy Josephine Baker.

Born on this date 111 years ago, Baker reached international fame by the 1920s. A star of the stage, her singing and dancing won her a role as part of the chorus line in “Shuffle Along,” the first all-black Broadway musical. After moving to Europe, Baker’s celebrity status skyrocketed.

“She set off for Paris and found her fame and artistic home in the city’s opulent cabarets, singing and performing uninhibited dance routines that celebrated female liberation and African cultural identity,” reports the Google doodle team.

Baker was one of the most photographed women on the planet during her lifetime. She was also a committed fighter for civil rights, refusing to perform for segregated audiences and working to advance the NAACP efforts.

Google also notes Baker’s time with the French Resistance during World War II when she worked on the sly, “hobknobbing” with Axis officials at high-profile events to collect intelligence during the war, “…often writing it on her sheet music in invisible ink.”

After the war Charles de Gaulle awarded Baker the Croix de Guerre and inducted her into France’s Legion of Honour.

Google’s doodle honoring the performer leads to a search for “Josephine Baker” and is designed as a slide show, featuring a variety of images highlighting different stages of her life:

Google is sharing the doodle on its U.S. homepage, along with a number of its international homepages, including France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Canada.

The post Josephine Baker Google Doodle honors Jazz Age icon & highlights her civil rights work appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Posted by at No comments:

Friday, June 2, 2017

Learn best practices for mobile search and in-store sales

Today’s consumers research products on the go, using their smartphones to find and choose at which nearby business to make a purchase or eat a meal. Most visit the store they select on the same day.

Yet most marketers can’t – or don’t – optimize their digital presence or measure the impact of their digital campaigns on in-store sales.

On June 6th, join our digital marketing experts as they explore online and offline connections across multiple digital channels. They’ll discuss best practices to drive foot traffic, plus key metrics to measure the impact of digital search marketing, organic search, social media, and ad campaigns on top-line growth.

Register today for “Mobile Marketing vs. In-Store Sales: Help! What’s the Correlation?,” produced by Digital Marketing Depot and sponsored by MomentFeed.

The post Learn best practices for mobile search and in-store sales appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Posted by at No comments:

SearchCap: Google ends ODP description, EU fines Google & local best practices

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

Local & Maps

Link Building

Searching

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

Search Marketing

The post SearchCap: Google ends ODP description, EU fines Google & local best practices appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Posted by at No comments:

Business profile and review best practices from TripAdvisor and Yelp

TripAdvisor and Yelp are two of the most powerful local search and review sites online. According to consumer survey data from Burke, review sites drive more immediate actions (i.e., phone call, store visit, website visit, email) than social media or search.

This consumer behavior is because of review site content and because they’re often consulted lower in the funnel. That’s why it’s important for local marketers to take full advantage of these sites — for multiple reasons, including SEO purposes.

TripAdvisor just released a diner engagement study. Yelp also has data on what drives engagement and conversions on its site. Below I’ve distilled findings from the two sources.

Claim and complete profiles

TripAdvisor found that “Restaurants with hours of operation on their TripAdvisor listing see 36 percent more engagement than those without them.” And Yelp says that “Businesses who complete their profiles see, on average, 5x the customer leads each month.”

Add at least 10 photos

TripAdivsor explained that “restaurants with 11 – 20 photos see double the amount of diner interaction over others with no photos at all,” and those “with at least one Management Photo see 44 more engagement over those with no photos.”

Yelp data show that “a business with 1-5 reviews and at least 10 photos sees 200 percent more user views than a business with the same number of reviews and no photos.”

Respond to reviews

As indicated above, businesses with reviews on their profiles see much more consumer engagement than those without. That’s because consumers are on TripAdvisor and Yelp specifically to read reviews.

TripAdvisor reports, “restaurants with over 20 reviews see twice as much engagement as those with no reviews,” and those with “over 40 recent reviews [see] 3x the engagement.” When managers or local business owners respond to reviews, there’s also more engagement: “Managers who respond to at least 1 percent of reviews see twice as much diner engagement with their TripAdvisor listings.”

Yelp echoes this in a more general way, saying that when business owners respond to reviews, it also encourages more reviews. Thus, the findings of the two sites are broadly consistent.

Here are the simple takeaways:

  • Claim and complete business profiles.
  • Add lots of photos to give consumers a sense of the place or examples of past work (more than 10).
  • Respond to reviews to show that business owners care and are engaged with the community.

The post Business profile and review best practices from TripAdvisor and Yelp appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Posted by at No comments:

Gilbert Baker Google doodle celebrates LGBT-rights activists & creator of the iconic rainbow flag

Today’s Google doodle celebrates Gilbert Baker on what would have been the LGBT-rights activist’s 66th birthday.

In 1978, Baker assembled a group of 30 people at San Francisco’s Gay Community Center to hand-dye and sew together more than 1,000 yards of cotton to create a rainbow flag that would be used for protests and marches. For nearly 40 years now, Baker’s creation has evolved into a symbol of pride and freedom for the global LGBTQA+ community.

Google says Baker wanted to create something beautiful.

“The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. Plus, it’s a natural flag — it’s from the sky,” said Baker about his choice to go with a rainbow as a symbol of the LGBT community.

Today’s doodle was designed by LGBT doodler Nate Swinehart. Google reports Swinehart worked with team members who felt a personal connection to the project and wanted to “… capture that same community spirit Baker treasured.”

From the Google Doodle Blog:

Together, the team decided the tribute would consist of a stop-motion animation of actual fabric strips coming together to create the flag. They made a trip to local San Franciscan fabric shops and filmed the doodle in a tiny kitchen only a few blocks from the same spot where Baker and his friends constructed that first flag in 1978.

The doodle leads to a search for “Gilbert Baker” and includes the usual sharing icon to post the image on social feeds or send via email.

Here’s today’s animated Gilbert Baker doodle that’s featured on Google’s US home page and a handful of its international sites:

Google also shared the following two early concepts for the animated image:

In addition to today’s doodle, Google is also celebrating Gay Pride Month by including rainbow flag imagery on LGBT-related search results.

As part of their writeup on Gilbert Baker and the doodle they created in his honor, Google spoke with Baker’s sister, Ardonna Cook.

She said her family is proud of her brother’s legacy of activism and artistry: “Gilbert led a bold and inspiring life by bringing The Rainbow Flag to life and it is that legacy which should guide us in respecting and celebrating diversity.”

The post Gilbert Baker Google doodle celebrates LGBT-rights activists & creator of the iconic rainbow flag appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Posted by at No comments:

Google officially stops using DMOZ for source of search results snippets

Google has announced it will no longer use the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) title and descriptions as one of their sources of the search results snippets.

On March 17, DMOZ officially shut down, and since the web directory is no longer being actively maintained, Google decided to stop using the DMOZ titles and descriptions in the Google search results.

Since 2006 or so, Google would sometimes use the DMOZ description as a snippet in the Google results when it felt that description was more useful than what was available from the meta description or the site’s content.

Google wrote “[W]ith DMOZ now closed, we’ve stopped using its listings for snippeting, so it’s a lot more important that webmasters provide good meta descriptions, if adding more content to the page is not an option.”

That means that you no longer need to have the NOODP directive on your pages. That directive told Google to opt out of using the DMOZ description; with Google saying they no longer will use it, that directive is not needed anymore.

Google strongly recommends you read this document to help Google pick the best title and description for your search result snippet going forward.

The post Google officially stops using DMOZ for source of search results snippets appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Posted by at No comments:

EU ready to fine Google billions in shopping search antitrust case [Report]

After several months of silence, it appears that antitrust regulators in Europe are ready to fine Google for “abuse of market position” in shopping search — one of three active cases against the company. Reuters reported the news based on discussions with “two people familiar with the matter.”

The article says the fine will likely be imposed by August and could amount to up to 10 percent of the company’s global revenues, which last year were roughly $90 billion. In other words, Google parent Alphabet faces exposure of $9 billion in this single matter.

The fine has been anticipated for some time given Google’s inability to settle the case with EU regulators. The company has made several unsuccessful attempts — (e.g., “rival links“) — to settle with former European Commission competition czar Joaquín Almunia. Almunia’s successor, Margrethe Vestager, has taken a tougher line against Google.

The EU’s formal “Statement of Objections” (antitrust charges) in the case focused on comparison shopping, but other areas of search would potentially be vulnerable to similar claims (e.g., local/maps). The following were some of the verbatim claims that appeared in the Statement of Objections:

  • Google systematically positions and prominently displays its comparison shopping service in its general search results pages, irrespective of its merits.
  • Google does not apply to its own comparison shopping service the system of penalties which it applies to other comparison shopping services on the basis of defined parameters, and which can lead to the lowering of the rank in which they appear in Google’s general search results pages.
  • As a result of Google’s systematic favouring of its subsequent comparison shopping services “Google Product Search” and “Google Shopping”, both experienced higher rates of growth, to the detriment of rival comparison shopping services.

Google has vigorously pushed back on the EU’s position, asserting that the evolution of its search results pages has been about improving quality and the user experience, which are beneficial to consumers:

Google has always worked to improve its services, creating new ways to provide better answers and show more useful ads. We’ve taken seriously the concerns in the European Commission’s Statement of Objections (SO) that our innovations are anti-competitive. The response we filed today shows why we believe those allegations are incorrect, and why we believe that Google increases choice for European consumers and offers valuable opportunities for businesses of all sizes.

Reuters is also reporting that the European Commission “will tell Google to stop its alleged anti-competitive practices.” That would presumably involve a change in how shopping search results are presented. It’s not clear specifically what that would mean. Google can appeal to the European Court of Justice should the penalties be imposed.

The two other active antitrust cases focus on exclusivity provisions in Google AdWords agreements and Android-OEM contracts and carry similar potential exposure for Google.

The post EU ready to fine Google billions in shopping search antitrust case [Report] appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)