Nine months on from Google’s ‘mobilegeddon’, marketers are adjusting to a world where more searches are conducted on smartphones than PCs. As part of our review of the year, we look back at the key trends that shaped mobile marketing in 2015, including Facebook opening up posts to search, Google and Twitter’s reunion and the rise of voice assistants.
April 2015 saw Google update its search algorithm to reward mobile optimised sites with higher rankings on mobile search results. The rules of SEO have changed and marketers need to follow a separate strategy to help their sites rank higher in phone searches, paying particular attention to user experience and technical factors.
Key trends to check your 2016 plans against:
Biggest 10 stories of the year:
Accelerated Mobile Pages: Google’s bid to beat the ad blockers
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages is forecast to be the next big thing in digital marketing for 2016. We look at what marketers need to know about how the new technology that Google hopes will tackles the rise in ad blocking on mobiles.
Facebook adds ‘trillions of users’ posts to search results
Facebook has indexed almost two trillion posts put on the site by its members to make it easier to find them- raising new privacy concerns in the process.
Baidu’s global market share drops nearly 8%
Chinese search giant Baidu saw its global market share fall to 7.52% in June 2015, according to new research.
Mobile SEO: 3 tips to rank high on Google
Marketers and website owners need to follow a separate strategy to help their websites rank higher in phone searches, paying particular attention to user experience and technical factors, according to new research.
Voice assistants: Rise of hands-free controls (infographic)
With assistants like Siri, Cortana, Google Now and Facebook M set to become major interfaces, what are the key trends around voice controls? New data looks at the users and motivations behind this growing technology that could change the face marketing as we know it.
Google and Twitter reunited: New deal extends tweets to desktop search results
Six years on from their first search partnership, Twitter posts will return to Google’s desktop search results following a renewed deal between the two internet giants.
Google surprise name change as simple as ABC
Alphabet Inc. is the new parent company in Google restructuring.
Search ranking factors in 2015: Quality rules as keywords and link building drops
Google is now more focused than ever on giving higher search rankings to good quality web content that is easy to understand and relevant to the query, while the days are numbered for old-style SEO such as link building or keyword density, according to new research.
Google’s biggest search revamp of 2015: Panda 4.2 goes live
Google has updated its Panda algorithym- the technology behind how it ranks search results, offering sites that fell after the last update a chance to recover.
Google ‘Mobilegeddon’ 2 months on: How did brands fare?
When Google released its Mobile-friendly update on April 21st 2015, many experts believed it would have a dramatic impact. Websites that we’re not deemed ‘mobile-friendly’ were penalised in the search results rankings on mobiles. But nearly two months on, how have the changes affected sites that are not optimised for smartphones and tablets? New research has some surprising results…
