Social Media Resistance is Futile
How many times a day do you check your personal Facebook account? Or Twitter? Perhaps LinkedIn? Social Media in all of its online forms has a way of permeating into the everyday actions of our day-to-day lives.
For business owners, surely it makes sense to meet your customers where they are spending a lot of their time?! The best way to engage with people potentially interested in your business is through Social Media, and yes, resistance is futile!
Micro Moments from Google – Big Changes for Industries
Google has been making moves to expand into new territory, and we are about to see big changes on the horizon that will change the market as we know it.
There was been some big news in search announced during the AdWords livestream in May. Google is expanding its California experiment of Google Compare which was first announced in March. This will allow people to compare quotes from local car insurance providers. Google has expanded the service to include reviews and it has now included extra states in the experiment. The services have also expanded to include credit cards and mortgage rates.
An Insider’s Perspective on the Google Update
People have been surfing the Internet on mobile devices for at least five years now and this has increased the number of search queries on mobile devices.
It should not come as a shock that Google would recognise the growing importance of these searches and work on improving their system to accommodate this.
Google released their mobile-friendly update on Tuesday April 21, 2015 (USA) targeting search rankings on mobile devices and assessing queries on a page by page basis.
The ‘internet of things’
Wearables and the integration of internet in our daily lives are quickly becoming so common that it no longer shocks us. Our increasing reliance on the ‘internet of things’ is now expected from consumers. They also expect to be able to find, afford and, use technologies of this calibre. Even though Google Glass may (or may not) have taken its last breath, wearables are here to stay. Watches are the most immediate example, but as technology starts to become more and more innovative, we will see it popping up in places we never thought possible. “From smart-lighting to smart-cars, consumers are obsessed by controlling everything from their armchairs through being connected to devices and smart phones” (Flannery 2015).
Googlebot’s Gem: Mobile-friendly URL Checker
The trend towards possessing a website which is cross-device-friendly (in other words it’s been optimised for optimum viewing across mobile phones, tablets and computers) has gained enormous momentum and for good reason. Numerous statistics and research show that users browsing the internet, and certainly including in Australia, are increasingly using mobile devices, and not just when they are ‘on-the-go’. How many times have you been sitting on the couch at home and, used your mobile phone to browse the internet rather than turn on your laptop?! We’ve all been seduced by the ease of using our mobile devices to search the internet, and Australian SMEs who have jumped on the band wagon are being swept off their feet.
So in the wake of the mobile friendly online revolution, Google have created an URL checker. The site, which is very unassuming in appearance despite the magical tool that it is, simply shows a blank URL tab in which any URL can be added. Google then begins its magic and starts to analyse if the URL which has been entered is mobile-friendly or not.