New Google Mobile app – an app with soul

After a relatively long wait, Google announced today that they have launched an update to their Google Plus iPhone app. As I type this post, my phone seems to be taking its own time in downloading the update which gives me the impression that this particular update is a fairly significant one. In fact, Google seem to almost want the Google plus app to be part of your normal day to day experience by stressing that “we’re not interested in a mobile or social experience that’s just smaller. We’re embracing the sensor-rich smartphone (with its touchable screen and high-density display), and transforming Google+ into something more intimate, and more expressive”.

The most significant line in their announcement to me, was their justification for the iPhone app upgrade, “today’s new iPhone app is an important step in this direction—toward a simpler, more beautiful Google”. I’m not sure about you, but I feel this is probably the biggest hint Google has publicly dropped of their efforts in moving toward a more  ’social’ and a more ‘mobile-centric’ strategy for their future.

So what areas have they improved on?
The stream – the upgrade has just completed on my mobile phone and I must say, it certainly is “a feast for the eyes”.  I certainly will give them a relatively high score for ‘first impressions’. Content that’s displayed on your stream not only include people’s posts in text but also incorporate elegance with regards to design. Google plus certainly looks a lot more stylish than it did before, and they do mean it when they say, “whether you post photos or articles or text, we’re making ‘em look gooood. We’re adding crisper fonts, larger profile pics and a friendlier homescreen. We’re making the stream easier to scan, and easier on the eyes with overlays, gradients and other visual elements”.

Hangouts on your iPhone – in addition to the above improvements, a great step forward is the ability to utilise hangouts directly via your iPhone. For someone whose closest friends are spread across five different time zones – be it Orlando, Oxford, Colombo, Singapore or Melbourne – the flexibility to perform hangouts virtually anywhere in the world is a significant improvement in terms of convenience and connectivity.

If there is any criticism of the app, at least for now, is the fact that the +1's and the number of comments tend to go unnoticed on some posts due to the colour of the buttons.

Also, I wish Google plus would let me upload more than one image at a time. It is quite annoying that images need to be uploaded one by one.

Overall though, I think this is quite a momentous and significant step toward a more social Google. A Google, who is trying to shun away from the perception of an ‘algorithm driven’ company to a more ‘humanistic company’ and is taking bold steps in connecting with their users at the most basic of “sensory” levels.

The iPhone update is rolling out now to the App Store (version 2.0.0.5888), and according to Google, the Android update is coming out in a few weeks which includes some “extra surprises”. Google claim that the new mobile app is “an app with sense and soul”, but what are your thoughts on the new mobile app? Have you tried it out yet and what are it’s features you like or dislike most? Feel free to share your thoughts with us below.

Shaad Hamid is an experienced SEO, PPC and social media consultant, blogger, and citizen journalist who is passionate about online marketing. Get in touch with Shaad on the social networks below:

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Google & Bing Panel Discussion – BrightonSEO 2012

The panelists consisted of representatives from Google (Pierre Far), Bing (Dave Coplin), Expedia (Martin McDonald) and well known Freelancer Rishi Lakhani -

Question 1 – Is SEO doomed, damned and/or in it’s infancy?

Google (Pierre) – SEO has never been dying. It’s evolving, and we’ve seen it change over time.

Martin McDonald – it’s in its infancy – but SEO will evolve, SEO will evolve into any organic medium. (e.g. mobile apps)

Rishi – The industry unfortunately has no standard practice, ethics board or a governing body – until this is implemented it will be difficult for the industry to be a formally recognised industry.

Bing (Dave Coplin) – SEOs were like magicians, alchemists.  No one understand what SEOs do. However, SEO will evolve well beyond what we can imagine -
There is no career path laid out, but SEOs have the ability to shape whatever career they want.
SEOs are passionate; this alone is commendable – you’d never see 1000 attendees for an email marketing conference!

Q2 – Question aimed for Pierre – “Been getting inquiries from people who have got themselves de-indexed. However, it’s been very difficult to define what a bad link is? Could you broadly classify what a ‘bad link’ is? secondly, what is the re-inclusion, process?”

Answer, when you say de-indexed, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s out of the index, only that it doesn’t rank in the SERPs. There’s 2 ways of getting penalised: manual penalty (the more serious penalty) and algorithmic penalty (e.g. can get away by changing on-page layout etc.)

So how do you classify if a link is bad? Ask yourself the following questions:

1) does the webmaster of the linking website genuinely want to link to you?
2) does linking to you add value to the user?

In terms of reinclusion – show that you have made an effort – Let Google know that you have identified bad links, you have emailed all the webmasters, these guys say they can’t remove them, these guys never got back to me, etc. and we will make an effort to help you.

Also make sure to tell us what you did, and to be honest.

Rishi – Check GWT, and see if there’s any dodgy links pointing to you

Martin – “How about competitive industries where people buy massive amounts of links?”
Pierre – buying links is a definite NO! Definitely report it!

We use over 200 signals, and there are some websites that rank without any links.

Q3 – What about Content? What should shape a good content strategy?
Bing (Dave Coplin) – Definitely social; it’s the new kid on the block, if you are bloody good, then your content will get shared.

So What is social? (Dave) For Bing it’s Twitter and Facebook

Google (Pierre)- who are my users? what do they want? and do they get it? Every page on your site must supply a knowledge demand. Use rich snippets, when dealing with duplicate content think about what you choose to serve as canonical. Also content doesn’t only mean text, use video, images, apps, reviews etc.

Rishi – Think about whether you are making it easy for people to share?
Does your content have tips?
Update old content. Ask yourself if these need updating, are they still relevant?
Add genuine resources in your posts.

Q4 – Do you test before rolling out Google Analytics redesigns?
Pierre: yes, we do test. We serve webmasters, serve in-house webmasters, agencies, so eventually something will have to give, but we try to cover as much as we can. Also provide us with specific feedback – tell us why the design is bad? Don’t say “your redesign is crap!” tell us what is the deficiency and how we should improve it.

Q5 – What is good social signals?

Bing (Dave)- good social signal is the quantity of the shares, the speed of which it is getting shared.
Google (Pierre)- if you are raising awareness about something, and it is genuinely shareable content, then these will get the coverage naturally.

Q6 – Aimed at Pierre – “you mentioned that you should know who your customers are, and what they’re looking for? Can you tell us about not giving us the search query data”?

Pierre: We do provide this data in in GWT – for most webmasters this data is more than sufficient.

Martin – The data sample size is so small that it’s rubbish, I rank for Expedia!
Rishi – I rank for insurance according to GWT. The data isn’t accurate.

Pierre – GWTs process data differently, our main focus is about protecting users and we don’t want user’s personal data being compromised by providing search query data especially with the roll out of Google plus your world.

Bing – easy to be angry about this – I’m not defending Google, or “dissing” them, but you must genuinely appreciate that there’s a larger issue here. People are getting more concerned about privacy issues.
But it certainly does show that there is an underlying need for more discussion and engagement among all parties; users, webmasters, legislators and search engines.

-Ends-

Shaad Hamid is an experienced SEO, PPC and social media consultant, blogger, and citizen journalist who is passionate about online marketing. Get in touch with Shaad on the social networks below:

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Near Miss or Near Perfect? New Match Behaviour Coming to Google

Google announced new matching behaviour just over a week ago, nicknamed ‘near exact and phrase’: exact keywords will match misspellings and ‘close variants’, and phrase keywords will cover searches containing misspellings or close variants of the phrase. It’s not live yet (and won’t be until mid-May) but the setting for the new behaviour is already available in all campaigns and is switched on by default.

So, should you opt in or out? Here are my thoughts:

Even if you turn the setting off, you can still be affected.

As campaigns are opted in by default, it seems likely that the majority of advertisers will be using this new match behaviour. So there may well be a sudden increase in competition on misspellings and close variants – clearly this will affect you if you already bid on them.

Could it homogenise performance? There’ll suddenly be a whole group of search terms under one bid, where previously there was only one term. If many competitors have [widget] on near exact match, they’ll be using the same bid for ‘widget’ and ‘widgets’ – if ‘widgets’ is more competitive and needs a higher bid, the competitors might increase the bid on [widget] and so make ‘widget’ more expensive too. Different variants will still perform differently – there isn’t a change in the searchers, so you wouldn’t expect a change in conversion rate – but CPCs of variants may converge.

Proper keyword research should uncover many variants. But it’s likely that some will be rare enough to have the dreaded ‘low search volume’ status: that means Google won’t let you directly advertise for them, but you could bid on them indirectly with near exact match. Also, it’s nigh impossible to find all possible variants – searchers are very inventive when it comes to misspellings.

Doing the keyword research to find variants takes time, and (as the cliché says) time is money. Ad impressions on irrelevant search terms are also money. The question is: which is less money? Google may let in some dud search terms, but it may cover relevant variants you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

You could use near exact as part of your keyword research: have an exploratory campaign with the new setting on and fill it with exact match keywords to find the behaviour of their variants. Then take the best performing ones into your regular campaigns (where exact is exact).

Will exact or phrase negative keywords’ behaviour change? Google’s announcement does not mention negative keywords, suggesting only positive ones are affected. There could be benefits to having a near exact match, such as when using ‘embedded match’, but keeping exact negative actually exact would seem to be better for most advertisers. Even if the new setting is on, you can still exclude individual variants when they don’t work.

What happens if you use Conversion Optimiser? Suddenly your exact match keywords will pick up brand new searches you don’t have any history for.

What about keyword metrics? The Quality Score and Estimated First Page Bid columns shown in your account are based on searches exactly matching the keyword (whatever the keyword’s match type is). In high competition areas merely changing a singular to a plural can impact performance and price, so if you have [widget] on near exact match but most of the searches are for ‘widgets’ the QS and EFPB may not reflect the keyword’s actual performance. QS and EFPB are both averages and thus should be treated with care: this is another thing to bear in mind when looking at them.

Ultimately whether you opt in or out depends on your account. It seems unlikely that near exact will help a campaign where variants are already covered and match-types are segregated; having multiple exact match keywords cover the same search terms will get in the way of precision management in the same way that having broad, phrase and exact match keywords in the same ad group will.

On the other hand, if you have campaigns which don’t need or can’t have that level of management the new setting may well be helpful. Consider testing the new setting – no one knows exactly how it will work out, so no one can say if it will help or hinder your account.

What do you think? Are you trying the new setting, opting out everywhere, or testing with some campaigns? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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