Monday, 6th July

Did you know that 70% of people say they’d rather learn about a product through content marketing than advertising?

Not bad when you consider how cost-effective it is to execute. However, there is no shortage of evidence showing that advertising still pulls in the big money – but you have to be prepared to spend on it.

So which one gives you a better ROI? This article in the Harvard Business Review has all the answers.

 

Tuesday, 7th July

Having trouble with referral data after switching to HTTPS? Moz’s Cyrus Shepard posted an article titled The Meta Referrer Tag: An Advancement for SEO and the Internet in which he sheds some light on the matter.

The post begins by discussing the vices and virtues of HTTPS and then goes on to explain how to implement the Meta Referrer tag and what you should expect to see when you do.

 

Wednesday, 8th July

Google had the SEO community buzzing earlier this week when it published an article on its Portuguese Webmaster blog which included the line: “do not buy, sell, exchange or ask for links.”

This had search marketers everywhere in a bit of a spin for a day, but on the 7th Google responded to the flurry of questions by saying that the post has now been altered to say that you cannot: Buy, sell or ask for links that may violate our linking webmaster guidelines.

Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz has all the details.

 

Thursday, 9th July

Facebook is changing up the way it calculates CPC and has announced that it’s dumping ‘likes’ from its computations. According to the Social Media giant, this is because it is trying to move away from a popularity contest approach and towards a more performance-objectives based model.

Ginny Marvin discusses what this means for advertisers and how campaign performance will be affected.

 

Friday, 10th July

On Friday the 10th of July, Search Engine Land published an article by Marcus Miller titled Top 5 Issues Wrecking Local SEO For Multi-Location Businesses.

The article discusses a question which has been raised a lot recently: how to rank better in local search when your business is a franchise or has multiple business locations.

Miller begins by exploring the importance of ranking in local search, before going on to explain the 5 steps that multi-location businesses need to be taking in order to climb up their local search rankings in all of their branch locations. He then wraps up with a great section on how best to implement these strategies in a way that will keep working in the long-term.