Every month at SIMS, Max provides a brief run-down of just some of the tech-related news that may affect small businesses, and agencies that work with small businesses and we post the links here. If any of these catch your interest, but you're not sure how they would affect you, feel free to get in touch and ask!
Here are all the new stuff happening in the industry in case you missed last night's SIMS.
Max's Round-up
See our "Spotting blackhats" blog following SIMS last night.
You can now also access Daniel Somer's SEO Blackhats presentation.
We spoke at the last SIMS about email subscribe buttons appearing directly in search results, but we also keep talking about Google's prioritising of mobile, the inevitable conclusion is that you can now subscribe to text messages from advertisers in Google ads on the search engine results page (SERP).
https://twitter.com/dan_shure/status/669194867260657664
I normally don't link to articles that include the words “The Ultimate Guide” in my round-up, but this round-up includes a lot of what we've talked about this year at SIMS, including Instagram and Pinterest, blogs, vlogs, email marketing. It's just wrapped up in a long list to give you some ideas.
50+ Places To Repurpose Your Content:
http://coschedule.com/blog/repurpose-your-content
This is really technical, but it's for you to work through with your developer and make sure they're getting these things right, especially if you're not using an off-the-shelf solution that will take care of a lot of this for you.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/technical-seo-2015-wiring-websites-organic-search
Hot on the heels (well, lukewarm on the heels) of Periscope, Facebook are rolling out their “Live Streaming” feature to all users, after being available for certain accounts (famous people) only until now.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/3/9838280/facebook-live-streaming
A host of companies and groups are on a quest to make encrypted traffic the default for the web. Google have even explicitly stated they are using encryption as an indicator and rewarding it. One thing holding back smaller companies has been the cost of paying for SSL certificates. “Let's Encrypt” is a free certificate authority (CA), supported by some very large companies, Facebook, Mozilla, Cisco, Shopify, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), and it's now available in a public beta.
Twitter have launched "moments" in the UK. This is either an amazing new feature to help them surface content, or Twitter trying desperately to work out what Twitter actually is.
“Out of hundreds of millions of Tweets a day, Moments surface the best of what’s happening on Twitter. Through Moments, millions of people can enjoy the power of Twitter – at the center of a protest, the front row at the Oscars, on the field at the World Cup, or from outer space. What you see on Twitter is what’s happening in the world.”
https://about.twitter.com/company/moments-guidelines
Here's one I missed from earlier this year, but Twitter have a tool for helping agencies understand how to leverage Twitter for their clients. They have a video explaining it too.
https://twitterflightschool.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFh8H17HWQA
The move of business listings to Google My Business means that links from your website to “Review My Business” may be broken. These lovely people have built a tool to help you recreate them, depending on where you want to send your customers.
http://searchengineland.com/get-google-review-links-g-update-237190
This is going to be really cool, especially as it's open to everyone via structured markup (schema.org, microdata etc). You will be able to accept bookings and orders directly from the search page. Is this giving too much control over your customer experience? Probably. Will you want to do it to beat your competitors? Probably.
We, at SIMS, hope you all have happy holidays in the run up to Christmas and we're excited to see you all in 2016!