Max's round-up this May of all things new in the industry.
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!
It's announcement season for all things new in the digital industry. Luckily for our SIMS audience, we have Max to keep us all up-to-date with the latest news:
http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/deeper-integration-of-search-console-in.html
Search Console and Google Analytics:
Here's a quote from their blog post announcing the feature:
- Find landing pages that are attracting many users through Google organic search (e.g., high impressions and high click through rate) but where users are not engaging with the website. In this case, you should consider improving your landing pages.
- Find landing pages that have high site engagement but are not successfully attracting users from Google organic search (e.g., have low click through rate). In this case, you might benefit from improving titles and descriptions shown in search.
- Learn which queries are ranking well for each organic landing page.
- Segment organic performance by device category (desktop, tablet, mobile) in the new Devices report.
http://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-now-lets-group-sites-together-property-sets-250168
For those of you that use Search Console a lot, this has been a long requested feature. Google treats each subdomain as a different website, which means your URL with the 'www' prefix and without are two different sites. They can now be combined, and reported on, as a “set”.
http://searchengineland.com/google-bringing-featured-snippets-rich-results-filters-search-analytics-report-250080
Google are adding “rich snippets” in their Search Console, so you can know how many people are seeing your site in those results. If you're technical and you're interested in how this impacts local search, you can find out more at http://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-updated-search-analytics-report-adds-knowledge-graph-local-rich-snippets-249179
http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-new-mobile-friendly-testing-tool-249734
The mobile-friendly test from Google has been updated, if you didn't know this existed, it's important that you use it and make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
https://blog.bufferapp.com/f8-facebook-features?utm_source=moztop10&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=moztop10
Some things we didn't get time to cover in last month's roundup from Facebook's F8 conference.
http://periscope.tv/periscopetv/1ynJOmpngRXKR
Periscope now let you save the videos you create using their real-time video service. This is one of the largest competitors to Facebook Live video, instead owned by Twitter and this makes the service far more useful.
http://www.thesempost.com/new-title-description-lengths-for-google-seo/
Big news (well, in the SEO world). Google have increased the width of some search results, meaning you get more characters to tell everyone about your page. Make the most of it in your page titles and META descriptions.
http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/announcing-data-studio-our-free-new.html
Google Announce Data Studio which lets you report on a huge set of data, including your Analytics and Adwords data. It's not fully available in the UK yet, although there's enough to play with if you're interested.
http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/ga360suite-product-announcement.html
Google are “unifying” their analytics and AdWords products. If you're in any way interested, then this is the blog post for you.
http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/app-first-analytics-with-firebase.html
If you're an app developer, there's an improved version of Firebase, the app from Google for you to use for your app-specific analytics.
http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/efficient-campaign-tagging.html
We sometimes mention “tagging” your links, although it can be a little technical. It's a way to help you know where your traffic is coming from, with more details than just “social”. And, better yet, you get to set the labels that get applied. There's an official Chrome extension that will help you manage your tags in Google Sheets, which is something we do.
Thank you and we hope to see you all in the next SIMS.