Skip to Content
Home » Blog

Blog

Syndicate content
Google: Mobile User Experience Now Impacts AdWords Scores

The rising prominence of mobile—and the growing awareness of the importance of good user experience—came to the fore yesterday when Google announced that AdWords ads will be dinged with lowered quality scores if they lead visitors to poor mobile experiences. That’s right—a Google ad that points to a website that doesn’t render well on mobile devices will cost more, rank lower, and possibly not show at all.

Quality Score (QS) is the score Google gives to ads in its popular AdWords program. It’s based on a variety of factors, and impacts how much an advertiser has to bid for an ad to appear, show up in a prominent placement, and be served on relevant searches. Now, one of those factors will be the mobile user experience. In a blog post announcing the change, Google

 explained the impact of pointing visitors to a site that doesn’t work on mobile devices. “A poor mobile web experience can negatively shape a consumer’s opinion of a brand or company and make it hard for them to engage or make a purchase,” noted Google’s David Nachum, the Product Manager for Mobile Ads. He added that “61% of users are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble accessing from their phone.” This change in Google’s method for calculating QS signals a new maturity for mobile. It also further marks the mainstreaming of user experience from a specialized technical concern to one that is broadly relevant to all marketers. As Google has now signaled again, great user experience is rapidly becoming essential to an effective marketing campaign, across all platforms.

 

Anonymous
Sep 22, 2011
Google, Mobile, Mobile UX
Why Google’s Panda/Farmer Update Makes UX Important for SEO

Several months into the radical changes brought about by Google’s Panda/Farmer update, it’s becoming apparent that user experience has grown in importance. The series of updates to how Google ranks sites for search results started in February, with successive changes rolled out through late July. The stated goal was to penalize lower-quality sites, and make the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) more responsive to social media.

What has resulted is a wholesale change in what makes a website come up on the first page of results when someone types in a search term.   Sites are now judged on a new set of criteria to determine if they’re worthy to rank in those coveted top spots. Gone are the days when simply writing a lot of content with the keywords you want to rank on, soliciting links to your page, and putting in the right title tags were close to enough. Google felt these criteria made the system too easy to “game.” To prevent this, they've changed their ranking algorithm, and added more human evaluation of web pages, rather than automated.
 
What now matters, note industry insiders, are a host of UX-related factors. OpenView Venture Partners’ Brendan Cournoyer specifically notes that user experience is a factor that ranks high for Google’s human evaluators of websites. Other key factors now, according to Wordtracker’s Mark Nunney, are
  • How many visitors return to your website after their first visit
  • How many pages they view per visit, and
  • How long they stay on your site
Although interesting content is the main reason people stay a long time on your site, view a lot of pages, and keep coming back, usability also a vital factor. If your site is easy to navigate, people stay. And great content needs to be made accessible and easy to find if visitors are going to enjoy it. Features that were once nice to have, such as social share buttons, are now among the most important, as Likes and Tweets impact search rankings. Navigation, share buttons, and layout join content and structure to form a much more complex way sites become highly ranked. Search has become about big-picture, strategic thinking, as it always was when done well.
 
Perhaps SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin put it best when he said in a recent podcast: “the job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist.” Looking holistically at your site, at the user experience in the fullest sense of the word, meaning how actual users are experiencing your site, is now the only way to rank high. 

 

Anonymous
Aug 09, 2011
Google, Google Panda Update, SEO, User Experience
Five Things You Can Do to Leverage Google+ For Business, Even Without Company Profiles
Google+ is taking the social media world by storm. Already, social media expert Chris Brogan has come out as a strong advocate, and people are flocking to invite their friends, colleagues, and family. Perhaps it’s the new platform’s Circles feature, which allows users to set up groups of connections with a particular interest or relationship with the user, and target each update just to a specific Circle. You don’t need to be in marketing to see the benefits of this type of narrow targeting—how many people have posted pet photos to the whole world on Facebook or shared work updates of no interest to our kin? Companies are waiting for their chance to stake a claim; so far, only people are being allowed to set up most profiles, with the service not yet open to every company that wants to set up a page, a la Facebook. There are still many ways you can leverage Google+ for your business: 

 

  1. If your site is in Drupal, add a Google+ module to immediately provide the same level of integration with the new service that you already have with Twitter and Facebook. Stay on top of new modules that will appear as soon as Google makes a public API available. Modules will be released with lightning speed, so be prepared to implement them once they hit to stay ahead of the G+ curve. As Acquia’s Product Marketing Manager Amanda Wilson points out in a recent blog post, one of the huge advantages of an open-source platform such as Drupal is the speed with which the supporting community provides new modules in response to developments in the online world. Stay informed and subscribe to groups so you can keep integrating Google+ with your site in increasingly connected ways. 
  2. The SEO bet is that getting shares and +1’s in Google+ will play an important role in search engine rankings. Start sharing useful content from your company’s content library in your personal Google+ account, if you feel it’s appropriate. Remember, the principles of content sharing and content curation are the same on Google+ as on other channels such as Twitter: share content you genuinely believe is helpful and useful for readers, and be generous: share content from around the web. It’ll make your profile a go-to account for industry information.
  3. Build Circles that touch on all the fields pertaining to your business. Google+ provides generic Circles, such as Friends and Acquaintances, but you can also create a Circle for anything you want. If you’re in Cloud computing, build a Cloud circle and add people with similar interests. You’ll have a built-in group of colleagues and collaborators.
  4. In all the brouhaha about Circles, remember Sparks! Characterized as a socially styled Google Alert, Sparks provide easy to access multichannel updates on your favorite topics. A rich source of competitive intelligence, industry trends, and ideas for blog posts, Sparks are one of the handiest marketing research tools social media offers.
  5. Look at who’s got you in their Circles. Potential partners, employees, and clients might be finding you on the network.
The industry is hearing that Google+ business pages are coming soon. Companies that will make the most of this social media channel, as with Facebook and Twitter, will be the ones that have authentically engaged on it as individuals, and marketing teams that understand the unspoken rules and best features of the platform. Be ready to leverage Google+ for your organization by laying a solid groundwork. 

 

Anonymous
Aug 01, 2011
Google, GooglePlus, Social Media, Social Networking
Where does TV meet the Web?

Google answered that question today at Day 2 of Google I/O, and the answer is at Google TV.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves...  They spent the first half of the keynote building up suspense talking about the Android momentum:

  • 21 OEMs
  • 48 Countries
  • 65 Devices
  • 100,000 Daily activation run rate
  • 1 billion miles traveled in GPS navgation
  • 50,000 Applications
  • 180,00 Developers

They announced the next release of Android 2.2 called Froyo, which has 5 Focus Areas:

  1. Speed: Just-in-time (JIT) compilation
  2. Enterprise: Exchange friendly
  3. Services: Application Data Backup API, Cloud-to-Device Messaging API, Tethering & Portable Hotspot
  4. Browser - 2x-3x javascript performance (The V8 engine from Chrome but ported for Android), fastest mobile browser, voice recognition for: searching, translations, support for flash
  5. Market - Update All feature, Automatic updating, and more

Then, they surprised all us by giving all five thousand attendees Sprint HTC EVO 4G Phones!

The second half of the keynote focused on the announcement of Google TV (Tagline: TV meets Web.  Web Meets TV).  The Google TV interface is extraordinary.  Do you ever search the web for when/what channel a show is on because the guide on your TV is too overwhelming?  Google TV merges this into one easy step on your TV using a bluetooth keyboard.   Google TV will integrate with DVR, Netflix, Amazon, and others.  The TV based browser is slightly transparent so that you can see the TV shows behind the browser as well.  Google TV has increased the number of channels on your TV from hundreds to millions by integrating all of the video on the web as a TV option for the common TV viewer.

The hardware includes a Google TV box that connects via HDMI to your current set top box.  It comes with a keyboard and mouse to control the Google TV device.  If paired, the Android phone with google voice search can also integrate so that you would not have to use the keyboard or mouse.  They're going to publish the protocol so that developers can create their own applications and hardware for Google TV as well.

Again, the entire keynote will be posted on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/googledevelopers if you'd like to watch.

-Submitted by Chris Apolzon and Laurie Richards

Anonymous
May 20, 2010
Android, Development, Google, HTML, Technology, TV, Web 2.0
I/O: Input/Output or Innovation in the Open?

The answer is...  Both!  Google I/O got its name from both a developers roots (Input/Output) as well as developers future, (Innovation in the Open).  They kicked off their third annual developers conference today and San Francisco is currently crawling with more than five thousand developers (including two from OHO Interactive) anxious to hear whatever big news it is that is almost always released at their conferences (stay tuned to our blog, it sounds like it'll be announced during tomorrow's keynote at 9AM PDT).

The conference can already be seen to have an incredibly strong focus on HTML 5, as well as the open web and the mobile web.  Some of the HTML 5 examples demonstrated, particularly the offline mugtug demo, were amazing.  Can you imagine running an entire web application locally from the cache?  With HTML 5 it'll be possible. 

In addition to HTML 5, Open video is also here!  Today Google, and their partners, announced the webm project, an open web media project.  The VP8 codec is also now open source and royalty free.  Youtube is supporting both initiatives, and is working to convert all of their videos.  Nightly builds of Mozilla and Opera are available now to start developing against webm/VP8 to try out the next big thing in video on the web.

Time Magazine was also on hand to announce the Sports Illustrated HTML 5 web application.  With this announcement, we can see that HTML 5 will usher in unique and intuitive experiences bridging the tech-savvy web with the fast-moving journalism space.

Perhaps the most exciting news of the morning was that Google wave is now open to ALL!  Sign up for your account today at wave.google.com.  They've also added lots of new features and usability improvements. My favorite new feature is email notifications of waves so that you don't have to have yet another application, tab, etc open on your phone or browser.  Embedding waves inside other applications (i.e. in salesforce "chatter") will also be more common in the coming months.

The entire keynote was streamed live on You Tube, and will soon be available on demand if you’d like to watch it.

-Submitted by Chris Apolzon and Laurie Richards

Anonymous
May 19, 2010
Development, Google, HTML, Web 2.0
Drupal Google Maps Integration

The Google Map API provides a robust interface for developing custom maps using your custom data. These maps are much more than way-finding. They are powerful visualizations of data that can be manipulated by users. In addition, a map offers a unique method of displaying search results.

OHO Interactive has developed Google Maps integrations that combine map data, with proprietary data, with public data records (such as public transportation), to provide unique, valuable user experiences.

Learn More About Our Experience Free Webinar: December 16, 2009

Jason Smith
Oct 21, 2009
Drupal, Google, Maps
Syndicate content