Online marketing business intelligence

I looked at the stats of my blog and saw that the number of UVs (Unique Visitors) was falling as hard the rain in Paris today. So I decided to quickly post an article on all the most important things I saw in the SEO, SMO and mobile search world in the past month or so.

• Google: Apart from showing the disappointing financial results for Q1, Google changed its algorithm as usual but for once, it made the changes public. First, site links are now widespread on the search engine result pages. The main impact will be that each website has more space and more links in the Search Engine Result Page  (SERP). This would surely lead to a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for websites whose content matches better what internet users look for. Secondly, SERP are now more local and geolocalised. Indeed, Google may use your latest local queries typed in the Google toolbar and responds to queries such as “japanese restaurant” with a map from Google Maps.  This is indeed very interesting because Google goes one step further into personalised results. It also shows that optimising your website into Local Business ads is  a must now more than ever. Finally, on top of offering the geocalised suggest feature and local news feature, which recently expanded to the UK, India and Canada, Google changed its URLs in the SERP. It means that more parameters will be available. Here is the example presented in the Google blog:

Old URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search
New URL: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The difference in parameters is the following:

——- old

http://www.google.com/search

hl=en
q=flowers
btnG=Google+Search

——- new

http://www.google.com/url

sa=t
source=web
ct=res
cd=7
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN
rct=j
q=flowers
usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w
sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The impact if the “cd” parameter is huge, as now, one can track the ranking of his website for each keyword bringing traffic to the website. See how you can do it here (in French) or here (in English).

• Mobile Search: Google released its latest Gmail version. This is a pretty good one as it is faster and uses the Gears technology (yep, you can access your mails even when you have no signal). Google Maps is getting closer and closer from Maps Quest. It seems that Google will already be number one for all vertical search features by the time the internet is available on each and every mobile device.
  

  Google Maps gets closer from Mapquest

• SMO and Twitter: It seems that Twitter makes most of the news for the SMO world. To follow the latest news, follow my bookmarks on the topic: Delicious/twitter

Voila! To stay updated on the latest news, you may want to follow me on twitter, or follow my rss, my delicious or all my feeds on friendfeed.

Have a fruitful week!