Here's a statistic to make your eyes boggle - over one billion searches are made on Google every month, and over half of those are made using mobile devices.
That's one billion searches for information or news, but what exactly were people looking for in 2015?
Here are just some of the top 'trending' searches from 2015 in Canada. (Other countries are available!*)
In their never-ending quest to keep the world of SEO on their toes, (or so it seems) Google have made some major changes to Google + pages.
Google + (Google Plus) has always been a bit of a minefield, but the main reason businesses used it was to ensure their place in local search results.
Your Google Local profile gave you the ability to add crucial information about any bricks and mortar business, such as the correct address, telephone number and company information. The fact that you also got a dedicated Google+ page, a sort of “Facebook light” profile page was a bonus.
But now it's all change again at Google+...
At this time of year, most stores have already set up their Christmas window displays, reminding us that it’s time to buy those special presents for friends and family.
We’re also decorating our homes and putting up the flashing reindeer and icicle lighting on the front porch (or is that just us?!). It reminds us that Christmas is coming and we still haven’t bought the darn turkey.
At the same time, across the world, sci-fi fans are getting very, very excited about the new Star Wars film which opens on December 18th. Wherever you look, there is Star Wars stuff, from toys to t shirts, mini figures to dog costumes (yes, really - see left).
So, three top trending topics this month are #Christmasgifts, #xmaslights and #StarWarstoys. By clever use of blogs and hashtags, your business can become part of the online conversations these trending topics create.
Black Friday may not be the big deal it is in the US, but Canadians do love a bargain as much as the next shopper!
So, while the Toronto Star* reported that most shopping malls were “politely busy", possibly due to deals starting earlier in the week, the same could not be said of some online stores….
It’s easy to think that Google is a totally automatic system that’s all software and no humans. In fact, that isn’t the case. Google employs a team of ‘quality raters’ who manually rate websites, using a strict set of Guidelines to ensure conformity of rating.
These Guidelines are supposedly just for internal use, but a set usually find their way into the public domain one way or another. The latest set ‘released’ date from October 2015, and give an interesting insight into Google’s key criteria.
While most of the Guidelines are nothing unexpected, there are a few gems in there we can all use to improve our websites!