The Panda 4.0 release had a notable negative impact on the SEO power of many PR websites, including PR Newswire. This led to the press release site issuing new guidelines to help ensure that their site only published quality content in an effort to recover some of their visibility.

The conversation has also delved into the value of a separate media releases in the age of digital marketing and social media. Brands now have multiple platforms where they can promote themselves, including their own blogs and social media platforms. Given the followings that brands can cultivate on social media, promotions that run on these platforms can be very effective. Since these forms of promotion also take place on the web properties of the brand itself, they offer greater control over any prospect interaction that occurs as a result.

Download the full report and better understand why you should be press releases to promote your brand and content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is in a very different place from where it was just a few years ago. Google has updated its search algorithm hundreds of times every year making rapid, sometimes dramatic changes to how sites are ranked on search results pages. This has often times led to a trend of SEOs engaging in "algorithm chasing" or rushing to try and outguess what Google will do next.

Download the full report and gain knowledge into Google algo changes and how they impact your site. 

Google reports that voice search reached 21% share of queries by 2019. Voice is riding on the explosion of mobile, smartphones, digital assistants on devices and on PCs, and smartwatches. Juniper predicts combined digital assistant prevalence to grow 255% to 5.5 billion by 2021.

The reasons for using voice search are easy to enumerate: faster, more convenient, handsfree, and typing on mobile devices is unpleasant (Thrive Analytics/LSA survey). It also helps that voice recognition has reached 94%+ accuracy, which is at parity with humans (Purna Virji Microsoft). Progress above this normal human rate will attract many more users. Learn how to optimize for voice search.

The voice search feature is growing and has exponentially grown in the last 3 years. Google Trends reports an increase in “ok google” queries from a relative base of 4 in March 2014 to 68 in 2017. That is a 1600% increase. Voice queries spike in December and January to around 98 as people buy new hardware. Voice queries are about 20% of total queries and assessed as 30X more action-oriented than text according to Mariya Moeva of Google.

Understand how to grow the user experiences on your site alongside the growth of voice search as it happens and download the full report.

Hyperlocal continues to be a driving force of commerce. According to Google, four out of five people use search engines for local search. These local searches then have a big impact on purchases: 50% of mobile users are likely to visit a store after they do a local search. Once these visitors arrive in the brick-and-mortar location, their chances of becoming paying customer is higher than the average visitor, with 18% buying versus 7% of people who did not arrive through local search.​

Customers using mobile devices also tend to have different intentions than desktop users. They are interested in key bits of information such as business hours, directions, products, and addresses. A hyperlocal strategy positions brands to better understand their local users and create content that appeals directly to them, allowing them to tap into the incredible influence of local mobile search.

Register for the full whitepaper to access a guide to creating your own hyperlocal strategy.​

Mobile is the future of the search. Over 53% of all browser searches online now happen on mobile, and Google says that their search algorithm embraces a full mobile-first index, which means it separates and prioritize the mobile experience over desktop.

Speed and responsiveness are crucial to SEO across all devices, but especially on mobile. This makes sense, since mobile devices will often be accessing the internet via cellular networks on data plans that may or may not have monthly data caps on them.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a type of HTML optimized for mobile enables pages to load extremely fast on a mobile device. Essentially, with the use of AMP markup a site can present a separate version of a page optimized for fast delivery on mobile. With that in mind it’s easy to think AMP pages are a one-size-fits-all solution you should use across your entire site, but that’s not necessarily the case.

Drive more mobile traffic to your site by better understanding AMP using our full whitepaper.

What's the difference between HTTP vs HTTPS? HTTPS is HTTP - just the secure version. HTTPS follows the same protocols as HTTP - the browser begins a connection to a server on a standard port. HTTPS works simultaneously with another protocol, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to communicate information safely in three ways:

1. Encryption: Encrypting the transferreed data for security
2. Data Integrity: Data cannot be altered or corrupted during transmission
3. Authentication: Users are authenticated to communicate with the website

HTTPS presents the best of both worlds: the data is visually appealing to the user, and you're getting the extra layer of security as the data moves.

Learn more and take a deep dive into HTTPS migration with the full report.