Archive for the ‘mobile search’ tag
Welcome To The Mobile Era Of Search
It’s rare when you can pinpoint the moment of a major game changer for an industry to a single day. Usually, these shifts happen over time; and then one day, you look back and realize how momentous a particular event really was. For paid search, there have been many catalysts that have accelerated…
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How Facebook ‘Home’ Could Change Mobile Search Forever
The unveiling of Facebook ‘Home’ felt like one of those key moments that really polarize opinion. It’s the current Marmite of the tech world; some people rushed to cover their screens in juicy Facebook goodness, others saw it as evidence that the Mayans were a year out. I guess I fall somewhere in between, which makes me the exception that proves [...]
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This Google office has a real fireman’s pole, slide, cattle walkway, and more (gallery)
Nap rooms are so 2000s. Massage rooms are a dime a dozen. And the in-office gym has been around since at least the 90s. So if you want to up the ante, attract the best talent, and have the most brag-worthy office in the world, you need more.
The actual, real, live fire pole
Like a full regulation fire pole that people can actually use to drop down a floor. Or an officially certified slide to get down to the lobby after a long day. Perhaps a cushioned and enclosed chill room.
Or even, believe it or not, a cattle walkway.
On a recent trip through Ontario, I had a chance to tour the company’s first office in Canada — and talk to the engineer who leads Google Canada, a former startup guy in Silicon Valley and native Canuck, Steve Woods. If you use mobile Gmail, a Chromebook, Google Maps, Google Calendar, or Google Fiber, there’s a good chance you’ve touched something built at Google’s offices in Waterloo, Ontario.
And if you ever get the opportunity, those offices are definitely something to touch as well.
“Startups are great, because you start from scratch,” Woods says. “Startups are awful, because you start from scratch. At Google, you can literally launch a project that affects a billion people.”
That’s one reason he decided to accept Google’s offer to leave the valley, return home, and “figure out what we should do in Canada and do it.”
In 2008, when Google opened the office, Waterloo and London were the company’s two centers of mobile excellence — likely due to Waterloo’s proximity to then-leading smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry. So Waterloo and London pioneered the mobile version of virtually every service Google offers: Maps, Gmail, Calendar, mobile search, and more. Waterloo, which now boasts about 200 engineers, also hosts the team that built Google Fiber’s user interface, and critical software for the Chrome Pixel, Google’s answer to Apple’s retina display, with full touch integration.
The office is located in a formerly industrial building which used to house a tannery, believe it or not (hence the cattle walkway). Google has co-located there with a number of accelerators, startups, and coworking spaces that together, make up Communitech, a startup mecca with strong connections to Waterloo University, angel investors, and venture capitalists.
The Googlers who work here. After a year, their drawing gets colored in.
Woods, whose recruiting strategy is to get ex-patriate Canadians to move back as well as to draw new talent from the nearby Waterloo University, says that it’s an attractive place for Googlers for a variety of reasons — not just the fire pole or massage room.
“There’s fewer bosses here, or at least they can’t find you,” he jokes. “At least a third of the people here have moved back from California.”
The actual cattle walkway
Woods says that Google’s most internally unpopular and controversial product ever was built in Waterloo as well: Conversion Optimizer. That’s a piece of software for advertising buyers that Google calls the “just trust us and push the button button,” which essentially hands your advertising campaign over to Google to optimize for the cheapest and most effective ads.
“It was extremely unpopular in Google,” Woods told me. “People were wondering: how much money will we lose?They were worried that advertisers would optimize their ad spend early in the month, hit their caps, and stop buying.”
Google’s known for taking risks, however, and the company ultimately decided to go ahead, despite the chance it might actually lose money. Now, the product is one of Google’s most popular for advertisers, and manages “many, many billions of dollars.”
“It took a Nobel prize-winning economist to prove that was untrue,” Woods said. “It’s great for Google, great for advertisers, and great for surfers.”
And another product Waterloo build that Woods is particularly proud of is what he calls “the largest project Google has ever done.”
It’s the first mobile search transcoder, which was an infrastructure that rendered web pages on Google’s own internal servers, decided which bits were most important for mobile phone web users, and sent only those bits. It sounds like something for the pre-smartphone days of historical antiquity, but not so:
“It’s still a very fast-growing project,” Woods told me. “The volume is staggering … billions of pages per day in countries in the third world, and even in the U.S., it’s still growing.”
So … why in Waterloo, Ontario?
Communitech, the community in the building that includes Google
“Something interesting is happening here,” Woods says. “The university produces an amazing kind of talent … and people that come into Google from the University of Waterloo do disproportionately well.”
Worldwide, he says, Waterloo has been one of Google’ top three or four recruiting centers for some years now. And, he adds, not everyone who wants to work for Google wants to live in California.
“This area has a very high proportion of startups to population,” he adds. “Google loves startups, and we love to hire entrepreneurial people.”
Oh, and the slide?
The office has a plastic red slide down from the second-floor Google reception area to the first-floor entrance. It has a prominent sign, “For Googlers Only,” which a PR rep told me was placed there because Ontario’s provincial slide inspector (yes, they have one, apparently), raised some concerns about safety.
I was bad, however, as I frequently am, and went down the slide anyways. The PR rep forgave me, as you can see in the video below:
Image credits: John Koetsier
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Relax, The Search Industry Is Doing Just Fine
For enterprise SEM practitioners looking to set budgets or otherwise anticipate their needs in the space for the months and years ahead, it’s been a particularly difficult time to get a read on how the industry is really trending. Conflicting data and opinions abound; new threats to the…
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7 Takeaways From The Local Search Association Annual Conference
Earlier this month, local search marketing leaders from the U.S., Canada and 12 other countries gathered in Las Vegas for the Local Search Association’s 2013 annual conference, “Search Starts Here.” Over several days, attendees engaged in informative discussions about the numerous…
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Top 5 Mobile SEO Tips For M-commerce & Retail
Clearly I’ve broken my own resolution when it comes to not talking about responsive Web design, as I’ve done so for the past two months. This month, I’m taking a break so I can focus on resolution #1: giving more tactical advice on how to do mobile SEO well. Today’s column…
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5 Must-Have Mobile Marketing Tools for Businesses
It seems like every week I read a new set of statistics about the importance of mobile in a company’s marketing strategy. Two of the most recent stand out. The first, from SteamFeed, included the fact that in the United States, 37 percent of internet usage occurs on mobile devices. The second and more interesting [...]
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Get Found, Make Money: Optimizing Apps for Search
Have you ever tried to meet someone at Grand Central Station or some other incredibly crowded venue? It sounds so doable and yet it is so not. There are too many people, too many distractions and too much stuff in the way.
App (tablet and phone applications) stores, both iTunes and Google Play Store have the same problem. Both have in excess of 750,000 files to paw through, download, try, remove and lather, rinse and repeat. It is likely true that for any problem “there’s an app for that,” but not an app to find the app.
Now I know what you’re thinking. App stores are online and I can use the handy search feature to find the app of my dreams or needs. Well….maybe. I ran a search using keyword productivity on both sites. In the search department, Google gets extra credit for a more pleasing search results display with icons, star ratings and a nifty description. However, points off for egregious self-promotion by soaking up 3 of the top 10 slots for Google Keep, Google Calendar (a productivity app?) and Google Drive.
Apple dispenses with search entirely and favors the top-down directory approach similar to that phone book you’re using to prop open the garage door (and equally as useful). An iTunes app category landing page is as easy to navigate as airport flight information boards. I am uncertain what the organization scheme might be, although it bears a striking resemblance to the one I use for my home office. I guess that Steve Jobs never had to use iTunes search or he certainly would have done something about that display.
So, if you want customers to find your app for either location, you will have to “make it so” yourself and here’s how:
On the page app optimization
As with traditional SEO, both app stores start with traditional information retrieval systems that emphasize the presence of the query terms in the body content and the placement on the page to put together a search results page. Position on this results page is based on magical thinking (for Apple) and a variety of algorithms (for Google).
Keywords
Apple encourages the assignment of keywords to your application and makes it as difficult as possible. They must be using some sort of Stone Age search in Cupertino, or they all know where everything is and do not need any sort of search functionality at all.
There is a 100 character limit to the keyword field that includes the required comma separators. There is no phrase matching. If you want your app to appear for a phrase like “business news,” the keywords would appear together, e.g. business, news. Google stopped paying attention to keyword metadata a long time ago and Google Play Store is no exception.
Name
For both the Google Play Store and iTunes, the presence of keywords in the app name is rewarded. The keyword-rich name should also include terms that reference the app’s functionality e.g. Weather+ International Travel Weather Calculator.
Apple limits the app name to 255 characters with full display on that page-o-links that serves as search results. For its Staff Picks on the Google Play homepage, app name display is limited to 17-21 (I have seen more at 17 than 21) characters (including spaces) with anything that follows represented by an ellipsis.
App icon
Icons are a very good idea and eye candy is the purpose. The icon appears on the download page as well as in the Google Play search results.
Details page
In iTunes, the details page is limited to 4,000 characters with 700 cited as a best practice. One screen shot is required with the ability to include four additional screen captures. The description of the application and functionality should be keyword-rich with a compelling call to action as customer interaction is a significant indicator of relevance. Additional components that can be included: an instructional video, customer ratings and reviews.
Categories
In iTunes the app will be listed under a primary category with the opportunity to select a second category for additional customer query option. The best practice recommendation is to use the customer pain point resolved as a guide for the second category.
Off the page factors that influence ranking
There are influences outside of download page text that can influence ranking in iTunes application search results. The primary off the page ranking factors are:
Downloads: the number and rate of downloads are key drivers of results placement.
Installation base: how many customers actually install the app.
Removals: whether customers dislike the app enough to shake off their lethargy to remove it entirely. Both Google Play and iTunes take note of uninstalls as an indicator of relevance.
Customer reviews and ratings: whether customers give you stars or actually write something down on the page. It is very important that you pay attention to the feedback from your users and respond in some way.
Recommendations
Optimize the application itself.
- Make sure that the performance speed is smokin’ fast
- Reduce the file usage weights
- Keep the application fresh with updates and enhancements
Build and sustain support from external assets.
- Website support: placement of a permanent download icon or graphic on your website
- Social media support: schedule tweets with a tiny URL, post to Facebook, pin on Pinterest and don’t forget regular updates on Google+ to sustain momentum
Reach out to key influencers.
- Contact app blogs and promotion networks to get them excited and talking about your swell new app!
- Encourage customer reviews and ratings
Gotchas for both
You will want to submit the app to both iTunes and Google Play Store at least two weeks before release as it takes time for the files to make their way through the Apple and Google processes. To do this, Google requires that you set up yet another account with the Google Play Developers Console to upload apps. The fee for doing so is $25. At least Apple lets you play without having to pay.
Is it just me or does this sound like the early days of SEO, the way it used to be 10 years ago with keyword sort-of-stuffing, key influencer outreach, and review “acquisition”? We might as well enjoy the waning days of this Luddite approach to SEO. No doubt Google is working on Panda-app as I write this post. Look for the icon below at the Google Play store. Or, more likely, it will come looking for you.
Mobile Search, a Missed Opportunity for SMEs
With Internet use on smartphones set to overtake desktop browsing by early 2013, it is surprising that businesses—big and small—are not taking full advantage of mobile search. A recent study by telecommunications giant T-Mobile indicates that 46 percent of local businesses are not visible when users search via smartphones. For those local businesses that took the [...]
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