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Statcounter.com reports that mobile internet usage in the US grew by 73% in 2014, to reach 24.4% in August and mobile usage has overtaken desktop in several countries. Your website has to be user friendly, and in 2015, that means mobile friendly too. 

A website that is mobile friendly: 

• Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash 
• Uses text that is readable without zooming 
• Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom 
• Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped 

Additionally, Google recommends making it easy for users to directly connect with you by simply tapping a phone number (click to call). 

InsuranceWebDesigns offerss responsive mobile websites. Not an InsuranceWebDesigns client? Try out Easy Online Mobile!

Amazingly, only one in ten marketers are considered “modern,” according to a recent study called “Why You Need to be a Modern Marketer: The Business Impact of Marketing Maturity in the Age of the Customer.” One key finding: Modern marketing delivers increases in sales and profitability. Marketers who win and retain customers in the digital age use technology and new processes to scale their reach and engagement while delivering measurable results to the business. 

Click here to read the report and find out where you fall on the “Marketing Maturity” scale—are you a Novice, Developing, Experienced, or a Modern Marketer?

The big news at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show and posted on Google’s blog: 

This spring, Sony, Sharp and TP Vision, with its range of Philips TVs, will start shipping televisions powered by Android TV. These have all the goodness of Android TV built in so you won’t need to plug anything extra into your television. You can use a single remote to watch live TV channels and play games, movies or shows from Google Play and your apps. 

Where Google goes, advertising follows!

With about 1.35 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the top social media destination. This month, Instagram, with its 300 million users, moved up to second place. Twitter is now in third place with 284 million users.

This is great news for Facebook because Facebook owns Instagram!

To help users connect and follow people and brands, Instagram announced that it will “verify badges for celebrities, athletes and brands, making it easier for you to connect with the authentic accounts you’re looking for.” Click here for more details.

From a 2005 New York Times article: “The name Cyber Monday grew out of the observation that millions of otherwise productive working Americans, fresh off a Thanksgiving weekend of window shopping, were returning to high-speed Internet connections at work Monday and buying what they liked.” December 1, 2014 marked the tenth anniversary of Cyber Monday.

According to internetretailer.com: “One universal trend emerged on Cyber Monday and throughout the holiday weekend: Consumers are browsing and buying more online with their mobile devices.” According to Custora, Mobile Shopping (ecommerce orders made on mobile devices) accounted for 21.9 percent of Cyber Monday orders. Email marketing drove 23.9 percent of orders.

The lessons are clear—make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Take the mobile-friendly test here. And, set up an email marketing campaign!

The sign on your business is in disrepair. Packages delivered to your business are blocking your doorway. What do you do? You repair the sign and you move the boxes. You make sure your business is easy to find.

The same care is required for your local online presence. You won’t rank well if you have conflicting information on any one of the thousands of sites where Google and other search engines gather local listings data. And, consumers are confused when they see discrepancies—they’re likely to go to a competitor whose listings are clean and consistent.

Give us a call and we’ll tell you more about local listings management.

Great news for businesses that have more than just one location.

As explained by Search Engine Journal: "Google has made an up-date to AdWords location extensions that allows numerous locations to display in mobile search ads. When several business locations are nearby, users may see as much as three locations in an ad. The extensions can display the street address and distance from the user's current location. Users can click to call or get directions for each location."

Click on this link to read more about location extensions.

Imagine you're just going about your working day a cashier at Target and next thing you know, you're on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. You're widely recognized! Because of social media, all.

That's what happened to #alexfromtarget. The account of how Alex became famous illustrates the mind-blowing power of social media.

Every interaction and communication you have on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social networking sites builds your business and your brand. You probably won't be a sensation like Alex, but you will be where consumers spend huge amounts of time and share huge amounts of content. The amount of information that is shared every day on Facebook is astounding! Facebook has more than one billion users and every 20 minutes, those users share one million links. Twitter is also remarkable in terms of marketing potential.

If you're not on social networking sites, or you're neglecting what you started, get it going today!

Penguin is the algorithm update that's crafted to champion Google in opposition to spam and other techniques that go against its webmaster guidelines.

The version that was released in October 2014, Penguin 3.0, is a global recharge that affected lower than one percent of English search queries.

As indicated by Search Engine Land, "The Penguin formula mainly considers a site's backlink profile ... It should demote sites with bad link profiles and help sites that were previously hit and then cleaned up their link profiles." Click here for more details about Penguin 3.0.

Last month, Barry Ritholtz published his 30,000 th blog post. He posted content-- graphs, investing articles, web links, video clips and economic analysis-- about five to 10 times a day, everyday for 11 years.

In this post, Ritholtz reveals what he's learned about effective writing a blog, featuring his advice on ways to build a good blog.

Basing on this research by HubSpot: Blog frequency impacts customer acquisition. 92 % of companies who blogged multiple times a day acquired a customer through their blog.

You probably don't have time to formulate and write multiple articles each day, but can you assemble a minimum of one? Otherwise, you're missing a key element of SEO.