News and Blog

Even as we talk about Internet advertising overtaking broadcast television in the U.S. by 2017 and physical stores struggle with the challenge of engaging online shoppers, a sizeable proportion of small businesses in the U.S. still do not have an ecommerce website or use a company website in any way to transact.
SurePayroll's latest Small Business Scorecard reveals that, even this far into an age of online shopping, only a quarter (26%) of small businesses in the U.S. have an ecommerce website - a website on which consumers can make purchases.
It seems unthinkable that 74% of small businesses have seemingly shunned the the Internet for making sales. Twenty-eight percent said they didn't even have a company website. However, 42% of those without a web presence say that "the web really isn't that important to their business".

Apple is getting into the paid-search business. At next week’s WWDC, according to a report in The Verge, the company will unveil paid-search ads for the App Store. It’s also going to introduce a new app-subscription revenue sharing model.

The App Store SEM possibility was first raised in a Bloomberg report in April. The actual product launch will come in the fall, but developers are being invited to join the beta today. According to copy on the Apple site:

Sephora is continuing its efforts to tap into new ways of monetizing millennial-friendly mobile platforms, enabling its Snapchat followers to purchase products featured in live stories by taking a screenshot and downloading the ShopStyle application.

The beauty giant, which announced the news on Snapchat last week, invited followers to shop a slew of popular cosmetics featured in its latest story by taking a screenshot of desired items. As a growing number of retailers establish a strong presence on the photo-sharing app, finding new ways to fuel impulse purchases among younger fans and drive additional mobile commerce revenue will likely be top-reaching goals.

Snapchat has previously been considered a solely visual marketing platform, on which brands can host impromptu Q&A sessions, take followers behind the scenes of photo shoots and tease consumers with sneak peeks of new products.

Currently the speed of your mobile pages does not impact your mobile rankings, however this may soon change.

Google will be updating the page speed ranking factor to specifically look at the page speed of your mobile pages when it comes to the mobile-friendly algorithm.

The issue today is that many of the ranking signals Google currently uses for mobile rankings are based on your desktop web pages, not mobile web pages. So if you have a really fast desktop web page, but the mobile version is really slow, it currently doesn’t hurt your mobile rankings.

When Google updates their mobile-friendly algorithm, they hope to add mobile-specific page speed as a factor and not rely on the desktop version.