Author name: 417 Marketing

After you type a query into Google, you might imagine a digital algorithm sifting through results and churning out the best answers, ranked by relevance and quality. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But despite the fact that Google employees created and refined the search engine’s algorithm, most people assume that Google has taken a “hands-off”

Have you ever tried to search for something on Google that you didn’t know how to spell? Or struggled to get Google to understand what you were trying to say? With its newest algorithm update – the biggest update since RankBrain was introduced in 2014 – Google is hoping to make it easier than ever

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Google hogging search traffic with zero-click searches. According to SearchEngineJournal.com, 34.4 percent of desktop searches and 62.5 percent of mobile searches are zero-click searches. But before you fall on your knees and curse Google for stealing all of your website’s traffic, check out this new study from

It’s not easy to locate relevant and useful responses to online searchers’ queries in a fraction of a second. To accomplish this, Google’s search algorithms take many factors into account. Known as ranking factors, these characteristics of a website may help – or harm – your website’s ability to rank highly. Since Google won’t reveal all

Many people are skeptical of the things they see online – and for good reason! Sometimes photoshopped pictures look more realistic than real life, catfishing (i.e., pretending to be someone else on social media) is so prevalent it spawned a popular tv show, and sophisticated fraudsters can impersonate legitimate credit card companies’ websites to steal

You know about on-page SEO and off-page SEO – maybe you thought you knew it all! But now that Google is trying to answer as many user queries as possible on the search engine results page (SERP), there is one more type of SEO that you need to understand: on-SERP SEO. We briefly mentioned it in our

Most people view Google as a sort of impartial guide to the internet, leading viewers to the websites that are most likely to answer their queries. However, unlike Jeeves, Google has a major hand in the game. After all, under the umbrella of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), you’ll find a number of valuable businesses and services: YouTube,

In an ideal world, you would receive a personal recommendation from a trusted friend every time you wished to purchase a product or schedule a service. In reality, you likely rely on the opinions of strangers who enjoy commending and criticizing businesses online. According to a new survey, 97 percent of consumers consult product reviews

If you know SEO, you know that Google is all about high-quality content. Whenever the algorithm changes or a new ranking factor emerges, the advice for webmasters always come back to one thing: continue writing original, relevant, high-quality content. It isn’t the only critical component of a website (of course) but according to Google, providing high-quality content

For nearly four years now, Google’s core algorithm has benefited from a brain . . . of sorts. RankBrain is a signal that employs machine learning to influence how the search engine produces results pages. It was designed to learn new things over time, build on its knowledge, and make valuable connections to improve the