Focussed Data and Insight – The Foundations of a Competitive Advantage
Posted By Garry,
September 6th, 2012
The key to unlocking a powerful strategy is to ask a simple question: what is our competitive advantage?
As Jack Wech once notably stated, “if you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.” If you know your competitive advantage then you are aware of how the company can compete and make money. Today, companies have the opportunity to generate a vast amount of data but much of it is stored away for later retrieval (that somehow doesn’t happen). When it does, there is a shocking lack of desire to work at revealing insights that will provide them with a strong competitive advantage.
In a recent survey by McKinsey, only 35% of 2,135 global executives believed that their strategies rested on unique and powerful insights. In addition, only 14% of executives surveyed placed novel insights among the top three strategic influencers of financial performance. McKinsey offered that one likely reason was that widespread availability of information and the adoption of similar sophisticated strategy frameworks create the impression that “everyone knows what we know and is probably analyzing the data in the same way that we are.” (more…)
Google puts itself in position 1 of SERPS for “credit cards” and “bank accounts”
Posted By Sam,
August 29th, 2012
Search for ‘bank accounts’ or indeed ‘credit cards’ or even ‘best bank’, some of the most lucrative and therefore competitive search terms around, and you will see that Google has displaced the normal natural search results for an Ad-box of its own, paid-for results. Click on this ad-box and it take you to a Google comparison site where the content is streamed by getthatquote.com
Previously if you searched for ‘credit cards’ or ‘bank accounts’ in Google you would get two ads above the organic content and 8 or so ads to the right of your page. As seen in the example below for “Insurance”. (more…)
Google Chrome overtakes Internet Explorer worldwide
Posted By Sam,
May 21st, 2012
It looks like it’s the end of Microsoft’s domination in worldwide web browser usage with Google Chrome usurping IE. According to StatCounter the most used web browser in the world is now Google Chrome overtaking Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and accruing 31.88% of the share of users compared to IE’s 31.47%.
Google Chrome’s recent rise has been verging on the rampant, gaining major ground on IE over the last 12 months. Google’s advance and IE’s decline has been extremely rapid within this area with Microsoft losing 25% of ground on Google in less than a year. This decline by Microsoft could in some way be linked to a similar decline in PC sales, the device to many that is synonymous with Windows and the IE family of web browsers.
Worldwide web browser share - Google overtakes IE
Google overtakes IE across the world according to StatCounter.
How referral traffic improves your rankings in Google
Posted By Andy,
September 5th, 2011
Linking is key. That statement, in the world of SEO, is like saying you need oxygen to breathe, its obvious – however, there have been many different arguments towards the benefit of linking in terms of referral traffic to help influence rankings within Google. I conducted a test some time ago and wanted to share the results within this blog entry. This data will hopefully highlight the benefits of obtaining links that provide a high volume of referrals and that this click through data influences rankings within Google.
20 Million Unique Visitors in 3 Weeks for Google+
Posted By Becky,
July 26th, 2011
ComScore Inc. has reported that fledgling social networking platform Google+ has acquired over 20 million unique visitors in its first three weeks (June 29, 2011 – July 19, 2011). This is an impressive increase of 82% from the previous week and 561% vs. two weeks prior. (more…)
The importance of Google Local Search
Posted By Garry,
September 27th, 2010
Cloud computing and Google’s move to localisation and mobile search will have a profound impact on how consumers search. People will be searching locally, more frequently, for more relevant results. This will have an increasing impact on local business sales.
Already, there are over 400 million local searches every month and growing. (more…)
How Google (and other SEs) crawl and ranks PDF files
Posted By IP-Author,
October 28th, 2009
There is one common thing that link web 2.0 users: the necessity to take part of this new fantastic world contributing to it, inserting web pages, picture, documents, comments and so on. So it’s not rare to see emerging web sites containing tons of new material rather than a forum at the top of the SERPs. And it’s not rare to see different type of documents rather than a standard web page. Documents like a Word file, Power point presentation, PDF etc. (more…)
How does Google read flash?
Posted By Andrew Mabbott,
June 24th, 2009
As Daniel identifies in his recent post, Google is indexing increasing quantities of flash content, and returning such content further up the search results. This raises the question of what web designers can do to see how google will experience their flash content.
Google your way around the UK with Street View
Posted By Andy,
March 20th, 2009
Recently, Google has unveiled its street view platform in the UK. Originating in the USA first, Google Street View offers users a 3d view of streets and cities. With Street View you can navigate along hundreds of thousands of roads, exploring in great detail using the navigation features to travel down any road, close, avenue, dual carriage way, or motorway of your choice.