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But in recent months, Google Posts have been losing their prominence.

the importance of a Google My Business (GMB) listing as a ranking signal increased 32 percent year over year. A GMB listing is now the largest local ranking factor for a business. Keeping your GMB listing fresh with content such as Google Posts improves your findability in search.

Google Posts are especially critical if your business depends on high-value purchases, and your goal is to create a valuable, long-term customer relationship.

But here’s the formula we’ve found to work really well: video for awareness, interactive display creatives and social channels for engagement, and product-focused creatives for acquisition. This is not just for a purely performance-based approach, but for encouraging account growth year-over-year with increases in traffic and conversions.

Smart campaigns for small business Along with Google’s recent rebranding of AdWords to Google Ads, they announced the arrival of a new automated campaign type for small businesses, called Smart Campaigns. This campaign type, now available in the US, is built on top of AdWords Express, and according to Google, it can produce significantly better results. For now, this will become the default campaign type for new advertisers. The target users of this type of campaign might have chosen AdWords Express or Local Service Ads in the past, and those options will remain available until further notice from Google. If a small business decides to work with an agency or wants to venture into PPC management, it can still opt for the full Google Ads experience. This means they can choose from varying levels of automation and make decisions about where to trade off using machine learning to drive results with manual management that provides more control.

What is automated In the case of Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA, Target ROAS and Enhanced CPC, Google automatically predicts the likelihood of conversions by looking at auction-time signals including device, location, language, dayparts and more. These predictions feed the automated bids that are used for every unique auction. What still needs to be done manually While Google can predict changes in conversion rate and conversion value based on a variety of factors that are widely applicable across a range of advertisers, these systems don’t yet consider unique factors that impact individual advertisers. This means that advertisers should supplement “automated” bid strategies with a management methodology that changes targets based on business-specific conversion factors. Things like flash sales, coverage in the media, weather, social media buzz and so on can all impact how an ad campaign converts, but these factors may not be apparent to Google’s machine learning, so the advertiser who is aware of these factors must do active bid management. But instead of managing things by changing a max CPC bid, management now entails changing the target.

The campaigns are almost entirely automated, from ad creatives to delivery optimization, based on the product or service being advertised and the goal the advertiser sets.

Smart Campaigns are built on AdWords Express technology, and Spalding says the company will continue to develop on it.

Smart Campaign ads can be delivered across Google’s properties, and users do not have the ability to turn off channels

The survey of 500 consumers asked about sources used to find a local business phone number or address. Google My Business listings was the top answer, but websites came in at number two:

Dominant preference for calls vs. email, messaging. After identifying the target business, 60% of consumers said they overwhelmingly would prefer to contact that business over the phone compared to other methods:60% Call on phone.16% Send email.15% Visit the physical location.4% Message through online form.

When we searched for presidents, a carousel of presidents in chronological order was presented, and when we click an image, the context is carried with it, something that does not occur when we search a president in isolation.

an entity is not simply a person, place or thing but also its characteristics.

There are a few key ways that Google determines the relatedness of entities, but one key mechanism that comes up repeatedly is the co-occurrence of the entities in the same resources.

Did you add trust signals to your site? Authors to articles, author bios, links to professional social media accounts etc

Organic click share is dramatically lower on mobile devices yet SEO optimization remains critical.

Equally important is looking into appearing in other types of results, such as image search and YouTube

Localized versions of a page are only considered duplicates if the main content of the page remains untranslated.

We don’t use any code-level language information such as lang attributes, or the URL. You can help Google determine the language correctly by using a single language for content and navigation on each page, and by avoiding side-by-side translations.

Translating only the boilerplate text of your pages while keeping the bulk of your content in a single language (as often happens on pages featuring user-generated content) can create a bad user experience if the same content appears multiple times in search results with various boilerplate languages.

You can target your website or parts of it to users in a single specific country speaking a specific language. This can improve your page rankings in the target country, but at the expense of results in other locales/languages.

If you don't select a target country, it means the site is globally applicable. If you have a ccTLD, the option isn't there.