Your Marketing and Design Reading for The Weekend

You may not have noticed, but Google has reduced the usual ten search listings to just seven on more than 18% of Google searches. Sometime around August 12th to 14th, the number of results with fewer than ten organic search listings went from 2% to over 18%. This is the equivalent of eliminating 5.5% of all first page organic listings!

Based on experiments, the author concluded that keyword searches with organic sitelinks (branded/navigational searches) appear to be showing seven or fewer organic listings versus the expected ten. If you are one of those businesses who were in positions eight, nine or ten and now find your listing on the dreaded page two of search results for important keywords, what are your options?

• You could try to drive more links and shares to that page to improve the rankings (no small task).
• You can spend more on AdWords on that keyword

Costs per click have been falling and, to grow their business by 25% this year, Google needs to get 24 billion more clicks on their ads. Many of us are going to have to increase spending.

Visual Marketing is Here--5 Ways You Can Use It to Sell Your Ideas

As much as I love writing copy, it seems like now we need to eliminate most or all written words and present all our content in cool infographics or funny cartoons (Thank goodness we have Mel Fernandez on our marketing team to translate Kriti and my ideas to designs).