Cloudi5 Technologies

Better reviews would have meant 13,000 more local leads for businesses in the study.

Digital marketing agency Location3 has released a new study that argues more review stars translates into higher paid-search conversion rates. While this finding makes intuitive sense, the study documented it with 16 months of SEM campaign data.
The data come from campaigns for national brands with local stores. In this context, “conversions” means post-click consumer actions on landing pages and brand websites. They include form fills, email inquiries, requests for quotes and other actions.

Location3 found that better overall ratings were correlated with improved performance. As stars increased, so did conversions:
Businesses in the lowest grouping had an average 3.31 stars, translating into an average conversion rate of 10.42 percent. The best-rated segment had an average of 4.96 stars, translating into a 12.83 percent conversion rate. Location3 concluded that if the lower-rated locations could convert at…

Some of the findings confirm and some upend conventional wisdom. Backlinko has done an extensive analysis of “voice search ranking factors” and identified 11 variables tied to appearing in Google Home results. The company examined 10,000 results delivered over the smart speaker. What Backlinko found was consistent with what many others have been saying but there were also a few surprises. For example, the study discounts the impact of Schema to some degree and page authority. Here’s a partial, paraphrased list of the ranking factors: PageSpeed is a significant factor; voice search results typically come from faster-loading pages.Google relies heavily on very authoritative domains for results, but pages not as much.Content that ranks well on the desktop tends to rank in voice search. This might be a correlation rather than causal however.Schema may not be a factor: 36 percent of pages voice search results came from pages using Schema.Roughly 41 percent of voice search results came from Fea…

Last year was a great year for the Angular team in terms of community. The Angular community reached a million developers at the end of 2017, and is growing five times faster than AngularJS did, the company recently revealed. To keep up the momentum, the team has released its 2018 roadmap with a major focus on productivity.


The Angular 2018 roadmap includes: Bazel, Schematics, Component Dev Kit, Angular Elements, and Ivy Renderer.

“The Angular team values applications users love to use, applications developers love to build, and a community where everyone feels welcome,” Brad Green, Angular platform engineering director at Google, wrote in a post.

Bazel is a multi-language build tool Google has been using within the company for more than a decade, according to Green. The Angular team is working to offer Bazel as an option for its developers. Bazel features advanced local and distributed caching, dependency analysis, parallel execution, incremental builds, multiple language support, abili…

Microsoft has announced email support in 15 Indian languages. The initiative by Microsoft comes on the occasion of International Mother Language Day, which is celebrated on February 21 every year.


Microsoft has announced email support in 15 Indian languages, that will be extended across its range of apps and services. This means that people will be able to use International Domain Names (IDNs) across services such as Office 365, Outlook 2016, Outlook.com, Exchange Online and Exchange Online Protection (EOP). The initiative by Microsoft comes on the occasion of International Mother Language Day, which is celebrated on February 21 every year. The company is also making efforts to support Email Address Internationalization (EAI), which makes technology accessible in local languages.
The 15 Indian languages supported for email address include, Hindi, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Konkani, Maithili, Marathi, Manipuri, Nepali, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. These languages are a p…

After years of pushing for 'secure by default' web sites, Google will identify insecure sites in the Chrome browser beginning mid-Summer.

July is shaping up to be a big month for Google. Earlier this month, the company announced its Speed Update set to roll out in July, and today announced it will then also mark all sites that have not migrated to HTTPS as “not secure.”
This move will coincide with the release of Chrome 68 and will look like this in a user’s browser:

Google has been pushing webmasters to make the change to non-secure web sites a for years now – including hinting at small rankings boost to further incentivize the shift. The campaign has proved successful. According to their blog post: Over 68% of Chrome traffic on both Android and Windows is now protectedOver 78% of Chrome traffic on both Chrome OS and Mac is now protected81 of the top 100 sites on the web use HTTPS by default Depending upon the size of a site and scope of the project, a migration from HTTP to HTTPS…

Earlier this month, Google rolled out the beta version of its new and improved Search Console to all verified users. Google has been testing the new Search Console for some months now, with a select number of users given early access to the beta. We’ve had sneak peeks at the slick, clean interface, and heard about some of the notable additions, such as the much-vaunted 16 months of historical search data now available to SEOs. The new Search Console is still in beta, and Google says that it will continue to port features from the old Search Console to the new over the course of the coming year. Webmasters and SEOs will be able to use both versions of Search Console side-by-side until the transition is complete. So now that the new Search Console is finally here, what shiny new features does it boast, what is more or less the same, and what functionality are we still awaiting with bated breath? Let’s take a look. What’s new
Search performance reportThe most powerful new functionality in the…