Month: January 2020

Notifications on the web enable users to receive important updates even when they are not interacting with a website. Notifications are an essential capability for a wide range of applications including messaging, calendars, email clients, ride sharing, social media and delivery services. Unfortunately, notifications are also a common complaint as many websites request the notification permission on first visit rather than at contextually relevant moments in the user’s journey. Unsolicited permission requests interrupt the user’s workflow and result in a bad user experience. To protect notifications as a useful service for users, Chrome 80 will show, under certain conditions, a new, quieter notification permission UI that reduces the interruptiveness of notification permission requests. Immediately after the Chrome 80 release, users will be able to opt-in to the new UI manually in Settings. In addition, the quieter UI will be automatically enabled for users under two conditions. First, for users who typically block notification permission requests and second, on sites with very low opt in rates. The automated enrollment will be enabled gradually after the release while we gather user and developer feedback. Later in 2020 we plan to enable additional enforcement against abusive websites using web notifications for ads, malware or deceptive purposes. This enforcement will be described in detail in a future blog post.

Quiet UI overview

Quiet UI (Desktop and Mobile)
The quieter UI is available in both Desktop and Mobile. The first time the UI is presented to the user, it will be accompanied by a dismissable in-product help dialog that explains the new feature.

Enrollment & opt out

Users can be enrolled in the quieter UI in three ways.

Manual enrollment (and opt-out)

Manually enroll on Desktop or Mobile via Notifications Settings

Users can enroll for quieter prompts manually, or disable it completely. To enroll, the toggle ‘Sites can ask to send notifications’ must be enabled in Settings > Site Settings > Notifications, then the checkbox ‘Use quieter messaging’ must be checked.

Automatic enrollment for users who infrequently accept notifications

Users who repeatedly deny notifications across websites will be automatically enrolled in the quieter notifications UI.

Automatic enrollment on sites with low permission acceptance rates

Sites with very low acceptance rates will be automatically enrolled in quieter prompts. They will be automatically unenrolled once the user experience is improved. Per-site information about notification permission acceptance rates will be made available via the Chrome User Experience Report in Q1 2020. 

Developer recommendations

First, we recommend that seo angency’s test their site’s permission request flow with the quieter notification permission UI, by enabling it manually in chrome://settings/content/notifications. At the time of writing, the feature is being rolled out gradually to Canary, Dev, and Beta channels, and can be force-enabled in chrome://flags/#quiet-notification-prompts in Chrome 80 and later. Second, we recommend that developers follow best practices for requesting the notification permission from users. Websites that ask users to sign up for web notifications when they first arrive often have very low accept rates. Instead, we recommend that websites wait until users understand the context and see benefit in receiving notifications before prompting for the permission. Some websites display a pre-prompt in the content area before triggering the native permission prompt. This approach is also not recommended if it interrupts the user journey: sites that request the permission at contextually relevant moments enjoy lower bounce and higher conversion rates. For help with user permission UX, you can refer to this 5 minute video on improving your user permission acceptance rates, and read about best practices when requesting permissions.
Posted by PJ McLachlan, Product Manager

Source: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/introducing-quieter-permission-ui-for.html

A survey of almost 400 businesses uncovered uncertainty and confusion about the importance of SEO.
Greg Sterling on December 17, 2019 at 2:33 pm

Google launched in 1998, more than 20 years ago. Yet the importance and value of search optimization is still not fully understood by many business owners. That’s an eye-opening finding from a recent survey by digital agency Fractl.

Business owners and consumers surveyed. Fractl surveyed 977 people in total about their Google and SEO knowledge, just under 400 of them were business owners (394). Just over 200 (219) had fewer than 5 employees. The remainder had between 5 and more than 100, with second largest group in the 10 to 24 headcount range.

The survey asked a range of general and specific questions, including “the meaning behind SEO buzzwords.”

The study initially asked consumers and business owners about how Google ranks search results. Only 13% of consumer respondents and 26% of business owners believed they had a “good” or “expert-level” understanding of why Google shows certain results above others.

Conversely, the majority of both groups did not feel they had a good understanding of how Google orders its results. This general ignorance also showed up in more specific questions about SEO knowledge. This is why its important for business owners to employ a good SEO Agency to take care of their rankings

We wouldn’t expect the general population to have a deep understanding of SEO terminology or mechanics. But, at least conceptually, one might expect that of business owners, for whom ranking matters.

Business owners were asked about their familiarity with SEO. A little more than half (55%) said they were “mostly” or “very” familiar with it.

Less than 20% (18.4%) said that SEO was “very important” to the health of their business. Just over 26% didn’t see SEO as critical to their success (“not at all,” “slightly”) and 55% were in the middle. The latter group believed that SEO was important but weren’t quite certain how important.

Why we care. Perhaps the most interesting finding here is the gap between the 55% of business owners who say they’re “mostly” or “very” familiar with SEO and 18.4% who say that it’s “very important” to the health of their businesses. Either the 55% aren’t all that familiar with SEO or there’s a problem with analytics or ROI data. Or maybe only the 18.4% are ranking.

Regardless, it appears the market still needs considerable education about the importance of SEO for local business and/or better tools and techniques to demonstrate value.

Source: searchengineland.com