In any small region, you’ll find hundreds of local businesses competing for the same customers.  Some of them are family-owned, some hire only veterans, and others are simply an amalgamation of experts from the nearby towns and cities.  Each of these companies aims to be the best, which is why it feels great to win awards.  It validates all of the hard work and effort the company and its employees have put in up to that point to achieve their goals.

Yesterday, Expert Roofing of Westchester was awarded the Customer Service Excellence Award by Westchester Magazine.  This prestigious honor came two weeks after Expert Roofing was voted the top chimney repair company out of 32 local companies for the 2nd straight year.  The Customer Service Excellence Award is bestowed on one company each year who exemplifies quality workmanship, industry-leading customer service, and volunteerism the region.  Looking at Expert Roofing’s social reviews, they clearly display an unmatched level of quality for their chimney repair and cleaning services.  A seemingly endless supply of 5-star reviews on Home Advisor, Angie’s List, Facebook, and Google point to a plethora of satisfied customers.  Many of the reviews mention repeat business, which is always a great sign of a quality chimney sweeper.  Regarding volunteering, many of the employees work with the local food shelter on occasion, and they also serve food at Equinox.

We stopped by their Yonkers location to speak with the owner who said:

“We’re really excited to win this award.  It means a lot to be named the top firm when there are so many great ones competing against each other.  I’m just proud of my team.  Our guys travel in from NYC, Jersey, and a few even out of state for work each day, ready to help our customers by delivering quality services we can stand behind.”

Congratulations to Ben and his team on another great year of service, and we look forward to seeing them go for the 3-peat next year.

Snapchat has outgrown other social media platforms to be a leading platform allowing the users to reach out to others across the globe. In the modern era, Snapchat is not all about capturing the picture-perfect moments. It is more about communicating with the wider range of human emotions –not just what might appear perfect or pretty.

Evolution of Snapchat

Evan Spiegel –the CEO & Co-founder of Snapchat released a blog post on the Snap Inc. –as it was named back in the year 2012. On the Snap Inc. platform, the users were only allowed to post photographs and this platform used to run only on the iOS platforms. Since the time of the first-ever blog by Evan Spiegel, Snapchat has managed to ensure making a huge impact on the overall global content marketing and the social media.

Instant and social messaging has become the norm since the inception of Snapchat. In fact, since Snapchat has made its arrival on the social media platform, other platforms like Instagram and Facebook started launching their own versions of some of the most popular features of Snapchat. Given the rising popularity of Snapchat, it is predicted that the existing competition will only continue growing between Snapchat and the other famous social media platforms out there.

History of Snapchat

2011: Launching of Snapchat, then Picaboo

Spiegel along with his co-founder of Snapchat –Bobby Murphy, told Forbes that they had met at Stanford University. It was then they went forward with the creation of Picaboo –the very first version of Snapchat in the year 2011. With the help of Picaboo, they wanted to create an application through which the users were able to send photos that would later on disappear.

2012: The Arrival of the Videos

In October 2012, Snapchat for the Android platform was launched on the Google Play store. This helped the platform in increasing its overall user base. By December the same year, the Snapchat users were able to send over 50 million photos on a daily basis. At the same time, the app rolled out its innovative update that allowed the users to upload 10-second videos as well.

2013-2014: Stories & Chats

In October 2013, Snapchat launched the concept of adding Stories –a short narration of the snaps that lasted for around 24 hours. In the year 2014, Snapchat took a step further by launching the Chat features that allowed the users to interact with each other through the app.

This is how the world-famous app Snapchat evolved!

Google algorithms keep changing every now & then. As technical as they might get, there are times when the high-end Google algorithms also get beaten up due to certain flaws. Recently in 2010, Google was highly criticized by the global media for increasing the overall amount of content clutter in its search results. As such, soon after, Google released the Google Panda update which was particularly aimed at removing low-quality & spammy content from the search results.

Whether or not some kind of knowledge-based trusting algorithm or method might be enough towards combating the fake news, it is clear that Google is keen on making its truthfulness as a matter of ranking factor. With the recent updates to the Google’s algorithms, there are some top SEO trends that you can expect in the coming times:

• Featured Snippets & Voice Search will Grow Hand in Hand: A recent study reveals that around 5 queries with respect to mobile searches come from voice search. This number is however, likely to increase with the advent of Google Assistance-enabled technology & devices like Google Home –which continues to rise in popularity. As the voice searching technology grows, you can expect observing an increase in the usage of featured snippets as Google sources its voice search results from the same. If the given trend continues, featured snippets might have to start competing with the topmost organic listing if your site wishes to get noticed.

 

• AI (Artificial Intelligence) Will be Powering More Aspects of the Search Engine: Since the world’s introduction to RankBrain, several aspects of Google search results have changed significantly. RankBrain is the machine learning AI (Artificial Intelligence) system by Google which is aimed at helping the search engine in processing the given search results. Since its launching 2 years back, RankBrain has advanced itself from searching around 15 percent of the search queries to nearly all of them.

 

The overall interest of Google in Artificial Intelligence tends to extend much more than RankBrain. However, Google has also come up with the latest Cloud Vision API –which is known to be capable of recognizing several objects. Definitely, Google tends to possess a wide range of high-end machine learning capacity such that it is now considering selling its own range of products. However, more interestingly, Google is on the verge of building an AI (Artificial Intelligence) system that overpowers the imagination of the humans all over.

 

• Mobile-First Indexing: Google recently announced that mobile searches have finally surpassed the overall desktop searches on the Google’s search engine. Just last year, BrightEdge claimed that around 57 percent of the overall traffic amongst its clients was from the mobile devices instead of the desktop systems. As a response to this gradual change in the user behavior, Google is on the verge of introducing “mobile first indexing”. This implies that Google will be creating & ranking the overall search listings on the basis of the mobile version of the given content. This will be applicable for the listings that are available for the desktop users as well.

 

• Mentions without Links: Recently, Bing has confirmed that they practice tracking the unlinked brand names or mentions and make use of them as a ranking signal. Similarly, a particular Google’s patent claimed that Google might be doing this as well in the coming times. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is beginning to play a major role in the overall ranking scenario, it is not unlikely to expect the use of “linkless” mentions of the given type to begin playing a major role in the overall search rankings of different web portals.

 

The tricks used for earning the brand mentions are no different from the tricks that are used for earning the links. However, as the total number of people who would be mentioning brands tends to be much higher than the total number of people who would be linking to them, this trick could offer an excellent boost for the small-scale brands out there that might be falling below the earning press threshold.

 

• Rise of the Manipulative Guest Posting Trend: Last year, Google had warned the webmasters across the globe that utilizing the method of article marketing as a major link-building trick turns out to be against the guidelines & might result in a hefty penalty. As this piece of knowledge is well known in any reputed SEO community, the announcement made by Google is likely signaling that a recent algorithm update might target manipulative guest posting to be on the trends in the coming times.

Look out for more on the latest SEO trends!