Spain and Italy are the next stops on our on-going tour of the global search engine markets, where we look at the latest SEO and PPC updates from the previous month.
Italy
Online Grocery Shopping On the Rise
Online shopping is growing in Italy. While this has been around in the UK market for a number of years, it has always been something of a faux pas in Italy. Shopping at the supermarket has traditionally been strictly considered an activity to do in person. However, this is changing with 2.7 million Italians now shopping for their groceries online.
Summary
Online marketing in Italy is showing some clear developments and displaying a lot of growth. Strong evidence suggesting this includes the competitive search engine market with many new entrants, and also the rise in online shopping.
Spanish Market
Online Marketing Expo
User experience was the topic on everyones lips at an Aprils Online Marketing Expo in Madrid. David Segura director of Double You spoke at the exhibition about treating users as individuals rather than a mass audience. Moreover he stated that consumers would rather have real stories and content of value rather than companies talking about themselves.
Ana Diaz Medio gave a presentation on the importance of quality content and personalisation for relevancy in search results. She also compared a company’s homepage to a “shop window” and that it marks the difference between customers’ staying on the site or navigating away.
In summary, the Spanish market is similar to the UK as it is talking about the importance of creating high quality content and creating a valuable user experience. Personalisation of the web is also discussed, backing up some of our internal predictions about the future of search.
Spanish Data Protection Agency Investigating Google
The decision to initiate this investigation comes after Google announced in January that it had modified its privacy policy from March 1, 2012. Since then, Google has offered one single privacy policy against more than 60 that it had previously for its various services (Google+, Gmail, YouTube, etc).
Although the company argued that it was a way to simplify the process, the move generated a considerable amount of doubt and led the EU Data Protection Authorities Group to conduct a joint analysis in which the multinational requested more information on the merger policy.
Last October, the European authorities detected gaps in the information Google was providing its users about data treatment, especially on the combination thereof, the specific purpose and categories of data they manage.
The EU has sent Google a list of recommendations on how to meet its data protection requirements.
Now you’re up-to-date with Italy and Spain why not check out the latest SEO and PPC happenings from Germany and France
Insights
