Research and Studies

Research reveals new insights into how featured snippets work This new study documents a never before made connection between featured snippets and regular snippets in the search results, as well as a new way to recognize when your site is competing for a featured snippet. I’m also going to detail an advanced process for obtaining featured snippets. […]

On March 8, 2017, I published the results of our study to see which was smarter, the Google Assistant on Google Home or Alexa on the Amazon Echo. As it happens, we tested Bing’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri all at the same time. We also tested Google search for reference purposes, since it’s historically been […]

On March 8, 2017, I published the results of our study to see which was smarter, the Google Assistant on Google Home or Alexa on the Amazon Echo. As it happens, we tested Bing’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri all at the same time. We also tested Google search for reference purposes, since it’s historically been […]

NEW! You can now see the 2018 edition of our mobile vs. desktop study here. You may have heard a rumor that the mobile revolution is upon us, and it surely is, but just how far along have we come? In today’s post, I’m going to share hardcore stats pulled from SimilarWeb that will help […]

You may have heard a rumor that the mobile revolution is upon us, ;->, and it surely is, but just how far along have we come? In today’s post, I’m going to share hardcore stats pulled from SimilarWeb that will help you get the complete picture. The assembled data shown here is based on U.S. […]

Many people assume that Google leverages all of its vast information resources in every way possible. For example, the great majority of people who think about it probably assume that Google uses their Chrome browser as a data source, and in particular, that they use it to discover new URLs for crawling. We decided to put […]

The arrival of the Amazon Echo in the U.S. on June 23, 2015, was notable because it was the first mass-market consumer-level device responding to voice control with general purpose functions, such as playing music. More recently on November 4, 2016, Google released a competing device known as Google Home. At Perficient Digital, we’ve been […]

Do you talk to your mobile device in public? Would you do it on the street, but not in a restroom? Why? We wanted to know, so we surveyed 914 users to learn how they interact with devices today, with many questions focusing on how they use voice commands with their smartphones. Without further ado, […]

Update: Our 2018 update to this study has been published! Find out how mobile voice usage habits and attitudes have changed since last year. Do you talk to your mobile device in public? Would you do it on the street, but not in a restroom? Why? We wanted to know, so we surveyed 914 users to […]

At Perficient Digital, we’ve been actively tracking Google’s indexation of Twitter since July of 2014. Today, I’m publishing our fourth update, and it offers up some fascinating insights. At the end of this post, you’ll find a handy slide deck summary of the whole study. To start, here are two of the more interesting conclusions […]

  We live in an increasingly mobile world. The June 2015 comScore US Mobile App report showed that 44% of all digital media time spent was being spent in smartphone apps. Note: that was a percentage of all digital media time, inclusive of time spent on desktop and tablets. If that number isn’t stunning enough, […]

  As seen in… [clearfix] Are Links Still Important for SEO? UPDATE! See our latest version of this study at Do Links Still Matter for SEO in 2017? You’ve seen the claims: “So Many New Ranking Factors!” “Content Quality is Everything!” “User Engagement is the New King!!” “Social Media Signals Rock!” “RankBrain has Taken Over […]