With three months behind us since Google introduced major changes to Google Grants, the philanthropic arm of AdWords, the long-term effects on account performance are now becoming apparent. Sadly, they’re not to nonprofits’ benefit.

First, some background: Google Grants is part of the Google for Nonprofits program, which allows registered 501(c)(3) organizations to take advantage of a handful Google products at reduced rates or no cost. While the Grants program provides nonprofits with in-kind pay-per-click (PPC) advertising through AdWords, it comes with a few limitations.

Major changes to Google Grants and its effects on nonprofit search marketing programs

Image courtesy of SEOPal

The search engine marketing community has been abuzz over the last week analyzing signs that a potentially game-changing update to Google’s algorithm is about to take place. No one knows exactly when the new version of Penguin will be implemented, or how it will affect SEM efforts, but Google has made it clear that this isn’t just another minor change – it’s the next step for Google in search engine marketing.

Google has announced a major change to the look of its search engine results pages for nonprofits: charity organizations are now included in Google’s Knowledge Graph, which adds additional information about the nonprofit to the right sidebar of the page.

Photo courtesy of Beanstalk, Inc.

If you’ve spent any time in Google Analytics, or any other analytics platform in the past year, you’ve likely spotted a pesky new “keyword” popping up within the organic traffic section. The keyword I’m referring to is (not provided), and due to several changes from Google and various browsers, the percentage of organic traffic being categorized under this term increased significantly in the second half of 2012.

So why is this new item appearing in your results and is there any hope to finding out what these users are actually searching on? Read on and you’ll soon find out…

Photo courtesy of TechCrunch.com

On January 15^th Facebook announced that it was releasing Graph Search, an effort by the company to provide users with more natural search results that are completely integrated with their social ecosystem. The basic function of Graph Search is to show users search results based on their Facebook friends and friends of friends.

Photo courtesy of CNN.com

Recently, BIA/Kelsey released its U.S. mobile local advertising forecast, which revealed that search is the largest mobile local revenue component and will be through the forecast period of 2016. It is also estimated that U.S. mobile local advertising will grow 54% from 2011 to 2016.

These results speak to the rapid changes we have recently seen within the local search space, most notably in mobile. Google reported that “50% of mobile searches have local intent,” up 10% from 12 months ago. Not only do we see local results on the SERP take up more than one-fourth of the page (depending on the searches), but a large amount of advertising is currently focused on targeting ads to users based on their location.