A Note About This Week’s Edition

It’s the week before Thanksgiving and Cyber5 so it shouldn’t be surprising that there is a lot of eCommerce news (and stats) to share today. The two big eCommerce news themes center around holiday sales and social shopping, both of which have been massively affected by COVID and the effects of quarantine and social distancing. That said, let’s start there.

Holiday, Q4, Cyber5, and a Focus on Trying to Finish 2020 Strong

Social Shopping and Advertising

Facebook, Google, and Pinterest Are “Top Picks” to Lead 20% Growth in Online Advertising in 2021
Instagram Adds Keyword Search in Addition to Profiles and Tags
YouTube Launches Audio Ads to Reach Music and Podcast Listeners
YouTube Audio Ads Help Drive Reach and Awareness
Twitter Debuts Carousel Ads With Up to 6 Images or Videos
Twitter Fleets Introduced to Encourage More Tweets
Upcoming Webinar: Mark Your Calendars! “Social Marketing 2021: Explosive Platform Expansion & Opportunity” on Weds., Dec. 16 at 2:00 PM EST. — EXCLUSIVE Content

General eCommerce News and Opinions

Google Advertising and Shopping

6 Advanced Google Ads Search Campaign Tips — EXCLUSIVE Content
Hijacked Google My Business Listings Appear to Be a Growing Problem
Google Ads Wants Advertisers to Give Broad Match Another Shot
How are your Google Shopping ads performing, especially now that up to half of search terms are hidden. Find out ASAP. Get your free Google Ads Scorecard.
Webinar on Demand: “15 Reasons Your SEO Rank Is Slipping (and How to Stop the Downward Slide).” — EXCLUSIVE Content (Get the replay and the slides.)

Amazon

Big Box Retailers and eCommerce

About Always Be Growing

So much happens in eCommerce news in any given week. It can feel overwhelming, even impossible, to keep up with the news and the changes that affect your business. But keeping up is a must for two reasons:

You need to make sound decisions based on fresh (and reliable) information.
If you miss a story, plenty of your competitors will have picked it up and left you behind.

The way to keep up and to make those sound decisions in a fast-paced noisy world is to get curated information delivered to you consistently. That’s why EXCLUSIVE provides “Always Be Growing,” our weekly Friday blog feature all about eCommerce.

Why Always Be Growing? Because the EXCLUSIVE team is driven by 5 core values, the first of which is “Always Be Growing: Continuously strive to learn, share, and grow as individuals and professionals.” And that’s what this weekly Friday round-up is our way of sharing the learning in order to help you grow.

Whether you missed our recent webinar, 15 Reasons Your SEO Rank Is Slipping (and How to Stop the Downward Slide), or you’d like to rewatch to make sure you didn’t miss anything, you’re in luck. We’ve got the recording and the slides available now. This is an incredibly important webinar that explains SEO (Search Engine Optimization), why your Google ranking may be slipping even if it seems like you’ve got SEO under control, and how to get back on track. Get the content here.

Presented by Nik Rajpal, EXCLUSIVE’s VP of Marketing Sciences, and Rebecca Stewart, EXCLUSIVE’s Director of Organic Search, 15 Reasons Your SEO Rank Is Slipping (and How to Stop the Downward Slide) is a must for any retailer committed to eCommerce.

Nik kicked off the webinar discussing the heart of SEO, namely a search engine’s algorithm used to scan for keywords that best represent the content. As these algorithms have become increasingly sophisticated, search engines like Google have added intricate weights and measures to pick up on what’s really important within website content and, more importantly, what’s important to searchers and readers and shoppers. These content cues send signals to the search engines so that the search engines can prioritize results. Hence, ranking and the pursuit of the coveted top spots.

The four main types of SEO signals and the ranking formula can be broadly explained as: Relevance + Technical + Crawl Authority + Brand Recognition = Ranking (NODE) Score

From there, Nik walked us through how Google’s algorithm has worked in the past and the various algorithm changes and major releases like Penguin and Panda. Anyone who runs a website and has gone through a major change like Panda knows just how much (and how mysteriously) these fickle calculations and formulae can affect a website’s SEO and ranking.

15 Reasons Your SEO Rank Is Slipping

You Have Not Done Demand Mapping, Organized in Topics
You’re Using Duplicate Content
Google Has to Guess Intent for You
Your Content is Shallow or Grammatically Incorrect
You Are Stuffing Too Many Bad Pages into Google’s Index
Your SEO Efforts Appear As If You’re Gaming the System
You Expect Google to Work with Little-to-No Info from You
You Don’t Test and Observe the SERP Layouts for Your Most-Coveted Keywords
You Haven’t Verified Your Schema for eCommerce
Your Local Pages Are Missing Local Schema Markup
Your Google My Business Is Underwhelming
You’re Not Using Intent-Based Signals
Google Finds Poor E-A-T Signals on Your Site — What’s E-A-T? Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
You Aren’t Studying Your Competition
Your Content Isn’t Mapped to Normal Search Behavior

For ALL 15 of these common SEO ranking killers, Nik shared backgrounds, solutions, and best practices. Definitely watch the replay and download the slides to get the full info there. It’s crucial and full of small changes that can garner big wins.

Beyond the 15 SEO Fails and Fixes

It’s the holiday season so we’re adding more goodies, this time in the form of extra content: “Some Bonus Ideas for Fourth Quarter.”

This section included:

Creating winning holiday landing pages
Not getting penalized for out-of-stock items displayed on detail pages
Optimizing on-site search
Showing that you care by making charitable contributions
And more!

There’s Still Time to Make Winning Changes!

Remember that there’s still time to make a significant improvement in your Q4 performance. Grab the replay and the slides and get to work showing Google that you know what search engines (and your shoppers) want. And while you’re at it, find out where you really stand with your Google SEO and more advertising metrics. Get your free Google Ads Scorecard today.