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.

Whether you missed our recent webinar, Google Ads Query Data Just Vanished: What Now? 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; 30%-50% of Google Ads search terms are now hidden and you need a solid strategy. Get the content here.

What We Mean By “Google Ads Query Data Just Vanished”

Up to 51% of Google ads search terms are now hidden and businesses are feeling the impact. This disruption is magnified by the change taking place in Q4 of a year that has been unpredictable and unstable at best. With up to HALF of Google ad conversions no longer showing search query data, you need to adapt and fast.

What Changed with Google Ads and When? Which Google Ads Search Terms Are Now Hidden?

In September 2020, Google redacted visibility into approximately 30%-50% of search terms used by shoppers. These affected terms were primarily long-tail keywords, which tend to be highly specific and to result in a low volume of searches and results, but a high conversion rate due to the specificity of the inquiry. An example would be “red metal travel espresso maker with frother.” A shopper searching using those search terms knows exactly the product sought, and the matching Google ad served up is likely to be spot on or pretty close to exact.

Losing insight into the search terms that deliver the highest rate of conversions can debilitate advertisers. Google likely made the move to address concerns over privacy, but to what effect on retailers? One would expect that the move would push advertisers to Google Smart Shopping, which diminishes user control and relinquishes it to Google to manage. But that’s a compromise, not a solution. A true solution requires better understanding the data that is visible, using it to more powerful ends, getting data from non-hidden sources, and allotting your ad spend and efforts other places such as Facebook and Bing. It also means a fresh approach to keyword bidding for Google Shopping so that you not only get the search result match and the conversion, but the visibility as well.

In this timely webinar, Nik Rajpal (EXCLUSIVE’s VP of Marketing Sciences) and Mike Frekey (EXCLUSIVE’s Director of Applied Data) explained the changes in ways both technical and accessible. They showed how losing visibility into these search terms actually presents retailers with opportunities both inside and outside of Google that empower those retailers with new insights and controls.

Watch the webinar and download the slides to catch Nik and Mike break down:

Criteria affecting which search terms are now hidden and which remain visible
How to leverage source/medium data to make targeting decisions
Using SEO data to illuminate relevant keywords and their patterns
New keyword strategies and reimagined funnels and buckets
Adjusting feeds to give more relevant information
The huge opportunity to target by device

As the webinar title asked, “What now?” Nik recommends that retailers using Google Ads find out exactly how severely they have been affected by the changes. You can do so at no cost when you get your executive-level Google Ads Scorecard. Once you have that information, you can hone in on opportunities — within Google and beyond it — where you can get the most bang (and visibility) for your advertising buck.