When retailers across the northeast region of the United States first began closing stores to protect residents against the global pandemic, the leaders of The Vermont Country Store moved quickly to put three marketing initiatives in place. The goal was to protect the health of employees and customers and the health of the business itself, according to Jim Hall, president and CEO. Operating since 1946, The Vermont Country Store, which bills itself as “The Purveyors of the Practical and Hard-to-Find,” carries a huge variety of old-fashioned products sold through two brick-and-mortar stores, a popular catalog, and a new e-commerce website. “Shopping at Vermont Country Store is fun. It’s entertaining. And it takes you back in time,” said Hall. The company’s retail locations in the Vermont cities of Weston and Rockingham look like the old-fashioned general stores of the 1800s, where town residents rode in on horseback to pick up sundries and sweet treats and visit with neighbors. Founders Ellen and Vrest Orton modeled their business after the general store run by Vrest’s father in North Calais, Vt. At this store, men in the town gathered each evening to wait for a horse-drawn stagecoach to bring the mail from Montpelier, 13 miles away. The store “smelled of leather harnesses, coffee, smoky kerosene lamps, tobacco and sugar maple logs burning in the potbelly stove,” according to Orton family lore. Ellen and Vrest restored an existing rural general store in Weston, and The Vermont County Store was born. They later developed the first store catalog and mailed it to friends on their Christmas card list. Today, the founders’ son Lyman Orton — and his sons Eliot, Gardner and Cabot — run The Vermont Country Store. The company sells various home goods, comfy country clothing, imported perfumes and soaps, hard candies, and fine chocolates. 1. Putting people over profitsIn response to the pandemic, company leaders quickly closed the two stores, buying time to understand all they could about the cause of the virus, the methods of transmission and best practices for protection. That knowledge inspired them to split the workforce into two shifts that never overlapped to control the spread of any possible infections. They sent the store and call center employees home to work remotely. Meanwhile, the company put in place strict mask and social distancing guidelines for the employees who run the distribution center, who continued to fulfill orders coming in through the catalog and ecommerce website. “People were buying cheese in massive quantities,” Hall says. “We sold hundreds of hams and cans of soup by the truckload.” Then came what is usually the store’s busiest time of year, the November and December holiday rush. Managers took the unusual step of capping the number of catalog and online orders. By limiting orders, they reasoned, they could meet customer service expectations with a smaller number of employees in the distribution center. Instead of adding the typical 550 seasonal workers for the holiday rush, The Vermont Country Story hired half that many, a reduction necessary to allow employees to follow social distancing guidelines. “I belong to a CEO discussion group, and every one of the members thought I was crazy that we were walking away from business,” Hall says. “But every one of them had significant outbreaks at their companies. Our battle plan was to hire a smaller number of people and keep more of them ongoing into 2021.” Sales were flat throughout the holiday season compared with the previous year, but the company avoided a COVID-19 outbreak altogether. “I think our team at The Vermont Country Store appreciated the fact that we placed people above profits. We still had an extraordinarily good year in 2020,” Hall says. 2. Continuing a strong connection with customers: An “immeasurable” giftThe Vermont Country Store enjoys a reputation for legendary customer service, brought to life by the agents who run the call center connected to catalog orders. During the pandemic, the retailer allowed call center agents like Charla Helton to work from home and empowered them to go beyond answering routine product questions and do everything possible to help customers suffering from pandemic-related stress. In just one example, Helton took a call from a concerned customer named Diana, who was spending the holidays apart from loved ones, sheltering from the pandemic in an isolated cabin in the Colorado mountains. Diana had ordered cozy warm socks as a holiday present for her elderly brother, also sheltering in the woods, and then grew concerned when the package did not arrive when she expected. She called the contact center and spoke to agent Helton, who tracked down the distribution bottleneck and got the package moving again. It arrived at its remote destination in time for Christmas. Diana later wrote a note thanking Helton for her kindness, recalling that the customer service agent had “asked me how I was and meant it. She tracked my order then talked to me. Really talked. This bit of grace was given to me on a day when being isolated in a small cabin in the Colorado mountains, away from family in order to survive until my turn for a vaccine comes, was a gift. Immeasurable.” Customers regularly write to Vermont Country Store, thanking them for the personal service the contact center employees provide, even from their living rooms. 3. Adopting modern marketing technologyWhen the pandemic hit, The Vermont Country Store had already started modernizing its e-commerce website, choosing Oracle Commerce. The retailer selected the cloud-based platform to provide customers a personalized shopping experience, based on data reflecting their history with the company, and to respond quickly to the ebbs and flows of business. The new website is “built to browse,” Hall said, encouraging shoppers to look at their leisure at the vast number of offerings, moving from department to department in a manner that mimics store layout. The website is so inviting, Hall says, it offers soul-weary shoppers a welcome respite from modern-day worries, encouraging them instead to savor the possibilities of an astonishing variety of feel-good, old-fashioned products. The retailer wanted a website that would allow call center agents to connect order information to customer records instantly so that agents could continue to offer the company’s legendary customer service. Its new website also needed to handle extreme seasonal variations in business volume, a valuable feature as online business exploded during the pandemic. The Vermont Country Store was also keen on an e-commerce solution that would continuously update with fixes and improvements to ensure the most modern site experience. In addition to Oracle Commerce, the company also adopted Oracle Responsys Campaign Management to help the store send targeted messages to customers based on their personal interests and buying behaviors. That tool later proved essential during the pandemic, when the company needed to steer customers toward products with greater inventory levels. Looking forward, The Vermont Country Store is implementing Oracle Infinity, a digital analytics platform, to better understand how to measure and influence customer behavior in real time. “We’re very pleased,” Hall said. “Now we’re only limited by our own imagination and creativity.” The post An old-fashioned retailer’s modern marketing approach appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3fN3nXW
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Google News Showcase launched in October 2020 to offer paid licensing options to publishers. The Showcase is now available in the U.K., Australia, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Czechia and India. Google News Showcase is now available on desktop, according to an announcement from Alex Cox, Product Manager of News. “Now every user of Google News, regardless of what device they’re using, can see enhanced story panels from our News Showcase partners,” said Cox. The desktop News Showcase is available in the same countries where the mobile version is. Here’s how the desktop version of the News Showcase looks: Google has also added a catalog sidebar to help users discover both national and local news. News outlets that participate will also now have a News Showcase tab on their landing pages (essentially their home pages within Google News). “Here, readers can see all their News Showcase panels: the latest Rundown panel, covering the most important issues for a publisher every day, and their story panels, which give readers deeper context on important articles,” wrote Cox. Google adds enhanced panels to mobile News Showcase. Along with the desktop experience, the News Showcase is also rolling out enhanced panels that will allow publishers to add linked bullet points to provide more context and information surrounding news and stories. Why we care. If you’re a publisher that relies on Google’s News Showcase for a chunk of your traffic the addition of desktop could mean a larger potential audience to drive to your site (from a new device type). It also means to ensure that your news site is still performing well on desktop too (no intrusive interstitials, make sure it loads quickly, make sure ads aren’t annoying). The addition of the linked bulleted list on the panels also means an opportunity to connect with your audience and increase clicks on your stories. Think these through and make sure to use them wisely. The post Google News Showcase now available on desktop, adds enhanced panels on mobile appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2T9TOKZ Google announced a new addition to the performance report in Search Console, specific for the practice problems rich results. You can now see the impressions, clicks, click through rates and other metrics in the performance report by filtering the report in the “search appearance” filter. The announcement. Google said on Twitter “following the Practice Problems Search Console enhancement report announcement a few weeks ago, today we’re adding this rich result as a search appearance on the Performance report to help you analyze its results.” The report. Here is a screenshot of the report filtered by “practice problems” in the search appearance filter: What practice problems look like. Google explained it as an “interactive feature tests your knowledge of high school math, chemistry and physics topics directly on Search.” Here is a GIF of it in action: More details. You can learn more about these practice problems, how to add them to your site, how to debug them and much more – over here. Why we care. If you are in the education online content business, you may want to leverage these new structured data types to get more exposure in the Google Search results. These may help increase your click-through rates on some of your snippets in the search results and it may help you gain more traffic to your site. It also may lead to less clicks, if the answer is solved directly on Google’s site but you now are able to track that within Search Console if they add this data to the performance report. The post Google Search Console performance report gains practice problems appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3vgHiaJ Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning, Marketers, and where are you finding a competitive edge in content? I’ve been interested to see Google’s announcement of LaMDA and MUM at I/O last week. To me, it seems like the overarching context is a better understanding of how humans ask for and understand information, but also better retrieval of the kinds of answers that people are looking for. Remember back when we used to “Ask Jeeves” full on questions (and probably still didn’t get the info we were looking for)? It almost seems like we’re headed back in that direction, but with more opportunity for getting almost exactly what we want. On our editorial call last Friday, the Search Engine Land team also talked about how generational change is happening in search. The latest group of search engine users search for almost everything — and they even sometimes use voice assistants to do it. Perhaps search engines are working with that generational change in mind when innovating too. Carolyn Lyden, Google expands ways to reach new and returning app users and update in-app event trackingIt’s getting harder to stand out in the app market as more apps are added to app stores every day. The way in-app event tracking worked in the past often made it hard for marketers to change their Analytics data on the fly, too. In an announcement last week, Google launched three new features to help app developers and marketers work together better and reach new and existing audiences more easily. What’s new?
Why we care. Marketers and app developers each have enough on their plates without having to try to coordinate massive efforts for small changes (like event tracking). These new features and offerings help each do their jobs easier and drive new user acquisition while keeping existing users engaged. YouTube to start showing ads on non-monetized videosStarting June 1, YouTube’s terms of service are officially changing. The announcement includes the addition of YouTube’s “Right to Monetize,” which means they will begin running ads on some non-monetized videos. This means that if you’re not part of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), YouTube still reserves the right to run ads on your videos. The program is scheduled to roll out globally beginning in June. Along with removing the choice for ads to run on your videos and channel, YouTube will not share the profits from ads if you’re not part of their Partner Program: “Channels that aren’t in YPP won’t receive a share of the revenue from these ads, though still have the opportunity to apply for YPP as they normally would once they meet the eligibility requirements,” according to the community post. Eligibility requirements to join YPP include the following:
Channels without these requirements could have their popular videos monetized without the chance to get a cut of the revenue. Why we care. This could be a big deal for businesses that haven’t monetized their channels or individual videos. If your brand made the choice not to join the YPP because you want to keep your company videos ad-free, you may want to audit where your YouTube embedded videos exist across campaigns and websites and switch to a paid provider with no ads. There’s no telling if a competitor ad could show up on your non-monetized brand video. Snapchat launches Public Profiles for Businesses (finally)Snapchat already had permanent profiles for Creators, Shows and Snapchatters, but officially announced the same for businesses using the platform now, too. “Public Profiles give brands the ability to have an organic presence on Snapchat, and house all of their unique Snapchat content in one discoverable place,” according to the announcement. Along with a set place to house your content, business profiles on Snapchat will allow companies to highlight engaging content directed toward your target audience, utilize the Lens AR Experiences, and share shoppable products within the app. Plus, these new profile types come with insights and analytics to help businesses continually improve. Other key features of the Public Profiles for Business include:
On the hunt for something new in 2021? Here are the latest career opportunities in searchDirector, Paid Media @ Three Ships (Raleigh, NC, remote)
Senior Analyst, SEO @ 360i (Atlanta, GA, remote)
Social Ads Lead @ Ankorstore (remote)
Vice President, Digital Marketing @ American Diabetes Association (USA, remote)
Enter a job opening for an opportunity to be featured in this section. Making Maps more accessible, DAI for video streaming, and planning an inclusive recoveryHow anyone can make Maps more accessible. Mara Chomsky, Director of Local Guides for Google Maps shares tips on how anyone can contribute to a more accessible world — both on and off of the map. Evolving Dynamic Ad Insertion for the future of streaming. “Today we’re reimagining our ad insertion technology for the next generation of video streaming with DAI Pod Serving, which helps simplify OTT streaming complexity by integrating with your existing first or third-party streaming workflow,” wrote Peentoo Patel, Group Product Manager, Google Ad Manager. Planning for an inclusive recovery. The inequitable impacts of the pandemic are well documented, but what we can do as marketers is not. Learn how to build a brand that is welcomed into people’s lives by earning their trust and upholding their values through Microsoft Advertising’s Marketing with Purpose playbook. Twitter is getting serious about getting verification rightTwitter announced last week that it’s finally re-opening its verification process after closing it down in 2017. The application is pretty simple: “Users can go to their account settings to find the application, in which they will have to explain who they are and why they qualify, provide some sort of official identification and wait between a few days and a few weeks to see if they’ve been accepted,” said David Pierce for Protocol. But the majority of applicants will likely be rejected. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There are six types of accounts that qualify for verification (including categories like brands, athletes, politicians, etc.) and they all have to meet some level of “fame,” for lack of a better word. The question is really: Who deserves the blue checkmark? If everyone is verified, then it’s almost the same as no one being verified. So there has to be a balance and it really has to mean something. What’s the solution? “Twitter landed on ‘notable accounts with high public interest,’ the sorts of people most users look for and follow who tend to be the sources of important information,” wrote Pierce. The post YouTube may start showing ads on non-monetized videos; Snapchat launches Public Profiles for Businesses; Monday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2SkEw5Y Mike McPeak, the marketing technologist and CRM specialist at Hale Trailer Brake & Wheel, came to my office a couple of months ago to talk about search marketing. We covered a number of topics in this video including:
You can learn more about Mike McPeak on LinkedIn or follow him n Twitter @seo_sitch. Here are the two part videos: If you’re a search professional interested in appearing on Barry’s vlog, you can fill out this form on Search Engine Roundtable; he’s currently looking to do interviews in the NY/NJ tri-state area. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel by clicking here. The post Video: Mike McPeak on search marketing in low tech environments appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3yycVi8 Feeling exhausted by your current content creation system? If you’re dreading your content to-do list, you might be doing it... The post A ‘Lazy’ Content Creation System that Fits Quality Writing into Your Busy Schedule appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/3bR9BF7 Date: Thursday, May 27, 2021 The goal of the Sitecore Summit Series is to inspire Sitecore users and share tips to help you optimize your Martech investments that will deliver measurable results such as improved engagement and conversion rates. The session will start with a 5-minute interview and then dive into a live demo. For this month’s Sitecore Summit, our two speakers will cover the following:
Register today to reserve your spot! The post Webinar: AI-Powered search with Coveo (part of the Sitecore Summit Series) appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3fb4di9 Businesses on Yelp can now use the LGBTQ-owned attribute to distinguish themselves to potential customers, the company announced Monday. In addition, businesses that self-identify as both LGBTQ-owned and “Open to All” will be highlighted with a rainbow-colored map pin on Yelp during Pride Month (the month of June). The LGBTQ-owned attribute. The new LGBTQ-owned business attribute is available now for businesses that wish to self-identify as such. The attribute appears in the “more info” section of a business profile within Yelp’s mobile app or in the “amenities and more” section of a business page on the Yelp website. This feature is offered free of charge and on an opt-in-only basis. “To protect businesses who choose to self-identify as LGBTQ-owned, Yelp is proactively monitoring pages for hate speech against the LGBTQ+ community and will remove any hateful, racist or harmful content that violates our content guidelines,” the company said in the announcement. The Pride Month map pin. During Pride Month, Yelp will distinguish restaurants, food and nightlife businesses with a rainbow-colored map pin if they self-identify as both LGBTQ-owned and “Open to All.” Open to All is a nonprofit, anti-discrimination campaign, but businesses do not need to formally register with it to claim the associated business attribute within Yelp. How to add these attributes to your Yelp business profile. First, log into Yelp for Business. Next, go to the Amenities section and select Add or Edit. Select Yes on the “LGBTQ-owned” attribute and/or the “Open to All” attribute and save the changes. Social justice through supporting local businesses. Consumers, or at least those on Yelp, seem to be responding to social injustice by seeking out businesses owned by members of marginalized communities. Earlier this year, Yelp launched the Asian-owned business attribute, which joined its preexisting women-owned, Black-owned and Latinx-owned attributes. This was a response to increased searches for such businesses: In February 2021, overall searches for women, Asian, Black and Latinx-owned businesses were up 2,930% compared to February of the year prior, according to Yelp’s Local Economic Impact Report. In April, searches for LGBTQ+-owned businesses on Yelp in the U.S. were up by more than 150% compared to April 2020, according to Yelp. Why we care. The LGBTQ-owned attribute can help businesses that identify as such highlight themselves to potential customers, as is the case with most badges or business attributes. The Pride Month map pin is another way to stand out on what might otherwise be a map full of indistinguishable local businesses. Together, these attributes can enable audiences that want to support LGBTQ-owned businesses to more easily find them. As the pandemic subsides across the U.S., consumers may also express pent-demand to travel or patronize businesses that they’ve been reluctant to over the last year or so due to safety concerns. Any way you can distinguish your business to customers seeking to resume pre-pandemic activities may help you make the most out of that pent-up demand. The post Yelp adds the LGBTQ-owned attribute and rainbow-colored map pins for Pride Month appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3hNjWpg How do videos help businesses generate more revenue? Industry data proves that it can! The bottom line is video is increasingly becoming more critical. If you want to get in front of your audience, videos are among the best ways to get attention. According to research:
Here are 5 ways videos can help your business generate more revenue. 1. Tell your story and increase your brandVideos engage your potential clientsVideos are an important way to connect with different audiences. A video can capture your company culture and your products. It can generate interest in your brand and create loyalty.
Videos can help people feel more engaged with your brand. Personalized videos can make a significant impression on your customers. If you know your customer’s interests, you can get them to open your emails and go to your landing pages. Use a Platform Like Movavi to Create and Edit VideosMovavi is an excellent way to organize your videos and edit them all in one place. You can then put these videos on different platforms to connect with audiences. They have an inexpensive annual license to do unlimited videos. Movavi gives you the ability to edit and create videos. You can take video on a camera or from your laptop. Whenever you make a video, it’s crucial to be able to switch between different scenes. You can leverage the stock videos and photos from Storyblocks to create engaging videos. 2. Upgrade your SEO on YouTube and GoogleBoost your reach with the biggest Search Engine sitesVideos are a great way to boost your SEO efforts. If you want to get more traffic through Google, video can help you rise in organic rankings. Because Google owns YouTube, they will put out YouTube videos in their search engine. Videos have a double benefit of showing up on YouTube and through your website.
Customers are still looking at Search Engines to watch videos. A large number of people will directly go on to YouTube or Google looking for content. It’s been increasingly important for businesses to check how they are utilizing videos for boosting their reach. However, just posting videos on YouTube is no longer enough to boost your visibility, you need to be aware of the latest YouTube trends to make sure that your video will be pushed by the platform’s algorithms and won’t get buried right after going live. A side benefit of having videos on your website is that you will start ranking higher for your content. Whenever someone watches a video, it will increase the duration they are on your website. When people stay on your website longer, it will signal to Google that your website is good and rank you higher. By getting in front of more people, it will help your business generate more revenue. You can really catapult growth by offering your audience something in exchange for their email address. It could be something simple like a downloadable PDF, but if you want to take it to the next level, consider building an online course. Not only will this allow you to grow as a thought leader in the eyes of your customer, but it’ll allow you to grow the relationship with the individual who got access. Repurpose content in multiple mediums (organize with Trello)Trello is a project management tool. You can use it to organize your thoughts. I’ve found one of the best ways to use a project management tool is by creating steps on how you want to repurpose your content. You can start with your video. You can get filming done, edited, and posted on YouTube and your website. If you have a blog, you can transcribe the video and create a blog post to create this content in written form. Your blog post can have little snippets that you use for your social media posts. Trello or similar programs can help you organize this process. Steps for organizing your project management system:
Whenever you can organize your production schedule, you will understand where your videos are in production. You can use these videos for your emails, YouTube, blogs, websites, and social media. 3. Enhance your click-through-rate (CTR) in emailWhen you have videos, it helps your overall email campaigns. They can increase your click-through rate and the number of subscribers. It’s an excellent way to engage with your audience.
By creating a lot of videos, you can segment your email list to their interests. You can send videos that are more pertinent to your audience. It will drastically improve your engagement and increase your authority in your niche. Different Email Service Providers (ESPs)The standard email service provider should be able to send broadcast emails and automated emails. Most email providers will require you to take advantage of their automated emails. Look at connecting with your email subscribers with personal videos whenever possible to get the highest conversions. Different Email Service Providers:
An email service provider will allow you to send broadcast emails to your whole email list. If you have a new video explaining your product or service, it can be an excellent way to introduce your new products through video. Sending videos to your email subscribers is a perfect way to get initial feedback about your video and potential sales. 4. Showcase your products and services with videoGet in-depth video reviews and draw your ideal customersWhenever people are coming to some buying decision, they will generally look at reviews. Customers value thoughts from an unbiased source.
People will consume reviews about products and services through multiple channels. Consider having your video videos and also written videos whenever possible. You will be able to target different audiences by offering other content mediums. Getting influencers to review your product or serviceInfluencer marketing is becoming increasingly popular. Influencers already have a large audience they can reach. For a lot of businesses, you can significantly increase your ROI just by investing in influencer marketing. Steps to connect with influencers:
Whenever you connect with influencers, you will need to do some negotiating. If you can get an influencer in your niche to create a video about your product or service, it can build instant credibility to your brand and potential sales. 5. Expand your social media influence with videoBuild more relatable connections with customersSocial Media connect your business with past and potential customers. Whenever you can create a steady stream of videos, you can repurpose this video on different social channels. Overall, videos will boost your engagement, reach, and brand awareness.
Social Media is not going away. People are constantly getting connected through these social media channels. If you can get your business on these social media channels, you can connect with customers and make potential sales. Scheduling your social media postsUsing a tool to schedule your social media posts is a great way to see your overall business marketing strategy. Instead of posting content one at a time, you can plan out how and where people will see your video posts. Social media planner and scheduling tools:
Social media scheduling tools are a great time saver. It helps you stay organized and get your video content out to different people. Each software has different focuses. Various scheduling tools operate in other social media platforms. Consider the extra features you will want for your business. ConclusionVideos are a versatile tool for a business. Your business can look at generating videos and posting them on multiple platforms. They can be repurposed to little tweets and blog articles. If you can expand your reach, it can lead to cementing your brand and boosting revenue. The post 5 ways videos can help businesses generate more revenue appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2Talq2M Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning, Marketers, we saw a lot of announcements from Google out of the Google I/O event this week. Knowing what is real and what is not is hard so be skeptical when you read about a specific announcement having a direct impact on your rankings or site traffic. While there is a lot of MUM (Multitask Unified Model) talk in the SEO world right now. Google said it won’t be live for “months and years.” So if you see colleagues attributing a change to a client’s ranking because of MUM, tell them to take a step back and consider that it might not be MUM, not yet at least. LaMDA is also not yet baked into Google Search. It may come in the future, but your site was not hit by a LaMDA penalty – not yet at least. Same with the page experience update. No, it is not live yet. It will be in about a month. But when it does go live, it won’t be based on your desktop pages yet, that will come later. If you are into commerce, you will want to see the changes Google announced around the Shopping Graph, Shopify integration and Google Lens at I/O. Oh, and if you produce a lot of video, check out the new supported markups available for you to start playing with (one is in beta). Want more I/O? Check out the 9-minute keynote abridged version on YouTube. Barry Schwartz, More Google search ranking algorithm updatesIt seems as if Google has been making more and more ranking and search algorithm updates in the past month than it has generally done over the past year. We just saw an update on Wednesday and Thursday, over the last weekend, on May 13th, also May 7th through 9th, and on May 1st. Danny Sullivan of Google said there has been no confirmed update and often when we report these unconfirmed updates, Googlers are “scratching our heads” about what is going on. But Google does small updates all the time and sites are always updating, so rankings do change, Danny Sullivan said. So was there an update? Well, look at your analytics and see if your organic Google traffic changed without you making any changes to your website. Why we care. Often when it comes to Google updates, having a confirmed update does not matter. It is more about asking did you change something on your end or did Google change something on its end. If you see a lot of site owners complaining about ranking changes in Google Search, then you are likely not alone and it likely is something Google did on its end. New smart bidding features for Google AdsGoogle Ads announced several new smart bidding features the other day. These include top signals in the bid strategy report, seasonality adjustments at the manager account level, Maximize conversion value bidding with recommendations, and new Target Impression Share simulations. The goal is to help make automation more intuitive to search marketers’ needs and better cater to changes in each advertiser’s individual market. Why we care. These feature improvements are part of the incremental advancements Google is working on to make Ads automation more intuitive and user-friendly. They can also be useful for advertisers in different industries — like seasonality adjustments for retail, etc. New video markup from Google SearchGoogle announced two new structured data options for videos at Google I/O this week, including Clip markup and Seek markup. Both of these work with Google’s key moments for videos in the Google search results listings, but Seek markup is still coming soon. Clip markup is a way to manually tell Google about your timestamps in your videos. While Seek markup is more of an automated way to communicate that to Google Search. Why we care. With more videos showing in Google Search, you will want to take efforts to make your videos stand out from the rest. Using Clip or Seek markup can help richen up your video results in Google Search to help improve click-through rates from Google Search to your videos. Google unveils its Shopping Graph, an expanded Shopify integration and more shopping features at I/OGoogle has put a name to something e-commerce brands and advertisers may have suspected already existed: the Shopping Graph. During the official announcement at Google I/O, the company revealed that the Shopping Graph builds on Google’s Knowledge Graph and brings together information from sites, prices, reviews, videos and product data that brands and manufacturers submit either through Merchant Center or Manufacturer Center. For shoppers, the company also announced Lens search for screenshots in the Photos app, cart reminders in Chrome tabs, and the ability to link loyalty programs to their Google accounts. For Shopify merchants, an expanded integration enables retailers to get their product listings to appear organically across Google Search, Shopping, Image search and YouTube in just a few clicks. Search tidbits from Google I/OHTTP/2 crawling. In John Mueller’s Google I/O presentation, he announced that Google is now crawling over 50% of its URLs over HTTP/2, which makes things more efficient for everyone. This is a huge increase from when Google announced this effort less than a year ago. Good metrics for core web vitals. Google said at I/O that they wanted to clarify that you do not need to pass all three core web vital metrics to get the small ranking boost for the page experience update. Google really never said you had to do this but there was confusion around this and Glenn Gabe summed up this news on Twitter. Catch up on I/O. If you missed Google I/O’s keynote, you can watch the 9 minute abridged version over here or the full version if you want on YouTube. AdSense policy updates and best practices. While not at Google I/O, Google has scheduled a webinar on the topic of the digital advertising ecosystem and policy updates with Google’s Chris Jones and Aurora Morales on Trust & Safety at Google. The webinar is on May 25th and you can sign up here. We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.
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