With COVID forcing many retailers online, there are more e-commerce options than ever. Google Search Central recently released new guidelines for developers to help improve search visibility for e-commerce sites. “When you share your e-commerce data and site structure with Google, Google can more easily find and parse your content, which allows your content to show up in Google Search and other Google surfaces. This can help shoppers find your site and products,” Google said in the guide.

The guide has seven pages covering the following topics:

Where content can appear. The guide says that e-commerce content can actually appear in more results than just traditional search. These include Google Search, Images, Lens, the Shopping tab, Google My Business, and Maps. “Product data is the most obvious type of e-commerce related content, but other types of information can also be useful to shoppers at different stages of their shopping journey,” according to the guide. Google recommends promoting content like product reviews, offers, customer service touchpoints and even livestreams.

Adding product data. Structured data can also help your e-commerce products show in Google search properties. The guide recommends the following ways to show Google what your products are:

• Include structured data in your site’s product pages.
• Tell Google directly which products you want to show on Google by uploading a feed to Google Merchant Center.

URL structure for e-commerce sites. “A good URL design structure helps Google crawl and index your site,” says the guide. A poor URL structure can cause confusion, though, resulting in missed content, content that’s retreived more than once, and crawlers thinking your site has infinity pages (and beyond!). The guide includes recommedations for a URL structure that helps search engines better understand your content and pages:

• Minimize the number of alternative URLs that return the same content to avoid Google making more requests to your site than needed.
• If upper and lower case text in a URL is treated the same by the web server, convert all text to the same case so it is easier for Google to determine that the URLs reference the same page.
• Make sure each page in paginated results has a unique URL.
• Add descriptive words in URL paths. The words in URLs may help Google better understand the page.

Make your e-commerce site navigation Google crawler-friendly. Both shoppers and search engines need to be able to easily understand what’s going on with your website and where to find what they’re looking for via navigation. What are navigation best practices for e-commerce? “For example, add links from menus to category pages, from category pages to sub-category pages, and finally from sub-category pages to all product pages.”

Why we care. With many businesses starting e-commerce websites for the first time over the past year or so, this guide can help ensure that they’re following the best practices to get their products seen in the varying search experiences Google provides. It also gives SEOs who focus on e-commerce documentation to show their clients and stakeholders to help get their recommendations implemented for better e-commerce SEO.

The post E-commerce SEO guide: New documentation from Google appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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, do you remember, the 21st night of September?

I associate that Earth, Wind & Fire track with the final days of summer/early days of autumn, when the heat waves get fewer and further between and life seems to settle into a more relaxed pace.

It looks like the weather isn’t the only thing changing, though: In Q1 2021, Expedia Group brought in three times more traffic from paid search on U.S. desktops than Airbnb, Tripadvisor and Booking.com combined, according to a Bernstein report. It also attracted one million more visits from paid search in March of this year than it did in March 2019.

You may recall that Expedia Group once characterized Google as its biggest competitor, and CEO Peter Kern has been open about wanting to reduce the company’s dependence on the search engine. But, travelers responded to the pandemic by seeking out vacations they could drive to, often away from urban areas. Seizing this opportunity, the company focused on markets like the U.S. and poured ad money into promoting Vrbo, its Airbnb competitor. “Vrbo generated 2.1 million display ad visits during the first three months of 2021,” Dennis Schaal wrote for Skift, “double that of sister company Expedia.com, Tripadvisor, Booking.com, and Airbnb combined.”

Diversifying your traffic sources remains important and can help keep your business stable, instead of being at the whim of whatever platform you may be reliant on. However, circumstances can change unexpectedly and when there’s an opportunity on the table, it may make sense to act. Being able to adapt in a timely fashion is critical and search marketers should prioritize that over any single strategy at any given time.

George Nguyen,
Editor

Mozilla tests Bing as the default search engine for 1% of users

Mozilla is conducting an experiment in which 1% of Firefox desktop browsers get set to Bing as the default search engine. The test will run until early 2022 but Mozilla has not disclosed more information, such as why it’s running this experiment or why it’s doing so with Bing.

Last August, Google and Mozilla reached a deal in which the former reportedly paid the browser company between $400 and $450 million per year for the privilege of being Firefox’s default search engine in most regions. It is possible that Mozilla is looking to set up a backup plan for when its contract with Google runs out in 2023.

Why we care. Many SEOs forego Bing optimization in favor of their higher traffic counterpart, but this is another reason to diversify your target search engines. It’s also another reason to potentially invest in Microsoft Advertising. While 1% of users isn’t a lot right now, if the Google deal falls through, having a Bing/Microsoft strategy may be beneficial if Mozilla makes it the default search engine.

Read more here.

Ads proliferate in Amazon search results as ad prices surge

“For consumers looking for toothpaste on Amazon, getting to unpaid results requires two full swipes up on the mobile app,” Annie Palmer wrote for CNBC. The e-commerce platform used to feature two or three sponsored products at the top of its results, but now, there may be as many as six ads that appear above any organic listings — and, there are even more promotions as you scroll down.

Sponsored product ads accounted for about 73% of merchants’ ad spend on Amazon in Q2, according to Merkle. And, the CPC for Amazon search advertising was $1.27 in August, a 47% increase from a year ago, according to a survey of 300 Amazon merchants conducted by Canopy Management. Last year, Marketing Land (now known as MarTech), conducted a survey in which 81% of Amazon advertisers said they planned to increase their ad spend on the platform over the course of 2020 — it looks like that trend won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

Why we care. On Amazon, more ads means less visibility for unpaid listings. This creates a tough environment for merchants that aren’t able to advertise on the platform. The situation only gets worse for sellers in product categories that Amazon has entered, with its “Amazon Basics” line of products, for example.

Higher CPCs also mean that brands with bigger budgets may have an advantage. There are no dedicated ad slots in the search results, an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC, which may be a mixed blessing: more ad slots may make ads less expensive, but they’ll also take up space that might have gone to unpaid results. 

Carousels and publishing anonymously: Not unless you can help it

Brands that arbitrarily publish blog content anonymously, hear me now. When asked how publishers should handle E-A-T best practices when authors don’t want to reveal their real names due to safety concerns, Google’s John Mueller replied that it’s best to add author names where you can. “If you can’t do it for any content, and it’s all basically ‘trust us’, then I don’t know how users are supposed to deal with that,” he added. Safety is number one, but if that’s not your reason for publishing without author bylines, just know that it could hurt your organic visibility.

Should you use a carousel? No, not according to shouldiuseacarousel.com. I hate/like that carousel the information is displayed on is a bit too fast for me to read, which, I suspect, is common for many others as well. Tip of the hat to Myriam Jessier for bringing this to our attention.

Google’s automotive search features disrupt the industry. Google seems to have launched new car-related search features that provide detailed specifications about models, including pricing, sale listings, configurations and so on. “In a lot of cases, OEMs also don’t provide all the data you see so we need to look for other sources to fill the gaps. This manual work results in our data team working year-round to add all this data in a categorized structured format,” Matt Smith, executive director of SEO at Edmunds.com, said on Twitter, adding, “We add all the schema or we won’t get search features or knowledge graph rankings. Google then takes our hard work and shows it however they want… But what are you going to do, lose your snippets?”

What We’re Reading: ‘Outcomes > input’: The hustle culture fallacy

As a child, I once told my father I wanted to be rich. “How?” he asked me — I told him I’d work hard. He disapproved, telling me that I needed to work smarter, not harder. Seemed like generic advice at the time, but with the glorification of “hustle culture,” I can better appreciate the wisdom.

In Rand Fishkin’s blog post for SparkToro, the search industry veteran scrutinized some of the principles that underpin hustle culture, like the belief that anyone can get ahead if they work hard (which downplays socioeconomic privilege) or that those who work hard are simply better.

“The logical move is to either A) work genuinely hard or B) pretend and posture as though I work hard. We can easily rule out C) honestly share that my journey, like most successful entrepreneurs, is 80% luck, 20% talent, maybe less,” Fishkin wrote.

The takeaways are that, if he had slowed down in his earlier years, he probably would’ve still achieved the same level of success, if not surpassed it. And, that there are other factors that contribute to success, like luck — it’s just a lot less flashy to brag about how fortunate you are.

When I was a radio journalist, I worked a lot harder than I do now. But, that career was relatively short (only a few years) because I ultimately burned out and was desperate for something more sustainable. I really think I got lucky with my current role — without my knowledge, a colleague had vouched for me before I had even completed interviews. If you’ve been similarly fortunate, consider paying it forward.

The post Mozilla tests Bing as the default search engine for 1% of users; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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, do you think of yourself as a brand?

“Thinking of ourselves too much as brands can take away from what’s human and real,” wrote Marketoonist creator Tom Fishburne. “If everyone acts too much like a personal brand manager, all communication can start to feel like marketing.”

Promoting yourself on places like LinkedIn or Twitter can help you further your career and open up new opportunities, but, “Communications that ‘feel like marketing’ is something that marketers work to avoid all day, every day, regardless of channel,” Chris Wood, my colleague and editor at MarTech, added.

“There’s a line between personal branding and self-promotion,” Fishburne said. “I think it’s less about what you say about yourself and more about what you do.” In a space where so many organizations and professionals rush to share their messaging about the latest industry news or current affairs, I can only recall two groups: the ones that totally botched their responses and the ones that actually went out there and did something.

If you’re interested in promoting yourself or your business and learning more ways to successfully engage on LinkedIn, Darryl Praill, CRO at VanillaSoft, will be leading a session on exactly that at our MarTech Conference, kicking off tomorrow at 11am ET. You can register for free for that session and much more, including sessions on marketing in the search-first era and proven methods for improving onsite search effectiveness.

George Nguyen,
Editor

Messy SEO Part 2: The importance of canonicalization

What do you do when you’ve merged two sites only to find that there are now a large number of canonical URLs pointing to now-non-existent pages? They don’t directly affect users like redirects do, which was what Corey Patterson, content and SEO manager for MarTech and Search Engine Land, covered in the first installment of our Messy SEO series. However, Google and other search engines rely on them to ensure that search results are up to date and meet users’ needs.

In the case of Marketing Land and MarTech Today, which we merged into MarTech.org back in May, Corey analyzed the URLs on each page via the Yoast SEO plugin and replaced the canonical URLs with the newly consolidated MarTech.org URL.

“​​This leaves many URLs out there, both in the SERPS and on the MarTech site itself,” Corey wrote, “Fortunately, the Third Door Media [our parent company] team already put in redirects from these domains to the new MarTech site, sending a pretty strong signal to search engines. But, with a domain as large as ours, it’s taken months for the index to cull the old URLs.”

Read more here. 

Microsoft Advertising is switching to a new feedback platform

Beginning in October, Microsoft Advertising will move to a new first-party feedback platform, the company announced Monday. Microsoft Advertising also plans to bring over existing feedback, status and votes from UserVoice, the platform it’s currently using, as part of the transition.

In addition to allowing advertisers to share their feedback and vote on feedback from other users, “This new feedback platform will enable [Microsoft Advertising] to listen and act on customer feedback in new and exciting ways,” Juan Carlos Ousset and Aaron Lauper wrote, although they didn’t provide any examples of what these “new and exciting ways” might be. Advertisers can still submit feedback via the existing platform until September 30, and all feedback will be migrated over.

Why we care. Feedback matters — that’s how Google knew that advertisers weren’t thrilled when it limited search terms reporting, and that led to the recent addition of more query data for impressions without clicks. The search marketing community on Twitter is often generous with its feedback, but (as many of you have probably experienced yourselves), screenshotting a social media post and putting it into a report for your client or boss may not be as effective as feedback submitted through proper channels.

Featured snippets links, cover songs and worthy causes

Google is testing links in featured snippets (again). In November, Google was spotted testing contextual links in featured snippets and many SEOs were keen to highlight the new opportunities and risks that came with this potential change. Now, Google is at it again, but Brodie Clark, who first brought this to our attention, has said that, this time around, the links all go to Wikipedia or an internal page. If this is closer to the final version — if there even is a rollout, that is — publishers may have less to worry about, since the links won’t be going to competitors (unless you count Wikipedia as a competitor).

The Beatles x Google Ads. ETA, we are sad to see you go away… Kirk Williams busts out his guitar for a PPC-centric rendition of Yesterday. Kirk, if you’re reading this, we need the full version of the song.

Celebrate your colleagues and diversity and inclusion in marketing. As a person of color, I can’t tell you how much it means to me to feel welcomed in the search industry, but sadly, not everyone is met with that experience. That’s why I’m so proud to announce our second annual Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing. Last year, Women in Tech SEO founder Areej AbuAli earned the accolade for her inspiring contributions to the industry. This time around, she’s a guest judge. There are a lot of advocates and organizations that deserve to be recognized for their allyship — if you know one, recognize them by submitting a nomination.

What We’re Reading: California’s challenge to Amazon’s labor algorithms carries potential ramifications for merchants

Last week, the California Senate approved AB 701, a bill that “would block Amazon and other companies from punishing warehouse workers who fail to meet certain performance metrics for taking rest or meal breaks,” Makena Kelly wrote for The Verge.

With numerous outlets reporting that warehouse employees are known to skip bathroom breaks in order to meet performance quotas, Amazon’s labor practices have been under intense scrutiny over the last few years. But, the bill doesn’t just affect Amazon, in fact, it doesn’t even explicitly name the company; however, “both Republican and Democratic lawmakers recognize that the e-commerce giant would be greatly affected by the enactment of the legislation,” Kelly wrote.

For businesses that use Fulfillment by Amazon, that may eventually mean a slower fulfillment process in California. If similar bills get passed in more states, the online retailer may have to rethink its labor practices on a larger scale. That’s potentially bad news for merchants that are reliant on Amazon, but Amazon isn’t the only platform out there — the new legislation could skew the math as retailers weigh their options, assessing not only fulfillment times but also seller fees, user bases and so on.

If signed into law, the bill would also force companies to be more transparent with their performance algorithms, revealing the quotas to regulators as well as employees, which should be…enlightening. Last Wednesday, after getting approved by the California Senate, AB 701 was sent back to the assembly for minor changes before it will be sent to Governor Gavin Newsom, who hasn’t signaled whether he’ll sign the bill.

The post Your communications shouldn’t feel like marketing; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.