Jul 5 2024
Organic SEO Strategy Guide: How To Boost Search Visibility & Drive Growth via @sejournal, @idigitalinear

This post was sponsored by Digitalinear. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

In a world where consumers search online for nearly everything – from product recommendations to local service providers – your brand’s digital presence is everything.

The right organic SEO strategy can boost your search visibility and drive sustainable business growth.

SEO is becoming increasingly complex with sweeping algorithm changes, intense competition, and the recent flood of AI-generated content.

So how can you navigate these challenges to enhance your site’s visibility and raise brand awareness?

Here, we’ll break down a strategic approach to organic SEO, focusing on building a solid foundation and continuously optimizing and analyzing performance.

Step One: Web Inspection

The first step to address is the core user experience of your website.

SEO strategies should always begin with the end user, how you solve their problems, and how you communicate your value to them.

If your website is a new obstacle to them, they’ll find solutions elsewhere. So, your first job is to clarify your intended user experience and make it seamless. This will take both audience research and technical optimization.

The audience research portion of inspecting your website should include:

  • Identify Success Metrics and Conversion Points: Your website must do its job well. You need a clear understanding of what you want users to do, which target audiences are likely to take those actions, what questions and pain points those users have, and how you can address them. Much of that strategy work comes later in the process, but for now, you need a clear view of your goals and intended user journeys. This will help you prioritize the most impactful technical fixes.
  • Assess Content Coverage and Quality: High-quality, relevant content is crucial for engaging users and ranking well in search results. Moreover, you need content that addresses the real needs of your target audiences at multiple stages of their journey. Understanding users’ needs and questions is critical to their experience and to lead them toward desired actions. Conduct a content audit to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement: identify low-engagement pages and analyze competitors to see what content you’re missing.

A comprehensive technical website audit should include:

  • Technical SEO: Ensure your site is technically sound by checking for issues like broken links, duplicate content, and proper use of meta tags. Many tools can assist with this, but individual tools may not provide a complete view. You may need to combine reports from multiple different tools.
  • Site Speed and Core Web Vitals: Slow-loading websites can deter visitors and negatively affect search rankings. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify speed issues.
  • Mobile-Friendliness: Google uses mobile-first indexing. This means that mobile-friendliness isn’t only important for mobile users. Your website’s indexing and ranking depend on its mobile performance, no matter what device is being used to view it. The content of your pages should be the same and provide the same experience between desktop and mobile. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can help you assess your site’s performance on mobile devices. If you want to lean into mobile trends, then mobile app development allows you to provide mobile users with unique, seamless experiences.
  • User Experience (UX): A positive user experience encourages visitors to stay on your site longer, reducing bounce rates and improving SEO. Evaluate your site’s navigation, layout, and overall usability, keeping your success metrics and conversion points in mind. Users should be able to find the next steps quickly.

A full website audit is both technical and strategic. Sometimes, you need an external perspective to accurately identify the UX and communication issues you might be encountering. This is where an SEO agency can provide the perspective, research, and dedicated resources a website needs for long-term success.

Digitalinear specializes in organic SEO, and packages begin with deep research into your business and niche alongside technical audits.

With a team of dedicated SEO professionals, Digitalinear performs a thorough website inspection using the best tools available, ensuring no stone is left unturned in your audit.

Step Two: Deep Optimization

Once you’ve identified the areas of your site that need improvement, the next step is to optimize.

Optimizing your website ensures that it meets search engines’ technical requirements while providing a seamless and engaging user experience.

This is where you should get into the fine details of keyword research and query intent matching, ensuring that your SEO goals align with the business goals of your website that you identified in step one.

Top rankings for keywords won’t have a business impact if you haven’t matched them to your core audience. Traffic won’t result in signups or sales if you’re not effectively engaging those users.

Research is one area where an SEO consultancy can be particularly helpful in providing objective competitor and industry analysis.

Here are some key research elements for optimization:

  • Keyword Research: Identify the most relevant and high-performing keywords for your industry. Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to find keywords that your target audience is searching for.
  • Content Optimization: Intent has been a big deal in SEO lately, and you must optimize for it as well as keywords. Matching your content to users’ needs and intents is where all your research will pay off in engagement, retention, and conversion. Use keywords naturally and ensure your content answers your audience’s questions and needs. Ensure you have wide and deep coverage of relevant topics demonstrating your unique expertise. Build strong networks of internal links to help users and search engines navigate and parse your content.

Key optimization techniques that lead to higher search rankings include:

  • On-Page SEO: This broad category includes content-focused and technical implementations to make individual pages shine. Your research and analysis thus far should culminate in a page with exceptional user experience. The elements load quickly and provide a consistent experience. The content demonstrates your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). You implement keywords, metadata, and linking effectively.
  • Link Building: Build high-quality backlinks to your site from reputable sources. This can help improve your site’s authority and search rankings. Creating content people share and want to link to is the first step. Then, you can actively seek links through many outreach strategies, such as digital PR, email, and social channels.

A full optimization process is a ton of work. Digitalinear is an SEO agency with services designed to simplify your process.

Their expert team uses advanced tools and techniques to ensure your site is fully optimized for search engines and users alike.

Additionally, Digitalinear provides web design and development solutions to enhance user interface and overall experience.

Step Three: Analyze Growth

After optimizing your website, it’s important to continuously analyze its performance to refine and improve your strategies over time.

This involves monitoring key metrics to evaluate the success of your SEO efforts and make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.

By regularly analyzing your growth, you can better understand what’s working and what’s not.

Here are some key SEO metrics to monitor:

  • Organic Traffic: Track the number of visitors coming to your site through organic search.
  • Engagement Rate: Monitor the percentage of visitors who do not engage with content.
  • Keyword Rankings: Keep an eye on how your targeted keywords are ranking over time.
  • Conversion Rates: Measure the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, etc.
  • Backlink Profile: Analyze the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to your site.

Digitalinear offers ongoing SEO consultancy. They can help you select the best metrics for your business goals and track and analyze them.

Their expertise ensures you make informed decisions that lead to tangible results, helping you drive continuous growth and stay ahead of the competition.

Start Meeting & Exceeding Your Growth Goals With Digitalinear

To navigate the complexities of SEO and achieve your growth goals, it’s essential to have a strategic partner that takes the time to understand your business, where you are now and where you want to be.

This involves a holistic approach to organic SEO through comprehensive site audits, deep optimization techniques, and continuous performance analysis. The audience research and testing involved are ongoing processes of learning.

Digitalinear offers expert guidance and tailored SEO solutions to help you enhance your online presence and drive sustainable growth.

With a team of professionals dedicated to exceeding your business objectives, they ensure that every SEO strategy is optimized for success.

Learn more about how Digitalinear’s tailored SEO services can make a difference for your business.

LEARN MORE

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Digitalinear. Used with permission.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jun 25 2024
Data-Driven Content Strategy: Boost Google Rankings With Real Audience Insights via @sejournal, @CallRail

Now, what about the content of the actual calls? Well, you can use that, too.

Let dive into how you can use call analysis to further inform your strategy.

How To Analyze Your Call Data

The insights you collect from customer phone interactions can have a game-changing impact on your business.

But you want to make sure the effort required to dig into those calls is worth it for your team.

This is where AI and machine learning technology can be utilized effectively to streamline your process and save time.

For example, Conversation Intelligence is an AI-powered tool by CallRail that constantly records, transcribes, and analyzes each inbound and outbound call.

With transcriptions that have near-human level accuracy, Conversation Intelligence goes a step further by spotting keywords, tagging calls automatically, and qualifying leads with powerful automation rules.

Plus, with multi-conversation insights, you can easily transform countless conversations into actionable insights at scale.

Not only does this analysis unlock deeper insights to help you catch customer trends and spot long-term shifts, but it also tells you what you should focus on in your content.

2. Website Form Submissions

Another effective way to gather essential audience insights is through website form tracking.

Online forms allow you to collect valuable data directly from users, such as their contact information, preferences, and interests.

When this data is paired with deeper analytics, you can gain a clear understanding of what drives the most qualified leads for your business.

With Form Tracking, you can find out exactly which ad or keyword made someone click “submit” on your form.

Launched last year by CallRail, this tool allows you to build custom forms or integrate existing ones, pairing the data with inbound call conversions for a holistic view of your marketing efforts.

Combining Call Tracking And Form Tracking

Leads often connect with businesses through multiple channels, so focusing on just one source isn’t really enough.

By using Call Tracking and Form Tracking together, you get a comprehensive overview of your leads’ entire customer journey.

Both of these tools essentially work by installing a single line of JavaScript code on your site, which captures and relays information about each of your leads back to CallRail.

You can easily evaluate the various campaigns that you’re running, like paid ads, social media posts, email nurture campaigns, etc. – all of which could be opportunities to incorporate tracking numbers and links to your forms.

Using both a tracking number and a form tracking link gives your leads the option to choose how they prefer to contact your business.

And as they reach out, you’ll be able to measure which campaigns and which conversion type – calls or forms – is getting the best results.

3. Customer Feedback & Surveys

If you really want a deep dive into the minds of your customers, surveys are an incredibly effective way to get feedback directly from the source.

Surveys allow you to ask your users targeted questions and receive precise answers about their preferences, pain points, and expectations.

You can then leverage this comprehensive data to guide your marketing strategy and fill any content gaps you may have.

Discover the type of content your customers prefer, the topics they are most interested in, and how they like to consume information.

Once they point out areas where they feel your content is lacking or what they would like to see more of, you can then fill the gaps in your strategy to give them what they want.

Integrating Customer Feedback Into Your Content

Understanding your audience can help you tailor your content to better meet their needs and preferences.

Here are some tips for how you can effectively integrate customer feedback into your content creation process:

  • Create a Feedback Loop: Ask your audience to rate the usefulness, quality, and relevance of your content to gain a clear picture of where you can improve. Then establish a system where their feedback continuously informs your content. Regularly conduct surveys and update your strategy based on the latest insights.
  • Prioritize High-Impact Content: Identify the topics and formats that resonate most with your audience and prioritize them in your content calendar. For example, if customers indicate a preference for video tutorials over written guides, focus more on creating video content. This ensures that you’re always aligned with what your audience finds most valuable.
  • Test and Iterate: After publishing content based on customer feedback, monitor its performance to see if it meets the intended goals. Use analytics to track engagement, shares, and other metrics. Be prepared to refine your content based on ongoing feedback and performance data.
  • Communicate Changes: Let your audience know that their feedback has been heard and implemented. This not only builds trust but also encourages more customers to participate in future surveys.

Unlock Higher Search Rankings With CallRail’s Data Solutions

Google is constantly changing its algorithms to produce higher quality search results for users, which presents numerous challenges for marketers and website owners.

Between the upcoming phase-out of third-party cookies and the recent core update, the search engine is cracking down heavily on content it deems as unhelpful.

That’s why it’s time to take a user-first approach to your content strategy.

By leveraging first- and zero-party data through methods like call tracking, form submissions, and customer surveys, you can create high-quality, relevant content that meets your audience’s needs and boosts your Google rankings.

CallRail’s suite of tools makes it easier to gather and analyze this data, helping you refine your marketing strategy and drive sustainable growth.

Ready to see the impact for yourself?

Try CallRail free for 14 days and start transforming your data into actionable strategies for higher ranking content.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jun 18 2024
How To Reduce Wasted Ad Budget: The Hidden Cost of Close Variants

This post was sponsored by Adpulse. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

As managers of paid media, one question drives us all: “How do I improve paid ad performance?”. 

Given that our study found close variant search terms perform poorly, yet more than half of the average budget on Google & Microsoft Ads is being spent on them, managing their impact effectively could well be one of your largest optimization levers toward driving significant improvements in ROI. 

“Close variants help you connect with people who are looking for your business, despite slight variations in the way they search.” support.google.com

Promising idea…but what about the execution?

We analyzed over 4.5 million clicks and 400,000 conversions to answer this question: With the rise in close variants (intent matching) search terms, what impact are they having on budgets and account performance? Spoiler alert, the impact is substantial. 

True Match Vs. Close Variants: How Do They Perform?

To understand close variant (CV) performance, we must first define the difference between a true match and a close variant. 

What Is a True Match? 

We still remember the good-old-days where keyword match types gave you control over the search terms they triggered, so for this study we used the literal match types to define ‘close variant’ vs ‘true match’. 

  • Exact match keyword => search term matches the keyword exactly. 
  • Phrase match keyword => search term must contain the keyword (same word order).
  • Broad match keyword => search term must contain every individual word in the keyword, but the word order does not matter (the way modified broad match keywords used to work).   

What Is a Close Variant? 

If you’re not familiar with close variants (intent matching) search terms, think of them as search terms that are ‘fuzzy matched’ to the keywords you are actually bidding on. 

Some of these close variants are highly relevant and represent a real opportunity to expand your keywords in a positive way. 

Some are close-ish, but the conversions are expensive. 

And (no shocks here) some are truly wasteful. 

….Both Google and Microsoft Ads do this, and you can’t opt-out.

To give an example: if you were a music therapist, you might bid on the phrase match keyword “music therapist”. An example of a true match search term would be ‘music therapist near me’ because it contains the keyword in its true form (phrase match in this case) and a CV might be ‘music and art therapy’.

How Do Close Variants Compare to True Match?

Short answer… poorly, on both Google and Microsoft Ads. Interestingly however, Google showed the worst performance on both metrics assessed, CPA and ROAS. 

Image created by Adpulse, May 2024

Image created by Adpulse, May 2024

Want to see the data – jump to it here…

CVs have been embraced by both platforms with (as earlier stated), on average more than half of your budget being spent on CV variant matches. That’s a lot of expansion to reach searches you’re not directly bidding for, so it’s clearly a major driver of performance in your account and, therefore, deserving of your attention. 

We anticipated a difference in metrics between CVs and true match search terms, since the true match search terms directly align with the keywords you’re bidding on, derived from your intimate knowledge of the business offering. 

True match conversions should therefore be the low-hanging fruit, leaving the rest for the platforms to find via CVs. Depending on the cost and ROI, this isn’t inherently bad, but logically we would assume CVs would perform worse than true matches, which is exactly what we observed. 

How Can You Limit Wastage on Close Variants?

You can’t opt out of them, however, if your goal is to manage their impact on performance, you can use these three steps to move the needle in the right direction. And of course, if you’re relying on CVs to boost volume, you’ll need to take more of a ‘quality-screening’ rather than a hard-line ‘everything-must-go’ approach to your CV clean out!

Step 1: Diagnose Your CV Problem 

We’re a helpful bunch at Adpulse so while we were scoping our in-app solution, we built a simple spreadsheet that you can use to diagnose how healthy your CVs are. Just make a copy, paste in your keyword and search term data then run the analysis for yourself. Then you can start to clean up any wayward CVs identified. Of course, by virtue of technology, it’s both faster and more advanced in the Adpulse Close Variant Manager 😉.

Step 2: Suggested Campaign Structures for Easier CV Management  

Brand Campaigns

If you don’t want competitors or general searches being matched to your brand keywords, this strategy will solve for that. 

Set up one ad group with your exact brand keyword/s, and another ad group with phrase brand keyword/s, then employ the negative keyword strategies in Step 3 below. You might be surprised at how many CVs have nothing to do with your brand, and identifying variants (and adding negative keywords) becomes easy with this structure.

Don’t forget to add your phrase match brand negatives to non-brand campaigns (we love negative lists for this).

Non-Brand Campaigns with Larger Budgets

We suggest a campaign structure with one ad group per match type:

Example Ad Groups:

    • General Plumbers – Exact
    • General Plumbers – Phrase
    • General Plumbers – Broad
    • Emergency Plumbers – Exact
    • Emergency Plumbers – Phrase
    • Emergency Plumbers – Broad

This allows you to more easily identify variants so you can eliminate them quickly. This also allows you to find new keyword themes based on good quality CVs, and add them easily to the campaign. 

Non-Brand Campaigns with Smaller Budgets

Smaller budgets mean the upside of having more data per ad group outweighs the upside of making it easier to trim unwanted CVs, so go for a simpler theme-based ad group structure:

Example Ad Groups:

    • General Plumbers
    • Emergency Plumbers

Step 3: Ongoing Actions to Tame Close Variants

Adding great CVs as keywords and poor CVs as negatives on a regular basis is the only way to control their impact.

For exact match ad groups we suggest adding mainly root negative keywords. For example, if you were bidding on [buy mens walking shoes] and a CV appeared for ‘mens joggers’, you could add the single word “joggers” as a phrase/broad match negative keyword, which would prevent all future searches that contain joggers. If you added mens joggers as a negative keyword, other searches that contain the word joggers would still be eligible to trigger. 

In ad groups that contain phrase or broad match keywords you shouldn’t use root negatives unless you’re REALLY sure that the root negative should never appear in any search term. You’ll probably find that you use the whole search term added as an exact match negative much more often than using root negs.

The Proof: What (and Why) We Analyzed

We know CVs are part of the conversations marketers frequently have, and by virtue of the number of conversations we have with agencies each week, we’ve witnessed the increase of CV driven frustration amongst marketers. 

Internally we reached a tipping point and decided to data dive to see if it just felt like a large problem, or if it actually IS a large enough problem that we should devote resources to solving it in-app. First stop…data. 

Our study of CV performance started with thousands of Google and Microsoft Ads accounts, using last 30-day data to May 2024, filtered to exclude:

  • Shopping or DSA campaigns/Ad Groups.
  • Accounts with less than 10 conversions.
  • Accounts with a conversion rate above 50%.
  • For ROAS comparisons, any accounts with a ROAS below 200% or above 2500%.

Search terms in the study are therefore from keyword-based search campaigns where those accounts appear to have a reliable conversion tracking setup and have enough conversion data to be individually meaningful.

The cleaned data set comprised over 4.5 million clicks and 400,000 conversions (over 30 days) across Google and Microsoft Ads; a large enough data set to answer questions about CV performance with confidence.

Interestingly, each platform appears to have a different driver for their lower CV performance. 

CPA Results:

Google Ads was able to maintain its conversion rate, but it chased more expensive clicks to achieve it…in fact, clicks at almost double the average CPC of true match! Result: their CPA of CVs worked out roughly double the CPA of true match.                 

Microsoft Ads only saw slightly poorer CPA performance within CVs; their conversion rate was much lower compared to true match, but their saving grace was that they had significantly lower CPCs, and you can afford to have a lower conversion rate if your click costs are also lower. End outcome? Microsoft Ads CPA on CVs was only slightly more expensive when compared to their CPA on true matches; a pleasant surprise 🙂.

Image created by Adpulse, May 2024

ROAS Results:

Both platforms showed a similar story; CVs delivered roughly half the ROAS of their true match cousins, with Microsoft Ads again being stronger overall. 

 

Image created by Adpulse, May 2024

Underlying Data:

For the data nerds amongst us (at Adpulse we self-identify here ✋!) 

Image created by Adpulse, May 2024

TL;DR

Close variant search terms consume, on average, more than half an advertiser’s budget whilst in most cases, performing significantly worse than search terms that actually match the keywords. How much worse? Read above for details ^. Enough that managing their impact effectively could well be one of your largest optimization levers toward driving significant improvements in account ROI. 

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Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Adpulse. Used with permission.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jun 11 2024
6 Local SEO Full-Guides That Help You Rank For Your Business Type

The elusive five-star review used to be something you could only flaunt in a rotating reviews section on your website.

But today, Google has pulled these stars out of the shadows and features them front and center across branded SERPs and beyond.

Star ratings can help businesses earn trust from potential customers, improve local search rankings, and boost conversions.

This is your guide to how they work.

Stars And SERPs: What Is The Google Star Rating?

A Google star rating is a consumer-powered grading system that lets other consumers know how good a business is based on a score of one to five stars.

These star ratings can appear across maps and different Google search results properties like standard blue link search listings, ads, rich results like recipe cards, local pack results, third-party review sites, and on-app store results.

How Does The Google Star Rating Work?

When a person searches Google, they will see star ratings in the results. Google uses an algorithm and an average to determine how many stars are displayed on different review properties.

Google explains that the star score system operates based on an average of all review ratings for that business that have been published on Google.

It’s important to note that this average is not calculated in real-time and can take up to two weeks to update after a new review is created.

When users leave a review, they are asked to rate a business based on specific aspects of their customer experience, as well as the type of business being reviewed and the services they’ve included.

For example, “plumbers may get “Install faucet” or “Repair toilet” as services to add,” and Google also allows businesses to add custom services that aren’t listed.

When customers are prompted to give feedback, they can give positive or critical feedback, or they can choose not to select a specific aspect to review, in which case this feedback aspect is considered unavailable.

This combination of feedback is what Google uses to determine a business’s average score by “dividing the number of positive ratings by the total number of ratings (except the ones where the aspect was not rated).”

Google star ratings do have some exceptions in how they function.

For example, the UK and EU have certain restrictions that don’t apply to other regions, following recent scrutiny by the EU Consumer Protection Cooperation and the UK Competitions and Market Authority about fake reviews being generated.

Additionally, the type of rating search property will determine the specifics of how it operates and how to gather and manage reviews there.

Keep reading to get an in-depth explanation of each type of Google star rating available on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

How To Get Google Star Ratings On Different Search Properties

As mentioned above, there are different types of Google star ratings available across search results, including the standard blue-link listings, ads, local pack results, rich snippets, third-party reviews, and app store results.

Here’s what the different types of star-rating results look like in Google and how they work on each listing type.

Standard “Blue Link” Listings And Google Stars

In 2021, Google started testing star ratings in organic search and has since kept this SERP feature intact.

Websites can stand out from their competitors by getting stars to show up around their organic search results listing pages.

Text result showing google star ratings in the SERPsScreenshot from SERPs, Google, February 2024

How To Get Google Stars On Organic SERPs

If you want stars to show up on your organic search results, add schema markup to your website.

Learn how to do that in the video below:

As the video points out, you need actual reviews to get your structured data markup to show.

Then, you can work with your development team to input the code on your site that indicates your average rating, highest, lowest, and total rating count.

structured markup example for google star ratings and reviewsScreenshot JSON-LD script on Google Developers, August 2021

Once you add the rich snippet to your site, there is no clear timeline for when they will start appearing in the SERPs – that’s up to Google.

In fact, Google specifically mentions that reviews in properties like search can take longer to appear, and often, this delay is caused by business profiles being merged.

When you’re done, you can check your work with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Adding schema is strongly encouraged. But even without it, if you own a retail store with ratings, Google may still show your star ratings in the search engine results.

They do this to ensure searchers are getting access to a variety of results. Google says:

“content on your website that’s been crawled and is related to retail may also be shown in product listings and annotations for free across Google.”

If you want star ratings to show up on Shopping Ads, you’ll have to pay for that.

Paid Ads And Google Stars

When Google Stars appear in paid search ads, they’re known as seller ratings, “an automated extension type that showcases advertisers with high ratings.”

These can appear in text ads, shopping ads, and free listings. Both the star rating and the total number of votes or reviews are displayed.

In addition to Google star ratings, shopping ads may include additional production information such as shipping details, color, material, and more, as shown below.

Google shopping ads showing star ratingsScreenshot from SERPs ads, Google, February 2024

Paid text ads were previously labeled as “ads” and recently have been upgraded to a “sponsored” label, as shown below.

paid ad showing google star ratingsScreenshot from SERPs ads, Google, February 2024

How To Get Google Stars On Paid Ads

To participate in free listings, sellers have to do three things:

  • Follow all the required policies around personally identifiable information, spam, malware, legal requirements, return policies, and more.
  • Submit a feed through the Google Merchant Center or have structured data markup on their website (as described in the previous section).
  • Add their shipping settings.

Again, some ecommerce sellers who do not have schema markup may still have their content show up in the SERPs.

For text ads and shopping ads to show star ratings, sellers are typically required to have at least 100 reviews in the last 12 months.

Paid advertisers must also meet a minimum number of stars for seller ratings to appear on their text ads. This helps higher-quality advertisers stand out from the competition.

For example, text ads have to have a minimum rating of 3.5 for the Google star ratings to show.

Google treats reviews on a per-country basis, so the minimum review threshold of 100 also applies only to 1 region at a time.

For star ratings to appear on a Canadian ecommerce company’s ads, for example, they would have to have obtained a minimum of 100 reviews from within Canada in the last year.

Google considers reviews from its own Google Customer Reviews and also from approved third-party partner review sites from its list of 29 supported review partners, which makes it easier for sellers to meet the minimum review threshold each year.

Google also requests:

  • The domain that has ratings must be the same as the one that’s visible in the ad.
  • Google or its partners must conduct a research evaluation of your site.
  • The reviews included must be about the product or service being sold.

Local Pack Results And Google Stars

Local businesses have a handful of options for their business to appear on Google via Places, local map results, and a Google Business Profile page – all of which can show star ratings.

Consumers even have the option to sort local pack results by their rating, as shown in the image example below.

Google star ratings on search resultsScreenshot from SERPs local pack, Google, February 2024

How To Get Google Stars On Local Search Results

To appear in local search results, a Google Business Profile is required.

Customers may leave reviews directly on local business properties without being asked, but Google also encourages business owners to solicit reviews from their customers and shares best practices, including:

  • Asking your customers to leave you a review and make it easy for them to do so by providing a link to your review pages.
  • Making review prompts desktop and mobile-friendly.
  • Replying to customer reviews (ensure you’re a verified provider on Google first).
  • Be sure you do not offer incentives for reviews.

Customers can also leave star ratings on other local review sites, as Google can pull from both to display on local business search properties. It can take up to two weeks to get new local reviews to show in your overall score.

Once customers are actively leaving reviews, Google Business Profile owners have a number of options to help them manage these:

options to manage review on google business profileScreenshot from Google Business Profile Help, Google, February 2024

Rich Results, Like Recipes, And Google Stars

Everybody’s gotta eat, and we celebrate food in many ways — one of which is recipe blogs.

While restaurants rely more on local reviews, organic search results, and even paid ads, food bloggers seek to have their recipes rated.

Similar to other types of reviews, recipe cards in search results show the average review rating and the total number of reviews.

recipe search results on desktopScreenshot from search for [best vegan winter recipes], Google, February 2024

The outcome has become a point of contention among the food blogging community, since only three recipes per search can be seen on Google desktop results (like shown in the image above), and four on a mobile browser.

These coveted spots will attract clicks, leaving anyone who hasn’t mastered online customer reviews in the dust. That means that the quality of the recipe isn’t necessarily driving these results.

Google gives users the option to click “Show more” to see two additional rows of results:

expanded desktop recipe search resultsScreenshot from SERPs, Google, February 2024

Searchers can continue to click the “Show more” button to see additional recipe results.

Anyone using Google Home can search for a recipe and get results through their phone:

Google assistant recipesScreenshot from Elfsight, February 2024

Similarly, recipe search results can be sent from the device to the Google Home assistant. Both methods will enable easy and interactive step-by-step recipe instructions using commands like “start recipe,” “next step,” or even “how much olive oil?”

How To Get Google Stars On Recipe Results

Similar to the steps to have stars appear on organic blue-link listings, food bloggers and recipe websites need to add schema to their websites in order for star ratings to show.

However, it’s not as straightforward as listing the average and the total number of ratings. Developers should follow Google’s instructions for recipe markup.

There is both required and recommended markup:

Required Markup For Recipes

  • Name of the recipe.
  • Image of the recipe in a BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, or SVG format.

Recommended Markup For Recipes

  • Aggregate rating.
  • Author.
  • Cook time, preparation time, and total duration.
  • Date published.
  • Description.
  • Keywords.
  • Nutrition information.
  • Prep time.
  • Recipe category by meal type, like “dinner.”
  • Region associated with the recipe.
  • Ingredients.
  • Instructions.
  • Yield or total serving.
  • Total time.
  • Video (and other related markup, if there is a video in the recipe).

To have recipes included in Google Assistant Guided Recipes, the following markup must be included:

  • recipeIngredient
  • recipeInstructions
  • To have the video property, add the contentUrl.

For example, here’s what the structured markup would look like for the recipeIngredient property:

example of structured markup for recipe steps in Google AssistantScreenshot from Google Developer, February 2024

Third-Party Review Sites And Google Stars

Many software companies rely on third-party review sites to help inform their customer’s purchasing decisions.

Third-party review sites include any website a brand doesn’t own where a customer can submit a review, such as Yelp, G2, and many more.

Many of these sites, like Featured Customers shown below, can display star ratings within Google search results.

Example of star ratings showing in SERPs from third-party review sitesScreenshot from SERPs listing of a review site, Google, February 2024

Rich snippets from third-party reviews, such as stars, summary info, or ratings, can also appear on a Google Business Profile or map view from approved sites.

For local businesses, Google star ratings appear in different locations than the third-party reviews on a desktop:

third party reviews and google stars on desktop resultsScreenshot from SERPs listing of a review site, Google, February 2024

On mobile, ratings are displayed on a company’s Google Business Profile. Users need to click on Reviews or scroll down to see the third-party reviews:

third party reviews in local mobile resultsScreenshot from SERPs listing of a review site, Google, February 2024

On a map, the results from third parties may be more prominent, like the Tripadvisor review that shows up for a map search of The Hilton in Vancouver (although it does not display a star rating even though Tripadvisor does provide star ratings):

third party reviews in map resultsScreenshot from SERPs listing of a review site, Google, February 2024

How To Get Google Stars On Third-Party Review Sites

The best way to get a review on a third-party review site depends on which site is best for the brand or the business.

For example, if you have active customers on Yelp or Tripadvisor, you may choose to engage with customers there.

third-party reviews in search resultsScreenshot from SERPs listing of a review site, Google, February 2024

Similarly, if a software review site like Trustpilot shows up for your branded search, you could do an email campaign with your customer list asking them to leave you a review there.

Here are a few of the third-party review websites that Google recognizes:

  • Trustpilot.
  • Reevoo.
  • Bizrate – through Shopzilla.

When it comes to third-party reviews, Google reminds businesses that there is no way to opt out of third-party reviews, and they need to take up any issues with third-party site owners.

App Store Results And Google Stars

When businesses have an application as their core product, they typically rely on App Store and Google Play Store downloads.

Right from the SERPs, searchers can see an app’s star ratings, as well as the total votes and other important information, like whether the app is free or not.

App store reviews in search resultsScreenshot from SERP play store results, Google, February 2024

How To Get Google Stars On App Store Results

Businesses can list their iOS apps in the App Store or on the Google Play store, prompt customers to leave reviews there, and also respond to them.

Does The Google Star Rating Influence SEO Rankings?

John Mueller confirmed that Google does not factor star ratings or customer reviews into web search rankings. However, Google is clear that star ratings influence local search results and rankings:

“Google review count and review score factor into local search ranking. More reviews and positive ratings can improve your business’ local ranking.”

Even though they are not a ranking factor for non-local organic search, star ratings can serve as an important conversion element, helping you display social proof, build credibility, and increase your click-through rate from search engines (which may indirectly impact your search rankings).

For local businesses, both Google stars and third-party ratings appear in desktop and mobile searches, as seen above.

These ratings not only help local businesses rank above their competitors for key phrases, but they will also help convince more customers to click, which is every company’s search game.

How Do I Improve My Star Rating?

Businesses that want to improve their Google star rating should start by claiming their Google Business Profile and making sure all the information is complete and up to date.

If a company has already taken these steps and wants to offset a poor rating, they are going to need more reviews to offset the average.

Companies can get more Google reviews by making it easy for customers to leave one. The first step for a company is to get the link to leave a review inside their Google Business Profile:

Ask customers for reviews linkScreenshot from Wordstream, February 2024

From there, companies can send this link out to customers directly (there are four options displayed right from the link as seen above), include it on social media, and even dedicate sections of their website to gathering more reviews and/or displaying reviews from other users.

It isn’t clear whether or not responding to reviews will help improve a local business’s ranking; however, it’s still a good idea for companies to respond to reviews on their Google Business Profile in order to improve their ratings overall.

That’s because responding to reviews can entice other customers to leave a review since they know they will get a response and because the owner is actually seeing the feedback.

For service businesses, Google provides the option for customers to rate aspects of the experience.

This is helpful since giving reviewers this option allows anyone who had a negative experience to rate just one aspect negatively rather than giving a one-star review overall.

Does Having A Star Rating On Google Matter? Yes! So Shoot For The Stars

Stars indicate quality to consumers, so they almost always improve click-through rates wherever they are present.

Consumers tend to trust and buy from brands with higher star ratings in local listings, paid ads, or even app downloads.

Many, many, many studies have demonstrated this phenomenon time and again. So, don’t hold back when it comes to reviews.

Do an audit of where your brand shows up in SERPs and get stars next to as many placements as possible.

The most important part of star ratings across Google, however, will always be the service and experiences companies provide that fuel good reviews from happy customers.

More resources:

Feature Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
All screenshots taken by author

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jun 5 2024
Your Guide To Dominating Local Search Marketing via @sejournal, @meetsoci

This post was sponsored by SOCi. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

As a marketer, you may feel like the ground is shifting under your feet with so many changes in the world of search. From Google’s recent announcement to release AI Overviews to all U.S. users to OpenAI revealing GPT-4o, there’s a lot to keep up with.

How will these changes impact your search efforts? Do you need to shift your search strategy?

We have the answers for you and more!

In this blog, we’ll explain how search marketing has changed, what this means for your brand, and share tactics to improve your online visibility. At the end, we’ll also introduce our new game-changer for local search management.

Let’s get into it!

The Evolution Of Search Marketing

As search evolves, many marketers are worried about their brand remaining visible online. While AI-generated search experiences are so new, we do know that now isn’t the time to make any drastic changes to your search marketing strategies.

You can test how your brand appears in generative AI (genAI) results (what we’ve dubbed GAIRs), but there’s no reason to sound an alarm — at least not yet.

Today, nearly three-quarters of consumers conduct local searches at least once a week. Similarly, in the U.S., over 800 million monthly searches contain some variation of “near me,” and more than 5 million keywords are related to “near me.”

Focusing on conventional local SEO efforts is the best way for your brand to ensure its visibility in traditional and GAIRs.

Local SEO for businesses with multiple locations involves incorporating a local SEO strategy for each business location. A multi-location SEO strategy, when done correctly, will boost your local search rankings, help you gain local customers, and improve brand awareness.

If your business doesn’t have multiple locations, you can still follow the tactics below to ensure your business is visible to your target audience in your specific area.

5 Ways To Improve Your Online Visibility

Now that you understand how search has evolved and the importance of local SEO, let’s dive into five local SEO tactics your brand can leverage to boost online visibility.

1. Claim & Optimize Local Listings

Local listings are online profiles of local businesses. They appear on search engines, local directories, and platforms like Google, Apple Maps, Yelp, Bing, and Facebook.

To increase your visibility on Google and beyond, your brand must claim local listings across all major local directories and remove duplicate listings.

Additionally, you need consistent and accurate information across all listings. At a minimum, your local listings should include the following information:

  • Name, address, and phone number (NAP) citations.
  • Business categories. (Example: Sushi restaurant)
  • Business hours, especially during holidays and major events
  • Products and services your business offers.
  • Links to your website and social media profiles.
  • Attributes. (Example: Curbside pickup or wheelchair-accessible seating)
  • High-quality photos and videos.

After optimizing your local listings, you can focus on your local pages.

2. Create Local Pages For Each Location

A local page, sometimes called a local landing page, is a web page you create for an individual store location or franchisee. It’s similar to local listings but lives on your site rather than an external directory like Yelp or Google.

Your multi-location business might have dozens or hundreds of local pages, each containing specific information about that store and the surrounding area.

Local pages should contain most of the business information found on your local listings. However, they’re also high-conversion pages. Therefore, they should also contain calls to action (CTAs) such as “order now” buttons or promotional sales and discounts.

Well-designed and optimized local pages can help your business appear high in local organic search results. As mentioned, these higher rankings often lead to more conversions and business for your stores!

3. Leverage A Store Locator

Store locators are similar to local pages. A store locator is a web page that lists all of your local stores or third-party dealers that sell your products.

Store locators help move website visitors through the customer journey by displaying valuable location information and unique details about each store. They make it easier for customers to purchase online and to contact or visit local stores.

Well-optimized and compatible store locators and local pages will help improve:

  • Local search rankings.
  • Website traffic and online conversions.
  • Analytics, such as where visitors are searching and coming from.

4. Implement An Online Reputation Management Strategy

While reputation management might not be something you’d consider when you think of improving your online visibility, you’d be surprised. According to local SEO experts, high numerical Google ratings are the sixth highest ranking factor in Google’s local pack and finder. At the same time, the quantity of native Google reviews (with text) is the eighth ranking factor.

A high quantity and quality of reviews don’t just affect local search rankings — they also impact conversion rates. According to our State of Google Reviews research report, an increase in one full star on a Google Business Profile (GBP) corresponds with a 44% increase in conversions.

To improve your reputation management strategy and gain more reviews:

  1. Respond to existing reviews in a personalized manner to show customers you value their feedback.
  2. Utilize social media to encourage customer feedback, ratings, and reviews.
  3. Make leaving a review accessible! Include links to your GBP on your website and in emails.
  4. Monitor the feedback that your business receives from reviews and make adjustments accordingly.

5. Create Unique Content

Generating localized content for your local pages, website, and listings is also essential. You want to ensure that your localized content optimizes and targets specific areas.

For instance, if you’re targeting the keyword “sporting goods store Seattle,” you want to update your URL, title tag, meta description, and headings with locally relevant keywords.

You should also leverage local images, including photos of your stores and products. Remember to include geo-targeted meta descriptions, alternative text, and descriptions within your images.

Types of local content your brand can create include but are not limited to:

  • Blogs.
  • Surveys.
  • Infographics.
  • Whitepapers.
  • Social media content.
  • Neighborhood guides.
  • User-generated content. (UGC)

For a more in-depth look at what it takes to improve your brand’s local SEO strategy, download our Top 10 Things You Should Be Doing in Local SEO Now guide!

How SOCi Can Help

Now that you understand what goes into creating a solid local search strategy, it’s time to boost your brand’s visibility. As marketers, you get how crucial search marketing is, but let’s be real, coming up with a plan to roll it out on a big scale is easier said than done.

That’s where SOCi comes in! We’ve built SOCi for more than a decade to ensure multi-location businesses rank well on local search and social media platforms, can create engaging content, and have the ability to manage each location’s online reputation.

We’ve enhanced our CoMarketing Cloud with SOCi Genius, an AI automation layer to help automate all of your daily localized marketing tasks. As part of SOCi Genius, we recently released Genius Search, a game-changer in search marketing!

As the newest innovation within the CoMarketing Cloud, Genius Search transcends traditional listings management by offering a dynamic, data-driven local search strategy that aligns with evolving consumer behaviors and market trends.

Genius Search uses the top data signals, such as reviews, search keywords and volume, weather, holidays, and others to deliver monthly AI-powered recommendations that can be accepted with the click of a button. Once accepted, these optimizations instantly improve your business listings’ rankings to directly relate to each location’s community.

It’s time to level up your local search strategy, and SOCi is here to help. Request a personalized demo today for more insight on Genius Search and our other Genius products!

Ready to start optimizing your website? Sign up for SOCi and get the data you need to deliver great user experiences.

Try SOCi For Free

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by SOCi. Used with permission.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jun 4 2024
How To Increase Website Traffic After The Google Update: 5 Blogger-Tested Tips via @sejournal, @getStay22

This post was sponsored by Stay22. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

The latest Google update hit our partners – travel bloggers – hard. Despite the challenges presented by this update, we are amazed by their resilience.

Although we cannot influence Google, we can definitely take charge of the things within our reach.

Here are five travel blogger-tested ways to increase website traffic after the latest Google update.

Get the most out of each visitor. Check out our guide, Ten Tips for Maximizing Revenue for Travel Bloggers.

1. Use Pinterest As An Additional Search Engine

Many people think of Pinterest as a social media platform, but it functions much more as a search engine.

Pinterest’s tools make it a fantastic way to get visitors to your website.

How To Get Started With Pinterest

  1. Create a new business account or link/convert a personal account to gain access to business tools like Pinterest Business Hub and Pinterest Analytics, which allow you to monitor searches and keywords.
  2. Write a catchy bio for your profile. If you have niche keywords you use on your website, include them here.
  3. Claim your website, allowing you to track whenever someone shares your website content on Pinterest. Additionally, it will automatically include your Pinterest profile and a follow button so you can attract more visitors.

How To Use Pinterest Like A Pro

Pinterest is built around pictures, so having great visuals is critical. You want to make yours stand out on the page.

  1. When you travel, snap many pictures and pick the best ones later.
  2. Use design tools like Canva to add text, create interesting layouts, and add branding elements.
  3. Create boards to organize your content into categories, such as by destination or blog post type.
  4. Just like any other search engine, keyword research is necessary on Pinterest. Use business tools like Pinterest Trends, which lets you see keyword search volume and which pins are most popular for them.
  5. Use your selected keywords everywhere possible, including pin titles, pin descriptions, and board descriptions.
Screenshot from Pinterest Trends, June 2024

Before you start pinning, optimize your blog posts to maximize revenue to ensure every visitor counts. See how to do that in our guide Ten Tips for Maximizing Revenue for Travel Bloggers.

2. Keep Visitors Engaged With Email Marketing

Email marketing is important because you own it. Instagram could ban your account, Google can derank you, but your email list is always yours.

Use this strategy to build less volatile, consistent traffic instead of new traffic.

How To Get Started With Email Marketing

  1. Select an email marketing provider. Travel bloggers love MailerLite and MailChimp because they are low-cost and simple.
  2. Start collecting email addresses. Create a mailing list signup form with your website host and insert it at the end of posts to collect your readers’ information.

How To Use Email Marketing Like A Pro

  1. Create a lead magnet that entices readers to share their information in exchange for it. Popular lead magnets in the travel blogging community are travel guides, ebooks, and itineraries.
  2. The goal of email is to get your reader onto your site. Keep your emails short and include impressive pictures and a clear link to your website. Leave them wanting more so that they click through.
  3. Before sending an email directing traffic to one of your pages, ensure the page is set up to maximize revenue. See how in our guide, Ten Tips for Maximizing Revenue for Travel Bloggers.

“While SEO is often touted as the king of traffic, good email marketing is the absolute queen. We regularly see spikes in our web analytics when we email our audience, but those spikes aren’t just temporary. They help our users build habits. We simply wouldn’t have nearly the business we have today without activating our email list.”

Beth Stanos, Wanderful CEO & Founder

    3. Add Your Content To Flipboard To Grab More Website Visits

    Flipboard is an article curation website that lets users flip through articles from different publications, like magazines.

    How To Get Started With Flipboard

    1. Download the Flipboard app on mobile and create an account and profile.
    2. Create Flipboard magazines. These are topic categories that group your content (much like Pinterest boards).
    3. Add your blog posts to them from the magazine page on Flipboard or the Flipit Chrome bookmark.
    Screenshot taken from Flipboard, June 2024

    How To Use Flipboard Like A Pro

    1. Add your fresh blog posts to Flipboard right after publishing.
    2. Add relevant content to your magazines that isn’t your own. Engaging with other bloggers’ content and maintaining new content in your magazines helps your reach.
    3. Include your target keywords in your magazine descriptions, post captions, and profile.

    “Flipboard has become a major traffic source for all 3 of my websites. They have fantastic tools for creators, like storyboards, scheduling, and RSS feeds for magazines, making creating and sharing compelling content easy.”

    Amanda O’Brien, theboutiqueadventurer.com Founder

    4. Get Discovered With Short-Form Videos On Social Media

    Did you know 77% of travelers use social media when planning their trips? Get their eyes on your content with short-form videos on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts.

    These platforms have algorithms to serve your content to people who don’t follow you, making them ideal for readers to discover you.

    How To Get Started Making Videos

    1. Create your accounts on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
    2. Download Capcut, a free mobile app for video editing. It’s better than the in-app editing functionality, with pre-installed templates and effects.
    3. Create a Linktree account or an alternative. All three platforms make it difficult for users to leave and visit your site, so a place where users can go for all your links is necessary.
    “PLACES ON EARTH WITH THE BLUEST WATER” by @thetravelshack, June 2024

    How To Make Short Video Content Like A Pro

    1. While traveling, keep video creation in the back of your mind. When you see eye-catching scenery or an interesting environment, be ready to capture it in video. Your video’s “wow” factor differentiates between a mediocre and a fantastic video.
    2. On Instagram, write detailed captions. On YouTube and TikTok, keep captions as brief as possible.
    3. Voice-over, on-screen text, and music are crucial to your engagement rate. You can add these with Capcut or in-app.
    4. Pick your video thumbnails carefully. Make sure they stand out in a grid of other videos.
    5. Finally, keep your short video short. The ideal length for a Reel is seven to eleven seconds, a TikTok 21 to 34 seconds, and a YouTube Short 25 to 35 seconds.

    “TikTok helped us to get our second blog on Mediavine. We shared detailed videos about “how to do something” and always included a call to action, directing viewers to our blog for more information. In recent years, we’ve had videos go viral while encouraging followers to visit the link in our bio. This has resulted in thousands of clicks to our websites.”

    Natasha Alden, theworldpursuit.com Co-Founder

    5. Expose Yourself To New Audiences With Guest Posting

    Having your writing published on another website gives you access to a whole new audience, making it an excellent strategy for attracting new readers.

    How To Start Guest Posting

    1. Find places that accept guest posts. Many publications have open submissions that you can submit to.
    2. If you see a site that has guest posts but no open submissions, find their contact information and send an inquiry email.
    3. Create a pitch by explaining your travel expertise and provide writing samples.

    How To Guest Post Like A Pro

    1. When creating your pitch, understand the site’s needs. What content gaps do they have? Focus your pitch there.
    2. Organic guest posting opportunities arise if you take the time to network. Meeting and developing friendships with travel bloggers is a great way to share audiences. You can network on social media, as well as in-person events like TBEX, TravelCon, and Traverse.
    3. Create a clear link back to your blog and include a catchy description so readers will be enticed to read more of your content.
    4. Strategize by monitoring the traffic of potential sites with tools like SEMRush and pick the best option.
    Screenshot from japan.travel, June 2024

    “Creating content for another publication to share as a standalone article allows you to share new expertise about a certain area. Whether through the article itself or subsequent social shares, a new audience gets exposure to you as a writer.”

    William Tang, goingawesomeplaces.com Founder

    See how William Tang made travel blogging his full-time job with the help of Stay22’s revenue-boosting tools. Read the case study.

    Compensate For Traffic Dips By Maximizing Your Revenue.

    Maximize your conversions with strategic CTA placement and Stay22’s cutting-edge AI-powered affiliate tools! Skyrocket your affiliate sales with these proven tips:

    DOWNLOAD OUR GUIDE: Ten Tips for Maximizing Revenue for Travel Bloggers.

    DOWNLOAD GUIDE

    Image Credits

    Featured Image: Image by Shutterstock. Used with permission.

    Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
    May 30 2024
    How To Find Competitors’ Keywords: Tips & Tools

    This post was sponsored by SE Ranking. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

    Wondering why your competitors rank higher than you?

    The secret to your competitors’ SEO success might be as simple as targeting the appropriate keywords.

    Since these keywords are successful for your competitors, there’s a good chance they could be valuable for you as well.

    In this article, we’ll explore the most effective yet simple ways to find competitors’ keywords so that you can guide your own SEO strategy and potentially outperform your competitors in SERPs.

    Benefits Of Competitor Keyword Analysis

    Competitor keywords are the search terms your competitors target within their content to rank high in SERPs, either organically or through paid ads.

    Collecting search terms that your competitors rely on can help you:

    1. Identify & Close Keyword Gaps.

    The list of high-ranking keywords driving traffic to your competitors may include valuable search terms you’re currently missing out on.

    To close these keyword gaps, you can either optimize your existing content with these keywords or use them as inspiration for creating new content with high traffic potential.

    2. Adapt To Market Trends & Customer Needs.

    You may notice a shift in the keywords your competitors optimize content for. This could be a sign that market trends or customer expectations are changing.

    Keep track of these keywords to jump on emerging trends and align your content strategy accordingly.

    3. Enhance Visibility & Rankings.

    Analyzing your competitors’ high-ranking keywords and pages can help you identify their winning patterns (e.g., content format, user intent focus, update frequency, etc).

    Study what works for your rivals (and why) to learn how to adapt these tactics to your website and achieve higher SERP positions.

    How To Identify Your Competitors’ Keywords

    There are many ways to find keywords used by competitors within their content. Let’s weigh the pros and cons of the most popular options.

    Use SE Ranking

    SE Ranking is a complete toolkit that delivers unique data insights. These insights help SEO pros build and maintain successful SEO campaigns.

    Here’s the list of pros that the platform offers for agency and in-house SEO professionals:

    1. Huge databases. SE Ranking has one of the web’s largest keyword databases. It features over 5 billion keywords across 188 regions. Also, the number of keywords in their database is constantly growing, with a 30% increase in 2024 compared to the previous year.
    2. Reliable data. SE Ranking collects keyword data, analyzes it, and computes core SEO metrics directly from its proprietary algorithm. The platform also relies on AI-powered traffic estimations that have up to a 100% match with GSC data.

    Thanks to SE Ranking’s recent major data quality update, the platform boasts even fresher and more accurate information on backlinks and referring domains (both new and lost).

    As a result, by considering the website’s backlink profile, authority, and SERP competitiveness, SE Ranking now makes highly accurate calculations of keyword difficulty. This makes it easy to see how likely your own website or page is to rank at the top of the SERPs for a particular query.

    1. Broad feature set. Beyond conducting competitive (& keyword) research, you can also use this tool to track keyword rankings, perform website audits, handle all aspects of on-page optimization, manage local SEO campaigns, optimize your content for search, and much more.
    2. Great value for money. The tool offers premium features with generous data limits at a fair price. This eliminates the need to choose between functionality and affordability.

    Let’s now review how to use SE Ranking to discover the keywords your competitors are targeting for both organic search and paid advertising.

    First, open the Competitive Research Tool and input your competitor’s domain name into the search bar. Select a region and click Analyze to initiate analysis of this website.

    Image created by SE Ranking, May 2024

    Depending on your goal, go either to the Organic Traffic Research or Paid Traffic Research tab on the left-hand navigation menu.

    Here, you’ll be able to see data on estimated organic clicks, total number of keywords, traffic cost, and backlinks.

    Image created by SE Ranking, May 2024

    Upon scrolling this page down, you’ll see a table with all the keywords the website ranks for, along with data on search volume, keyword difficulty, user intent, SERP features triggered by keywords, ranking position, URLs ranking for the analyzed keyword, and more.

    Image created by SE Ranking, May 2024

    What’s more, the tool allows you to find keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t.

    To do this, head to the Competitor Comparison tab and add up to two websites for comparison.

    Image created by SE Ranking, May 2024

    Within the Missing tab, you’ll be able to see existing keyword gaps.

    Image created by SE Ranking, May 2024

    While the platform offers many benefits, there are also some downsides to be aware of, such as:

    1. Higher-priced plans are required for some features. For instance, historical data on keywords is only available to Pro and Business plan users.
    2. Data is limited to Google only. SE Ranking’s Competitor Research Tool only provides data for Google.

    Use Google Keyword Planner

    Google Keyword Planner is a free Google service, which you can use to find competitors’ paid keywords.

    Here’s the list of benefits this tool offers in terms of competitive keyword analysis:

    1. Free access. Keyword Planner is completely free to use, which makes it a great option for SEO newbies and businesses with limited budgets.
    2. Core keyword data. The tool shows core SEO metrics like search volume, competition, and suggested bid prices for each identified keyword.
    3. Keyword categorization. Keyword Planner allows you to organize keywords into different groups, which may be helpful for creating targeted ad campaigns.
    4. Historical data. The tool has four years of historical data available.

    Once you log into your  Google Ads account, navigate to the Tools section and select Keyword Planner.

    Screenshot from Google Ads, May 2024

    Now, click on the Discover new keywords option.

    Screenshot from Google Ads, May 2024

    Choose Start with a website option, enter your competitor’s website domain, region, and language, then choose to analyze the whole site (recommended for deeper insights) or a specific URL.

    Screenshot from Google Ads, May 2024

    And there you have it — a table with all keywords that your analyzed website uses in its Google Ads campaigns.

    Screenshot from Google Ads, May 2024

    Although Keyword Planner can be helpful, it’s not the most effective and data-rich tool for finding competitors’ keywords. Its main drawbacks are the following:

    1. No organic data. The tool offers data on paid keywords, which is mainly suitable for advertising campaigns.
    2. Broad search volume data. Since it’s displayed in ranges rather than exact numbers, it might be difficult to precisely assess the demand for identified keywords.
    3. No keyword gap feature. Using this tool, you cannot compare your and your competitors’ keywords side-by-side and, therefore, find missing keyword options.

    So, if you want to access more reliable and in-depth data on competitors’ keywords, you’ll most likely need to consider other dedicated SEO tools.

    Use SpyFu

    SpyFu is a comprehensive SEO and PPC analysis tool created with the idea of “spying” on competitors.

    Its main pros in terms of competitor keyword analysis are the following:

    1. Database with 10+ years of historical data. Although available only in a Professional plan, SpyFu offers long-term insights to monitor industry trends and adapt accordingly.
    2. Keyword gap analysis. Using this tool, you can easily compare your keywords to those of your competitors using metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, organic clicks, etc.
    3. Affordability. It’s suitable for businesses on a tight budget.

    To explore competitor data, simply visit their website and enter your competitor’s domain in the search bar.

    You’ll be presented with valuable insights into their SEO performance, from estimated traffic to the list of their top-performing pages and keywords. Navigate to the Top Keywords section and click the View All Organic Keywords button to see the search terms they rank for.

    Screenshot of SpyFu, May 2024

    Yet, this free version provides an overview of just the top 5 keywords for a domain along with metrics like search volume, rank change, SEO clicks, and so on. To perform a more comprehensive analysis, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

    When it comes to the tool’s cons, it would be worth mentioning:

    1. Keyword data may be outdated. On average, SpyFu updates data on keyword rankings once a month.
    2. Limited number of target regions. Keyword data is available for just 14 countries.

    Wrapping Up

    There’s no doubt that finding competitors’ keywords is a great way to optimize your own content strategy and outperform your rivals in SERPs.

    By following the step-by-step instructions described in this article, we’re sure you’ll be able to find high-value keywords you haven’t considered before.

    Ready to start optimizing your website? Sign up for SE Ranking and get the data you need to deliver great user experiences.

    Try SE Ranking For Free

    Image Credits

    Featured Image: Image by SE Ranking. Used with permission.

    Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
    May 29 2024
    Why Using A Log Analyzer Is A Must For Big Websites

    This post was sponsored by JetOctopus. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

    If you manage a large website with over 10,000 pages, you can likely appreciate the unique SEO challenges that come with such scale.

    Sure, the traditional tools and tactics — keyword optimization, link building, etc. — are important to establish a strong foundation and maintain basic SEO hygiene.

    However, they may not fully address the technical complexities of Site Visibility for Searchbots and the dynamic needs of a large enterprise website.

    This is where log analyzers become crucial. An SEO log analyzer monitors and analyzes server access logs to give you real insights into how search engines interact with your website. It allows you to take strategic action that satisfies both search crawlers and users, leading to stronger returns on your efforts.

    In this post, you’ll learn what a log analyzer is and how it can enable your enterprise SEO strategy to achieve sustained success. But first, let’s take a quick look at what makes SEO tricky for big websites with thousands of pages.

    The Unique SEO Challenges For Large Websites

    Managing SEO for a website with over 10,000 pages isn’t just a step up in scale; it’s a whole different ball game.

    Relying on traditional SEO tactics limits your site’s potential for organic growth. You can have the best titles and content on your pages, but if Googlebot can’t crawl them effectively, those pages will be ignored and may not get ranked ever.

    Image created by JetOctopus, May 2024

    For big websites, the sheer volume of content and pages makes it difficult to ensure every (important) page is optimized for visibility to Googlebot. Then, the added complexity of an elaborate site architecture often leads to significant crawl budget issues. This means Googlebot is missing crucial pages during its crawls.

    Image created by JetOctopus, May 2024

    Furthermore, big websites are more vulnerable to technical glitches — such as unexpected tweaks in the code from the dev team — that can impact SEO. This often exacerbates other issues like slow page speeds due to heavy content, broken links in bulk, or redundant pages that compete for the same keywords (keyword cannibalization).

    All in all, these issues that come with size necessitate a more robust approach to SEO. One that can adapt to the dynamic nature of big websites and ensure that every optimization effort is more meaningful toward the ultimate goal of improving visibility and driving traffic.

    This strategic shift is where the power of an SEO log analyzer becomes evident, providing granular insights that help prioritize high-impact actions. The primary action being to better understand Googlebot like it’s your website’s main user — until your important pages are accessed by Googlebot, they won’t rank and drive traffic.

    What Is An SEO Log Analyzer?

    An SEO log analyzer is essentially a tool that processes and analyzes the data generated by web servers every time a page is requested. It tracks how search engine crawlers interact with a website, providing crucial insights into what happens behind the scenes. A log analyzer can identify which pages are crawled, how often, and whether any crawl issues occur, such as Googlebot being unable to access important pages.

    By analyzing these server logs, log analyzers help SEO teams understand how a website is actually seen by search engines. This enables them to make precise adjustments to enhance site performance, boost crawl efficiency, and ultimately improve SERP visibility.

    Put simply, a deep dive into the logs data helps discover opportunities and pinpoint issues that might otherwise go unnoticed in large websites.

    But why exactly should you focus your efforts on treating Googlebot as your most important visitor?

    Why is crawl budget a big deal?

    Let’s look into this.

    Optimizing Crawl Budget For Maximum SEO Impact

    Crawl budget refers to the number of pages a search engine bot — like Googlebot — will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. Once a site’s budget is used up, the bot will stop crawling and move on to other websites.

    Crawl budgets vary for every website and your site’s budget is determined by Google itself, by considering a range of factors such as the site’s size, performance, frequency of updates, and links. When you focus on optimizing these factors strategically, you can increase your crawl budget and speed up ranking for new website pages and content.

    As you’d expect, making the most of this budget ensures that your most important pages are frequently visited and indexed by Googlebot. This typically translates into better rankings (provided your content and user experience are solid).

    And here’s where a log analyzer tool makes itself particularly useful by providing detailed insights into how crawlers interact with your site. As mentioned earlier, it allows you to see which pages are being crawled and how often, helping identify and resolve inefficiencies such as low-value or irrelevant pages that are wasting valuable crawl resources.

    An advanced log analyzer like JetOctopus offers a complete view of all the stages from crawling and indexation to getting organic clicks. Its SEO Funnel covers all the main stages, from your website being visited by Googlebot to being ranked in the top 10 and bringing in organic traffic.

    Image created by JetOctopus, May 2024

    As you can see above, the tabular view shows how many pages are open to indexation versus those closed from indexation. Understanding this ratio is crucial because if commercially important pages are closed from indexation, they will not appear in subsequent funnel stages.

    The next stage examines the number of pages crawled by Googlebot, with “green pages” representing those crawled and within the structure, and “gray pages” indicating potential crawl budget waste because they are visited by Googlebot but not within the structure, possibly orphan pages or accidentally excluded from the structure. Hence, it’s vital to analyze this part of your crawl budget for optimization.

    The later stages include analyzing what percentage of pages are ranked in Google SERPs, how many of these rankings are in the top 10 or top three, and, finally, the number of pages receiving organic clicks.

    Overall, the SEO funnel gives you concrete numbers, with links to lists of URLs for further analysis, such as indexable vs. non-indexable pages and how crawl budget waste is occurring. It is an excellent starting point for crawl budget analysis, allowing a way to visualize the big picture and get insights for an impactful optimization plan that drives tangible SEO growth.

    Put simply, by prioritizing high-value pages — ensuring they are free from errors and easily accessible to search bots — you can greatly improve your site’s visibility and ranking.

    Using an SEO log analyzer, you can understand exactly what should be optimized on pages that are being ignored by crawlers, work on them, and thus attract Googlebot visits. A log analyzer benefits in optimizing other crucial aspects of your website:

    Image created by JetOctopus, May 2024
    • Detailed Analysis of Bot Behavior: Log analyzers allow you to dissect how search bots interact with your site by examining factors like the depth of their crawl, the number of internal links on a page, and the word count per page. This detailed analysis provides you with the exact to-do items for optimizing your site’s SEO performance.
    • Improves Internal Linking and Technical Performance: Log analyzers provide detailed insights into the structure and health of your site. They help identify underperforming pages and optimize the internal links placement, ensuring a smoother user and crawler navigation. They also facilitate the fine-tuning of content to better meet SEO standards, while highlighting technical issues that may affect site speed and accessibility.
    • Aids in Troubleshooting JavaScript and Indexation Challenges: Big websites, especially eCommerce, often rely heavily on JavaScript for dynamic content. In the case of JS websites, the crawling process is lengthy. A log analyzer can track how well search engine bots are able to render and index JavaScript-dependent content, underlining potential pitfalls in real-time. It also identifies pages that are not being indexed as intended, allowing for timely corrections to ensure all relevant content can rank.
    • Helps Optimize Distance from Index (DFI): The concept of Distance from Index (DFI) refers to the number of clicks required to reach any given page from the home page. A lower DFI is generally better for SEO as it means important content is easier to find, both by users and search engine crawlers. Log analyzers help map out the navigational structure of your site, suggesting changes that can reduce DFI and improve the overall accessibility of key content and product pages.

    Besides, historical log data offered by a log analyzer can be invaluable. It helps make your SEO performance not only understandable but also predictable. Analyzing past interactions allows you to spot trends, anticipate future hiccups, and plan more effective SEO strategies.

    With JetOctopus, you benefit from no volume limits on logs, enabling comprehensive analysis without the fear of missing out on crucial data. This approach is fundamental in continually refining your strategy and securing your site’s top spot in the fast-evolving landscape of search.

    Real-World Wins Using Log Analyzer

    Big websites in various industries have leveraged log analyzers to attain and maintain top spots on Google for profitable keywords, which has significantly contributed to their business growth.

    For example, Skroutz, Greece’s biggest marketplace website with over 1 million sessions daily, set up a real-time crawl and log analyzer tool that helped them know things like:

    • Does Googlebot crawl pages that have more than two filters activated?
    • How extensively does Googlebot crawl a particularly popular category?
    • What are the main URL parameters that Googlebot crawls?
    • Does Googlebot visit pages with filters like “Size,” which are typically marked as nofollow?

    This ability to see real-time visualization tables and historical log data spanning over ten months for monitoring Googlebot crawls effectively enabled Skroutz to find crawling loopholes and decrease index size, thus optimizing its crawl budget.

    Eventually, they also saw a reduced time for new URLs to be indexed and ranked — instead of taking 2-3 months to index and rank new URLs, the indexing and ranking phase took only a few days.

    This strategic approach to technical SEO using log files has helped Skroutz cement its position as one of the top 1000 websites globally according to SimilarWeb, and the fourth most visited website in Greece (after Google, Facebook, and Youtube) with over 70% share of its traffic from organic search.

    Image created by JetOctopus, May 2024

    Another case in point is DOM.RIA, Ukraine’s popular real estate and rental listing website, which doubled the Googlebot visits by optimizing their website’s crawl efficiency. As their site structure is huge and elaborate, they needed to optimize the crawl efficiency for Googlebot to ensure the freshness and relevance of content appearing in Google.

    Initially, they implemented a new sitemap to improve the indexing of deeper directories. Despite these efforts, Googlebot visits remained low.

    By using the JetOctopus to analyze their log files, DOM.RIA identified and addressed issues with their internal linking and DFI. They then created mini-sitemaps for poorly scanned directories (such as for the city, including URLs for streets, districts, metro, etc.) while assigning meta tags with links to pages that Googlebot often visits. This strategic change resulted in a more than twofold increase in Googlebot activity on these crucial pages within two weeks.

    Image created by JetOctopus, May 2024

    Getting Started With An SEO Log Analyzer

    Now that you know what a log analyzer is and what it can do for big websites, let’s take a quick look at the steps involved in logs analysis.

    Here is an overview of using an SEO log analyzer like JetOctopus for your website:

    • Integrate Your Logs: Begin by integrating your server logs with a log analysis tool. This step is crucial for capturing all data related to site visits, which includes every request made to the server.
    • Identify Key Issues: Use the log analyzer to uncover significant issues such as server errors (5xx), slow load times, and other anomalies that could be affecting user experience and site performance. This step involves filtering and sorting through large volumes of data to focus on high-impact problems.
    • Fix the Issues: Once problems are identified, prioritize and address these issues to improve site reliability and performance. This might involve fixing broken links, optimizing slow-loading pages, and correcting server errors.
    • Combine with Crawl Analysis: Merge log analysis data with crawl data. This integration allows for a deeper dive into crawl budget analysis and optimization. Analyze how search engines crawl your site and adjust your SEO strategy to ensure that your most valuable pages receive adequate attention from search bots.

    And that’s how you can ensure that search engines are efficiently indexing your most important content.

    Conclusion

    As you can see, the strategic use of log analyzers is more than just a technical necessity for large-scale websites. Optimizing your site’s crawl efficiency with a log analyzer can immensely impact your SERP visibility.

    For CMOs managing large-scale websites, embracing a log analyzer and crawler toolkit like JetOctopus is like getting an extra tech SEO analyst that bridges the gap between SEO data integration and organic traffic growth.

    BOOK A DEMO

    Image Credits

    Featured Image: Image by JetOctopus Used with permission.

    Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
    May 28 2024
    Google, Bing & Amazon’s 2024 Shopping Ad Changes & How To Navigate Them

    Inventory has always played a significant role in the way you sell on Amazon.

    Running out of inventory can impact your organic ranking and can impact your advertising strategy.

    Besides the potential loss of sales, poor inventory control also impacts the amount of inventory Amazon will allow you to send into the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program.

    Keep reading to learn more about:

    • How your Inventory Performance Index (IPI) score impacts your available storage volume.
    • What the IPI is, and how it’s calculated.
    • Recommended actions for improving your IPI score.
    • Tips for Amazon sellers who are new to Seller Central.

    Amazon Limiting Sellers Storage Based On Storage Utilization

    Amazon controls your storage capacity limits based on storage utilization and your sales history: 

    Total Capacity Limit

    This limits the amount of inventory you can restock to Amazon’s FBA warehouses in one shipment and the overall maximum number of units you can store at Amazon.

    Accounts that have been active for less than 39 weeks are not subject to these restrictions.

    It is important to note that this is only true for those accounts on the Professional Seller Plan.  Those with individual Seller Plans are limited to 15 cubic feet per month.

    This limits the maximum cubic feet of storage space you have at Amazon. These limits are reviewed and adjusted monthly.

    Any changes you can expect for your storage capacity for the following month will be announced on the third Monday of the month.

    Included in your storage usage are the inventory currently stored at Amazon, inventory en route to Amazon, and any shipments that have been prepared but not yet sent to Amazon.

    Screenshot of storage capacity monitor on Amazon Seller Central. Screenshot from Amazon Seller Central, February 2024

    The Storage Volume is highly impacted by your IPI (Inventory Performance Index).

    We will further discuss how your IPI is calculated later in this article.

    IPIScreenshot from Amazon Seller Central, February 2024

    Sellers who fall below the minimum criteria can have their storage limited. Operating with such limited storage can significantly undermine your sales forecasts.

    We will outline the steps you can take to ensure you have sufficient storage for your high-demand season, maximizing your sales on Seller Central.

    We’ll also review what you can do if you fall below Amazon’s set criteria.

    You can find your limit by going to Seller Central, selecting Inventory, navigating to the Inventory Dashboard, and then selecting Inventory Performance under the dropdown for Inventory.

    Screenshot of how to navigate to find your storage capacity on Amazon. Screenshot from Amazon, February 2024

    Your IPI score will be near the top of the page.

    To reach your storage capacity, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the small gray box labeled Capacity Monitor.

    Success on Amazon Means You Have To Manage Your Inventory Levels Proactively

    Amazon says that it considers the following criteria for your storage levels:

    • IPI Score and Sales Performance: Higher storage capacities are granted to accounts that consistently achieve a high IPI score.
    • Storage Utilization: In determining storage limits, Amazon considers your current inventory, inbound inventory, and shipments that are prepared but not yet dispatched.
    • Sales Volume: Amazon will also look at sales volume over time.

    Improving Your IPI

    If you have a low IPI score, know it will take time to improve your score.

    IPI is a rolling average. It can take anywhere from 2 to 12 weeks to increase your score on Amazon, so planning ahead of time is essential.

    This means if your IPI is below the 400 Amazon requires, you need to start taking aggressive action today.

    This article will outline how to avoid having detrimental storage limits, how it happens, and what to do when you’re already below the threshold.

    For those interested in Restock Limits, we’ll explore this topic in more detail later in the guide.

    What Is The IPI (Inventory Performance Index), And Does It Affect Me?

    The IPI will only affect those using Seller Central and FBA warehouses.

    It does not affect those using Vendor Central, Kindle Direct Platform, or those selling on Seller Central by Merchant Fulfilling or utilizing Seller Fulfilled Prime for their items.

    Inventory Performance Index (IPI)

    The Inventory Performance Index (IPI) manages how well you control and manage your inventory at Amazon.

    This metric is a 12-week rolling average. It looks at several components over three months.

    Four components make up the Inventory Performance Index (IPI):

    Excess Inventory

    This is the most important metric as it measures where your profitability may take a hit due to storage fees and holding costs for slow-moving FBA inventory.

    Excess Inventory percentages help sellers plan when to restock more or remove inventory from FBA.

    An item is considered to have excess inventory when it has over 90 days of supply based on the forecasted demand. 

    Sell Through Rate

    This metric is just how it sounds. The formula that Amazon uses to calculate Sell Through rates is:

    (Units Shipped In the Last 90 Days)/(Average Units on Hand Over the Last 90 days)

    Stranded Inventory

    This provides information on products that aren’t selling due to listing issues.

    This occurs when your listing doesn’t meet Amazon guidelines.

    In these instances, your products become stranded and unable to move while still incurring FBA storage fees.

    In-Stock Inventory

    Amazon looks at the percentage of time your products have been in stock during the past 30 days, with additional weight given to items that have sold more units over the past 60 days.

    If you maintain a high in-stock inventory, it will result in fewer lost sales.

    Four components of the Inventory Performance Index.Screenshot from author, February 2024

    It is important to highlight that these components are not weighted equally.

    Excess Inventory

    Excess Inventory and Sell-Through Rate are the parameters that have the most significant impact on IPI, while Stranded Inventory and Restock Rates can play a minor role in the overall score.

    This means you will get more movement focusing solely on the first two components rather than spreading your efforts equally across all four elements.

    During the height of the pandemic, Amazon changed the minimum IPI to 500. IT has since reduced the minimum IPI back to 400.

    However, Amazon can increase or decrease the minimum IPI desired score at any point in time.

    For this reason, we advise our clients to aim for a total IPI of 600.

    Your minimum goal should be achieving at least 50 points over the current IPI requirement.

    Some product mixes make maintaining a high IPI easier than others. For example, if you are a small brand with many products that move consistently, your IPI will generally tend to be higher.

    If you are a seller with a large product mix that changes often, it is the most challenging to manage.

    Combatting Capacity Limits

    If you’re currently experiencing a capacity limit, Amazon can increase your capacity limit for a specific period of time by submitting a request subject to Amazon’s approval.

    It is important to remember that if the storage limit increase request gets approved, your account is subject to paying a “reservation fee” for each cubic foot of capacity requested, and it will get charged at the end of the specified period.

    Such fee is subject to a credit depending on your sales achieved during the period (performance credits are earned at $0.15 for every dollar of sales you generate using the additional capacity.)

    Another alternative is to continue selling items via merchant fulfillment or using other third-party sellers to move your inventory or send small shipments of your fastest, most profitable inventory to Amazon.

    Further down in this article, we will highlight what you can do when your inventory performance is low, you are facing potential inventory limits, or if you’re new to Amazon.

    Why Would Amazon Do This?

    It seems like it would be counterintuitive for a company that is so focused on having as many products on its platform as possible to limit the amount of inventory you could sell.

    However, as more sellers joined the platform and with rising FBA and Prime offers, overcrowding at the warehouses started to become a larger problem for Amazon.

    Amazon sellers were attracted to FBA because of the low cost of storage rates. Sellers were using the FBA program as a cheap way to warehouse large amounts of inventory.

    At first, Amazon tried to increase storage fees. Adding long-term storage fees dramatically increased the storage cost for merchandise aged over six months.

    However, even with those changes, Amazon couldn’t curve the overcrowding and demand in its FBA warehouses.

    As a result, it started to introduce storage limits in 2019.

    From Amazon’s perspective, it wants to ensure customers have favorable shopping experiences and quickly get the products they want.

    This means ensuring that the products most likely to sell are available.

    Amazon looks at how you have managed inventory in the past and whether customers are purchasing your products to determine how much space is allocated to you.

    The better Amazon feels you are at managing your space at Amazon’s FBA warehouses, the more storage space you will be allowed.

    What If My IPI Is Below The Current Threshold?

    If your IPI is currently below the threshold or within 50 points of the lowest threshold, these are the actions we recommend.

    The first step is to check the current threshold. As of the writing of this article, the current threshold for IPI is 400.

    However, here’s the direct link to the policy so you can find the current threshold, as Amazon can change this at any time. You can find the current required IPI in Seller Support under the heading FBA Inventory Storage Limits (login required).

    You can review your current IPI score in Seller Central by going to Inventory, Inventory Planning, and then clicking on your IPI score.

    IPI score in Seller Central.Screenshot from Amazon Seller Central, February 2024

    Even with aggressive tactics, changing the IPI significantly can take 2 to 12 weeks.

    Recommended Actions To Improve Inventory Performance Index (IPI)

    Excess Inventory – Dump Slow Moving Items

    Excess inventory is generally one of the top two reasons your IPI score could be low, since it is the most heavily weighted metric.

    The first step to addressing excess inventory is to pull back inventory you don’t expect to sell.

    Focus on stock-keeping units (SKUs) that have gone out of fashion or merchandise experiencing a significant demand drop, like seasonal products.

    If you don’t expect it to sell within three months, you should pull back the inventory to sell on a different channel by creating a removal order.

    You can also start to use the Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) to fulfill your website orders from your Amazon stock.

    Sometimes, it makes more sense to discount and/or advertise products to help them sell faster to remove them from your inventory rather than call back inventory from Amazon.

    Optimizing a listing that is not moving can also help increase the sell-through rate.

    A quick note on having Amazon destroy products – sometimes, the company will liquidate that product instead of destroying it.

    If inventory control is an essential factor for your brand, we recommend pulling back the inventory even though it costs more.

    While Amazon is great at logistics and moving items through its process, it isn’t great at returning items to sellers.

    Often, items arrive damaged or mixed SKUs in multiple boxes, clogging up receiving departments.

    If possible, we want to ensure that we’re proactively taking action to avoid pulling back inventory and risk inventory being damaged or unavailable to be sold for a long time.

    Sell-Through Rate – Send Fast-Moving Items

    Amazon looks at this to identify whether the items you’re selling are things customers want to purchase.

    The way that we improve the sell-through rate is to send in small shipments of items that will sell out very quickly.

    If you’re currently using LTL or FTL, we recommend that you move to small parcel shipments during this process so that you can send more frequent shipments without going out of stock for long periods.

    As you’re restocking items, you want to prioritize those that will move quickly, sending small quantities of items that will sell out as soon as they arrive or shortly after.

    This allows your overall sell-through rate to increase dramatically and significantly impact your overall IPI.

    It is vital that no matter how fast you think a product will move through, as you send these products in, you’re testing small batches to make sure that things will sell at the pace you anticipate.

    Stranded Inventory

    Inventory that’s being held in FBA warehouses and not available for sale affects your overall IPI.

    Fixing stranded inventory can make a slight difference; however, if you need to move your IPI significantly, this component of the overall metric will only make a slight difference.

    It would be best to address stranded inventory weekly or bi-weekly, depending on your general sell-through rate.

    In-Stock Inventory

    This is probably the most frustrating metric of the IPI because, basically, Amazon is telling you that you can’t restock items because they’re not selling fast enough.

    At the same time, it’s trying to encourage you to ensure you stay in stock.

    We have found that this metric is very lightly weighted, and you’re better off focusing on the two key metrics of excess inventory and sell-through rate.

    There has been some debate about whether deleting previous SKUs can increase this; however, we have not seen that this significantly impacts the total IPI.

    General IPI Notes

    As you’re working to increase your overall IPI, it is important to remember that it can take several weeks to increase.

    The IPI is an average calculated over 12 weeks.

    You must give the IPI enough time to move before determining whether your actions are making a difference.

    It can be tempting to check your IPI often. However, your IPI score is only recalculated once a week.

    If you need to raise your IPI quickly or by a significant amount, you may need to take overly aggressive actions in pruning your inventory and pumping fast-moving items through your account to increase your score to the required amount.

    You might have to also bid for a capacity increase.

    You should only do this if you have the data to support being able to sell through that higher quantity of items so you do not incur extra charges.

    Additional Options To Combat Low IPI and Storage Capacity Issues

    Sometimes, this means utilizing third-party sellers to ensure that inventory can be available to customers with a Prime offer.

    Some of the brands we work with have focused on selling their fastest-moving SKUs while they improve their overall IPI score and capacity limits.

    Then, they utilized third-party sellers to carry their slower-moving items while they worked on increasing their averages.

    We have several reliable third-party resellers we refer our clients to if it’s ever an issue.

    This means that those accounts saw a faster increase in storage capacity as they were sending in inventory that was selling at a much faster rate and restocking regularly.

    If you don’t want to utilize third-party sellers, the alternative is to increase your total number of merchant-fulfilled offerings.

    Remember that Merchant Fulfilled offerings generally don’t compete well against FBA offers, so watch your competition to determine feasibility.

    While many brands avoid third-party sellers because it may reduce control over their brand, in this instance, it can be an excellent tool to ensure that you don’t lose potential market share to other competing product lines.

    Another step you can take is to allocate your FBA warehouse space to items with the highest margin and smallest dimensional size, as they are highly profitable and sell quickly.

    Leaving items with lower profitability or moving slower through Merchant Fulfilled (MF).

    Tips For New Amazon Sellers

    If you’re a new seller coming to Amazon or moving from Vendor Central to Seller Central, start by sending small quantities at first.

    You have a grace window of 39 weeks when opening your account.

    However, you want to ensure you send in small amounts of inventory. A few cases per product can help you identify the overall sell-through rate.

    There is no minimum for sending inventory into Amazon FBA. So, it is possible to test as little as one unit at a time to test products on Amazon.

    Sending in small shipments does increase your overall shipping cost and can reduce profitability in the short term.

    However, when you’re first investigating the platform, sending in smaller quantities can help you better understand your product’s demand and help avoid additional fees that can be required to call inventory back or pay for storage fees.

    Once you have a better idea of your sell-through rate, you can start to increase the total sizes of your inventory.

    It is a delicate balance to have enough inventory so that you don’t run out of stock but also that you don’t have excess inventory.

    While, in general, you want to aggressively avoid stockouts, the impact of a low IPI score should take priority.

    Monitoring Inventory Matters

    To succeed on the platform, you must take an active role in your Amazon inventory management.

    In prior years, simply avoiding restocks was enough.

    However, these new requirements require a greater focus on monitoring your sell-through rate and storage utilization on Amazon.

    Prepare now to support your Amazon marketing and sales goals for the coming holiday season.

    More Resources:

    Featured Image: Piscine26/Shutterstock

    Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
    May 22 2024
    Optimizing Interaction To Next Paint (INP): A Step-By-Step Guide via @sejournal, @DebugBear

    This post was sponsored by DebugBear. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

    Keeping your website fast is important for user experience and SEO.

    The Core Web Vitals initiative by Google provides a set of metrics to help you understand the performance of your website.

    The three Core Web Vitals metrics are:

    This post focuses on the recently introduced INP metric and what you can do to improve it.

    How Is Interaction To Next Paint Measured?

    INP measures how quickly your website responds to user interactions – for example, a click on a button. More specifically, INP measures the time in milliseconds between the user input and when the browser has finished processing the interaction and is ready to display any visual updates on the page.

    Your website needs to complete this process in under 200 milliseconds to get a “Good” score. Values over half a second are considered “Poor”. A poor score in a Core Web Vitals metric can negatively impact your search engine rankings.

    Google collects INP data from real visitors on your website as part of the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). This CrUX data is what ultimately impacts rankings.

    Image created by DebugBear, May 2024

    How To Identify & Fix Slow INP Times

    The factors causing poor Interaction to Next Paint can often be complex and hard to figure out. Follow this step-by-step guide to understand slow interactions on your website and find potential optimizations.

    1. How To Identify A Page With Slow INP Times

    Different pages on your website will have different Core Web Vitals scores. So you need to identify a slow page and then investigate what’s causing it to be slow.

    Using Google Search Console

    One easy way to check your INP scores is using the Core Web Vitals section in Google Search Console, which reports data based on the Google CrUX data we’ve discussed before.

    By default, page URLs are grouped into URL groups that cover many different pages. Be careful here – not all pages might have the problem that Google is reporting. Instead, click on each URL group to see if URL-specific data is available for some pages and then focus on those.

    Screenshot of Google Search Console, May 2024

    Using A Real-User Monitoring (RUM) Service

    Google won’t report Core Web Vitals data for every page on your website, and it only provides the raw measurements without any details to help you understand and fix the issues. To get that you can use a real-user monitoring tool like DebugBear.

    Real-user monitoring works by installing an analytics snippet on your website that measures how fast your website is for your visitors. Once that’s set up you’ll have access to an Interaction to Next Paint dashboard like this:

    Screenshot of the DebugBear Interaction to Next Paint dashboard, May 2024

    You can identify pages you want to optimize in the list, hover over the URL, and click the funnel icon to look at data for that specific page only.

    Image created by DebugBear, May 2024

    2. Figure Out What Element Interactions Are Slow

    Different visitors on the same page will have different experiences. A lot of that depends on how they interact with the page: if they click on a background image there’s no risk of the page suddenly freezing, but if they click on a button that starts some heavy processing then that’s more likely. And users in that second scenario will experience much higher INP.

    To help with that, RUM data provides a breakdown of what page elements users interacted with and how big the interaction delays were.

    Screenshot of the DebugBear INP Elements view, May 2024

    The screenshot above shows different INP interactions sorted by how frequent these user interactions are. To make optimizations as easy as possible you’ll want to focus on a slow interaction that affects many users.

    In DebugBear, you can click on the page element to add it to your filters and continue your investigation.

    3. Identify What INP Component Contributes The Most To Slow Interactions

    INP delays can be broken down into three different components:

    • Input Delay: Background code that blocks the interaction from being processed.
    • Processing Time: The time spent directly handling the interaction.
    • Presentation Delay: Displaying the visual updates to the screen.

    You should focus on which INP component is the biggest contributor to the slow INP time, and ensure you keep that in mind during your investigation.

    Screenshot of the DebugBear INP Components, May 2024

    In this scenario, Processing Time is the biggest contributor to the slow INP time for the set of pages you’re looking at, but you need to dig deeper to understand why.

    High processing time indicates that there is code intercepting the user interaction and running slow performing code. If instead you saw a high input delay, that suggests that there are background tasks blocking the interaction from being processed, for example due to third-party scripts.

    4. Check Which Scripts Are Contributing To Slow INP

    Sometimes browsers report specific scripts that are contributing to a slow interaction. Your website likely contains both first-party and third-party scripts, both of which can contribute to slow INP times.

    A RUM tool like DebugBear can collect and surface this data. The main thing you want to look at is whether you mostly see your own website code or code from third parties.

    Screenshot of the INP Primary Script Domain Grouping in DebugBear, May 2024

    Tip: When you see a script, or source code function marked as “N/A”, this can indicate that the script comes from a different origin and has additional security restrictions that prevent RUM tools from capturing more detailed information.

    This now begins to tell a story: it appears that analytics/third-party scripts are the biggest contributors to the slow INP times.

    5. Identify Why Those Scripts Are Running

    At this point, you now have a strong suspicion that most of the INP delay, at least on the pages and elements you’re looking at, is due to third-party scripts. But how can you tell whether those are general tracking scripts or if they actually have a role in handling the interaction?

    DebugBear offers a breakdown that helps see why the code is running, called the INP Primary Script Invoker breakdown. That’s a bit of a mouthful – multiple different scripts can be involved in slowing down an interaction, and here you just see the biggest contributor. The “Invoker” is just a value that the browser reports about what caused this code to run.

    Screenshot of the INP Primary Script Invoker Grouping in DebugBear, May 2024

    The following invoker names are examples of page-wide event handlers:

    • onclick
    • onmousedown
    • onpointerup

    You can see those a lot in the screenshot above, which tells you that the analytics script is tracking clicks anywhere on the page.

    In contrast, if you saw invoker names like these that would indicate event handlers for a specific element on the page:

    • .load_more.onclick
    • #logo.onclick

    6. Review Specific Page Views

    A lot of the data you’ve seen so far is aggregated. It’s now time to look at the individual INP events, to form a definitive conclusion about what’s causing slow INP in this example.

    Real user monitoring tools like DebugBear generally offer a way to review specific user experiences. For example, you can see what browser they used, how big their screen is, and what element led to the slowest interaction.

    Screenshot of a Page View in DebugBear Real User Monitoring, May 2024

    As mentioned before, multiple scripts can contribute to overall slow INP. The INP Scripts section shows you the scripts that were run during the INP interaction:

    Screenshot of the DebugBear INP script breakdown, May 2024

    You can review each of these scripts in more detail to understand why they run and what’s causing them to take longer to finish.

    7. Use The DevTools Profiler For More Information

    Real user monitoring tools have access to a lot of data, but for performance and security reasons they can access nowhere near all the available data. That’s why it’s a good idea to also use Chrome DevTools to measure your page performance.

    To debug INP in DevTools you can measure how the browser processes one of the slow interactions you’ve identified before. DevTools then shows you exactly how the browser is spending its time handling the interaction.

    Screenshot of a performance profile in Chrome DevTools, May 2024

    How You Might Resolve This Issue

    In this example, you or your development team could resolve this issue by:

    • Working with the third-party script provider to optimize their script.
    • Removing the script if it is not essential to the website, or finding an alternative provider.
    • Adjusting how your own code interacts with the script

    How To Investigate High Input Delay

    In the previous example most of the INP time was spent running code in response to the interaction. But often the browser is already busy running other code when a user interaction happens. When investigating the INP components you’ll then see a high input delay value.

    This can happen for various reasons, for example:

    • The user interacted with the website while it was still loading.
    • A scheduled task is running on the page, for example an ongoing animation.
    • The page is loading and rendering new content.

    To understand what’s happening, you can review the invoker name and the INP scripts section of individual user experiences.

    Screenshot of the INP Component breakdown within DebugBear, May 2024

    In this screenshot, you can see that a timer is running code that coincides with the start of a user interaction.

    The script can be opened to reveal the exact code that is run:

    Screenshot of INP script details in DebugBear, May 2024

    The source code shown in the previous screenshot comes from a third-party user tracking script that is running on the page.

    At this stage, you and your development team can continue with the INP workflow presented earlier in this article. For example, debugging with browser DevTools or contacting the third-party provider for support.

    How To Investigate High Presentation Delay

    Presentation delay tends to be more difficult to debug than input delay or processing time. Often it’s caused by browser behavior rather than a specific script. But as before, you still start by identifying a specific page and a specific interaction.

    You can see an example interaction with high presentation delay here:

    Screenshot of the an interaction with high presentation delay, May 2024

    You see that this happens when the user enters text into a form field. In this example, many visitors pasted large amounts of text that the browser had to process.

    Here the fix was to delay the processing, show a “Waiting…” message to the user, and then complete the processing later on. You can see how the INP score improves from May 3:

    Screenshot of an Interaction to Next Paint timeline in DebugBear, May 2024

    Get The Data You Need To Improve Interaction To Next Paint

    Setting up real user monitoring helps you understand how users experience your website and what you can do to improve it. Try DebugBear now by signing up for a free 14-day trial.

    Screenshot of the DebugBear Core Web Vitals dashboard, May 2024

    Google’s CrUX data is aggregated over a 28-day period, which means that it’ll take a while before you notice a regression. With real-user monitoring you can see the impact of website changes right away and get alerted automatically when there’s a big change.

    DebugBear monitors lab data, CrUX data, and real user data. That way you have all the data you need to optimize your Core Web Vitals in one place.

    This article has been sponsored by DebugBear, and the views presented herein represent the sponsor’s perspective.

    Ready to start optimizing your website? Sign up for DebugBear and get the data you need to deliver great user experiences.

    Try DebugBear For Free

    Image Credits

    Featured Image: Image by Redesign.co. Used with permission.

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