October 2022 - Premium eCommerce marketing services

Month: October 2022

Customer retention strategy for eCommerce before, during and after the holiday season

Posted on by LION Digital

Succeeding with engaging marketing activities in the holiday season assumes thoughtful planning of customer acquisition and retention strategies and their creative realisation. To help you get started, LION compiled a list of initiatives grouped into:

  • Tactical – organised by readjusting standard channels and tools that are typically already in place in the majority of eCommerce companies, and the outcomes will be seen immediately after appliance;
  • Strategic tools for customer retention need more time and effort to plan, launch and manage. However, the results are a solid base for the entire business’s longevity and subsequent scaling.

Tactical initiatives

Customer research and feedback

Generally, understanding the customer starts from target audience research and continues on the various marketing channel touch points. Capture the intention and attention of holiday shoppers by:

  • Surveying to collect information about the holiday shopping plans of the customers
  • Researching general shopping trends in the market
  • Sharing gift lists with popular items
  • Introducing holiday trends to inspire
  • Running teasing campaigns
  • Launching early access for loyal customers
  • Optimising the purchase process.

However, the customer journey doesn’t end with the purchase! 37% of respondents claim that more than five and 33% – more than three purchases are needed to create solid brand loyalty. Therefore, post-purchase communications are invaluable contributors to the overall business management process. Why did customers buy this particular product? What is the level of their satisfaction? How do they use the product or service? If they don’t use it, then why? What is the definition of customer loyalty specifically for your company? Moreover, remember that enriched data and an extra occasion to be in touch with the customer is another perfect way to cross-sell.

Encourage users at the right moment to create an account

The importance of account creation for repurchasing and increasing the customer retention rate is apparent. The problem is that the mandatory creation of an account could be an issue because many online shoppers prefer to purchase as a guest, so asking to create an account could prevent them from placing their first orders. However, you can suggest an account creation immediately after the first purchase is completed and even simplify the process by applying the information from the details of this order.

Send only value-adding emails

There is a list of must-have emails to start:

  • Welcome email
    Don’t miss the opportunity of using the email with the highest possible open rate of 50-60% at its maximum capacity. Personalise it apart from just using the name, but applying the details of the purchase and incorporating the personalised suggestion of similar products and services blocks.
  • Content email
    Send a selection of relevant content in different formats to maintain customer engagement even after holiday sales seasons: promoting new offers, bundles, and special gifts to a specific segment of the target; sharing relevant content from the company’s blog and establishing the brand as a thought-leader in the industry; interacting with the audience by surveying and asking questions about the experience with the brand; updates about new products and information that your audience will find valuable.
  • Upsell email
    Existing customers already have a history of successful experiences. Therefore, they trust the company and are more eager to purchase again. At the same time, the data collected during the previous order allows one to personalise subsequent communications easily.
  • Abandoned cart email
    The goal is the suggestion to proceed, provide some promo code that could be applied to gain additional perks or simply show that the company is ready to receive feedback.

Emails can help to build customer relationships before and after purchases, but only if they add benefits to the customer experience that holiday shoppers probably wouldn’t want to miss. Worth putting yourself in the client’s shoes and asking, “So what?” – the question client asks when reads the email, critically assessing the information and the relevance of the received stimulant to act.

Retarget ads on social media

Apart from organic coverage that could be gained through appealing social media posts and encouraging the clients through various communication channels to follow and engage with the brand, as one of the best customer retention strategies, consider plugging in the social media’s retargeting power, which allows showing ads on social to people who already somehow were engaged with the website starting from those visited it once to those who dropped the cart.

Discount or credit for those who return

When the margins are low, applying discounts or credit strategies could negatively affect the bottom line. However, sending them for existing clients’ next purchases or retaining those who haven’t purchased for long could be a winning strategy to increase customer retention rate. Considering the amounts on discount and credit as a way to cut customer acquisition costs, increasing thought as a standard discount of 10% up to 20% or even more doesn’t seem excessive.

Strategic initiatives

Boost your customer support to the next level

A proper level of customer support became an unspoken golden standard for the highly-competitive eCommerce field. Online shoppers are most likely unpleasantly surprised if the company doesn’t match these standards. However, creating additional value could add to communications with clients an element of surprise and delight that puts the business, in the eyes of this particular customer, in a special place, spotlighting among the competitors:

  • Sustainable 24-hour service
    Attract customer support agents, sourcing them across different time zones to provide outstanding 24-hour service alongside sustainable working conditions.
  • Live chat
    The flexibility of the time to send the request and receive the responses makes live chat the communication type the eCommerce customers prefer over the phone and email communications.
  • Omnichannel customer service options
    An omnichannel customer support strategy guarantees that you have agents spread across multiple channels, ready to meet and provide timely and eligible support to customers where they are.
  • FAQ page and store policies
    Big holiday sales seasons are the sources for a large amount of data collection, and it is an omission not to use insights to make the next year’s customer experience more advanced. Collect, analyse and systemise the information about the most frequent queries related to the business on FAQ pages and predefined store policies, and the next holiday sales season may proceed much more smoothly.

Own the responsibility even if others are to blame

The customer experience contains different stages, elements and actors. The customers cannot and shouldn’t have to be able to separate these elements. Therefore, they apprehend the experience as a whole, and if something small licks, the overall customer experience impression could be damaged. Being able to own the responsibility for clients’ difficulties and turn the negativity into positivity should be one of the key methods in customer retention strategy and loyalty management.

Personalise the customer journey

The main point of difference for an eCommerce business could be creating a customer journey that feels as if it was explicitly designed with customers in mind and was tailored to the specific customer’s need. Improve the customer retention rate by differentiating the company from its competitors and making loyal customers flow away harder:

  • Positive emotions and entertaining experiences
    Gamification on the website, reusable packaging and other ideas at each stage of the customer journey – positive associations make the company product or service much more memorable in the customer’s mind.
  • Unexpected gifts and thank you notes
    Miniature versions of the product samples or personalised and branded thank you notes with a handwritten signature included in the order are a striking touch perfectly appropriate for the holiday seasons and birthdays.

Return policy as the security guarantee to clients

92% of consumers polled claim they will be ready to buy from the online store again if the product return process is easy. It is connected to feeling secure from the risks of wasting money and extra time beyond what was already invested on an item that can or cannot match the requirements or the initially stated product description. Remind online shoppers that they can trust you if they’re not satisfied with the product, and they will be more likely to buy from your business, even if they’re unsure about a product.

A good return policy considers all conditions when a request can be qualified and specifically underlines the situations when it cannot be qualified as a return. Ensure ahead that the return policy is clear, reasonable and fair. 

Customer loyalty program – never dying classics

A sustainable customer portfolio contains a balanced range of new and retained clients. The strategies for working with retained clients consider the frequency of purchases as the key indicator to focus on. The importance of customer loyalty and engagement cannot be overestimated. The essence of customer loyalty programs is to reward the customer for various actions, from authorising the credit card and actual purchasing to leaving a review and inviting a friend. What effort should be rewarded and how – depends on the business model specifics and strategy. Regardless, customer loyalty programs are proven to be one of the most efficient ways for customer retention.

Subscription service

Subscriptions provide regular revenue for the business by locking people into purchasing monthly. Moreover, they keep existing customers constantly engaged by delivering personalised experiences, and it shouldn’t have to be mandatorily the entire business model for the online shop. For example, for eCommerce cosmetics retailers, monthly subscription boxes could include miniature versions of the best-selling products.

Conclusion

We hope these LION tips will help you succeed in highly competitive holiday season markets!

Whatever initiatives to retain the customers you choose, uphold a data-driven and creative approach. Don’t forget to measure the efficiency of your efforts and distinguish valuable insights to adjust and change the direction if needed. Last but not least – select dedicated partners in your technology stack.

At LION Digital, we value relevancy the most in complex customer retention strategies. Although we make agnostic recommendations based on customer needs, we recommend Yotpo who is a quality service partner, to help accelerate our clients’ growth by enabling advocacy and maximising customer lifetime value. Yotpo includes the most advanced solutions for SMS marketing, loyalty and referrals, subscriptions, reviews, and visual user-generated content – you can choose depending on what customer retention strategies you want to apply.

Given the influx of volume to the website, Yotpo heavily emphasises leveraging all the first-party data collected during the holiday promotions for post-holiday communications to make smarter, segmented audiences for email and SMS flows. Make this data work for you and provide hyper-personalized marketing to your subscribers. For example, get them back on site with a new product that complements one they have already purchased.

GET IN CONTACT TODAY AND LET OUR TEAM OF ECOMMERCE SPECIALISTS SET YOU ON THE ROAD TO ACHIEVING ELITE DIGITAL EXPERIENCES AND GROWTH

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Article by

ASSELYA Sekerova –
MARKETING & PROJECT MANAGER

Is your agency focusing on ROAS and not Revenue?

Posted on by LION Digital

As the cost of paid media advertising has increased over the last 2-3 years of exaggerated eCommerce usage, we have seen Cost Per Clicks (CPC’s) rise at an exponential rate as businesses scramble, fight to acquire market share & increase top-line revenue. As a result of this, we saw the ability to maintain a decent Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) be put in a comprising position were to maintain the ROAS, the business may have to sacrifice top line & paid media revenue contributions.

This now has created a fork in the road that feels like more of an ultimatum for the business, that it must either choose an acceptable ROAS with slower revenue growth of 5-10% YoY… or a historically below average ROAS with strong revenue growth of 20-30% YoY. A common example that you may be focusing on the wrong goal is if your ads account ROAS is growing, but your full site revenue may be stagnant or even in decline over the same period.

Here at LION Digital, we have seen both of these scenarios play out & neither of them is good or bad, right or wrong. Your agency should be having an in-depth conversation with your monthly/quarterly about what your true business goals are overall. It needs to be about more than just monthly budgets, monthly revenue targets, new product launches & increasing awareness of your product/service. We need to be setting goals for 1,2,3 years into the future & then reverse engineering them to work out micro checkpoints that will lead you to your macro goal. This may seem like common knowledge but somewhere along the line, digital marketing has been misconstrued that more money & big changes equal big returns & big improvements. Sadly this is not true.

This put digital media agency’s in an interesting position where they can no longer pump out a 1 size fits all approach & even the small businesses entering the online market need to have an in-depth understanding of what they are looking to get out of their marketing.

In this article, we’ll cover the most important points to consider when identifying goals for your business’s growth in 2022 & beyond.

Firstly, let’s break down what is Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) & if it is the right goal for the business at this stage in its life cycle.

When we have a new client start at LION, the most common strategy we implement is to spend 1-3 months optimising the account to an acceptable ROAS we have set with the client & doing an in-depth technical audit to ensure that when it comes time to scale, that we don’t have any issues behind the scenes that will hamper our ability or cause amplified inefficiencies. This is the most common issue we uncover in new accounts we onboard from other agencies, they have tried to scale in the past but the agency hasn’t done anything apart from putting the budgets up & hope for the best. Although some technical aspects may be time-consuming for LION lay a solid foundation by mastering the basics, we have found this is the only way to ensure long-term success.

Once we have created a stable foundation, we begin to set multiple KPIs, benchmarks & goals to work towards in manageable steps. One of those KPIs is ROAS & it can be looked at in two ways based on your business/industry/season/market conditions:

  • Firstly, you may use ROAS as an indicator of inefficiency to protect your margins. This has been important for the last 2-3 years with increasing supply issues, logistics costs increasing & margins getting thinner.
  • Secondly, you may use ROAS as a floor metric for performance that you do not wish to drop below while trying to maximise revenue.

Neither of these approaches is good or bad, right or wrong. You simply need to be honest about what would benefit the business in the short vs long term.

In terms of what approach you chose & what the ROAS could look like are vastly different from one industry to another. The main points that drive differences are:

  • Cost Per Click (CPC), driven by the level of competition
  • Average Order Value (AOV) of your online business
  • Total Ad Spend Budget (Cost) Allocated across the account
  • Types of campaigns running, Brand/PMAX/Shopping/Remarketing/Display/Search

It’s important we cover this, as these metrics will heavily influence your ROAS metric & overall results. The most overlooked point is simply what types of campaigns are running & do they align with the goals/approach you’re working towards. This point is the bread & butter of why there is a trade-off between ROAS & Revenue.

For example, if we were to focus on ROAS, the budget split would be more towards retaining market share, retention, loyalty & efficiency of ad spend. This would likely skew the spend towards PMAX/Shopping/Remarketing & maybe some niche search campaigns.

On the flip side, the more the ad account tracks into the generic search keyword territory, the competition is going to be higher, the conversion rate will be lower & ad costs will likely increase. The results will be similar if the ad account tracks more towards Display ads, Youtube & broad awareness marketing.

However, these campaigns still have value & will likely contain the highest % of people who haven’t yet bought from you. It’s imperative that if you do decide to spend money on these campaign types, you have price competitiveness, stock availability, unique selling points, reasons to buy from you over a competitive & lastly, a suitable budget for a minimum of 1-3 months of ad run time.

That last point is crucial as paid search is vastly different from social ads in that the longer your ads run, the better your reputation, expected clickthrough rate & bounce rate becomes. This will improve your ad relevance in the eyes of Google & allow you to creep up the paid rankings over time. Unfortunately, in paid search in 2022, there is very little likelihood that dropping $10k into broad keywords on Black Friday is going to reap the business any type of results if you don’t have any form of foundation from previous months’ work.

GET IN CONTACT TODAY AND LET OUR TEAM OF ECOMMERCE SPECIALISTS SET YOU ON THE ROAD TO ACHIEVING ELITE DIGITAL EXPERIENCES AND GROWTH

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Article by

Sam McDonough –
Paid Media Director

WebMaster Hangout – Live from SEPTEMBER 07, 2022

Posted on by LION Digital

A site that connects seekers and providers of household-related services.

LIZZI SASSMAN: (01:03) So the first question that we’ve got here is from Dimo, a site that connects seekers and providers of household related services. Matching of listings is based on zip code, but our users come from all over Germany. The best value for users is to get local matches. Is there some kind of schema markup code to tell Google algorithm show my site also in the Local Pack. Please note we do not have local businesses and cannot utilise the local business markup code. The site is… and I’m going to redact that.

  • A: (01:36) Yes, so Dimo– as you noted, local business markup is for businesses with physical locations. And that means that there’s typically one physical location in the world for that place. So it should only show up for that city. And your other question, currently, there’s no rich result feature for online services only that you could use structured data for, but you can claim your business profile with Google Business Profile manager and specify a service area there. So I think that that could help.

Is there a way to measure page experience or the core web vitals on Safari browsers, and is there a way to improve the experience?

MARTIN SPLITT: (02:12)  Indra asks, Google Search Console shows excellent core web vital scores for our site, but I understand that it only shows details of Chrome users. A majority of our users browse using Safari. Is there a way to measure page experience or the core web vitals on Safari browsers, and is there a way to improve the experience?

  • A: (02:35) Well, you can’t really use Google Search Console for this, but you can definitely measure these things yourself with the browser developer tools in a Safari browser and maybe ask around if you have any data from Safari users through analytics, for instance. There’s nothing here that we can do for the page experience or Search Console’s page experience resource because the data is just not available.

How can I best switch from one domain to a new one?

JOHN MUELLER: (03:01) For the next question, I’ll paraphrase. How can I best switch from one domain to a new one? Should I clone all the content or just use 80% of the content? What is the fastest way to tell Google that they’re both my sites?

  • A: (03:17) We call this process a site migration. It’s fairly well documented, so I would look up the details in our documentation. To simplify and leave out a lot of details, ideally, you’d move the whole website, 1 to 1, to the new domain name and use permanent 301 redirects from the old domain to the new one. This is the easiest for our system to process. We can transfer everything directly. If you do other things like removing content, changing the page URLs, restructuring, or using a different design on the new domain, that all adds complexity and generally makes the process a little bit slower. That said, with a redirect, users will reach your new site, regardless of whether they use the old domain or the new one.

Do you support the use and the full range of schema.org entities when trying to understand the content of a page, outside of use cases such as rich snippets?

LIZZI SASSMAN: (04:04) And our next question is from IndeQuest1. Do you support the use and the full range of schema.org entities when trying to understand the content of a page outside of use cases such as rich snippets? Can you talk about any limitations that might exist that might be relevant for developers looking to make deeper use of the standard?

  • A: (04:26) So, to answer your question, no, Google does not support all of the schema.org entities that are available on schema.org. We have the search gallery which provides a full list of what we do support for rich snippets, like you mentioned, in Google Search results. But not all of those things are visual. We do talk about certain properties that might be more metadata-like, and that aren’t necessarily visible as a rich result. And that still helps Google to understand things, like authors or other metadata information about a page. So we are leveraging that kind of thing.

What could be the reason that the sitemap cannot be read by the Googlebot?

GARY ILLYES: (05:07) Anton Littau is asking, in Search Console, I get the message “sitemap could not be read” in the sitemap report. No other information is provided. What could be the reason that the sitemap cannot be read by the Googlebot?

  • A: (05:21) Good question. The “sitemap could not be read” message in Search Console may be caused by a number of issues, some of them technical, some of them related to the content quality of the site itself. Rarely, it may also be related to the hosting service, specifically, if you are hosting on a free domain or subdomain of your hoster, and the hoster is overrun by spam sites, that may also cause issues with fetching sitemaps.

We’ve got guides and tips that are illustrated on our website, and they’re not performing well in the SERP.

LIZZI SASSMAN: (05:53) Our next question is from Nicholas. We would like to know how algorithms treat cartoon illustrations. We’ve got guides and tips that are illustrated on our website, and they’re not performing well in the SERP. We tried to be unique, using some types of illustrations and persona to make our readers happy. Do you think we did not do it right?

  • A: (06:18) I don’t know because I don’t think I’ve ever seen your cartoons, but I can speak to how to improve your cartoon illustrations in SERP. So our recommendation would be to add text to the page to introduce the cartoons, plus alt text for each of the images. Think about what people will be searching for in Google Images to find your content. And use those kinds of descriptive words versus just saying the title of your cartoon. Hope that helps.

Does posting one content daily increase rankings?

GARY ILLYES: (06:46) Chibuzor Lawrence is asking, does posting one content daily increase rankings?

  • A: (06:53) No, posting daily or at any specific frequency, for that matter, doesn’t help with ranking better in Google Search results. However, the more pages you have in the Google index, the more your content may show up in Search results.

Does Google agree with the word count or not?

LIZZI SASSMAN: (07:09) OK, and the next question is from Suresh. About the helpful content update that only 10% write quality content, and the rest, 90%, don’t right quality content, lengthy content, but how should they write quality content? Does Google agree with the word count or not?

  • A: (07:29) Well, nope, content can still be helpful whether it’s short or long. It just depends on the context and what that person is looking for. It doesn’t matter how many words, if it’s 500, 1,000. If it’s answering the user’s intent, then it’s fine. It can be helpful. These are not synonymous things.

When using words from a page title in the URL, should I include stopper words too?

JOHN MUELLER: (07:49) I’ll paraphrase the next question, hopefully, correctly. In short, when using words from a page title in the URL, should I include stopper words too? For example, should I call a page whyistheskyblue.HTML or whyskyblue.HTML?

  • A: (08:08) Well, thanks for asking. Words in URLs only play a tiny role in Google Search. I would recommend not overthinking it. Use the URLs that can last over time, avoid changing them too often, and try to make them useful for users. Whether you include stop words in them or not or decide to use numeric IDs, that’s totally up to you.

Do different bots type, image, and desktop share crawl budgets?

GARY ILLYES: (08:31) Sanjay Sanwal is asking: do different bots type, image, and desktop share crawl budget? And what about different hosts?

  • A: (08:40) Fantastic question. The short answer is yes, Google Bots and its friends share a single crawl budget. What this means to your site is that if you have lots of images, for example, Googlebot Images may use up some of the crawl budgets that otherwise could have been used by Googlebot. In reality, this is not a concern for the vast majority of the sites. So unless you have millions of pages and images or videos, I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s worth noting that the crawl budget is per host. So, for example, if you have subdomain.example.com, and you have another subdomain.example.com, they have different crawl budgets.

Request to 301 redirect the subdirectory to their new German site. Would you advise against it?

JOHN MUELLER: (09:24) Christopher asks: we’ve sold the German subdirectory of our website to another company. They request us to 301 redirect the subdirectory to their new German site. Would you advise against it? Would it hurt us?

  • A: (09:40) Well, on the one hand, it all feels kind of weird to sell just one language version of a website to someone else. On the other hand, why not? I don’t see any problems redirecting from there to a different website. The only thing I would watch out for, for security reasons, is that you avoid creating so-called open redirects, where any URL from there is redirected to an unknown third party. Otherwise, that sounds fine.

Can I expect to see clicks and impressions from this in the search appearance filter as we can see with some other rich results?

LIZZI SASSMAN: (10:08) Sam Gooch is asking: I’m experimenting with a new learning video, rich result, and can see it’s being picked up in Google Search Console. Can I expect to see clicks and impressions from this in the search appearance filter as we can see with some other rich results?

  • A: (10:23) Well, to answer this question specifically, there’s no guaranteed time that you’ll be able to see a specific rich result in Google Search after adding structured data. But I think what you’re asking about here is for a specific thing to be added to Search Console, and we’ll have to check with the team on the timeline for that. And we don’t pre-announce when certain things will be added to Search Console. But you can check the rich result status report for the learning video and make sure that you’re adding all of the right properties and that it’s valid and ready to go for Google to understand what it needs in order to generate a rich result. Hope that helps.

How big is the risk of penalising action if we use the same HTML structure, same components, layout, and same look and feel between the different brands?

JOHN MUELLER: (11:02) Roberto asks: we’re planning to share the same backend and front end for our two brands. We’re ranking quite well with both of them in Google. How big is the risk of penalising action if we use the same HTML structure, same components, layout, and same look and feel between the different brands? What would be different are the logos, fonts, and colours. Or would you suggest migrating to the same front end but keeping the different experience between the two brands?

  • A: (11:33) Well, this is a great question. Thanks for submitting it. First off, there’s no penalty or web spam manual action for having two almost identical websites. That said, if the URLs and the page content are the same across these two websites, then what can happen for identical pages is that our systems may pick one of the pages as a canonical page. This means we would focus our crawling, indexing, and ranking on that canonical page. For pages that aren’t identical, we generally index both of them. For example, if you have the same document on both websites, we’d pick one and only show that one in Search. In practice, that’s often fine. If you need both pages to be shown in Search, just make sure they’re significantly different, not just with a modified logo or colour scheme.

JavaScript SEO, what to avoid along with JavaScript links?

MARTIN SPLITT: (12:23) Anna Giaquinto asks, JavaScript SEO, what to avoid along with JavaScript links?

  • A: (12:30) Well, the thing with links is that you want to have a proper link, so avoid anything that isn’t a proper link. What is a proper link? Most importantly, it’s an HTML tag that has an href that lists a URL that is resolvable, so not like a JavaScript colon URL. And that’s pretty much it. If you want to learn more about JavaScript-specific things for Search, you can go to the JavaScript beginner’s guide on developers.google.com/search and see all the things that you might want to look out for.

I research a keyword that has no volume or keyword density, but we are appearing for those keywords on the first page. Should we target that keyword?

LIZZI SASSMAN: (13:05) Our next question is from Sakshi Singh. Let’s say I research a keyword that has no volume or keyword density, but we are appearing for those keywords on the first page. Should we target that keyword?

  • A: (13:19) Well, Sakshi, you can optimise for whatever keywords you want, and it’s not always about the keywords that have the most volume. I would think about how people should find your page and target those keywords.

Will audio content be given more priority and independent ranking following the helpful content algorithm update?

GARY ILLYES: (13:32) Kim Onasile is asking, hello, you previously advised that there are no SEO benefits to audio versions of text content and that audio-specific content doesn’t rank separately like video content. However, given you also said it might be that there are indirect effects like if users find this page more useful and they recommend it more, that’s something that could have an effect. Will audio content be given more priority and independent ranking following the helpful content algorithm update?

  • A: (14:07) This is an interesting question. And ignoring the helpful content algorithm update part, no, audio content, on its own, doesn’t play a role in the ranking of text results.

Is it OK to fetch meta contents through JavaScript?

MARTIN SPLITT: (14:33) Someone asked, is it OK to fetch meta contents through JavaScript? I think that means it is OK to update metatag data with JavaScript?

  • A: (14:44) While that is possible to do, it is best to not do that. It may give Google Search mixed signals, and some features may not pick up the changes. Like, some specific search result types might not work the way you expect them. Or it might have incorrect information, or it might miss something. So I would suggest not doing that.

Both of my websites have been hit by different updates, around 90% drops, and are suffering from some type of flag that is suppressing our sites until the soft penalty is lifted.

GARY ILLYES: (15:08) Anonymous is asking, both of my websites have been hit by different updates, around 90% drops, and are suffering from some type of flag that is suppressing our sites until the soft penalty is lifted. Or is there even a soft penalty?

  • A: (15:26) Good question. No, the named updates that we publish on the Rankings Updates page on Search Central are not penalties in any shape or form. They are adjustments to our ranking algorithms, so they surface even higher quality and more relevant results to Search users. If your site has dropped in rankings after an update, follow our general guidelines for content, take a look at how you could improve your site as a whole, both from content and user experience perspective, and you may be able to increase your rankings again.

When would be the next possible update for the Search results?

JOHN MUELLER: (16:03) Ayon asks, when would be the next possible update for the Search results?

  • A: (16:09) Well, on our How Search Works site, we mentioned that we did over 4,000 updates in 2021. That’s a lot of updates. Personally, I think it’s critical to keep working on things that a lot of people use. Our users and your users expect to find things that they consider to be useful and relevant. And what that means can change over time. Many of these changes tend to be smaller and are not announced. The bigger ones, and especially the ones which you, as a site owner, can work on, are announced and listed in our documentation. So in short, expect us to keep working on our systems, just like you, hopefully, keep working on yours.

Does having a star aggregated ranking on recipes improve its position?

LIZZI SASSMAN: (16:54) And our next question is from Darius. So Darius is asking, does having a star aggregated ranking on recipes improve its position?

  • A: (17:05) I think what Darius is asking about is the stars that show up for recipes and with structured data and whether or not that has an effect on ranking. So while the stars are more visual and eye-catching, structured data in and of itself is not a ranking signal. And it isn’t guaranteed that these rich results will show up all the time. The Google algorithm looks at many things when it’s creating what it thinks is the best Search experience for someone. And that can depend on a lot of things, like the location, language, and device type.

When I don’t set a rel-canonical, then I can see the internal links in the search console in the links report. Is this normal?

JOHN MUELLER: (17:37) Christian asks: I have set the rel-canonical together with a noindex meta tag. When Google does not accept a canonical at all, all internal links are dropped. When I don’t set a rel-canonical, then I can see the internal links in the search console in the links report. Is this normal?

  • A: (17:55) Well, this is a complex question since it mixes somewhat unrelated things. A noindex says to drop everything and the rel-canonical hints that everything should be forwarded. So what does using both mean? Well, it’s essentially undefined. Our systems will try to do the best they can in a conflicting case like this, but a specific outcome is not guaranteed. If that’s fine with you, for example, if you need to use this setup for other search engines, then that’s fine with us too. If you want something specific to happen, then be as clear as possible for all search engines.

If a video is indexed in the video indexing report, is it still worth adding the video structured data on that page and why?

LIZZI SASSMAN: (18:33) And our next question is from Thijs.  If a video is indexed in the video indexing report, is it still worth adding the video structured data on that page and why?

  • A: (18:47) Well, yes. Just because something’s indexed doesn’t mean that there’s not an opportunity to improve how it appears. Structured data helps Google understand more about your video, like what it’s about, the title, interaction statistics, and that kind of stuff. And adding structured data can make your videos eligible for other video features, like key moments. So it’s not just, oh, get your video indexed, and that’s it. There are other things that you can do to improve how your content appears on Google.

Can I cloak a list with lots of products to Googlebot and show users a Load More button?

MARTIN SPLITT: (19:20) Tamás asks, can I cloak a list with lots of products to Googlebot and show users a Load More button?

  • A: (19:26) I think this is not cloaking, as what users see when they click on the Search result roughly matches what Googlebot sees. And if you have a Load More button, users will click that if they don’t see the product they are expecting there. So I don’t think this is cloaking, and that’s a solution that I think works from a crawling point of view.

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