Good morning, search marketers, are you feeling pride in your work?
I hope so — there is incredible work happening across this industry. Yesterday, we announced the Search Engine Land Award finalists. They represent the best in SEO, SEM, local, B2B and B2C search marketing. Be sure to check out the list and congratulate your peers. As a judge over the last four years, I've been blown away by the ingenuity and creativity of search marketers to solve problems and overcome challenges to achieve their companies' and clients' goals. Congrats to all the finalists. We'll be spotlighting many of the winners and their campaigns on Search Engine Land after they are announced at the awards and afterparty at the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture during SMX Advanced in Seattle on June 4.
SEMrush is a well known competitive search insights platform. Now, flush with a $40 million investment — and mandate to grow — it is getting into the market for Amazon seller tools. The company's new tool is called Sellerly. It's free, for now, and designed to help Amazon sellers split test their product detail pages to improve visibility and conversions.
SEOs, you may have seen that Google released an update to its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines — the guide that quality raters (i.e. humans) use to evaluate websites and results pages. We took a side-by-side look at some of the elements that have been updated. There is more emphasis on interstitial pages, particularly those that require an app download, as part of the distracting ads section. The term E-A-T is still used, but is de-emphasized somewhat in this latest version in favor of the term "page quality." The update also clarifies that author expertise is not necessarily a requisite when the creator may not have formal or everyday expertise "but is not doing any harm."
SEMs, Google also shared an update on the ongoing reporting gap problem, including which metrics and reports are still incorrect. The only conversion data that remains to be fixed for May 1 and May 2 is for store visits, store sales and local conversions. Several reach metrics still aren't fixed, and hotel campaigns have incorrect impression share stats for the two-day period.
Lots more below, including how to deal with higher brand CPCs, Googlebot testing and more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief