🔍 Google Merchant Center rolling out (barely) pre-holiday updates

Oct 31, 2019

Good morning search marketers, are your product schema in order?

Every year just before the holiday shopping season goes into hyper-drive, you can count on the big ad platforms to release a bunch of commerce-related updates aimed at brands and sellers. Right on time, Google announced a number of feature updates in Google Merchant Center yesterday. The biggest trend to come out of the updates is the increasing ability for Google to tap schema product markup on retail sites.

If you've got product markup implemented on your pages, Google can crawl it to:

Surface the information — free of charge — in rich results. This can happen automatically, but you can also activate Surfaces on Google in Merchant Center to enable it.
Build automated feeds for use in Shopping campaigns. Automated feeds will be available in all Shopping campaign countries starting in November.

It pays to watch and reply to your GMB reviews. Local businesses that improve their Google My Business star ratings from 3.5 to 3.7 can see significant increases in conversions, according to a new study. Further, enterprise locations that replied to at least 32% of reviews achieved 80% higher conversion rates compared SMBs and direct competitors that replied to 10% of reviews.

Keep reading for a Pro Tip on long-tail keyword research and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

Think about long-tail keywords for search intent

"When compiling long-tail keyword research for your site's SEO content, be sure to include intent keywords," encourages Kristopher Jones of LSEO. "These are often commercial in nature and tend to represent the later stage of a sales funnel. As the searches get more and more specific with intent keywords, search volume will decrease, but the searches that a keyword does get will be more valuable. With fewer searches, you can end up having a better chance at ranking higher when people are closer to the end of their journey."

"A good practice to get into is to check your organic traffic in Google Analytics regularly. See what keywords are leading people to your site, and to what pages specifically. Then check out those landing pages to see what worked to get users there. Then look at your low-traffic web pages you're hoping start to rank higher soon. Why aren't they being found? How can you optimize them?"

Learn More »

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Search Shorts

Google Ads login issue

Entry-level SEO is where big wins happen. On the topic of industry conferences, John Mueller from Google said: Entry-level is where the big wins are, and where even 'experts' can learn a ton. It's easy & natural to over-estimate yourself (certainly in front of peers). "It takes time & practice to become an expert, it takes education to become a 'practitioner,'" John added.

Google Ads login issue. Google confirmed it had a login issue for the Google Ads network. Ad serving and ad reporting were not impacted.

Sitemaps. Google's John Mueller said do not crawl your site to build your XML Sitemap.

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