🔍 New Google Ads report and Google Assistant voice payments test

May 27, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, join us if you can.

Today, I'll be hosting Facebook ads experts Gil David, founder of Run DMG and Florian Litterst of Adventure.de, on Live with Search Engine Land. We're going to dive into Facebook Shops — what it means for brands and businesses and a whole lot more — today at 12:00 p.m. ET. If you'd like to join us live, sign up this morning to get a calendar invite. The replay will be available if you miss it.

While we're talking commerce, Google Assistant has a new "confirm with voice match" payments feature, enabled via the Home app. Details about where it can be used are still fuzzy, indicating this is still experimental, but the support page touts the ability to "make purchases with your Google Assistant, like in-app purchases," for example. There are certainly many scenarios in which voice match purchasing could be useful. We'll have to see how Google rolls this out.

And lastly, also on the retail front, a new report in Google Ads lets advertisers compare product category performance across Search and Shopping campaign types. The categories are based on the pre-defined categories Google uses to bucket product queries.

Keep reading for a Pro Tip on creating content for Shopify SEO and more.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief

Pro Tip

Finding Shopify blog opportunities

"One of the most common opportunities for Shopify stores is to create blog content for SEO," explains Chris Long of Go Fish Digital. "Often, we see that Shopify sites are targeting keywords with informational intent with transactional pages. This creates a discrepancy between what content the store has and what Google is 'willing' to rank. The result is that the Shopify store doesn't have pages to support the intent of the keywords. Luckily, the process to find opportunities for your Shopify blog is pretty straightforward:

Identify your high-value keywords: These can be keywords that you know are likely to generate a lot of revenue for your store. You can also use AdWords data to tie your keywords to revenue to find these.
Manually review their intent: Next, manually perform searches for each of these keywords. Note what types of results Google is actually returning here. Are they informational or transactional or a mix of both?
Inventory your own site content: Does your Shopify store have the content to match the intent of each keyword? Do you have a category page created for queries returning product listing pages? Do you have posts written for queries with informational content?
Optimize or create content: Next you'll need to determine what execution steps you will take. If you have the content infrastructure, then you might simply need to optimize and adjust the targeting of existing pages. If not, you may need to create new ones.

Learn more »

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Search Shorts

Google's quality in question

Google search quality. Since the May 2020 core update, there have been lots of questions about the quality of Google's search results. Our own Barry Schwartz posted a Twitter poll, which you can take over here.

Indexing issues in Google. If you are seeing indexing issues or pages dropping out of the Google index, it might be related to the core update – maybe.

One thousand words. Here's a good quote from Google's John Mueller: "However, in general, having one 1000 word article on a site doesn't make the site a great site overall, and doesn't mean all content from it will be automatically shown visibly in search."

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