September 2019 Newsletter
In This Issue
Our Top 5 Favorite Online Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Businesses (That Don’t Involve Product Optimization!)
There are hundreds of strategies for online marketing, and for eCommerce businesses, there is money at stake. Implementing these top 5 online marketing strategies can improve your bottom line, and some cost little more than time to enable!
Avoiding Online Scams That Target Senior Citizens
Anyone can be scammed online, but senior citizens are amongst the most targeted. Learn the most common scams to protect yourself or your loved ones and avoid losing money, or worse.
Google’s Rich Results Update
True to their word, Google has been prioritizing schema (structured data) and rich snippets this year as a mode of enhancing their user experience. Using schema markup allows websites to clarify their relevance and explain the meaning of their content. Through this strategy, sites are able to provide data that creates visuals and helps them stand out on the SERP.
On September 16, 2019, Google updated the rules surrounding rich snippets, particularly concerning reviews, so that this powerful tool can be used for good and not evil:
- Self-regulated reviews. Have you ever been searching for a product or business and noticed the star rating the accompanies the result? This is the effect of schema markup that provides users with a quality reference in the form of a rating. Being an easy element to falsify, Google has updated its rules to only include third-party ratings and not self-regulated ones. An example of a self-regulated review as defined by Google? The instance where “Joe’s Diner” takes reviews about “Joe’s Diner” that have been collected from other sources on the internet and copies or embeds them onto the “Joe’s Diner” website itself.
- Types of schema with reviews. In the past, reviews could be provided for any type of schema, which doesn’t make much sense considering it’s hard to review something like a Medical Condition. Reviews are now limited to more commonly reviewed instances like movies, recipes, products, and businesses.
In addition, rules surrounding the “name” property have changed. Specifically, the property is now a required field in markup code, whereas it was not required previously. As Google continues to optimize this feature, expect more updates that may affect your site. Contact Top Of The List if you are interested in adding schema to your site to help search engines understand your site better and reap the benefits of rich snippets.
Tip of the Month
Write for humans, not for search engines. Content creation is a huge, important part of drawing attention to your site. Knowing that search engines use algorithms to identify website information can make it tempting to revert back to old-school methods that sacrifice quality for keyword-stuffing. However, this approach does more harm than good when it comes to ranking.
Search Engines like Bing and Google are not interested in delivering results to their visitors that are unreadable and low-quality, which means that they are putting more resources into human-inclusive techniques. Updates like Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) employs real people to review websites and incentivizes content creators to write for humans, not algorithms. After all, humans are the ones that will ultimately be consuming and benefitting from website content. Appearing at the top of search results won’t help your business unless visitors are engaged and returning to view your new ideas. Without high-quality subject matter and execution, your only readers will be search engine spiders. Even they will stop coming if they don’t find tasty morsels there!
Just for Laughs
A man went to the doctor. “Doc,” he said pointing to different parts of his body. “When I touch my arm it hurts. When I touch my neck it hurts. And when I touch my stomach it hurts. Do I have some rare disease?”
“No,” the doctor replied, “you have a broken finger.”
Our best for your success!
