To all of the businesses, advertisers, and marketers out there, we hope you are doing well as the summer season winds down.
Sometimes it is good to slow down for a moment and take stock of what is going on in our industry, so we (and you) know what your next strategic marketing steps should be moving forward.
That said, we have some news you need to know if your attention surrounding these stories has not already been piqued.
There has been a lot going on with Google, including new algorithm updates in the past 30 days.
So, we wanted to provide you with a recap of all these changes and our recommendations to reflect what Google wants to see from your business online. So buckle up. Here we go!
Google Product Reviews Update – July 2022
What we know so far: The Google product reviews update aims to promote review content that is above and beyond much of the templated information you see on the web.
Google has said it will promote these updated product reviews in its search results rankings. Google wants to see better quality product reviews for ecommerce stores—this is quality NOT quantity.
Technically, according to Google, this is not a penalty against any of your specific content, but rather Google is pushing to reward sites providing more insightful review content with rankings above what yours may offer.
What do we recommend? So glad you asked…
What This Means for Ecommerce Stores
For the long term, you will want to ensure that you apply more detail and effort to your product review content. This shift to more context-rich product review content won’t happen overnight—so you should take stock now of what separates the “good” from the “not as good” in the eyes of Google.
Make reviews unique so they stand out from your competitors online.
We can hear the wheels in your head spinning saying, “quality product reviews, what exactly does that mean?” Luckily for us (and you), Google has laid out the aspects of a quality product review that you can check out right now by clicking here.
Be sure to bookmark this page so you can refer back to it and share it with your team.
Using a Product Review System
If you do not have a product review system in place, this is the perfect place to start and your opportunity to improve your product listings even more.
There are low-cost review tools that help build your product reviews, provide a product schema markup built-in, and are seller rating approved for Google Ads and Shopping.
Here are a few the National Positions team recommends. We are not affiliated or paid for these recommendations; however, based on our experience, they are pretty solid options.
– https://www.yotpo.com/platform/reviews/ – Our #1 choice, starting at $115/mo
– https://results.shopperapproved.com/productreviewsoftware – Our #2 choice, starting at $199/mo
If you need help setting up these platforms, please let us know, and we can assist you with integrating this onto your site and help you plan out how this should be sent out so you can start capturing more product reviews.
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Google Data Center Outage – August 2022
What we know so far: We wouldn’t really consider this an algorithm change, but more of an unfortunate event.
There was a widespread outage with Google Search due to an electrical explosion at one of Google’s Data Centers that affected the following:
– Outages and inaccessibility of Google Search
– Old pages dropping out of Google Search
– New pages not being indexed by Google Search
– Google Search results look stale and outdated
– Huge ranking fluctuations
What do we recommend now? We are continuing to monitor any ranking and traffic fluctuations.
Most sites should return to normal as this issue gets resolved, but it is unclear how long it will take for everything to come back to the state it was before this fire.
We will continue to monitor our clients’ analytics to ensure their websites were not negatively affected.
We recommend you do the same. The incident occurred on August 9th, 2022—you can use this date as a point of reference in tracking changes in your site traffic.
Google’s Helpful Content Update – August 2022
What we know so far: Google has announced that they will start to roll out a helpful content update starting August 25, 2022, that could take up to 2 weeks to complete.
The new “helpful content update” targets “content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people,” Google said.
This update aims at helping customers find “high-quality content.” Google said this is an “ongoing effort to reduce low-quality content and make it easier to find content that feels authentic and useful in Search.” This targets content written for search engines over human-first content.
National Positions Was Planning Ahead
Good news! We knew this day was coming and preemptively updated the content style we knew Google wanted to see before they even talked about launching this new algorithm.
Google has provided an overview of the type of content they are looking to rank and what to avoid.
We will continue to monitor our clients’ sites during this roll-out to see if there is anything we still need to modify on existing and new content. We constantly refine our SEO strategy, style, and content guidelines for improved performance.
Especially since Google wants to see user-intent content vs. content for the purpose of SEO rankings.
Monitoring the Situation(s)
We will continue to monitor these Google updates and algorithm changes.
If you are currently a National Positions client, let our team know if you have any questions or would like to schedule a call to discuss everything in more detail.
However, if you are not a National Positions client (yet), we have two options/recommendations for you to get a jump on these updates. The first is to meet with your team or agency to ensure they are aware of the issues noted above and have a plan of action for addressing them.
If you don’t have a team or agency monitoring this situation, now is the time to change that. Contact our team today—we can provide you with a rundown of what the impact might be and what you can do moving forward. Visit our contact us page to drop us a line. We also have many resources for you on our blog and our resources page.
And that’s the marketing news you need to know for this week. We will be back with more updates soon!