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Recently, Google stated that almost half of the pages shown in the global search results are actually indexed by Google using the mobile-first indexing procedure. This means the pages one visits from a Google search are actually indexed on the basis of the mobile version of that web page.

If you are wondering as to what mobile-first indexing is all about, it’s certainly a way Google crawls and indexes the web. However, the indexing is done based on the mobile version of the page and not the desktop version anymore. It can be seen as a way Google differentiates the experience rendered by a website on a desktop version vs. the user experience it offers on a mobile version.

Another thing that a lot of people must be wondering about is the fact as to how would one actually know if one’s website has been moved to mobile-first indexing. Well, there’s absolutely no need to worry about that as Google will notify the website owners as soon as one’s site is moved to mobile-first indexing. However, it is important for one to check one’s messages in the Google Search Console. Also, your site will be labeled as last crawled by the Googlebot Smartphone user agent in the URL inspection tool which is another signal that the site has been moved.

Google has laid emphasis on the fact that websites should put more attention on structured data and of course, alt-text for images for optimized results. Hence, if your desktop web pages aren’t similar to your mobile web pages in terms of content and structured data, your site ranking is more likely to be impacted by this move. As a matter of fact, Google has been moving only those sites to mobile-first indexing that have great parity between their desktop and mobile versions.

Amazon alone contributes to a massive portion of the sales of the eCommerce industry. It will be interesting to find out as to what really helped companies like Amazon do so well and get so huge.

We will analyze the entire thing from the SEO point of view and try to find out what actually is helping these top eCommerce companies perform so well in the search engines. It certainly will help many of us learn a lot from them.

Offer Customers an Extensive Catalog with Third-Party Sellers

Needless to say, Amazon has been dominating the eCommerce industry for the past many years. However, it is important to understand the reasons behind its stunning success so far. As we tried to analyze the underlying facts, we came across one of the most important yet underreported aspects of Amazon’s success. This is none other than its huge catalog of products and, of course, its tie-ups with the third party sellers.

As per the Q1 in 2018, third-party sellers contribute 52 percent of the total sales volume on Amazon. In 2017, the sales from third-party sellers elevated to $31.88 billion in revenue which is certainly a huge portion of Amazon’s revenue for the year.

Third party sellers have always been a very important part of Amazon’s growth. Subsequently, this helped Amazon to offer its users with a wide selection of products and at the same time, reduce the prices for the customers. The concept was designed by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and it is internally known as the Virtuous Cycle.

If we try to see it from the SEO standpoint, offering a wide selection of products is certainly targeting more queries. This is certainly an excellent way to capture more of long tail traffic. Subsequently, this helps in selling more brands and ranking increasingly higher.

Offering Retailers and Manufacturers the Best Reason to Link To Their Websites

Another eCommerce giant with a very successful strategy to consider is certainly eBay. eBay makes roughly 9 billion dollars per year. Although there is no denying the fact that eBay pretty much runs on the same concept of third-party sellers that Amazon uses, however, it has definitely taken the concept a lot further. eBay is not only a platform entirely based on third-party sellers but also, it is a well-known platform for bidding on items sold by other users. As a matter of fact, eBay earns more backlinks than Amazon does; as per the SEMrush update, while Amazon earned about 2.7 billion backlinks, eBay earned 4.8 billion.

Although there’s no denying the fact that eBay earns revenue far less than Amazon but it definitely has a leading edge over Amazon when it comes to backlinks. Hence, somewhere down the line, it’s doing something very right and if you are wondering as to what it can be, it’s offering the sellers a very good reason to link their pages to the eBay’s pages and auctions. Also, they update the links regularly as the new auctions go up.

A Clear Niche With Unique Products; Different From Selling Mass Produced Goods

Etsy is remarkably successful in terms of US traffic. Although Etsy uses almost the same strategy as eBay of offering its users a platform for selling and earning automatic promotion, it has a small twist to it. Etsy has gradually turned out to be a platform to buy strictly from creative people everywhere. This ensures that each product is unique with most of the sellers as artists and craftspeople. According to SEMrush, Etsy has around 49 million in search traffic.

Conclusion

While, the big eCommerce giants like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy continue to dominate the eCommerce industry, there is still a lot of space for the smaller players to capitalize on provided that we really learn from the biggest winners. Subsequently, this will help us find our own way and maybe, much innovative.

We have just stepped into 2018 and it’s certainly a perfect time to evaluate our position as an industry as well as speculate the probable SEO Trends and Google Changes that might be coming our way later this year.

Algorithm updates based fake news

In 2010, there had been constant pressure from the Media’s end on Google to take strict action against the various websites that consisted of mainly spammy or low-quality contents and in February 2011, Google released its Google Panda update which apparently seemed to be a pretty massive move on the part of Google to target the spammy or low-quality contents.

If you are wondering as to why I am referring to this today, it is to show you the real underlying picture behind such updates. The reality is a lot different from what it seems and the fact is that the media has been consistently pressurizing Google to promote fake updates for the past one and half years which is quite an extensive problem for search industries which is why many experts term it as “Google’s biggest-ever search quality crisis.”

Such accusations undoubtedly have had a deep impact on Google’s image. Google, on the other hand, has been doing its best to fight it off the best it can by banning publishers from promoting fake news ads, finding new ways to offensive auto complete suggestions reporting, devaluing “non-authoritative information” and adding “fact check” tags to search results.

Back in 2015, Google released a paper on Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT) which is a factual accuracy based quality evaluation of websites instead of evaluation based on the number of inbound links and if implemented, the Knowledge-Based Trust system can probably, demote sites selling fake news to a large extent. However, it certainly emphasizes the fact that Google takes truthfulness as the most important ranking factor.

Growth of Voice search and featured snippets

According to a recent study, one out of five mobile searches has a voice search which is evident of the growing popularity of voice search among the people.

The number is most likely going to increase with extensive use of Google Assistant enabled devices which will eventually lead to an increase in featured snippets.

Artificial intelligence is going to have many new aspects to it

Since the time, Google has come up with its Machine Learning AI system RankBrain to process search results; it’s fascination for AI has been getting more apparent over the years. Another great AI is the Cloud Vision API with an incredibly tremendous capacity of recognizing a massive number of objects.

Google certainly has a lot to offer when it comes to Machine Learning and perhaps, this is why they have begun to sell it as their own product. As Google incorporates its AI in their search algorithms, the search results will behave in a less predictable way. This may not be a good thing for many of us but we had better prepare for this.

Huge decline in manipulative guest posting

Back in May, last year, it has been announced by Google that large-scale link building with article marketing is strictly against its guidelines and may even result in a penalty.

The announcement has been taken pretty seriously among the SEO communities and it has been taken as a strong sign of a manipulative guest posting targeting algorithm update.

Unlinked brand mentions

According to the confirmation by Bing, only the unlinked brand mentions are tracked down by them and used as a ranking Signal. Some SEO experts are anticipating Google to be doing the same as well from an indication of a patent by Google.

Mobile First Indexing

Considering the fact that mobile searches have beat the desktop searches last year with 57% of the traffic from mobile devices, Google will most likely emphasize on mobile first indexing which means ranking on Google’s search listings will be totally based on the brilliance of the mobile version of content.

Let’s try to understand the massive role that reviews play in making the search strategy incredibly effective and subsequently, influencing Google’s trust in your brand to a large extent.

There’s absolutely no denying the fact that a lot of businesses have been using fake reviews to tremendously influence the purchasing decisions of the consumers. Also, the customers are influenced to a certain extent though but it doesn’t really pay off in the long run. However, the prevalence of fake reviews has a very devastating impact and as a matter of fact, such moves are instead damaging the trust of the consumers to a huge extent. Review sites like Google or Amazon have got completely aware of this problem for quite a while and in fact, they have begun to take the most appropriate steps to identify and eradicate such practices of deceiving the customers.

This is certainly the right time to have an elaborate discussion and determine on what’s the most appropriate ethical approach to online reviews going to be like from now on to produce a long-lasting positive impact upon the consumers’ perception of your brand. In fact, this is the first best thing to start with for every single business nowadays and that pretty much explains as to what an important role reviews play in business promotion nowadays.

Google’s perspective towards building Consumer’s trust

According to a recent research conducted in cooperation with the University Of California, Irvine as well as PlacesScout, there is a strong correlation between ratings and search engine performance for local businesses. The study also reveals the secret that with every keyword or location mentioned in the reviews, it enhances the search engine rankings. A lot of businesses have already been benefitted by this.

Google itself had once stated that star ratings in Google Search Ads can enhance click through up to 17% and organic listings with 4-5 stars with rich snippets is usually seen to have a slightly higher click-through rate than listing without stars. The concept has proved to be pretty effective for many businesses over the years.

It’s a proven truth that although reviews don’t influence the search engine ranking directly; they can enhance the CTR to a large extent which is certainly a great benefit in itself. Most importantly, the user-generated reviews can unimaginably influence the consumers’ decision more than any other factor does.

The first big leap

Google has made it incredibly easy for us to get our customers review our services and in fact, this is one of the most important things to start with. The better you do at this, the higher goes the ranking. All you have to do is find your Place ID using the lookup tool provided by Google, put your business name in the “Enter a location” search bar and as the business name appears, click on it to see your Place ID beneath that. Then, copy the Place ID and paste it to the end of the URL: https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=

After you add the Place ID to the URL, you can check the URL in your browser and it should take you to your business search result page with its rate and review.

Sharing this URL with your customers and third-party review sites will most likely enhance your search engine ranking to a massive extent.

This is probably the most organized way to start promoting your business.

Recommended to Read: Local Ranking Factors In 2018

Tactics to pick up more reviews

Here are a few ways to pick up more reviews.

• Identifying and generating reviews from industry-specific review sites can be pretty effective in winning the trust of your consumers
• Reviews from trusted bloggers can work like a magic in educating more consumers about your business
• The way you respond to your reviewers also plays a very important role in creating the best impressions for your consumers. What consumers usually keep looking for is a reliability factor as well as the concern on the part of a business.
• Contacting the happiest customers and encouraging them to post their review is probably a brilliant thing to do in relation to generating more organic reviews as you can always expect them to have the most amazing views about your service
• Incorporating social media with the customer support is certainly not a bad idea at all. In fact, it’s an amazing way of helping your consumers and showing your concerns towards them. This even increases your chance to get new customers as everything will be visible online in the form of comments almost like reviews
• When asking for a review, make sure you ask your consumers the most appropriate questions. Irrelevant questions may lead to irritated reviews by the consumers and you don’t want that, right? So, before you determine the kind of questions you are going to ask your consumers, have a great anticipation of the consumer’s psychology. This actually increases your chance of getting more positive and remarkable reviews

Conclusion

Reviews can be unimaginably effective in elevating your search engine ranking. However, it’s important to develop the right perspective towards it and maintain the most organized as well as an ethical approach towards getting more reviews. Fake reviews may seem to work for a while but it’s certainly not going to work in the long run and furthermore, the popular review sites have already realized the damage fake reviews have caused over the years which is why technically, there isn’t much space for fake reviews any longer. Most importantly, as a businessman, would you not want to see your customers have consistent faith in your brand? Just a bit of carefulness about reviews can undoubtedly create a huge difference for your business in times to come. Reviews may seem to be a very minute aspect but it certainly has a lot to contribute to your business ranking provided that you have the right perspective towards it. Perhaps, that’s the reason why Google has been emphasizing so much upon ethical reviews and it certainly pays off.

Sometimes, Google extends the search results snippets from 160 characters to a maximum of 320 characters for some websites. But that does not mean the fundamentals of writing a meta description changed. However, there isn’t much clarity about the concept as of yet. There isn’t much information if Google is sometimes display all of the 320 characters or if Google is going to show the meta description or content from your page. If there’s one thing for sure about Google’s way of handling the snippets, it’s the fact that it’s solely based on the search queries and the relevance of content on a certain web page. Sometimes meta description written by SEO company is ignored by Google

According to a Google spokesperson, it’ll be too early to give it a try to expand the meta description and there’s absolutely no need to do it as long as one is happy with the current ones. He further added saying that nowadays they add slightly longer snippets to display more of the meta description. However, if you aren’t happy or if you want to experiment with it, you can always go ahead. There’s certainly a lot of talks going on about this sudden update if existing metas should be updated by the SEO or expanded by Google instead. Some believe it can improve the click-through rates. However, from the technical perspective, meta descriptions don’t really contribute to the ranking of a site in any way, be it long or short. It can at the most determine the way your site should be visible in the search results.

What is SEO?

SEO is kind of a word we hear most often these days and you must have heard a friend or a relative use this word a lot of times as well. Many times, you must have wondered like, “what the devil is SEO?” However, SEO is literally a magical word for a lot of people who are fully aware of its meaning and significance. For them, who are not at all familiar with its meaning, understanding SEO is going to be a great deal of fun as well and SEO is certainly not very difficult to understand. The term SEO stands for search engine optimization and is an important part of Digital Marketing. Now, before we get deeper into SEO, it is important to understand the transition in marketing. Marketing, as we all know plays a very significant role in promoting a business. However, neither business nor marketing is any longer the same as it used to be ten to fifteen years back from now. Business has had a big leap from being a mere buy and sell activity to a far more advanced stage of e-commerce while marketing has had a major transformation as well from being a door to door or brochure based promotion to online marketing.

How it is going to help us anyway?

Interestingly, we have now reached a stage where in marketing has become by far more dependable than what it used to be in the past and eventually, business has got exceptionally confident. The perception of competition has massively changed over the past few years. Despite tremendous competition among the various businesses these days, competition is no longer being able to intimidate businesses. Instead, competition is taken as an inevitable part of every business. However, the magnitude can be lessened to a large extent with the help of Digital Marketing to help business continue to find its way towards more growth and advancement. Since the time the concept of Digital Marketing started, there has been a stunning progress in business in terms of sales. SEO has got pretty popular among all the other Digital Marketing techniques because of its incredible effectiveness in increasing the online traffic for many e-commerce websites.

In the current world of online business, it is almost mandatory for every business to have one’s online presence which is of course a website. Now, it is important to understand that websites nowadays not only promote the various businesses but also are important platforms for online sell and purchase which is why e-commerce websites are desperately in need of increasing traffic everyday to improve sales and ROI. However, there are numerous e-commerce websites these days for every single product which is why the competition level has elevated massively over the years and this is certainly a lot more aggressive than that in the past. This is when SEO or the search engine optimization can unbelievably help a business acclimatize to the intense competition as well as help in accelerating the growth. In fact SEO has already proved its effectiveness over the past few years and this is why some believe that SEO constitutes a major part of Digital Marketing.

How does SEO work?

SEO and SERPs are couple of most widely used abbreviations nowadays in relation to online business and they are of course pretty connected as well. While SEO stands for search engine optimization, SERPs stands for search engine results pages. SEO helps websites to be on the SERPS and if you are still wondering as to why it is so important for a website to be on the SERPs, well, the answer is increased traffic. As a website is increasingly visible on the search engine or SERPs, it will be introduced to more and more web traffic which may eventually lead to an increase in sales. On the contrary, nowadays, being out of sight is literally being with no sales and no business on the part of a website. Now technically, SEO comprises a whole lot of techniques which can be basically divided in two categories; the on-page SEO and the off-page SEO. The on-page SEO deals with keyword research and incorporating keywords in the content while the off-page SEO deals with link building but to understand the most ideal functions of SEO, we need to know as to what the search engines are looking for.

The important aspects that search engines take into account

1. Relevant contents

Search engines try their best to serve their traffic with the most relevant results available and in case, a website has the most relevant content in relation to a particular search, the search engines will certainly like to show up that content. However, it is important for the website to make the search engines aware of its presence first and only then it can start expecting some organic traffic from the search engines for its relevant contents. Perhaps, this is why a lot of emphasis is laid upon the various niche and the long tail keywords by the SEO strategists to reach out the traffic better or to serve the traffic better.

2. Content’s Quality

Even though informative websites are now better known as blogs and websites dealing with online business are known as e-commerce websites, there is one thing that every website has to pay special attention on and that is the website content. Written content plays a very significant role in websites’ optimization. In fact, the search engines determine the relevancy in terms of the written content. However, only original and valuable contents get utmost importance while copied or duplicate contents are right away ignored. Content is a high quality content if the idea is properly expressed in it and if the content is highly informative as well as grammatically accurate. Most importantly, the content must be composed in such an interesting that it is able to engage the readers.

3. Website’s Loading Speed

A website with a poor loading speed can be a big disappointment for the traffic as well as the search engine which is why there is absolutely no space for slow loading websites on the SERPs. Instead, some of the search engines may even penalize websites if they are found with slow loading speed. From SEO point of view, every SEO technique will fall flat on its face until and unless a website has a proper loading speed. However, there are ways to increase the loading speed of a website and usually, it is done by the SEO strategists themselves so that every other SEO technique falls in to the right place.

4. User Experience

It is important to provide the users with the most convenient and pleasant experience on one’s website in terms of fast and simple navigation, brilliant inter linking, stunning interface, etc. which is partly a work of SEO and partly that of Web designing. It is important for a website to provide its visitors with the things that they are looking for in the shortest possible time.

5. Cross Device Compatibility

It is absolutely important for websites to be equally optimized on all the devices. Websites, nowadays have to be Responsive websites which means having the ability to maintain the same incredibly pleasant user experience on varying screen sizes be it a Mac or an Android phone or a tablet.

6. Keyword Density

2 to 3% is the ideal Keyword Density for any content. For those of you are not very familiar with this word, keyword density is the percentage of the keywords to the total word count of a content.

7. Keyword stuffing

The search engines are very particular about the proper use of keywords and in case keywords are found to be used inappropriately, the search engines will consider it to be keyword stuffing which in other words mean forcefully incorporating the keywords in the content without having any relevance. Keyword stuffing can deteriorate the ranking of a website to a large extent.

8. Intrusive or obnoxious Ads

Website with a lot of ads can get its visitors really frustrated sometimes and probably, give them the worst user experience ever. Visitors who are in genuine need for a certain piece of important information from websites can get terribly annoyed and disappointed as they are being disturbed by intrusive ads.

9. Comments

Search engines pay a lot of attention on the various comments a website has for its various posts. What it really looks for is the kind of engagement the traffic has with the website. Also, good comments are kind of clear indication of the brilliant informative aspect of a website.

10. Meta Descriptions

Using a relevant Meta descriptions about the content in not more than 156 characters and with the keywords incorporated appropriately, you can certainly increase your chance of being on the SERPs to some extent. This is something which must be always treated with utmost importance.