☠️ SEO Isn't Dead, You're Just Doing It Wrong.

What You Need To Know From The Industry

• Baidu has joined the AI race and announced Ernie AI 4.0. The Chinese giant says its new and improved ErnieBot is not inferior to any aspect of Chat-GPT.

• Google is adding to its 700+ schema markups by rolling out structured data for car dealerships. It will display car details on their search pages.

• Amazon research shows that 70% of European SMEs lack confidence and need support to build an e-commerce offering, despite 82% recognising the importance of scaling online.

• Spotify launched a Merch Hub to allow artists an e-commerce outlet to sell their merchandise.

Amazon Prime Day Results

The 10th and 11th of October brought another manufactured retail holiday from Amazon, in the form of its Prime Day event.

This is the 8th anniversary of the event, which pulls in mega bucks for the e-commerce giant. How did it do? Well, no surprise, it was their best Autumn event to date.

Here’s a rundown:

• Prime members snapped up over 150 million products from Amazon’s 3rd party sellers.

• Around 60% of sales were below $20, while 4% were over $100.

• The average order value was slightly lower this time around, at $53.47.

• Shoppers aren’t buying as much for Christmas as expected, with many opting to use the event to stock up on essential household items.

• Amazon says apparel (25%), home (23%), household essentials (21%) and beauty (19%) were the most popular categories in this month’s event.

• Amazon says that its Prime members saved more than $1bn across millions of Prime Day deals.

So what does this all mean for Amazon? Big bucks, obviously. It’s yet another sign that the industry giant is still rising from strength to strength and is showing no signs of slowing down. Early reports are also showing that Amazon FBA sellers and drop-shippers have done mostly well out of the event.

And for those e-commerce stores and shoppers who feel like they missed out on their dose of retail spending during the event, don’t worry. We have Black Friday & Cyber Monday just a few weeks away.

The Outpost’s Opinion: This is impressive once again for Amazon, who seem to be playing by their own rules when it comes to selling and creating a buzz in their online space. We all know that at the end of the day, Amazon is the one who is ultimately benefitting from this event. But if solo entrepreneurs and independent retailers are getting a slice of the action, it’s not all so bad.

SEO TIPS: It’s Not Dead, You’re Just Doing It Wrong

SEO has changed a lot in the last 20 years. But still, I’m seeing people on the daily declaring it is dead.

Has it died? With Google alone receiving over 8.5 billion searches per day, of course it bloody hasn’t.

SEO is one of the most rewarding long-term marketing tactics a business can utilise. But methods which once got you to rank numero uno on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), may not see you rank in the top 100 now.

With two new core updates being rolled out in the last 5 weeks (Feeling brave are we, Google?), it’s resulted in a whole host of changes in ranking across most industries. In particular, we’re seeing large blog and news sites being hit the most.

So to all those angry Reddit and Twitter (I’m still refusing to call it X) fanatics, this is for you. SEO optimisations you can do to increase your site’s rank. By focusing on these aspects, you can’t go too far wrong.

1. Build Authoritative Backlinks

   There was once a time when backlinks were a game quantity over quality. But with the rise of black-hat SEO techniques and link farming, quality is the way to go. You want authoritative and contextual links to your site. Sites with a higher domain authority (DA) will pass more link juice to your site, so to speak. Using tools like HARO is a good way to get backlinks from other sites. Alternatively focus on creating great content which people want to share, quote and link back to.

2. Rich Snippets

   Rich snippets (formally Rich Results) are additional data blocks inserted alongside a Google result. Common rich snippets include reviews, prices or recipes. Although they are not a ranking factor, by optimising for rich snippets, you’ll make your site listing stand out on the SERP, increasing the size of your listing on the page, making it more eye-catching and improving click-through-rate (CTR) to your site.

   

   (Example rich snippet showing product ratings, price, stock and image.)

3. Optimise For Mobile

   Mobile-first websites are favoured by Google and rewarded as a result. With more and more users searching on mobile devices, you need your site to be optimised to avoid poor user experience and drop-offs.

4. Create Evergreen Content

   Gone are the days of needing to post weekly blogs to your site. Creating evergreen content is the way to go. Instead of spreading content across five or six posts, structure it into one. We are finding that ‘ultimate guides’ and longer-form content perform the best in Google results. So don’t be scared to go back to old content, update it and optimise it, if done well you’ll likely see a boost in rankings as a result.

5. Create User-First Content

   Search engines, particularly Google, are rewarding user-first content. Google’s guidelines encourage webmasters to follow the E-E-A-T structure, by creating content which demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Don’t use keywords for keywords sake, create an experience which answers questions and supports the user journey.

6. Optimise Page Speed

   A poor page speed can massively hinder user experience and seriously hit your conversions. You can test your page performance using the Page Speed Insights tool. A quick-win to improve page speed is by optimising your images by properly sizing, compressing and converting them in to a Web-P format.

The Outpost’s Opinion: SEO is one of the most crucial marketing channels. I hate to say that SEO is free, because is isn’t. If nothing else, it takes a lot of valuable time to rank highly. But when you get it right, the results are like no other.