Big brands find pandemic success with e-commerce platforms; Monday’s daily brief

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and would you pay per tweet?

That seems to be the question floating across Twitter over the weekend after the social media platform announced that they’re testing a tweet subscription option. The feature would be called Super Follows and it allows creators and publishers to give paid users access to extra tweets, community groups, newsletter subscriptions, and badges to show off support for the low, low price of $4.99 a month.

Most other platforms have launched direct payment features for creators, and it seems to make sense elsewhere. YouTube creators and Facebook group community managers often put a ton of work into their final products, but it’s hard to imagine that paralleled on Twitter. I’ve never seen it as a place for curated content, but more a platform for news and genuine conversation. 

Maybe I just lack the imagination. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But I’m intrigued to see where brands can take it if it goes live for everyone.

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

Pitch to speak at SMX

The Search Engine Land team is already in the throes of planning for SMX Advanced, and we’re looking for speakers like YOU to join the lineup. For the first time ever, SMX Advanced is happening virtually, which means if you’ve never been before, it’s easier than ever to attend. It also means that location doesn’t have to be a barrier to entry for speaking at SMX, either.

You don’t have to be a veteran speaker to pitch for SMX, just passionate and knowledgeable about search marketing and helping other marketers learn. We’re looking for speakers to lead sessions on the latest in SEO, PPC, and user experience.

Here are a few tips for submitting a compelling session proposal:

• Present an original idea and/or unique session format.
• Include details about what attendees will be able to do better or differently as a result of attending your session.
• Include a case study or specific examples and explain how they can be applied in different types of organizations.
• Be realistic about what you can present in the time allotted. You can’t cover everything about your topic. Going more in-depth on a narrow topic is often more valuable to the attendee.
• Provide tangible takeaways and a plan of action.

So toss that imposter syndrome aside (yep, I see you out there thinking “I don’t belong at SMX” and, guess what–YOU DO) and get to pitching.

Pitch your session here.

Over half of enterprise brands see a 7X return on Amazon advertising

With COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantines forcing us all to stay home, American consumers spent 44% more online in 2020 than in 2019. The pandemic accelerated the adoption of Amazon as an e-commerce platform for many brands, and thus Amazon Advertising. 

Feedvisor surveyed over 1000 enterprise to Fortune 500 companies about their e-commerce strategies during the pandemic and found that most found success with Amazon and the in-platform advertising:

• 78% of brands surveyed are currently selling on the platform (up from 55% in 2019)
• 88% of brands use Amazon’s advertising platform (up 21% from 2019)
• 51% of brands said they saw a return of 7x or more (39% of brands see between a 4x–6x return)

But it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine: “While Amazon continues to permeate brands’ strategies and grow in significance, other e-marketplaces are entering the mix. In the report, brands both on and off Amazon share similar sentiments around the challenges of operating on the platform, including increased competition and the inability to control the customer experience,” according to the report.

Why we care. Along with e-commerce platforms like Shopify, many brands leveraged e-marketplace when the pandemic struck. It’s critical that companies capitalize on both the advantage these platforms provide and their advanced technology to drive more traffic to their product listings, create a personalized online shopping experience, and tailor their advertising campaigns to their target audiences. “The brands that embrace the digital revolution of retail, invest in data and technology solutions, and optimize their presence on Amazon and e-marketplaces will be well-positioned for long-term growth in the inevitable new normal,” said Victor Rosenman, founder and CEO, Feedvisor. 

Yelp releases its first Trust and Safety Report

Yelp launched a new trust and safety site last week. It’s aimed at informing consumers about its recommendation software, consumer alerts, content moderation practices, and information about the attributes that appear on business profiles. The platform also released its first-ever Trust and Safety Report to provide a summary of the steps it took to reduce harmful content. Here are a few interesting tidbits from the report:

• In 2020, Yelp received more than 18.1 million reviews. Of that figure, roughly 25% were not recommended by its recommendation software because it suspected the reviews were a conflict of interest, not useful, solicited or otherwise unreliable.
• Between March 1 and December 31, 2020, Yelp’s human moderators removed over 5,200 reviews for violating its special COVID-19 content guidelines. Between May 25 and December 31, 2020, more than 13,300 reviews were removed for threats, hate speech, lewdness or other similarly harmful content.
• The platform put up more than 2,500 consumer alerts on business pages to warn users when attempts were being made to manipulate reviews and ratings.
• From May 25 to December 31, 2020, Yelp published 550 public attention alerts on business pages that were either accused of, or the target of, racist behavior.

On the hunt for something new in 2021? Here are the latest career opportunities in search

Associate Director, Paid Search @ ForwardPMX (NYC)

• Develops and owns SEM media strategy across Search and Shopping
• Oversee team that owns reporting analysis and optimizations

SEO Consultant @ Builtvisible (London, UK)

• Run SEO campaigns with demonstrable impact on clients’ organic performance
• Advise on SEO opportunities and challenges so clients are getting the best value

Director of Marketing @ Science Exchange (Remote: Palo Alto)

• Build a lean marketing function with demand gen, product marketing and creative pillars
• Partner closely with product teams to clearly articulate value of new product releases

PPC/Paid Search Manager @ onXmaps, Inc. (Missoula, MT – relocation assistance offered)

• Identify and execute campaign management tactics across multiple campaigns 
• Maximize CTR and conversion rate through best practices and continuous testing

Enter a job opening for an opportunity to be featured in this section.

What’s on your mind, marketers?

As search marketers, we deal with a ton of new and evolving issues every day. Ads platforms are moving toward more automation. Google’s algorithm updates are always shifting. Getting data from social ads is impossible. Clients don’t always understand KPIs. Remote work can be a struggle. Salary negotiation is hard. We want to know what you’re dealing with on the day-to-day. (Or, alternatively, what you’re excited about in our industry! Tell us how you nailed it.)

So we made a quick survey for you to dish. Give us the deets.

Tell us what you’re working through.

Signs of a Google local search ranking update

Google local ranking update. Starting this past Wednesday and Thursday there have been signs that Google pushed out a local ranking search algorithm update.  Some of the local tracking tools are noticing and some local SEOs are noticing as well. 

Showcase Shopping Ads. Mike Ryan walks through the “death” of Google’s Showcase Shopping Ads, what it means for retail advertisers, and why it happened: “This was not an overnight change but has been underway for months. But it wasn’t communicated very effectively and, surprise surprise, it all happened because of Smart Shopping Campaigns ”

Mailto and telephone links. It doesn’t appear that you can pass Google PageRank to mailto or telephone hyperlinks, at least John Mueller said so by saying “we see links as being between canonical URLs, so if the href points to something that’s not a canonical URL for our indexing, then we don’t see that as a link.”

We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

• Google Posts: Conversion Factor — Not Ranking Factor – Moz
• How Fast Should My Webpage Be and Why Should I Care? – BruceClay
• Rich Snippets: Everything You Need To Know In 2021 [With Case Study] – SEObility
• Shopify: Shackles for SEO or the future of eCommerce? – Hallam
• Tech Firms Train Voice Assistants to Understand Atypical Speech – Wall Street Journal