Image by Natalia Ovcharenko from Pixabay
SMX West is happening in San Jose, CA, this week. So far, the buzz is positive on content, even if the news isn’t always what we want to hear. Here are some highlights from the first day.
Most Amazon Advertisers Will Spend More on Ads This Year
The show kicked off with a keynote address “How the Rise of Digital Commerce is Reshaping Search and Performance Marketing” from Ginny Marvin, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land, Dana Tan, Sr. Manager, Global SEO at Under Armour, and Benjamin Spiegel, Chief Digital Officer, Global Beauty, Procter & Gamble. In it, Marvin highlighted the data uncovered in marketing Land’s Digital Commerce Advertising Survey that revealed the majority of Amazon advertisers (81%) have plans to spend more on ads in 2020. Moreover, 41 percent of those advertisers are planning to spend as much as 25 percent more than they did in the past six months, while 10 percent said they would increase their Amazon budget by 50 percent or more.
So how will they pay for it? Per the survey, 53 percent of respondents said incremental spending would fund the increase, followed by 31 percent pulling from traditional advertising channels’ budgets. However, Paid Social and Search take a hit, too, at 21 percent and 17 percent, respectively.
To read more about the survey results, please click here.
The presenters then shared the 2020 Periodic Table of Digital Commerce Marketing, developed by Search Engine Land. It is a marketing tool designed to help you create and organize the process for marketing products online moving forward. Furthermore, the tool can help you tweak current campaigns, too. Finally, the presenters shared their experience using SEO, PPC, and social marketing intersect to increase digital commerce sales.
Category Pages Outperform Product Pages for Keyword Rankings
JumpFly, a PPC Management company, presented their findings on an organic search ranking value comparing e-commerce category pages vs. product pages on Wednesday. Their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) director, Jill Kocher Brown, presented the results in a session “SEO for Ecommerce Category and Product Detail Pages.” Their findings suggest that category pages outperform the product pages in rankings for the number of keywords, estimated organic traffic amounts, and potential traffic driving ability. Brown and one of her co-presenters, Vice President of e-commerce for the Integer Group, Tony Verre, also shared their tips and tricks for scalable SEO strategies for both types of pages.
To see the presentation slides from JumpFly’s presentation, click here.
Future-Proofing Your Site For Google’s Core Algorithm Updates
Lily Ray, SEO Professional, DJ, Drummer, & Fitness Enthusiast, of Path Interactive, presented tactics to keep your site rankings during Google’s core algorithm updates. Her presentation was an update to her past session a few months ago at SMX East to reflect the latest and most excellent ways to future-proof websites.
Core updates can wipe out your rankings. In the last update, YMYL (Your Money Your Life) sites were especially hard hit. Ray shared stories of recovery that involved patients and hard work but also were a success.
Ray went on to present 12 steps to Future-Proof the sites for which you are responsible. From maintaining content quality to owning past bad behavior to renewing focus on being relevant and honoring searcher’s intent, she gave practical tips and advice for SEO managers pulling their hair out after every core update.
To view Ray’s presentation, including the 12 steps to future-proofing your sites, please click here.
And this was the first day! More to come about today’s presentations tomorrow.
Wish you were there? No worries; you can attend SMX West Advanced June 8-10, 2020, in Seattle.
PPC Ad Editor is the first all-in-one tool that allows teams to create, share, and edit PPC ads with their clients and then upload directly into Google Ads. For more information, visit www.ppcadeditor.com.
Sources:
Brown, Jill Kocher. “JumpFly SEO Director Presents at SMX West 2020.” Jumpfly.com. 19 February 2020. Web. 20 February 2020. <https://www.jumpfly.com/blog/jumpfly-seo-director-presents-at-smx-west-2020/>.
Marvin, Ginny. “Vast majority of Amazon Advertisers plan to spend more on ads again this year.” Marketingland.com. 19 February 2020. Web. 20 February 2020. < https://marketingland.com/amazon-advertising-survey-2020-276201>.
