SEO TL;DR #10: Free Barcode Scanners for Google Business Profiles, Reasons your 'Helpful Content' may not be Ranking & Coupon Rich Results
SEO TL;DR - 05/02/2024
Increase your store visibility with Product Listings inside your Google Business Profile
Google Business Profiles (formerly Google My Business) now lets you add products using their free barcode scanner. This allows you to effortlessly showcase in-store products on Google Search & Google Maps.
Google explained that when you add in-store products, it may help:
Increase your store’s visibility. Your in-store products can show in search results and on your Business Profile on Google Search and Maps
Show customers what’s available in your store. Many customers use Google to check whether stores near them stock the products they want.
Here is a screenshot of the steps, from Search Engine Roundtable:
Check your eligibility and find out more about the process here: support.google.com/business/answer/9934993
Reasons your ‘helpful content’ might not be ranking
Google Search Liason Danny Sullivan recently gave feedback on why an individual site wasn’t showing up in the SERPs. The user posted this with a screenshot of their GSC visibility report:
Does anyone have an explanation to why some of our articles are not showing up in the SERPs... at all?
I'll update the article with new info, it pops back in and ranks well, then disappears again.
This is happening to lots of our great content, it's very frustrating :(
The URL in question was an article about the top 10 Steam Deck alternatives for 2024.
While this is a very specific feedback, the diagnostics could be helpful to other sites in the same situation. While the feedback doesn’t mention any direct ranking factors, Google’s systems are designed to reward reliable, helpful content, so the more pages align with that goal, the more you're potentially going to be successful with it.
To paraphrase the feedback Danny gave:
At first glance, it wasn't clear that there was much original content here. It looks and feels at first glance like a typical "here's a bunch of product pages."
Some devices have long video reviews, which is good to show you have experiences to share. Maybe that needs to be more evident in the written content.
Most of the devices mentioned don't exist yet. You're promising the reader the best alternatives for 2024, but if they don't exist yet, that's potentially unsatisfying to people coming to this page.
The article feels out-of-date. For example, the Rog Ally is not out yet. The article is dated Jan 29th 2024, yet you mention it was “just announced” on April 1st 2023.
The Lenovo Legion Go also isn’t out, and you mention “all signs are pointing towards an October 2023 release date". It’s confusing that a page claiming to be fresh is referencing 2023 release dates.
Mixing out-of-date info on a page that claims to be fresh isn't a great experience.
If you want to diagnose how helpful your own content is, answer these 38 self-assessment questions from Google themselves.
New copy & paste coupon Rich Results
Brodie Clark confirmed that rich results featuring coupon codes have launched in the US, with the ability for the rich result type to show on both mobile and desktop with a code that can be copied from Google’s search results:
While this hasn’t been publicly confirmed by Google, it is showing for all users in the US when relevant to the query.
The new coupon codes draw the eye and look more prominent in search, so they could help improve your click-through rate.
While not confirmed for the UK, it may only be a matter of time and preparing for them is easy enough to do via Merchant Center within the Marketing > Promotions tab. You can find more details on 7 other rich results you can leverage for eCommerce SEO here.
Google sunsetting their caching feature
In the previous SEO TL;DR, I explained that while the cache link from search results had disappeared, you could still access the cache by searching for "cache:yourdomain.com".
Google has confirmed that you won’t be able to do this in the near future, so the closest alternative will be using the Wayback Machine to see snapshots of content.
Google’s consolidated SEO starter guide
Last week I also covered how Google was planning on halving its SEO starter guide, which ranks #3 for ‘SEO’ and how that could be bad and good for SEO.
Google released an update explaining why they believed this was a wise choice, saying:
We refreshed our SEO Starter Guide to better fit its namesake (you guessed it): a starter audience.
Launched in 2008, this guide was originally a 22-page PDF that was designed to be a one-stop-shop for the most common SEO topics.
The pocket-sized version of the SEO Starter Guide has a better focus on the topics we think a person who's just dipping their toes in SEO should focus on and why.
Read the SEO Starter Guide