Digital Marketing

The demand for content marketing services is steadily increasing. From the latest stats, leads from content marketing are thrice as many as those of outbound marketing. So, it makes sense why over 80% of marketers spend more money on content marketing. But with millions of content getting published daily, getting your way around content marketing can be pretty difficult – or maybe not? That’s what many people think. But the reality is that with the right strategies, content marketing can be simple and effective. Getting people to read your blog shouldn’t be difficult. I’ll share with you a few tips on how to go about it. These tips will improve the content itself and also optimize your content’s performance. Understand Search Intent As the name suggests, search intent is the intention or goal a user has when entering keywords into the search engine. Search intent is becoming a central factor for SEO and slowly dethrones backlinks as the dominant ranking factor. Google thrives to display the most relevant blog posts in its search results. They try to figure out the users’ intentions and improve semantic search.  You can explore the search intent by looking at the search results of Internet users. You need to know what people are searching for and what answers they want to get. This way, you can create content tailored to their needs. Run the Panda Survey The Panda Survey, though old, is still incredibly effective. Google Panda is an algorithm update used to reward high-quality websites in Google’s organic search results. It eliminates thin content, duplicate content, low-quality content, low-quality user-generated content, and low-trusted content. The internet is left a better place by filtering out such content, with only high-quality and valuable content. When Panda hits your content, it suddenly drops its organic traffic or search engine rankings. But aside from low-quality content, other factors can also result in lost traffic and rankings—for example, your competition. Someone with better content can outrank and move ahead of you. Panda’s advantage is that it creates a healthy and competitive environment, which keeps content creators on their toes. To avoid getting hit by Panda, there are a few things you need to do.  One, remove or overhaul duplicate content. Carefully vet and ensure that your content is original, error-free, and provides value to the reader. Thirdly, revise the affiliate/content ratio so that affiliate links and ads do not dominate your content. Finally, abandon content farming practices. Update Old Content Every manufactured good has an expiration date. Every content marketer needs to improve his/her content. The internet is always growing. And the only way to maintain your content fresh with a healthy conversion rate is to periodically republish and update your old content. Some bloggers prefer to spin out new posts, but cheap is always expensive. By republishing new content, you’re being as up-to-date as possible and keeping everything relevant. The best part is that the process of updating old content is a straightforward one. Begin by making a list of the posts worth updating. Use your favorite SEO tool (mine being Ahrefs) and see how your articles rank on Google. Generally, posts that rank outside Google’s Top 10 are worth updating. Secondly, remove outdated links. Read through your posts and replace all dead and outdated links with current and updated ones. Also, update your article’s formatting to one that is clean, reader-friendly, and consistent. Publish X vs. Y posts FedEx Vs. USPS, Dropshipping vs. Fulfillment by Amazon. Have you come across such posts? These are X Vs. Y posts. And they are an excellent way to attract more traffic to your site and make more sales. There are two reasons for this: One, X Vs. Y posts don’t have a lot of SEO competition. Your article can rank top of Google within a few weeks with proper SEO optimization. Secondly, internet users that search for X Vs. Y topics have more knowledge on the topic. For example, someone that searches for FedEx Vs. USPS already knows about both companies and is just trying to compare which one is better. This is why the CPC of X Vs. Y blogposts is often higher than the CPC of normal blog posts.  Optimize for long-tail keywords I’m sure it’s not the first time you’ve heard about keywords when it comes to SEO. The problem is that most keyword search tools give out the same set of keywords to every user. If only there was a tool that produced untapped keywords not known by your competitors? Well, good news; there is. I’m talking about the Google Keyword Planner. Log in to the Keyword Planner and enter a main keyword. The tool will then scan for thousands of keyword ideas. The cool thing is that most of your competitors don’t use the Google Keyword Planner for keyword research. Focus on the headline It only takes 2.7 seconds to capture the human brain – proof enough of why your headline should be as catchy as possible. The headline is a make-or-break factor for every content. So, if you want to have a flood of readers, maybe it’s time to spend more time crafting and compelling irresistible headlines. How do you come up with an irresistible headline? Simple: promise your readers something they want. Let your headline suggest to the reader that here is a piece of content that you should spend your time reading. A majority of people will only read articles whose headlines have grabbed their attention. There are numerous factors that could assist in creating highly performing headlines. Here are a few of them. Run a headline check Headline analyzer tools are an efficient way to ensure you’re on the right track. Tools like the EMV Headline Analyzer are not only easy to use but also effective. The tool ranks your headline based on its emotional marketing value. Generally, scores above 30% are acceptable. Use Emotional Titles Studies have shown that headlines with emotional keywords get more clicks. Creating titles with

When it comes to making the most of every hour, marketing departments are usually at the top of everyone’s game. They have to do so much to support so many in their businesses, from sales to public relations and social media, even the people in the corner offices. That’s why anything they can use to get more out of the day is much appreciated.     Fortunately, there are a whole host of apps that can come to the rescue, each of which is designed to address a different part of the marketing puzzle. For example, if you want to laser in on collaboration, apps can make it simpler to conduct business via the cloud or to video conference in for team meetings.  You can also use apps to create and manage content and share across teams, too. What else should you look for in apps? This graphic gives you a start. Click To Enlarge Via Salesforce The post The Best Productivity Apps for Marketers in 2021 (Infographic) appeared first on Bluenest.

When it comes to reaching customers, there’s no denying that you must have a digital presence. Even if you don’t have a completely robust e-commerce presence, customers still may want to turn to your digital platforms in order to inform themselves, answer questions, or just share details. Part of the reason for that is more and more people have access to the internet; in fact, nearly every person has internet access, making its power undeniable.     In order to make sure that you are doing that well, you need to develop a digital marketing strategy. That means having a keen understanding of your audience. You also must figure out who your competitors are and what they’re doing in that space as well. You also need to know where you are digitally and where you need to be. What does that look like? This graphic helps explain it in greater detail to help you move forward. Click To Enlarge Via Salesforce The post How to plan your Digital Marketing Strategy. – Infographic appeared first on Bluenest.

In this article, we will map out every type of backlink that’s worth building, teach you how to build them, and even what order they should be built in for maximum SEO impact. Everything we discuss here is practiced daily in our agency and fuels our website rankings (and our clients’ website rankings) Note: Read this article on Link Building before you go through this. It provides a very clear, conceptual and high-level look at how this all works from a 30,000-foot bird’s eye view. This guide on backlinks will discuss, in detail, all the different types of backlinks and how to get them – but without the context of what & why from our link building article, it may be less clear what you should do. What are backlinks? Backlinks (aka “back links”, “back-links”, “links”, “inbound links”, etc.) are hyperlinks that point to your website but come from other websites.   When a Website A hyperlinks to Website B, you can say that Website B just acquired a “backlink” from Website A. Simple enough, right? Why Are Backlinks Important? Search engines (especially Google) use backlinks as a ranking factor. Backlinks are analogous to “votes”, “referrals”, a “vouch” or “recommendation” about your website and its content.    Very similar real life, when multiple people recommend a movie, or restaurant, or music artist, you tend to become interested & develop a sense of trust for that thing. Google works the same way.    The more (quality + relevant) backlinks your website acquires, the higher your content & keywords will rank, and the more relevant traffic will come to your website. It’s awesome. How to Get Backlinks Backlinks fall into 2 main types: Built Earned This means that some links you can go out and build yourself. This would include things like: Social profile links Blog comments Forum signature links Business directory listings etc. Other links you have to earn. This would include things like: Getting a link on another bloggers website Getting a link from a story written in Techcrunch etc. Although there are only two real types of links, there are 3 ways to get backlinks. Build Earn (Naturally or Unnaturally) Buy We will try to break up & organize this guide by backlinks you can “Build” vs. backlinks, you must “Earn”. And, if there is a place to buy them (ex: from a trusted link building service provider) we will mention that in each link write-up. A quick note on link builders & link building services There is a seemingly endless amount of link building service providers on the internet. Really, you can find everything from Citations to SAPE if you know where to look.    Buying links from the wrong person can get you into serious SEO trouble.    Be careful who you get links from. We only recommend getting links from very trusted providers, and we will never recommend someone we have not worked with before – at least not without a gigantic disclaimer.    Make sure you fully trust & vet any person or company before purchasing links from them. What Makes a Link Good? There are some properties that make a link good, and knowing how to evaluate link opportunities is a crucial skill to develop for conducting a successful SEO campaign.    We cover this in detail in our Link Building Intro Guide, but it’s worth re-capping a few of the main points here as well.    Things that make backlinks good: Authority Relevance Traffic Backlinks to Avoid Up to this point, we have talked a lot about back links you should acquire, which kind to get and how to do it. But, equally important to the backlinks you GET is the ones to AVOID getting.    The key to mastering this (without having to memorize a bunch of stuff) is to learn how to identify a “bad neighborhood” – and avoid being associated with it.    In general, you want to avoid getting links from: Irrelevant websites (unless they are very high DR) Domains in questionable geographies Domains that have been hacked/spammed Domains with toxic or over-optimized anchor text Public Blog Networks Software built backlinks Fiverr Public Blog Networks A public blog network is really just a PBN (private blog network) that isn’t actually private. Building and maintaining a private blog network is very time consuming, expensive, technically difficult, and overall just one giant P.I.T.A.    However, if done well and kept secret they are extremely powerful. The problem is there are many providers that publicly sell links on their “Private” Blog Networking – thus making it a “Public Blog Network”.    They usually don’t have your best interests in mind they just want some money for a link. Do not get these links. Software built backlinks There are a lot of software that builds backlinks these days. They are cheap, fast & can build links in huge quantities. This used to work many years ago, but now it is really just a recipe for disaster.    Unless you really know what you are doing, stay away from using software to build links. Fiverr A lot of SEOs go to Fiverr for link building work. Terrible idea. Although there may be the occasional quality link provider on Fiverr – for the most part these people are spammers who are trying to make some easy money.    They don’t care about you, or your client, or your website or anything other than selling garbage.    Do you really think this is worth this dude’s time to build you 500,000 links for $5? And do you really think it would be natural for Google to see 500,000 links come to your site all of a sudden? Why Manufacturing industry needs Digital marketing The answer is Duck No. Avoid Fiverr for backlinks. Evaluating a Potential Backlink Opportunity Here is a video talking about a guest post opportunity I was presented with, but that I ultimately deemed to be a bad idea. In the video, I

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard Many SEOs agree that showing expertise, authority, and trustworthiness in your site content is important to ranking well. But why is that, exactly? Is it because Google E-A-T is an actual ranking factor, or is it something else? In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard explores whether it can be considered a true ranking factor, making your E-A-T goals SMART, and how to communicate it all to curious stakeholders. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday, coming to you from my home where I am wearing a tuxedo, wearing a tuxedo in hope that it exudes a little bit of expertise, perhaps authority, maybe even trust. Yes, today we are talking about Google E-A-T, expertise, authority, trust, specifically asking the question, “Is Google E-A-T actually a ranking factor?”  Now surprisingly this is a controversial subject in the world of SEO. Very smart SEOs on both sides of the debate. Some SEOs dismiss E-A-T. Others embrace it fully. Even Googlers have different opinions about how it should be communicated. I want to talk about this today not because it’s a debate that only SEOs care about, but because it’s important how we talk to stakeholders about E-A-T and SEO recommendations. Stakeholders being clients, website owners, webmasters. Anybody that we give an SEO recommendation to, how we talk about these things is important. So I don’t want to judge. I don’t want to be the final say — that’s not what I’m attempting — about whether Google E-A-T is an actual ranking factor. But I do want to explore the different viewpoints. I talked to dozens of SEOs, listened to Googlers, read Google patents, and I found that a lot of the disagreement comes not from what Google E-A-T is — we have a pretty good understanding what Google E-A-T actually does — but how we define ranking factors. Three ways to define “ranking factors” I found that how we define ranking factors falls into roughly three different schools of thought.  1. Level 1: Directly measurably, directly impact rankings Now the first school of thought, this is the traditional view of ranking factors. People in this camp say that ranking factors are things that are directly measurable and they directly impact rankings, or they can directly impact rankings. These are signals that we’re very familiar with, such as PageRank, URLs, canonicalization, things that we can see and measure and influence and directly impact Google’s algorithm. Now, in this case, we can say Google E-A-T probably isn’t a ranking factor under this definition. There is no E-A-T score. There’s no single E-A-T algorithm. As Gary Illyes of Google says, it’s millions of little algorithms. So in this school or camp, where things are directly measurable and impactful, Google E-A-T is not a ranking factor.  2. Level 2: Modeled or rewarded, indirect effects Then there’s a second school of thought, almost equal to the first school of thought, that says Google’s algorithm is sufficiently complex that we don’t really know all the direct measurements, and in these days it’s a little more useful to think of ranking factors in terms of what is modeled or rewarded, things with effects that are possibly indirect. Now this really came about during the days of the Panda algorithm in 2012, when Google started using much more machine learning and eventual neural networks in its algorithm. To give you a brief overview and to grossly oversimplify, Panda was an algorithm designed to reduce low-quality and spammy results in Google search results. To do this, instead of using directly measurable signals, instead they used machine learning. Again, to grossly oversimplify, Britney Muller has a great post on machine learning. I’m going to link to it if you’re interested. But what they did is they took sites that they wanted to see more of in Google search results, sites like New York Times, things like that, that based on certain qualifications, like did they think the site was well-designed, would you trust it with your credit card, does it seem like it’s updated regularly and written by authors, and they put these in a bucket. Instead of giving the algorithm direct signals, they told the machine learning program, “Find us more sites like this. We want to reward these sites.” So in this bucket, ranking factors are things that are modeled or rewarded. People in this school of thought say, “Let’s just go after the same thing Googlers are going after because we know those things tend to work.” Algorithms that fall in this bucket are like Panda, site quality, and E-A-T. In this school of thought, yes, E-A-T can be considered a ranking factor.  3. Level 3: Any quality or action, direct or indirect effects Then there’s even a third school of thought that goes further than these two, and this school of thought says any quality or action that could increase rankings should be considered a ranking factor, even if Google doesn’t use it in its algorithm, direct or indirect. An example of this might be social media shares. We know that Google does not use social media shares directly in its algorithm. But getting your content out in front of a large number of people can lead to links and shares and eventually more traffic and rankings as those signals roll downhill. Now it may seem kind of crazy to think that anyone would consider something a ranking factor if Google actually didn’t consider it a ranking factor directly in its algorithms. But if you think about it, this is often the way real-world business scenarios work. If you’re the executive of a company, you don’t necessarily care if Google uses it directly or not. You just like seeing the end result.  An example might be, aside from social media, bounce rate, long clicks. TV commercials, excellent example. If you were in a Super

Have you ever noticed that some URLs start with “http://”, while others start with “https://”? Maybe you noticed that extra “s” when you were browsing websites that require giving over sensitive information, like when you were paying bills online. But where’d that extra “s” come from, and what does it mean? To put it simply, the extra “s” means your connection to that website is secure and encrypted; Any data you enter is safely shared with that website. The technology that powers that little “s” is called SSL, which stands for “Secure Sockets Layer.” As a consumer, you always want to see https:// when visiting any site you trust with your essential information. As a marketer, you’ll want to make sure you have an SSL or two for your audience. So let’s talk about why SSL is a big deal. What is an SSL Certificate? Let’s define an SSL. This definition comes straight from SSL.com: When you land on a page that has a form you filled in and hit “submit” for, the information you entered can be intercepted by a hacker on an unsecure website. This information could be anything from details on a bank transaction to what you enter to register for an offer. In hacker lingo, this “interception” is often referred to as a “man-in-the-middle attack.” One of the most common ways an attack happens is this: A hacker places a small, undetected listening program on the server hosting a website. That program waits in the background until a visitor starts typing information on the website, and it will activate to start capturing the information and then send it back to the hacker. A little scary, right? But when you visit a website that’s encrypted with SSL, your browser will form a connection with the web server, look at the SSL certificate, then bind your browser and the server. This binding connection is secure to ensure no one besides you and the website can see or access what you type. This connection happens instantly, and in fact, some suggest it’s faster than connecting to an unsecure website. You simply have to visit a website with SSL, and voila: Your connection will automatically be secured. An SSL is security technology. It’s a protocol for servers and web browsers that makes sure that data passed between the two are private. This is done using an encrypted link that connects the server and browser. Companies that request personal information from a user, such as an email address or payment information, should have SSL certificates on their website. Having one means that the details you are collecting are private and ensures the customer that when they see that padlock and “https://”, their privacy is safe. SSL certificates are categorized by the level of validation and encryption provided or the number of domains or subdomains under the certificate. There’s three types of certificates you can earn depending on the SSL you obtain. Let’s talk about them in more detail. Types Of Certificates The umbrellas that SSL certificates fall under are encryption and validation, and domain number. They each have three classifications, and can be applied for on the SSL website. Certificates are processed by a Certificate Authority (CA), which is software designed specifically for running and granting these certificates. For encryption and validation certificates, there are domain, organization, and extended validation. For certificates defined by the domain number, the types are single, multidomain, and wildcard. Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificate This certificate shows the padlock, HTTPS, business name and country in the address bar to diminish being mistaken for a spam website. Extended Validation (SV) SSL are the most expensive SSLs to obtain, but they are valuable in showing the legitimacy of your domain from the address bar. To set up an EV SSL, you must prove that you are authorized to own the domain you’re submitting. This ensures users that you are legally collecting the data needed to execute certain actions — such as a credit card number for an online transaction. An EV SSL certificate can be obtained by any business, and it should be a priority especially for those that need identity assurance. For instance, if your website processes web payments or collects data, you’d want to get this certificate. Organization Validated (OV SSL) Certificate This certificate verifies that your organization and domain validation are real. Organization Validated (OV) SSL certificates offer a medium level of encryption and are obtained in two steps. First, the CA would verify who owns the domain and if the organization is operating legally. On the browser, users would see a small green padlock with the company’s name following. Use this type of certificate if you don’t have the financial resources for an EV SSL but still want to offer a moderate level of encryption. Domain Validation (DV) Certificate The Domain Validation (DV) certificate offers a low level of encryption shown as a green padlock next to the URL in the address bar. This is the quickest validation you can receive, and you’ll only need a few company documents to apply. This verification happens when you add a DNS to the CA. For this certificate, the CA will review the right of the applicant to own the domain being submitted. (Note: DVs don’t secure subdomains, just the domain itself). Unlike the EV SSL, the CA won’t vet any identity data, so you won’t know who is receiving your encrypted information. But if you’re part of a business that can’t afford a higher-level SSL, a DV gets the job done. Wildcard SSL Certificates Wildcard SSL Certificates are in the “domain and subdomain number” category. Wildcard SSLs ensure that if you buy a certificate for one domain, you can use that same certificate for subdomains. For example, if you bought a Wildcard for example.com, it could be applied to mail.example.com and blog.example.com. An option like this is cheaper than obtaining multiple SSL certificates for a number or domain. Unified Communications (UCC) SSL Certificate Also known

The adage “patience is a virtue” doesn’t apply online. Even a one-second delay can drastically reduce pageviews, customer satisfaction and drop conversions. The speed of your site even affects your organic search rankings. So what’s the biggest factor contributing to your page speed? Size. It takes browsers time to download the code that makes up your page. It has to download your HTML, your stylesheets, your scripts and your images. It can take a while to download all that data. As web users expect more engaging site designs, the size of a site’s resource files will continue to grow. Each new feature requires a new script or stylesheet that weighs down your site just a little more. How do you make sure your site is up to speed? There are some great resources for analyzing this. Google’s PageSpeed Insights, HubSpot’s Website Grader, and GTMetrix are some of the most popular. Both services will analyze your site and tell you where you’re falling behind. A little warning: the results can be a bit daunting sometimes, but most fixes are relatively quick and easy. You might not fix everything the speed service recommends, but you should fix enough to make the site experience better for your visitors. Let’s learn how to speed up things. While a few modern content management systems like HubSpot implement speed-enhancing options out-of-the-box, more common systems, like WordPress and Joomla, require a little manual labor to get up to speed. Now let’s look at some essential speed solutions that every webmaster should consider. 1. Scale down your images. Images are one of the most common bandwidth hogs on the web. The first way to optimize your images is to scale them appropriately, so they don’t affect page loading time as much. Many webmasters use huge images and then scale them down with CSS. What they don’t realize is that your browser still loads them at the full image size. For example, if you have an image that is 1000 x 1000 pixels, but you have scaled it down to 100 x 100 pixels, your browser must load ten times more than necessary. Take a look at the size difference when we scaled down one of our images: Just by changing the dimensions of my image, from 598 x 398 to 600 x 232, the file size decreased immensely. If you optimize your images before uploading them, you won’t forget to when you put them on your page. Sometimes though, scaling images will make your photos blurry. The clarity can be lost and the image becomes distorted. If that usually happens to you, go with the second option: compressing. Compressing images will drastically reduce image size without losing out on the quality. There are several free online tools for image compression, such as tinypng.com, that can reduce your image sizes.You can see size reductions anywhere from 25% to 80%. For example, I took that first image, with 133 KB, and compressed it using a free website app called Squoosh. When the image was completed, it was 87% smaller, and didn’t lose any of its original quality. 2. Cache your browser for data storage. Why make visitors download the same things every time they load a page? Enabling browser caching lets you temporarily store some data on a visitors’ computer, so they don’t have to wait for it to load every time they visit your page. How long you store the data depends on their browser configuration and your server-side cache settings. To set up browser caching on your server, check out the resources below or contact your hosting company: Apache Caching IIS Caching Nginx Caching 3. Reduce CSS load time. Your CSS loads before people see your site. The longer it takes for them to download your CSS, the longer they wait. An optimized CSS means your files will download faster, giving your visitors quicker access to your pages. Start by asking yourself, “Do I use all of my CSS?” If not, get rid of the superfluous code in your files. Every little bit of wasted data can add up until your website’s snail-pace speed scares away your visitors. Next, you should minimize your CSS files. Extra spaces in your stylesheets increase file size. CSS minimization removes those extra spaces from your code to ensure your file is at its smallest size. See if your CMS already minimizes your CSS or if there’s an option for it. HubSpot, for example, already minimizes your CSS by default, whereas WordPress websites require an additional plugin such as WP Hummingbird to optimize those files. If your CMS does not have a minimize CSS option, you can use a free online service like CSS Minifier. Simply paste in your CSS and hit “Compress” to see your newly minimized stylesheet. Minimizing your resource files is a great way to knock some size off your files. Trust me — those little spaces add up quickly. 4. Keep scripts below the fold. Javascript files can load after the rest of your page, but if you put them all before your content — as many companies do — they will load before your content does. This means your visitors must wait until your Javascript files load before they see your page. The simplest solution is to place your external Javascript files at the bottom of your page, just before the close of your body tag. Now more of your site can load before your scripts. Another method that allows even more control is to use the defer or async attributes when placing external .js files on your site. Both defer and async are very useful, but make sure you understand the difference before you use them. Async tags load the scripts while the rest of the page loads, but scripts can be loaded out of order. Basically, lighter files load first. This might be fine for some scripts, but can be disastrous for others. For instance, let’s say one of your pages has a video above

Posted by MrLukeCarthy COVID-19 has switched up life as we know it, and it’s unlikely to stop doing so for some time. E-commerce shopping is a perfect example of how things have changed, and in a number of ways. If you feel like Shopify has been dropping huge, disruptive news bombs practically each week now, you’re right! And who’d have guessed that in the UK, the exclusively online supermarket, Ocado, is now worth more than brick-and-mortar grocers Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, and Marks and Spencer combined. The speed of transformation in e-commerce since the COVID-19 outbreak (an already fast-paced industry) has been savage. Supply chains are under strain for many brands selling online (especially where demand is high and supplies are low). How do you best manage expectations and maximize every opportunity to sell to your target audience? With your consumers now relying on the world of online shopping more than ever, how can you be sure you’re getting your fair share of that online retail pie? Well, this post is designed to help you answer precisely these questions. Whether your sales have taken a hit or you have “off the wall” levels of demand, here are some ideas to help you navigate that bounce back and to help customers stay in love with your brand. Pay close attention to changing on site search behavior Your site search is a goldmine of insight, especially right now. Seriously. Frequently checking in to understand how and what your customers are looking for once they get to your store can reveal a bunch of opportunities. It’s possible that before COVID-19 took a stronghold on everyday life, customers had different contexts in mind when searching for your products. For example, searches for “gloves” today vs. in January are likely to be visitors searching for two separate products entirely. It’s important to ensure that you’re serving today’s customer sufficiently and addressing their context correctly to remain relevant and to improve conversion. Here’s an extreme example, but it’s a poignant one nonetheless. For context, Holland and Barrett are a popular, high street healthcare retailer with a strong web presence here in the UK. When searches for “coronavirus” had skyrocketed and demand for hand sanitizer and Paracetamol (another brand of acetaminophen, like Tylenol) were painfully high, what I found incredible was that searching for “coronavirus” on their website yielded no results. This seemed particularly jarring for a retailer that, first, sells items that have been scientifically proven to kill and help prevent the spread of the virus and, second, is a dedicated healthcare business. Not only does this throw a huge wrench in the works when it comes to CX and customer perception, this tiny yet costly oversight is likely to have cost them sales and customers too. Customers are also searching for products that aren’t typically associated with a certain brand or online store due to exhausted stocks elsewhere. For example, the top three search terms for one of my e-commerce clients are now “Mask”, “mask”, and “PPE”. The search terms “mask”, “PPE”, and close variants were practically non-existent prior to mid-May. Kit and Ace, a clothing retailer, has responded to precisely this changing behavior. After seeing a huge spike in the number of site searches for masks, they’re now introducing a new, premium, scientifically-derived mask that also fits their brand. They’re donating 100% of profits from the masks, but this tactic will likely to drive more sales in their other categories too. This is a great move, especially since apparel sales have shrunk during this time. It’s important to find emerging opportunities when typical product lines are no longer in demand. The point I’m trying to make here is that, in order to succeed coming out of the other side of this pandemic, you need to ensure you’re fully in tune with the wants and needs of today’s customer — whatever that looks like for you. Using site search can absolutely give you a huge window into their demands and interests. If products are out of stock, offer excellent alternatives (where possible) As touched on earlier, supply chain management is going to be increasingly challenging — especially in areas where demand is outstripping supply — yet so many retailers miss out here. For some products, it doesn’t matter how hard you try, every retailer has them listed as “out of stock.” For branded items that have stock issues globally, being the retailer that offers a perfectly good alternative could be enough to win over that visitor and win the sale that other retailers have lost. To use a specific example, FTX is a manufacturer of radio-controlled cars, and is a brand sold on Europe e-commerce site Wheelspin. There’s an FTX item that you cannot get before the end of June (for love nor money) on any website due to COVID-19. The pandemic has forced factories to close and that disrupts production for many goods.  Specifically, in this example, it’s the FTX brushed motor that’s become victim to supply chain issues. However, there’s a brand that has a perfectly suitable alternative item that’s identical in specification, and it’s in stock:  Proactively offering solid alternatives with as few compromises as possible can be a great way of winning sales and delighting customers in a way that your competitors likely won’t be. Add an “in stock only” filter Continuing on the topic of store stock and managing a turbulent supply chain, a simple but welcome feature is to add an “items in stock” filter. It goes without saying that allowing customers to browse items they’re able to get their hands on quickly will go down well and could help improve conversion on your website. Another benefit of adding such a filter is the ability to bring light to other lines that are typically overshadowed by more popular (but now out of stock) items. Taking this a step further, you could also help your customers experience by adding a filter for products expected to arrive within a certain timeframe,