[Ep114] - Updates From Google SEO Day

#TWIMshow - This Week in Marketing

1. Shopify Announces Audience During Their Semi-Annual Showcase - Shopify Editions is Shopify's new semi-annual showcase demonstrating the speed and breadth of innovation at Shopify to bring merchants into the future. Per Shopify, they are powering a radically different model of commerce: Connect to Consumer (C2C). To help merchants embrace C2C, they unveiled an entirely new B2B offering, launching Tokengated Commerce, partnered with Google to help consumers shop local, brought commerce to Twitter, launched Tap to Pay on iPhone—just to name a few.

Shopify Audiences, a new marketing tool helps Shopify Plus merchants find new customers. Using Shopify’s unique view on purchase intent and their merchant network helps identify buyers who are looking for your products. Then create and export high-interest audiences to ad platforms like Facebook.

Other notable things announced at Shopify Editions are:

a.) B2B on Shopify makes it seamless for Shopify Plus merchants to sell to other businesses on the same platform that they use for D2C. Say goodbye to spreadsheets, one-off invoices, and manual data entry. Not to mention, they’ve also partnering with ERP providers such as NetSuite, Brightpearl, and Acumatica to automatically integrate merchants’ essential data with their B2B solution.

b.) With Shopify’s offline GMV growing nearly 80% year over year in Q1 2022, they figured out that in-person shopping is coming back in a big way—and they want a piece of the pie. That’s why they’re one of the first commerce platforms to launch Tap to Pay on iPhone in the U.S. in partnership with Stripe. Currently in early access with select Shopify point-of-sale merchants, Tap to Pay on iPhone will be fully available in the U.S. in the coming months.

With Tap to Pay on iPhone, they’re lowering the barrier to entry for Shopify merchants to expand into offline retail for the first time without needing extra hardware or investment. Per Shopify, “Think farmers markets, new pop-up experiences, test shops for established merchants to expand to new physical locations. Enabling Tap to Pay on iPhone will broaden the possibilities in offline commerce, giving merchants who haven’t yet tried in-person selling an easy way to connect with customers IRL.”

c.) Local Inventory on Google . Turning browsers into local buyers. We know that nearly all U.S. consumers have searched for local businesses online, with more than a third searching multiple times every week. Shopify is about to improve those searches in a big way with local inventory sync on Google, available through Shopify’s Google channel. Now, Shopify merchants can automatically let nearby customers know when a product is available in store. Shopping local has never been more convenient.

Local inventory sync on Google is globally available via Shopify’s Google channel to merchants using Shopify’s point-of-sale app.

You can find all the details here.

2. Twitter Launches New Shopify Integration - Social commerce continues to be a growing opportunity for merchants. Orders placed with Shopify merchants through partner integrations quadrupled YoY in the first quarter of 2022.

Sometimes, a brand’s biggest audience is the one they haven’t tapped. Twitter’s hundreds of millions of users represent potential connections for independent merchants, and that’s why Shopify is the first commerce platform to partner with Twitter as it continues to scale its Twitter Shopping ecosystem. In fact, shopping-related Tweets saw 40-billion impressions over the last year alone.

Using Shopify’s new Twitter sales channel, merchants can reach consumers directly from their Twitter profiles, creating a frictionless path to purchase in today’s digital townsquare. This will enable Shopify merchants to list their products on their Twitter Professional Profiles, with each item, when tapped, then redirecting users to the Shopify product page to make a purchase.

Twitter’s shopping features include Twitter Shops and Shop Spotlight, and, starting today, both are available for free to all Shopify U.S. merchants selling to U.S. consumers.

“The Twitter sales channel makes it quicker and easier to meet our customers wherever they are,” said Jessica Stevens, Senior Social Media Manager at Trixie Cosmetics. “The automatic syncing is going to help us save so much time, and the sales channel allows me to easily connect the two platforms that we already tap into to sell products and engage with customers.”

3. Twitter Releases Twitter Write, Notes Feature - Finally available on some user profiles, Twitter's new "Notes" feature offers a quick, seamless method to include lengthy text pieces in your tweets. The Notes UI is quite simple and has all the standard features of a blog post composer, such as the ability to add header pictures, insert photos and links within the text, and a quick way to add tweets.

Once posted, Notes will display as a Twitter card that directs users to the complete article. You have a lot more area for your longer-form content on the app because Note titles are only allowed to be 100 characters long and the body of a Note can be up to 2,500 words.

Additionally, unlike tweets, notes can be edited after they are published, and a "Edited" label will be appended at the top of the note.

4. LinkedIn Updates Event Engagement Options & Simplifies ‘Repost’ Process - In order to promote on-topic conversation and interaction within LinkedIn Events, LinkedIn is now introducing new comment engagement options. You may now interact with participants before, during, and after the session by using the Comments tab of a LinkedIn event. You can also reply to particular comments in-stream. With more than 24,000 events being added to the app each week as of this writing, the option is intended to take advantage of LinkedIn Events engagement. Furthermore, LinkedIn recently added LinkedIn Events to its simplified "Boost" ad option, giving users another method to promote their LinkedIn event listings.

p.s. Users are currently starting to see the enhanced Comments choices in-stream as the option is being rolled out.

Additionally, LinkedIn is making it simpler to share updates on LinkedIn by adding a new, streamlined "Repost" option to the "Share" menu. When you tap the "Share" prompt, a new "Repost" option will soon be available, allowing you to share without leaving a comment (currently your only option). By removing the requirement for users to contribute their own commentary to every re-share, this will make it simpler to share posts.

5. Will Google Crawl URLs In Structured Data? - Does Google crawl alternative kinds of links like those found in structured data? Google’s John Mueller answered:

“So for the most part, when we look at HTML pages, if we see something that looks like a link, we might go off and kind of like try that URL out as well. That’s something where if we find a URL in JavaScript, we can try to pick that up and try to use it. If we find a link in kind of a text file on a site, we can try to crawl that and use it.”

Do not blindly assume that just because a link is in structured data means it will or will not be indexed.

He recommends that if you want Google to go off and crawl that URL, make sure that there’s a nat...