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Posted by Everett
If eCommerce businesses hope to remain competitive with Amazon, eBay, big box brands, and other online retail juggernauts, they’ll need to learn how to conduct content marketing, lead generation, and contact nurturing as part of a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy.
First, I will discuss some of the ways most online retailers are approaching email from the bottom of the funnel upward, and why this needs to be turned around. Then we can explore how to go about doing this within the framework of “Inbound Marketing” for eCommerce businesses. Lastly, popular marketing automation and email marketing solutions are discussed in the context of inbound marketing for eCommerce.
Email acquisition sources differ greatly between lead gen. sites and online stores. The biggest driver of email acquisition for most eCommerce businesses are their shoppers, especially when the business doesn’t collect an email address for their contact database until the shopper provides it during the check-out process—possibly, not until the very end.
With most B2B/B2C lead gen. websites, the entire purpose of every landing page is to get visitors to submit a contact form or pick up the phone. Often, the price tag for their products or services is much higher than those of an eCommerce site or involves recurring payments. In other words, what they’re selling is more difficult to sell. People take longer to make those purchasing decisions. For this reason, leads—in the form of contact names and email addresses—are typically acquired and nurtured without having first become a customer.
Whether it is a B2B or B2C website, lead gen. contacts (called leads) are thought of as potential customers (clients, subscribers, patients) who need to be nurtured to the point of becoming “sales qualified,” meaning they’ll eventually get a sales call or email that attempts to convert them into a customer.
On the other hand, eCommerce contacts are often thought of primarily as existing customers to whom the marketing team can blast coupons and other offers by email.
Retail sites typically don’t capture leads at the top or middle of the funnel. Only once a shopper has checked out do they get added to the list. Historically, the buying cycle has been short enough that eCommerce sites could move many first-time visitors directly to customers in a single visit. But this has changed.
Unless your brand is very strong—possibly a luxury brand or one with an offline retail presence—it is probably getting more difficult (i.e. expensive) to acquire new customers. At the same time, attrition rates are rising. Conversion optimization helps by converting more bottom of the funnel visitors. SEO helps drive more traffic into the site, but mostly for middle-of-funnel (category page) and bottom-of-funnel (product page) visitors who may not also be price/feature comparison shopping, or are unable to convert right away because of device or time limitations.
Even savvy retailers publishing content for shoppers higher up in the funnel, such as buyer guides and reviews, aren’t getting an email address and are missing a lot of opportunities because of it.
Here’s a thought. If your eCommerce site has a 10 percent conversion rate, you’re doing pretty good by most standards. But what happened to the other 90 percent of those visitors? Will you have the opportunity to connect with them again? Even if you bump that up a few percentage points with retargeting, a lot of potential revenue has seeped out of your funnel without a trace.
I don’t mean to bash the eCommerce marketing community with generalizations. Most lead gen. sites aren’t doing anything spectacular either, and a lot of opportunity is missed all around.
There are many eCommerce brands doing great things marketing-wise. I’m a big fan of Crutchfield for their educational resources targeting early-funnel traffic, and Neman Tools, Saddleback Leather and Feltraiger for the stories they tell. Amazon is hard to beat when it comes to scalability, product suggestions and user-generated reviews.
Sadly, most eCommerce sites (including many of the major household brands) still approach marketing in this way…
Established eCommerce brands have gigantic mailing lists (compared with lead gen. counterparts), to whom they typically send out at least one email each week with “offers” like free shipping, $ off, buy-one-get-one, or % off their next purchase. The lists are minimally segmented, if at all. For example, there might be lists for repeat customers, best customers, unresponsive contacts, recent purchasers, shoppers with abandoned carts, purchases by category, etc.
The missing points of segmentation include which campaign resulted in the initial contact (sometimes referred to as a cohort) and—most importantly—the persona and buying cycle stage that best applies to each contact.
Online retailers often send frequent “blasts” to their entire list or to a few of the large segments mentioned above. Lack of segmentation means contacts aren’t receiving emails based on their interests, problems, or buying cycle stage, but instead, are receiving what they perceive as “generic” emails.
The result of these missing segments and the lack of overarching strategy looks something like this:
My, What a Big LIST You Have!
TIME reported in 2012 on stats from Responsys that the average online retailer sent out between five and six emails the week after Thanksgiving. Around the same time, the Wall Street Journal reported that the top 100 online retailers sent an average of 177 emails apiece to each of their contacts in 2011. Averaged out, that’s somewhere between three and four emails each week that the contact is receiving from these retailers.
The better to SPAM you with!
A 2014 whitepaper from SimpleRelevance titled Email Fail: An In-Depth Evaluation of Top 20 Internet Retailer’s Email Personalization Capabilities ( PDF) found that, while 70 percent of marketing executives believed personalization was of “utmost importance” to their business…
“Only 17 percent of marketing leaders are going beyond basic transactional data to deliver personalized messages to consumers.”
Speaking of email overload, the same report found that some major online retailers sent ten or more emails per week!
All too often, the eCommerce business will carry around big, dead lists of contacts who don’t even bother reading their emails anymore. They end up scrambling toward other channels to “drive more demand,” but because the real problems were never addressed, this ends up increasing new customer acquisition costs.
The cycle looks something like this:
It’s like trying to fill your funnel with a bucket full of holes, some of them patched with band-aids.
Inbound marketing allows online retailers to stop competing with Amazon and other “price focused” competitors with leaky funnels, and to instead focus on:
Each of these areas will be covered in more detail below. First, let’s take a quick step back and define what it is we’re talking about here.
A lot of people think “inbound marketing” is just a way some SEO agencies are re-cloaking themselves to avoid negative associations with search engine optimization. Others think it’s synonymous with “internet marketing.” I think it goes more like this:
Inbound marketing is to Internet marketing as SEO is to inbound marketing: One piece of a larger whole.
There are many ways to define inbound marketing. A cursory review of definitions from several trusted sources reveals some fundamental similarities :
“Inbound Marketing is the practice of earning traffic and attention for your business on the web rather than buying it or interrupting people to get it. Inbound channels include organic search, social media, community-building content, opt-in email, word of mouth, and many others. Inbound marketing is particularly powerful because it appeals to what people are looking for and what they want, rather than trying to get between them and what they’re trying to do with advertising. Inbound’s also powerful due to the flywheel-effect it creates. The more you invest in Inbound and the more success you have, the less effort required to earn additional benefit.”
“Inbound Marketing is a collection of marketing activities that leverage remarkable content to penetrate earned media channels such as Organic Search, Social Media, Email, News and the Blogosphere with the goal of engaging prospects when they are specifically interested in what the brand has to offer.”
This quote is from 2012, and is still just as accurate today. It’s from an Inbound.org comment thread where you can also see many other takes on it from the likes of Ian Lurie, Jonathon Colman, and Larry Kim.
“Inbound Marketing is a multi-channel, buyer-centric approach to online marketing that involves attracting, engaging, nurturing and converting potential customers from wherever they are in the buying cycle.”
From Inflow’s Inbound Services page.
“Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content.”
From Inbound Marketing – Wikipedia.
“Inbound marketing” refers to marketing activities that bring leads and customers in when they’re ready, rather than you having to go out and wave your arms to try to get people’s attention.”
Via Marketing Land in 2013. You can also read more of Larry Kim’s interpretation, along with many others, on Inbound.org.
“Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be.”
Via Hubspot, a marketing automation platform for inbound marketing.
When everyone has their own definition of something, it helps to think about what they have in common, as opposed to how they differ. In the case of inbound, this includes concepts such as:
The magic happens when retailers begin to hyper-segment their list based on buyer personas and other relevant information (i.e. what they’ve downloaded, what they’ve purchased, if they abandoned their cart…). This all starts with audience research to develop personas. If you need more information on persona development, try these resources:
Once personas are developed, retailers should choose one on which to focus. A complete campaign strategy should be developed around this persona, with the aim of providing the “right value” to them at the “right time” in their buyer’s journey.
We’ve developed a quick-start guide in the form of a checklist for eCommerce marketers who want to get started with inbound marketing, which you can access below.
Hands-on experience running one campaign will teach you more about inbound marketing than a dozen articles. My advice: Just do one. You will make mistakes. Learn from them and get better each time.
Below is an example of how a hypothetical inbound marketing campaign might play out, assuming you have completed all of the steps in the checklist above. Imagine you handle marketing for an online retailer of high-end sporting goods.
When segmenting visitors and customers for a “high-end sporting goods / camping retailer” based on the East Coast, you identified a segment of “Trail Hikers.” These are people with disposable income who care about high-quality gear, and will pay top dollar if they know it is tested and reliable. The top trail on their list of destinations is the Appalachian Trail (AT).
Tommy’s first action is to do “top of the funnel” research from search engines (one reason why SEO is still so important to a complete inbound marketing strategy).
A search for “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” turns up your article titled “What NOT to Pack When Hiking the Appalachian Trail,” which lists common items that are bulky/heavy, and highlights slimmer, lighter alternatives from your online catalog.
It also highlights the difference between cheap gear and the kind that won’t let you down on your 2,181 mile journey through the wilderness of Appalachia, something you learned was important to Tommy when developing his persona. This allows you to get the company’s value proposition of “tested, high-end, quality gear only” in front of readers very early in their buyer’s journey—important if you want to differentiate your site from all of the retailers racing Amazon to the bottom of their profit margins.
So far you have yet to make “contact” with AT Hiker Tommy. The key to “acquiring” a contact before the potential customer is ready to make a purchase is to provide something of value to that specific type of person (i.e. their persona) at that specific point in time (i.e. their buying cycle stage).
In this case, we need to provide value to AT Hiker Tommy while he is getting started on his research about hiking the Appalachian Trail. He has an idea of what gear not to bring, as well as some lighter, higher-end options sold on your site. At this point, however, he is not ready to buy anything without researching the trail more. This is where retailers lose most of their potential customers. But not you. Not this time…
On the “What NOT to Pack When Hiking the Appalachian Trail” article (and probably several others), you have placed a call-to-action (CTA) in the form of a button that offers something like:
Download our Free 122-page Guide to Hiking the Appalachian Trail
This takes Tommy to a landing page showcasing some of the quotes from the book, and highlighting things like:
“We interviewed over 50 ‘thru-hikers’ who completed the AT and have curated and organized the best first-hand tips, along with our own significant research to develop a free eBook that should answer most of your questions about the trail.”
By entering their email address potential customers agree to allow you to send them the free PDF downloadable guide to hiking the AT, and other relevant information about hiking.
An automated email is sent with a link to the downloadable PDF guide, and several other useful content links, such as “The AT Hiker’s Guide to Gear for the Appalachian Trail”—content designed to move Tommy further toward the purchase of hiking gear.
If Tommy still has not made a purchase within the next two weeks, another automated email is sent asking for feedback about the PDF guide (providing the link again), and to again provide the link to the “AT Hiker’s Guide to Gear…” along with a compelling offer just for him, perhaps “Get 20% off your first hiking gear purchase, and a free wall map of the AT!”
Having Tommy’s email address also allows you to hyper-target him on social channels, while also leveraging his initial visit to initiate retargeting efforts.
Eventually Tommy makes a purchase, and he may or may not receive further emails related to this campaign, such as post-purchase emails for reviews, up-sells and cross-sells.
Upon checkout, Tommy checked the box to opt-in to weekly promotional emails. He is now on multiple lists. Your marketing automation system will automatically update Tommy’s status from “Contact” or lead, to “Customer” and potentially remove or deactivate him from the marketing automation system database. This is accomplished either by default integration features, or with the help of integration tools like Zapier and IFTTT.
You have now nurtured Tommy from his initial research on Google all the way to his first purchase without ever having sent a spammy newsletter email full of irrelevant coupons and other offers. However, now that he is a loyal customer, Tommy finds value in these bottom-of-funnel email offers.
Every inbound marketing campaign will have its own mix of appropriate channels. This post has focused mostly on email because acquiring the initial permission to contact the person is what fuels most of the other features offered by marketing automation systems, including:
Inbound has, for the the most part, been applied to businesses in which the website objective is to generate leads for a sales team to follow-up with and close the deal. An examination of various marketing automation platforms—a key component of scalable inbound marketing programs—highlights this issue.
Most of the major marketing automation systems can be be used very effectively as the backbone of an inbound marketing program for eCommerce businesses. However, only one of them (Silverpop) has made significant efforts to court the eCommerce market with content and out-of-box features. The next closest thing is Hubspot, so let’s start with those two:
Unlike the other platforms below, right out of the box Silverpop allows marketers to tap into very specific behaviors, including the items purchased or left in the cart.
You can easily segment based on metrics like the Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value (RFM) of purchases:
You can automate personalized shopping cart abandonment recovery emails:
You can integrate with many leading brands offering complementary services, including: couponing, CRM, analytics, email deliverability enhancement, social and most major eCommerce platforms.
What you can’t do with Silverpop is blog, find pricing info on their website, get a free trial on their website or have a modern-looking user experience. Sounds like an IBMⓇ company, doesn’t it?
Out of all the marketing automation platforms on this list, HubSpot is the most capable of handling “inbound marketing” campaigns from start to finish. This should come as no surprise, given the phrase is credited to Brian Halligan, HubSpot’s co-founder and CEO.
While they don’t specifically cater to eCommerce marketing needs with the same gusto they give to lead gen. marketing, HubSpot does have an eCommerce landing page and a demo landing page for eCommerce leads, which suggests that their own personas include eCommerce marketers. Additionally, there is some good content on their blog written specifically for eCommerce.
HubSpot has allowed some key partners to develop plug-ins that integrate with leading eCommerce platforms. This approach works well with curation, and is not dissimilar to how Google handles Android or Apple handles their approved apps.
The Magento Connector for HubSpot, which costs $80 per month, was developed by EYEMAGiNE, a creative design firm for eCommerce websites. A similar HubSpot-approved third-party integration is on the way for Bigcommerce.
Another eCommerce integration for Hubspot is a Shopify plug-in called HubShoply, which was developed by Groove Commerce and costs $100 per month.
You can also use HubSpot’s native integration capabilities with Zapier to sync data between HubSpot and most major eCommerce SaaS vendors, including the ones above, as well as WooCommerce, Shopify, PayPal, Infusionsoft and more. However, the same could be said of some of the other marketing automation platforms, and using these third-party solutions can sometimes feel like fitting a square peg into a round hole.
HubSpot can and does handle inbound marketing for eCommerce websites. All of the features are there, or easy enough to integrate. But let’s put some pressure on them to up their eCommerce game even more. The least they can do is put an eCommerce link in the footer:
Despite the lack of clear navigation to their eCommerce content, HubSpot seems to be paying more attention to the needs of eCommerce businesses than the rest of the platforms below.
Nothing about Marketo’s in-house marketing strategy suggests “Ecommerce Director Bob” might be one of their personas. The description for each of their marketing automation packages (from Spark to Enterprise) mentions that it is “for B2B” websites.
Driving Sales could apply to a retail business so I clicked on the link. Nope. Clearly, this is for lead generation.
Passing “purchase-ready leads” over to your “sales reps” is a good example of the type of language used throughout the site.
Make no mistake, Marketo is a top-notch marketing automation platform. Powerful and clean, it’s a shame they don’t launch a full-scale eCommerce version of their core product. In the meantime, there’s the Magento Integration for Marketo Plug-in developed by an agency out of Australia called Hoosh Marketing.
I’ve never used this integration, but it’s part of Marketo’s LaunchPoint directory, which I imagine is vetted, and Hoosh seems like a reputable agency.
Their pricing page is blurred and gated, which is annoying, but perhaps they’ll come on here and tell everyone how much they charge.
As with all others except Silverpop, the Marketo navigation provides no easy paths to landing pages that would appeal to “Ecommerce Director Bob.”
This option is a SalesForce product, so—though I’ve never had the opportunity to use it—I can imagine Pardot is heavy on B2B/Sales and very light on B2C marketing for retail sites.
The hero image on their homepage says as much.
Again, no mention of eCommerce or retail, but clear navigation to lead gen and sales.
Eloqua, now part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC), has a landing page for the retail industry, on which they proclaim:
“Retail marketers know that the path to lifelong loyalty and increased revenue goes through building and growing deep client relationships.”
Since when did retail marketers start calling customers clients?
The Integration tab on OMC’s “…Retail.html” page helpfully informs eCommerce marketers that their sales teams can continue using CRM systems like SalesForce and Microsoft Dynamics but doesn’t mention anything about eCommerce platforms and other SaaS solutions for eCommerce businesses.
There are many other players in this arena. Though I haven’t used them yet, three I would love to try out are SharpSpring, Hatchbuck and Act-On. But none of them appear to be any better suited to handle the concerns of eCommerce websites.
The purpose of the section above wasn’t to highlight deficiencies in the tools themselves, but to illustrate a gap in who they are being marketed to and developed for.
So far, most of your eCommerce competitors probably aren’t using tools like these because they are not marketed to by the platforms, and don’t know how to apply the technology to online retail in a way that would justify the expense.
The key concepts behind inbound marketing apply just as much to online retail as they do to lead generation.
In order to “do inbound marketing,” a marketing automation system isn’t even strictly necessary (in theory). They just help make the activities scalable for most businesses.
They also bring a lot of different marketing activities under one roof, which saves time and allows data to be moved and utilized between channels and systems. For example, what a customer is doing on social could influence the emails they receive, or content they see on your site. Here are some potential uses for most of the platforms above:
Assuming you don’t have the budget for a marketing automation system, but already have a good email marketing platform, you can still get started with inbound marketing. Eventually, however, you may want to graduate to a dedicated marketing automation solution to reap the full benefits.
Most of the marketing automation systems claim to replace your email marketing platform, while many email marketing platforms claim to be marketing automation systems. Neither statement is completely accurate.
Marketing automation systems, especially those created specifically for the type of “inbound” campaigns described above, provide a powerful suite of tools all in one place. On the other hand, dedicated email platforms tend to offer “email marketing” features that are better, and more robust, than those offered by marketing automation systems. Some of them are also considerably cheaper—such as MailChimp—but those are often light on even the email-specific features for eCommerce.
Email “blasts” in the form of B.O.G.O., $10 off or free shipping offers can still be very successful in generating incremental revenue boosts — especially for existing customers and seasonal campaigns.
The conversion rate on a 20% off coupon sent to existing customers, for instance, would likely pulverize the conversion rate of an email going out to middle-of-funnel contacts with a link to content (at least with how CR is currently being calculated by email platforms).
Inbound marketing campaigns can also offer quick wins, but they tend to focus mostly on non-customers after the first segmentation campaign (a campaign for the purpose of segmenting your list, such as an incentivised survey). This means lower initial conversion rates, but long-term success with the growth of new customers.
Here’s a good bet if works with your budget: Rely on a marketing automation system for inbound marketing to drive new customer acquisition from initial visit to first purchase, while using a good email marketing platform to run your “promotional email” campaigns to existing customers.
If you have to choose one or the other, I’d go with a robust marketing automation system.
Some of the most popular email platforms used by eCommerce businesses, with a focus on how they handle various Inbound Marketing activities, include:
This platform builds in features like abandoned cart recovery, advanced email list segmentation and automated email workflows that nurture contacts over time.
They also offer a host of eCommerce-related features that you just don’t get with marketing automation systems like Hubspot and Marketo. This includes easy integration with a variety of eCommerce platforms like ATG, Demandware, Magento, Miva Merchant, Mozu and MarketLive, not to mention apps for coupons, product recommendations, social shopping and more. Integration with enterprise eCommerce platforms is one reason why Bronto is seen over and over again when browsing the Internet Retailer Top 500 reports.
On the other hand, Bronto—like the rest of these email platforms—doesn’t have many of the features that assist with content marketing outside of emails. As an “inbound” marketing automation system, it is incomplete because it focuses almost solely on one channel: email.
Another juggernaut in eCommerce email marketing platforms, Vertical Response, has even fewer inbound-related features than Bronto, though it is a good email platform with a free version that includes up to 1,000 contacts and 4,000 emails per month (i.e. 4 emails to a full list of 1,000).
Responsys (the email platform), like Eloqua (the marketing automation system) was gobbled up by Oracle and is now part of their “Marketing Cloud.”
It has been my experience that when a big technology firm like IBM or Oracle buys a great product, it isn’t “great” for the users. Time will tell.
Out of the established email platforms for eCommerce, Listrak may do the best job at positioning themselves as a full inbound marketing platform.
Listrak’s value proposition is that they’re an “Omnichannel” solution. Everything is all in one “Single, Integrated Digital Marketing Platform for Retailers.” The homepage image promises solutions for Email, Mobile, Social, Web and In-Store channels.
I haven’t had the opportunity to work with Listrak yet, but would love to hear feedback in the comments on whether they could handle the kind of persona-based content marketing and automated email nurturing campaigns described in the example campaign above.
Congratulations for making this far! Here are a few things I hope you’ll take away from this post:
There is a lot of great content on the topic of Inbound marketing, some of which has greatly informed my own understanding and approach. Here are a few resources you may find useful as well.
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Cindy Krum recently published a must-read primer on the upcoming Mobile-Friendly changes which I highly recommend checking out before proceeding. Got it? Good. With the mad rush to optimize mobile sites prior to April 21st, it ca… Continue reading → Posted by randfish
From information about your location and device to searches you’ve performed in the past, Google now has a great deal of information it can use to personalize your search results. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains to what … Continue reading →
Posted by Dr-Pete
In the beginning, there were 10 results, and it was good. Then, came expanded site-links and Google’s 7-result SERP. Around the middle of 2014, we started to hear reports of SERPs with odd numbers of organic results – 9, 8, 6, 5, and even 4 page-1 results. At first, these were sporadic and hard to replicate, but they quietly expanded. This is a recent 4-result SERP for “autism speaks”:
By some counts, there are as many as 16 non-paid links on this page (not counting images), but by traditional SEO standards, there are only 4 true organic positions for which you can compete. So, what’s going on here? Is it just random, or is there a method to Google’s madness?
For a couple of months, I just assumed these strange result counts were some kind of glitch. Then I noticed an unusual pattern. Last October, Google rolled out the “In The News” Update. This update expanded news results to many new sources, but it also seemed to change the pattern of when news results appear. This is 28 days of data from MozCast’s Feature Graph (10K queries):
The presence of News results seemed to be cyclical, dipping early in the week and peaking later in the week. I don’t follow News results closely, so it was just a curiosity at first, until I saw another bit of data. This is the average page-1 result count for that same period:
While the scale of the change was much smaller (please note that both graphs have a restricted Y-axis to make the effect more visible), the opposing shapes of the curves seemed like more than a coincidence. As News results increased, the average page-1 organic result count decreased.
Spot-checking various SERPs, I was able to confirm this effect. If page 1 had a News box, then the organic result count would be decreased by one (to either 9 results or 6, depending on the starting point). Here’s a sample SERP (I’ve removed snippets to simplify the image) for “samsung galaxy tab”:
This is a basic 10-result SERP, but when a News box comes into play, we’re only left with 9 organic results. This raised the question – were other verticals having a similar impact? Digging deeper, I found that, in addition to News results, Image results and In-depth Articles also occupied one organic position. Remember the example at the top of the post? It’s a brand query, resulting in a 7-result SERP, but it also has News results, Image results, and In-depth Articles. If we do the math: 7 – 1 – 1 – 1 = 4 results. It’s not random at all.
In the interest of being more methodical, what if we looked at the average page-1 organic result across every combination of verticals in our data set? We’ll stick with a starting point of 10 results, to keep the data clean. Here’s a table with the average counts by vertical combination:
I’ve taken the average out to two decimal places just to be more transparent, but what we’re seeing here is little more than a tiny bit of measurement error. Generally speaking, each instance of a vertical result type (as a whole, not individual links within these verticals) costs a 10-result SERP one organic ranking position. It’s worth nothing that SERPs with all 3 verticals are pretty rare, but when they occur, each of those 3 verticals costs one position and one opportunity for you to rank on page 1.
So, do the same rules apply to 7-result SERPs? Well, Google isn’t a big fan of making my life easy, so it turns out this gets a bit more complicated. When 7-result SERPs originally launched, our data showed that they almost always came with expanded sitelinks in the #1 organic position. By “expanded sitelinks”, I mean something like the following:
Sitelinks usually appear for queries that either have a strong brand connotation or at least a dominant interpretation. While we typically use 6-packs of expanded sitelinks as an example, actual counts can vary from 1 to 6. Originally, the presence of any sitelinks yielded a 7-result SERP. Now, it’s gotten a bit more complicated, as shown by the table below:
Since each row of sitelinks can contain up to 2 links, the general logic seems to be that 1 row of sitelinks equates to 1 additional organic result. If you have 3 rows of sitelinks, then Google will remove 3 organic results from page 1.
Google’s logic here seems to revolve around the actual display of information and length of the page. As they add some elements, they’re going to subtract others. Since the physical display length of of most elements can vary quite a bit, the rules right now are pretty simplistic, but the core logic seems to be based on constraining the total number of results displayed on page 1.
All of this raises a difficult question – what is an organic result? As SEOs, we typically don’t think of vertical results as “organic” by our fairly narrow definition, but they’re much more organic than paid results or even Knowledge Graph. What’s more, Google is starting to blur the lines with verticals.
For example, in the past couple of weeks, Google has redesigned the look of In-depth Articles twice. You might think “So what? It’s just a design change,” but take a closer look. At the end of March, Googled removed the “In-depth articles” header. Here’s an example of the new design (for the query “jobs”):
While the thumbnail images and horizontal dividers still set these results apart somewhat, Google’s intent seems to be to make them appear more organic. Keep in mind, too, that other, organic results use thumbnails as well (including videos and recipes).
Then, just a couple of weeks later (our systems detected this on the morning of April 8th), Google went much farther, removing the thumbnails and even the byline. Here’s part of a screenshot for “Putin”:
Can you spot the true organic results here? They’re the first two – the rest of this screenshot is In-depth Articles. The only real clue, beside the count and source-code markers, is the horizontal divider on either end of the 3-pack. On mobile, even the dividers are gone, as every result is treated like a “card” (see below).
As an SEO, I’m still inclined to call these results “vertical” for two reasons: (1) historical precedent, and (2) these results play by different ranking rules. I think reason #2 is the more important one – In-depth Articles are currently dominated by a core set of big publishers, and the algorithm differs quite a bit from regular, organic results.
You wanna get really crazy? Let’s look at an entire SERP for “polar” on an Android device (Moto G). This result also includes In-depth Articles (warning: scrolling ahead):
Let’s do the math. For starters, it’s a branded result with expanded sitelinks, so we should have a 7-result page. Remember that those last 3 results are In-depth Articles, so we’ll subtract 1, leaving us with what should be 6 results. See the “app pack” in the middle? That’s an Android-specific vertical, and instead of counting the pack as just 1 result, Google is counting each link as a result. So, we’re only left with 3 traditional organic results on this SERP, despite it being packed with information.
I strongly suspect this trend will continue, and it will probably expand. The definition of “organic” is blurring, and I think that all of these vertical results represent SEO opportunities that can’t be ignored. If we’re stuck in the mindset of only one “true” organic, then our opportunities are going to keep shrinking every day.
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