Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format. With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

When it comes to Googling products, Bricks beat Clicks

Retailers with physical presence dominate search results

While apple.com enjoyed the biggest absolute boost in search visibility during 2021, established retail brands walmart.com, nordstrom.com, bestbuy.com and target.com are in the top five in the analysis by Searchmetrics.

No pure-play eCommerce brand (those without physical stores) made the top ten winners list. And while three major online marketplaces - amazon.com, ebay.com and etsy.com - were among the major eCommerce winners in search in the 2020 analysis, no online marketplaces featured in 2021.

"The pandemic continued to impact people's ability or willingness to shop freely in physical stores last year, meaning curb-side pickup, click-and-collect and buy online pickup instorehave been booming. So perhaps it's fitting that the sites that have made the most gains in search during the year are mainly those with physical stores who can offer shoppers these options," said Lillian Haase, CMO of Searchmetrics.

During the pandemic, the brick-and-mortar retailers invested significantly in improving their web presence, product range and their purchase, delivery and collection processes. They seem to have accepted the challenge to compete with online marketplaces and they are seeing some good success, as the study revealed.

It seems that 2021 was a busy year for search with the roll-out of two major core algorithm updates (in June / July and November). Google uses core updates to correct and optimize its algorithm to ensure it is delivering the most relevant results. While the timing of the November update was criticized for hitting retailers close to the holiday shopping season, Searchmetrics' analysis shows it actually had a positive impact on the Google visibility of retail websites including bestbuy.com and target.com.

July also saw the roll-out of the Core Web Vitals update (also known as the Page Experience update) in which Google began rewarding websites that deliver a good user experience in areas such as load time, interaction, and stability. This new ranking factor is not just important for eCommerce stores' visibility in search, it also has a positive impact on revenue and conversions.

Also, Instagram, which many retailers use to drive product discovery, saw traffic and sales achieve an unprecedented rise in absolute search visibility in Google.com searches. While its competitor Pinterest was one of the biggest losers in 2021.

"This trend is the same across all the countries we analyzed; Instagram seems to be getting a lot right, while Pinterest seems to have fallen out of favour with Google," said Haase.

The Searchmetrics study measured search performance by analyzing weekly search results for millions of keywords throughout the year, scoring websites for factors such as how frequently they appear in results and how high they rank. The top ten ranking was based on a website's absolute improvement in search performance between the start and end of 2021.

More findings from the Searchmetrics analysis can be found on the company's blog at: https://blog.searchmetrics.com

Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format.

With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

You'll learn to sell yourself, sell your products, and sell your brand on the internet, writing high-conversion landing pages, social media posts, and more. You'll start attracting customers you didn’t even know existed, and learn the top trade secrets for customer retention.

You'll become a lean, mean selling machine. See how the experts do it and learn to adapt what they've done for your own profit. You'll learn to write strong, powerful, effective sales copy, whether it's for a sales script, sales letter, flyer, insert, advert or just about anything else.

You'll learn how to sell whether you're selling by telephone, by mail, or even meeting prospects face-to-face. You'll find out how to size them up, present yourself, nail down their true needs, close the sale, and learn to tackle the tricky ones.

You'll discover the biggest secrets of successful direct mail sellers, sales letter writers, and how to segment and choose the right prospects for each campaign.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)