October Winners & Losers — Tyson Stockton // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “YouTube is one of our losers this month. At the beginning of this year they surpassed Wikipedia as being the most visible website but then a good chunk of this year weve seen a steady decline and this month, in particular, we saw a drop for YouTube. They started the month sitting at 45 million points for visibility and now they are down to 39 million.” -Tyson

• “On the reverse side of the coin, Wikipedia has reclaimed the throne as the most visible website and has steadily increased throughout the year and is now sitting just over the 55 to 56 million range.” -Tyson

• “Lets say Google hears that some sort of legislation is coming down, like the Anti-Trust case against them and its related to how they use some of their properties to bolster their search presence to monetize their business and theyre sitting here, we run the worlds biggest search engine and we bought the company that is number one for visibility. Maybe we should just tweak a littlealgorithm, adjust ranking factors, bump Wikipedia up, YouTube will be number two and were going to show decreasing market share.” -Ben

• “Is it possible that what is causing YouTube to shrink is a conspiracy where an engineer that has taken their foot off the gas for YouTube to help Google make a better case for some of their legal problems?” -Ben

• “Personally, I think that this is short-lived like I do expect YouTube to actually increase. With some of the announcements with the last couple of weeks, especially on the SearchOn 2020 event when they announced that now they are basically going to be breaking videos into segments so you can jump into a certain time signature point in the video. I have a feeling YouTube will bounce right back in the upper echelon.” -Tyson

• “I would say, and this is strictly of SEO visibility, I looked at the websites where the main people drew during the campaign and Joe Biden actually is the number one out of the group and he had a pretty substantial increase this month. Especially, at the beginning of October, we saw a sharp rise in visibility for his website.” -Tyson

• “Joe Biden is sitting at 7,000 change and a lot of that coming and was actually a 45% increase at the beginning of the month to achieve that and then we have, I would say then, given the theme of the podcast, losers of the month are Donald J. Trump which started the month around 5,000 in change and his ending is around 3,000 but he did jump up this last week with about a 1,000 points so he had a little bit of recovery there. There was definitely a switch on which website was ranking higher.” -Tyson

• “Joe Biden is still above Trump but it gets a little murky because you do have to throw in that Trump has two websites. Trump.com is about his business, his branding which is not too substantial as far as SEO visibility goes and its actually below what Donald J. Trump has right now. So were talking Trump.com website at 1,000 and Donald J Trump at 3,000, Joe Biden being at 7,000.” -Tyson

• “Another one that we saw jump up last month oddly enough is Bernie Sanders, but I would say that the biggest ally and the one that I was not prepared for was Kanye West. One, I was not prepared to see him on the ballot.” -Tyson

• “I think this is an ecommerce play for Kanye West. It has to be. He doesnt actually want to be the President and maybe this is what we said about Donald Trump, a couple of years ago. I wont get into any of my political preferences in any podcast ever, thats for the other Ben Shapiro but what the hell is Kanye West doing on the ballot?” -Ben

• “Were right into the heels of turning into the season. Both of us are in the camp where sales are going to happen earlier this year, in particular, for the biggest ticket items. Its going to be more like a rolling event.” -Tyson

• “Amazon once again is on our winners list. They have a very strong October. Forthe full year, they have been on an increase. As far as SEO visibility, they have steady increases so Amazon is in a very good place to capture the upcoming market.” -Tyson

• “We are also seeing a Google-Amazon heat up. Were seeing Google become more aggressive with the free listing, were seeing it integrate more into the SERPs. We are also seeing Schema markup for shipping, its rolled out not just for the US but globally now. I feel like Google is starting to ramp up their inventory and going to compete more aggressively in ecommerce queries.” -Tyson

• “In the second tier is where it gets more interesting. I think its going to be a big year for the big players. We have seen positive signs for the most part with a lot of the big 10 in ecommerce and from a macro level, I expect that to just continue. We are seeing some competition heat up in that number 2 spot. Walmart solidified its position in number two but they have been slipping a little bit. Overall, they are just treading waters so to speak.” -Tyson

• “The ones that are closing back in is eBay where they used to be solid number 2, then taken over by Walmart, and now they had a strong year of not making big splash growth but just week over week steady improvements and they start the year closer to abit over a million from an SEO visibility score and now theyre up 50% so they are, they closed the gap to only 400,000 between Walmart.” -Tyson

• “I have a dark horse for this year, I think Wayfair is going to have a monster year and the reason is just the topic. I think that the home goods are going to huge.” -Ben

• “I would also throw Home Depot in that category. I expect Home Depot to have a very strong Q4.” -Tyson

• “The Top 10 ecommerce had a strong October. Amazon, eBay, Target, Etsy, Home Depot andWayfair are my winners.” -Tyson

• “For losers, not as much as political statement but I would say that loser would be Donald J. Trump just for the fact that Kanye is closing in and surpassing him as far as SEO visibility score point.” -Tyson

• “My loser of the month is Google with the Anti-Trust coming. It will affect how Google operates at least in the short-term. Im sure they are going to have some modifications to some of their strategies.” -Ben