The most useful Winners & Losers episode of all time — Tyson Stockton // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “There are macro winners in the social platform space, some gains and some declines like Twitter may have a decent month butif you look at a larger time frame, they are still down. There are some movements in e-commerce. Last time we had Walmart and Best Buy being negatively impacted but last week we saw a bounce back from them.” -Tyson

• “We saw an increase from Wikipedia in which, the longest time they were number one and then towards the end of last year, YouTube overtook them and we saw them slip back by Mid-March but this month was when we saw a separation from their visibility score. Currently speaking Wikipedia is sitting at 56 million and YouTube has been brought down to 43 million.” -Tyson

• “The world has been shaken up by the coronavirus that we are not going to do this standard Winners & Losers this month. Nordstrom got crushed, Wikipedia is number one there are winners and losers but we are actually going to cover a little bit different topic, take a step back and think about what is happening at the macro-scale in SEO.” -Ben

• “The reality is we dont know whats going to happen but we know that it is not going to be the same as the previous years. I think the anticipation is that it is definitely going to be more fluid from an activation perspective.” -Tyson

• “This year we know that online is going to be a more significant driver to this years holiday shopping. Everyone listening can predict that online shopping is going to be up in the score.” -Tyson

• “The biggest piece here, in all the uncertainty that is going on, is that embrace that thinking of preparing yourself and have your campaign lined up ahead of time.” -Tyson

• “I would definitely anticipate more of a rolling sale. I dont think it is going to be as much as a one-day event, Black Friday or Cyber Monday type thing.I dont expect to see the same hyper-focused into individual days as much as that is spread across the entire period.” -Tyson

• “From an SEO perspective, I would be less focused on promoting and pushing this specific event and more focused on listing allvotes. The same thing that we saw on the COVID piece where search demands were very spotty, certain categories were odd.” -Tyson

• “Rather than focusing on chasing this hypothetical demand, I would be more focused on tightening up my existing technical side of the site. What I mean by that is improving site performance, speed, internal linking.” -Tyson

• “Two things. Summer is the time to get your projects done. Focus on web vitals because that is coming and dont wait until its here. The second thing is there is going to be a rolling Black Friday potentially, so tighten up all the technical stuff.” -Ben

• “You need to strategically think about when are you going to fire your missiles and the SEO team and Digital Marketing team needs to start thinking about when that is going to happen. Here is an opportunity for SEOs to really take leadership in their organization.” -Ben

• “If I was placing bets, I would go earlier. If your organization is not well determined and there are no set plans for it, I would bethe one advocating to be more aggressive and go earlier in the season than to be waiting.” -Tyson

• “It depends on what you are selling. If I am selling socks, I want it the day after Christmas or the day before Christmas. Whatever the impulse, the last possible day your impulse buy is I want that event late. If you are talking about big-ticket items, I want that stuff to be done early.” -Ben

• “Lets bring this back to one notable loser this month. There was a huge drop from Nordstrom. Two weeks ago, we saw a 40% decrease in their overall SEO visibility.” -Tyson

• “You took my winner of the year! The leadership is sort of the old guard at eBay and they are getting back to their roots. I honestly think that the business is going to be refocused. Not only from an SEO perspective but just in general, I believe in good things for eBay.” -Ben

• “When you look at eBays visibility score for this year, sure they were challenges in the past but if you look from the year start, they had a consistent week over week increase in visibility leading back to the start of the year. They started the year back around 900,000 from an SEO visibility score and now they have moved up into the 1.5 million range.” -Tyson