eCommerce Marketing For Dopamine Addicts

Recently one of my freelance clients got me onto their SEMRush account. It’s a nice tool, it has its place in Search Engine Marketing. But it’s also important to remember, behind those numbers and algorithms, that there are people behind those screens. I try to always look behind the SEO to figure out what motivates the users in the first place.

Hot new acronym to play with: E-A-T

SEMRush has its own blog to help with content marketing. In their obligatory end-of-year post looking ahead into 2020, they bring up E-A-T a lot. E-A-T stands for “Expertise, Authority, and Trust,” and it’s the latest Google indexing bugaboo which everybody is struggling to ascertain. What everybody forgets is that behind the numbers and algorithms, Google cares about what motivates people too.

Turning to SearchEngineJournal, E-A-T is a human-driven link quality control method, where Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines is “used by humans to assign quality scores to search results for specified queries… In other words, pages that would receive high-quality ratings from raters applying these guidelines are the kinds of pages Google wants to rank well.”

And then those pages, in turn, get stamped with the “Expertise Authority Trustworthiness” seal of approval. That doesn’t change the algorithms directly; instead it guides the engineers in adjusting those algorithms to bring up those pages more often.

The bottom line: Users – the humans behind those queries – want to see results that are actually helpful, engaging, and informative. That’s as opposed to mechanical SEO content churned out to appease the algorithm gods. Now that I’ve humanized the mechanical search process, watch as I mechanize the human angle all over again:

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New at GeekyDomain: Hearthstone Guides!

I never seem to get caught up around here lately, but the holidays will do that to you. I’ve picked up a new gig at GeekyDomain, whose site focus is self-explanatory. For a few opening posts, we’ve decided to make guides for my favorite digital collectible trading card game. There’s a guide to the standard Hearthstone meta post Descent of Dragons, and the first half of my extensive, book-length guide to Hearthstone Battlegrounds format, covering the heroes. In the second half, I offer a guide to Hearthstone Battlegrounds minions – when to go for tribal, when to settle for goodstuff, and why demons are underrated.

The Battlegrounds one is something I’ve been itching to take on for awhile, because no guides out there I saw were up to date. Or else, the rankings for the heroes was done by somebody who obviously hadn’t played more than a few games on day one. We’re going to make an effort to keep the 2-part guide updated, because it’s basically the only complete strategy guide to Hearthstone‘s Battlegrounds format on the web.

Stay tuned, and welcome my new host GeekyDomain to the Penguin Pete fold. My influence spreads like Cthulhu’s tentacles! Oh, by the way, did you know I also blogged about Game of Thrones there?

She’s cute, but she’s never going to break tier 3.

For your Christmas catching-up: The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump

Here it is Christmas Eve, and I’ve JUST NOW shoveled my way out from under my workload to pay attention to my own site for a change.

I know most of you want to think about this like you need a hole in your mistletoe, but I promise it’s funny and enlightening. The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump examines where we are, how we got here, where we might be going, and – are you sitting down for this? It actually explains things so they make *some* sense!

It’s a defining Christmas for the Trumpster. Lots of soul-searching is due (though we may be sure none will be undertaken). If ghosts of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and John McCain visited him tonight, that would be most fitting.

eCommerce Marketing: How We Misread the Internet Audience

By now the Internet has chewed up and masticated the infamous Peloton exercise bike ad. For you people in the future visiting to soberly learn the lessons from the Ghosts of Christmas Ads Past, here’s what that was all about:

The Internet reaction to this ad is a textbook case of unexpected backlash

Everybody mocked it. And lest you be tempted to think “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” Peloton’s stock actually fell 10% due to bad press from the ad.

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Christmas Gift Shopping With Penguin Pete

So it’s the holiday season and I’ve actually taken a break from my usual Scroogy behavior to go Black Friday shopping last week. This is the first time I’ve ever done that! Normally I stay in, safe from getting trampled. But the kids were in town to visit this last Thanksgiving weekend, and we don’t get to see them that often these days, so I suggested we stampede Historic Valley Junction. And man did we have a blast! Black Friday isn’t as crowded as it used to be.

Of course, I turned it into a client post too. Everybody else runs around Valley Junction taking selfies with everything, so why not join in and be able to monetize it too? That link you will find is also an eccentric gift idea guide.

What didn’t make it into that post: We ate lunch at Heavenly, an Asian restaurant where they know what a bowl of hot ‘n’ sour soup is and set the table with chopsticks in mind first. They have this awesome mural behind the bar there:

mural at Heavenly cuisine in Valley Junction

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