Amazon's annual report is out! This piece discusses the company's growth and addresses some challenges they anticipate. These are challenges all ecommerce stores should know. The challenges include: 1. Channel expansion: i.e. acquiring Whole Foods. 2. Risks of international operations: important lessons for all ecommerce retailers expanding beyond their borders need to consider. 3. Optimization of data & fulfillment centers. 4. Seasonality and holiday strain: how Amazon prepares for Q4 traffic and sales that all ecommerce businesses should keep in mind. 5. Rapidly Evolving business model: the risks ecommerce stores should understand as they rapidly grow. 6. Government regulations: knowing how data protection, taxation, and energy consumption are being influenced by various government agencies. These are lessons all ecommerce retailers can gain valuable insight from the world's largest online giant.

Gone are the days when you could easily hack SEO by loading a page with keywords and creating artificial backlinks. Today, Google is consistently rolling out changes to its algorithms to reward quality. Unlike the past, if you have low-quality pages on your website, it can negatively impact your overall ranking. What’s a low-quality page? It’s one that isn’t used or visited, is full of duplicate content from other pages, has thin content or very low engagement in the eyes of Google. Here’s the thing: It’s entirely possible that you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of low-quality pages on your site — in the eyes of Google — and you might not even realize it. We call this problem index bloat. It happens when Google has indexed a lot of URLs for your website that it views as low-quality. In this article, we’ll show you: 1. An example of index bloat 2. Common causes 3. The exact steps you can take to see if you have a problem

Another awesome post from Nick Eubanks that does a deep dive into keyword research, specifically for e-commerce (but applies to much more than just that). Great to read through if you're trying to figure out where to put your focus from an SEO point of view.