In the latest edition of Google’s SEO office-hours Q&A video, Senior Search Analyst John Mueller addressed concerns about inaccurate prices in search results.

His advice may be helpful if you’re having similar problems with Google displaying the wrong prices for your products.

Ensuring Accurate Product Prices in Organic Search Results

One of the questions focused on ensuring accurate prices are displayed in organic text results for their products.

In his response, Mueller drew attention to Google Merchant Center feeds.

“I’d recommend using the Merchant Center feeds if you can,” Mueller advised.

He pointed out that Merchant Center offers ways to submit pricing data directly.

He recommends retailers look into this option, implying it’s a low-effort way to ensure accurate prices across search results.

Mueller continues:

“There are ways to submit pricing information in Merchant Center that don’t require a lot of work, so check that out. If you can’t find ways to resolve this, then please drop us a note in the help forums with the details needed to reproduce the issue.”

For those unfamiliar, Google Merchant Center is a tool that allows businesses to upload their product data to Google, making it available for Shopping ads, free listings, and other Google services.

This gives retailers more control over how their product information, including prices, appears across Google’s ecosystem.

Addressing Currency Discrepancies in Rich Results

Another question during the session concerned wrong currencies showing up in rich results.

This can impact how shoppers interact with search results, leading to confused customers and lost sales.

Mueller said this problem stems from Google’s systems potentially viewing pages as duplicates, especially when content is nearly identical across different regional site versions.

He explained,

“Often this is a side effect of Google systems seeing the page as being mostly duplicate. For example, if you have almost exactly the same content on pages for Germany and Switzerland, our systems might see the pages as duplicates, even if there’s a different price shown.”

To resolve this issue, Mueller suggests:

1. Differentiate content: Pages for different regions or currencies should have sufficiently different content to avoid being flagged as duplicates.
2. Use Merchant Center: As with the previous question, Mueller recommended using Merchant Center feeds for pricing information instead of relying solely on structured data.

Key Takeaways

This Q&A highlights a common challenge for online stores: Getting Google to show the correct prices in search results.

To help Google get it right, retailers should:

• Think about using Google Merchant Center to feed in more accurate prices.
• Ensure different country product page versions aren’t too similar to avoid duplicate content problems.
• Monitor how prices and currencies look in search results and rich snippets.
• Use Google’s help forums if there are problems you can’t fix.

Listen to the full Q&A session below:

Featured Image: Tada Images/Shutterstock

Meta is rolling out ad platform upgrades for Facebook and Instagram.

The updates, coming in the next few months, focus on boosting performance and customization through AI-powered campaign optimization.

New Features For Precise Value Definition

Meta is rolling out a new “Conversion Value Rules” tool to give advertisers more flexibility.

This feature lets you adjust the value of different customer actions or groups to your business within a single campaign.

Let’s say you know some customers tend to spend way more over time. Now, you can tell the system to bid higher for those folks without setting up a separate campaign.

Incremental Attribution Model

Meta plans to introduce a new optional attribution setting later this year. This feature will focus on what it terms “incremental conversions.”

Instead of maximizing the total number of attributed conversions, this new model aims to optimize ad delivery for conversions likely to occur only because of ad exposure.

In other words, the model identifies and targets potential customers who wouldn’t have converted without seeing the advertisement.

Initial tests of this feature have yielded positive results. Advertisers participating in these trials have observed an average increase of over 20% in incremental conversions.

Enhanced Analytics Integration

Meta is launching direct connections with external analytics platforms, starting now and continuing through 2025. They’re kicking off with Google Analytics and Northbeam and plan to add Triple Whale and Adobe later.

These connections let businesses share combined campaign data from different channels with Meta’s ad system. The goal is to give advertisers a complete picture of how their campaigns perform across various platforms.

By getting this broader data set, Meta expects to fine-tune its AI models and help advertisers run more effective campaigns.

Cross-Publisher Journey Optimization

Meta is using what it’s learned from its early connections with analytics tools to update its ad system. These changes consider how customers interact with ads across different platforms before purchasing.

Early tests of this update have been positive. On average, third-party analytics tools show a 30% increase in conversions attributed to Meta ads. However, advertisers might see higher costs per thousand impressions (CPMs).

Right now, this update is being applied to campaigns that aim to increase the number or value of conversions under the sales objective. Meta plans to extend this to other campaign objectives soon.

Google Analytics Integration: What It Means

The Google Analytics connection is big news for industry folks, as it could offer the following benefits:

• Unified view of Meta ads and overall site performance
• Better multi-touch attribution
• Insights to refine SEO strategy based on paid social impact
• Smarter budget decisions between paid social and SEO
• Easier reporting
• Cross-channel optimization opportunities

This integration blurs the lines between paid social, organic social, and SEO, offering a more holistic view of digital marketing efforts.

Why This Matters

As privacy changes shake up digital advertising, Meta’s updates address the need for more accurate, valuable insights.

The move towards AI-driven features and cross-channel integration marks a new era in ad sophistication.

To make the most of these updates, review your Meta ad strategy and clearly define your customer journey and value metrics.

Stay tuned for the rollout, and be ready to test these new features as they become available.

Featured Image: Cristian Valderas/Shutterstock

We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024.

In this article, we’re focusing on bootstrapped software companies—those who have never raised external funding. All SEO data featured here comes piping hot from the Ahrefs API.

In a nutshell: free tools, programmatic content, and content localization feature heavily.

These free tools target extremely high volume keywords, like pdf to word with an estimated 3.9M searches in Indonesia alone. Here’s the actual page that ranks so well:

These tools have also been localized to different languages, with the Spanish-, Indonesian- and Portuguese-targeted subfolders generating a large portion of the website’s traffic growth:

The biggest single driver of BuiltWith’s growth is the addition of a Korean language subfolder, builtwith.com/ko, housing localized versions of 191 website pages:

Other language subfolders (particularly /de, /es, and /fr) also generate a decent amount of traffic:

Oh hey, that’s us! Ahrefs is a powerful all-in-one SEO toolset, and the source of all the SEO data in this article.

Ahrefs	2023	2024	Absolute change	Percent change
Organic traffic	2,171,168	4,271,413	2,100,245	96.73%
Organic pages	4,522	18,982	14,460	319.77%
Organic keywords	225,855	231,761	5,906	2.61%
Keywords in top 3	14,291	20,618	6,327	44.27%

We don’t need conjecture here. Our free AI writing tools are responsible for a big part of our organic traffic growth:

Our paragraph rewriter (113k visits per month), paraphrasing tool (99k), and instagram caption generator (73k) are particularly popular:

Try them out for yourselves here: https://ahrefs.com/writing-tools.

We also launched a programmatic SEO campaign, using Ahrefs data to rank the world’s most popular websites:

The localized versions of these pages—particularly Swedish and French—account for the majority of the traffic:

One of Surfshark’s fastest-growing pages is a free IP address checking tool:

But interestingly, most of the company’s organic growth has come from branded keywords, like surfshark discount code, surfshark deals, and surfshark login:

This is a good indication that the company has been investing heavily in brand marketing, increasing branded search queries as a byproduct.

Looking at the Paid search reports in Ahrefs, we can see that the company launched a substantial advertising campaign in the last couple of months (we’ve logged 876 separate ads):

Big, expensive brand advertising campaigns are not common for bootstrapped companies.

Although the fundraising data suggests that Surfshark has never raised outside capital, their website shares that “In 2022, Surfshark and Nord Security merged under one holding company to form a cybersecurity powerhouse while still operating independently.”

This suggests that Surfshark may not be bootstrapped in the truest sense (but I’ve left it in because it showcases an interesting—and expensive—way to grow organic traffic).

All of IPQS’ traffic growth (and in fact, 57% of their total estimated organic traffic) comes from a single page, a free tool for looking up phone numbers:

This page manages to rank in first place for keywords like phone number lookup (353K monthly searches in the US), phone lookup (48K), and check this phone (35K):

This, despite just 84 referring domains and a design that probably looked good circa 2005:

Final thoughts

We’ll share more of these analyses in the coming weeks. Want us to include your company in the next round? Just fill out this short Google Form.