This pull down screen is always in the way, whenever I'm jumping between tabs. Please re-consider it

They change the algorithm in an attempt to improve search relevance. They're not trying to "make your organic rankings drop." I would concede they do design the SERP around driving ad revenue nowadays though.

That's what they say, but there is abundant evidence that's not actually why they make some of the changes they do. We have seen it first hand. Their ad experts suggest you go down paths that have the end result of siphoning your organic traffic into paid traffic, which then causes a spiral of lowering of organic rankings, which then makes you more reliant on the paid traffic. Maybe that is their ads team more than it is their algo team, but Google themselves is very good at tricking you into doing things that make you more reliant on their paid ads than organic rankings. We've gotten into big arguments with the Google team about it. We have shown them data that their suggestions are not in our best interest, and actually hurt our organic rankings over time. Their solution is to replace our ad rep every 6 months, who then goes on to suggest the same things over and over and over. Then they ask you all sorts of inside info questions probing your business and trying to get information out of you about competitors and trends. Then they use that information to solicit your competition to go and bid on the same keywords, driving the costs up. I realize independent PPC people would be different, but it is abundantly clear the internal Google people are trying maximize Google's ad revenue, not help the vendors.

Not really. They have a product. They try to improve that product and also increase their profitability, just like any business.

I would agree if they didn't have a monopoly on who sees what on the internet. There comes a point when you get too big and powerful to just hand wave away practices as just part of capitalistic operations. I see Google and Amazon as being too big now. The issue is that Google's product is everyone. It's you and me. They have our data, and we are the product that they serve up to companies. Admittedly I own one of those companies benefiting from it, but I am not immune to seeing the problem behind how Google makes their money. I don't really have an issue with the general idea of it. I have an issue with the specifics of how they hold their finger on the scale in their benefit. Amazon is just as bad, if not worse. Definitely worse, actually. Plus, I hate being lied to and misled. I absolutely hate it. If there is an indication I am being lied to or misled, I am going to treat our business relationship very differently from then on out. There is a culture of that in both their organizations, and it shows.

Not if your PPC person is worth their salt. For example, I think you're still wasting money by immediately retargeting purchasers like myself, which is what I pointed out in that PM I sent you a while back. You're also missing out on a ton of brand keywords, for which your competitors are running ads and stealing your traffic. That one's PPC 101.

Perhaps my wording was not the best. I more meant that using the strategies that work for existing customers, then trying to blindly apply them to new customers, can be like lighting $100 bills on fire. We are not doing that. We have pretty good strategies for actually converting new customers, then getting them as repeat ones. Our re-targeting strategies have also been formed over years based on what has and has not worked. We have had a ton of people suggest things to us over the years. Tons of experts all telling us what they think we should do. More often than not, we find that what works on paper and what works in the real world in our specific case are not always the same. We bid on tons of our own branded keywords. We used to bid on competitor branded keywords, but we found that to be a waste of money in all but a very few cases. Are you referring to ND branded keywords, or competitor ones? We absolutely bid on branded keywords.

I'd only use the top-level categories in the mega menu. Listing out all those subcategories is what makes the menu so large and obtrusive. I would have assumed the mega menu was to send internal link juice to those subcategory pages.

It was based off feedback from users asking for a quick menu they could jump to many of our products from. The feedback on it has all been positive, till this post. I mean, if you look at our Google customer reviews, you will see that "easy to navigate site, shopping was easy, and site contains tons of good information" is a common theme in many of them. I am always up for improving things if we can, but I am bombarded by messages from people giving conflicting feedback all the time. Sometimes it is a very vocal minority complaining about something, while the vast majority of people like it and are just content to use it and not really give public feedback. It's hard for me to determine the right answer most of the time.

I'm guessing Shopify doesn't allow supplements? In a general sense, Shopify would have "better" SEO out of the box. Or Magento, but that'd be hefty development fees.

We've used Shopify and Magento, and both have their benefits and drawbacks. Magento is a mess unless you have a dedicated developer on staff to deal with it 24/7. We ran Natrium on Magento for a while. We ran as fast as we could away from it after a while. Unless you are a massive company with a huge catalog and a dedicated web developer team, SAAS solutions are better. We ran Ceretropic on Prestashop for a while, too. We did Opencart, Shopify, and Woocommerce as well. Bigcommerce is far from perfect, but we know it and can work with the imperfections. We were close to migrating to Shopify a while back, but some of the limitations there were too much for us to overlook and spend the money and hassle on migration.