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The PPP provisions of the CARES Act were further interpreted by the U.S. Small Business Administration (“SBA”) in four interim final rules issued on April 2, 2020 (the “Interim Rule”), April 3, 2020 (the “Affiliation Rule”), April 14, 2020 (available here), and April 24, 2020 (available here), and Frequently Asked Questions issued on April 6, 2020 and updated through April 24, 2020 (the “FAQs” ). In conjunction with the issuance of the Affiliation Rule, the SBA also issued a two-page explanation of the affiliation principles applicable to the PPP (the “Affiliation Guidance”). The Interim Rule provided important information on the calculation of the loan amount, and added some further requirements. The Affiliation Rule and Affiliation Guidance clarified the affiliation principles that apply to applicants. The FAQs provide some additional clarification regarding the application of the affiliation rules and interpretation of the CARES Act, including guidance on how to calculate “payroll costs” and how a relationship with a third-party payroll provider and/or Professional Employer Organization (“PEO”) should be viewed for purposes of the PPP. The FAQs make it clear that borrowers and lenders may rely on the SBA’s guidance in the FAQs and the Interim Rule available at the time of application. Specifically, the FAQs provide that the government will not challenge lender PPP actions that conform to such guidance.

Unlike most typical SBA loans, the PPP Loans are unsecured loans requiring no collateral, no personal guarantee, and no showing that credit is unavailable elsewhere.

A 2-year term (decreased from the maximum maturity of 10 years under the Act), An interest rate of 1% (increased from prior Treasury guidance that set the interest rate at 0.5%), Principal and interest deferred for 6 months.

Digital agencies are incredibly hard to sell; to do so, you need to have streamlined your process as much as possible

12-month net profit average and then times that by a multiple. Typically, a multiple will range between 20–50x of the 12-month average net profit for healthy, profitable online businesses. As you get closer to 50x you have to be able to show your business is growing in a BIG way month over month and that your business is truly defensible

EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization.

How to influence the organic product carouselIn Google’s blog post, they detailed three factors that are key inputs: Structured Data on your website, providing real-time product information via Merchant Center, along with providing additional information through Manufacturer Center.This section of the article will explore Google’s guidance, along with some commentary of what I’ve noticed based on my own experiences.

Make sure your product markup is validatedThe key here is to make sure Product Markup with Structured Data on your page adheres to Google’s guidelines and is validated.

Submit your product feed to Google via Merchant CenterThis is where it starts to get interesting. By using Google’s Merchant Center, U.S. product feeds are now given the option to submit data via a new destination.The difference here for Google is that retailers are able to provide more up-to-date information about their products, rather than waiting for Google to crawl your site (what happens in step 1).Checking the box for “Surfaces across Google” gives you the ability to grant access to your websites product feed, allowing your products to be eligible in areas such as Search and Google Images.For the purpose of this study we are most interested in Search, with the Organic Product Carousel in mind. “Relevance” of information is the deciding factor of this feature.Google states that in order for this feature of Search to operate, you are not required to have a Google Ads campaign. Just create an account, then upload a product data feed.Commentary by PPC Expert Kirk Williams:“Setting up a feed in Google Merchant Center has become even more simple over time since Google wants to guarantee that they have the right access, and that retailers can get products into ads! You do need to make sure you add all the business information and shipping/tax info at the account level, and then you can set up a feed fairly easily with your dev team, a third party provider like Feedonomics, or with Google Sheets. As I note in my “Beginner’s Guide to Shopping Ads”, be aware that the feed can take up to 72 hours to process, and even longer to begin showing in SERPs. Patience is the key here if just creating a new Merchant Center… and make sure to stay up on those disapprovals as Google prefers a clean GMC account and will apply more aggressive product disapproval filters to accounts with more disapprovals. ”– Kirk WilliamsFor a client I’m working with, completing this step resulted in several of their products being added to the top 10 of the PP carousel. 1 of which is in the top 5, being visible when the SERP first loads.This meant that, in this specific scenario, the product Structured Data that Google was regularly crawling and indexing in the US wasn’t enough on it’s own to be considered for the Organic Product Carousel.Note: the products that were added to the carousel were already considered “popular” but Google just hadn’t added them in. It is not guaranteed that your products will be added just because this step was completed. it really comes down to the prominence of your product and relevance to the query (same as any other page that ranks).

the real value of the badge is the access it provides to Local Services Ads (LSA). This is Google’s local trust pack. It is a cost-per-call advertising inventory unit that acts unlike anything we have ever encountered as marketers.

Badges are earned within two distinct programs – Google Guaranteed and Google Screened.

This year, Google solidified the growth intentions behind its newly minted trust layer, with the launch of Google Screened for Professional Services providers. This program is for lawyers, financial planners, real estate agents, photographers, event planners, and tax specialists.

Many of the PPC specialists I know will privately have data showing that the minimum threshold Google usually has for paid ads is lower for competitive brand buys.

If you don’t pay Google’s brand tax, don’t pay enough, or (like the Schick razors search above) don’t pay enough in all the right places, the search giant will introduce results that aren’t what searchers wanted, aren’t nearly relevant to rank in the organic results, but are just tolerably irrelevant enough to help them extract billions in extra income.