Google has been personalizing search results for some time. You may have noticed that searching for a fairly generic service can bring you results specific to your geographical area, and if you search while signed into your Google account, Google may personalize results based on your search history. Search result personalization is taken to a […]
Original post by Pam
Google has been personalizing search results for some time. You may have noticed that searching for a fairly generic service can bring you results specific to your geographical area, and if you search while signed into your Google account, Google may personalize results based on your search history. Search result personalization is taken to a […]
Original post by Pam
Halloween is just around the corner but if you are thinking of starting Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your company it does not have to be a frightful time. The biggest challenge in managing your website’s SEO is simply motivating yourself tackle something that seems so intangible and insurmountable. By breaking SEO into pieces, […]
Original post by Kate
Brainstorming is an essential phase of keyword research for both paid search campaigns and search engine optimization. The goal of brainstorming keywords for a site is to generate a large, diverse pool of potential phrases without regard to search volume, cost or competitiveness just yet. Brainstorming keyword phrases is not a task that should be […]
Original post by Pam
For many business owners, the foray into e-commerce feels like a dive into a vast sea of ambiguity. Even established companies have to develop new means of getting noticed and attracting customers when they venture into the online market. But just because your expertise is not in the field of internet marketing doesn’t mean you […]
Original post by Pam
The concept of Google PageRank is widely misconstrued, so I thought I would take the time today to discuss this often confusing and perhaps overvalued means of judging a web page. First, let’s debunk a common misconception about PageRank: the term “PageRank” does not refer to “the rank of a page.” Actually, PageRank is named […]
Original post by blogadmin
Luxury retailer Cartier recently launched a MySpace presence for its Love by Cartier campaign. But it faces an interesting reputation management issue: since MySpace already has hundreds of profiles that use the name Cartier (it is a surname, after all).
If you type in “Cartier MySpace” in Google, this is what you get:
If someone really wants to find the page, they may head over to MySpace and use it’s site search box, and still not find the official page:
You have to type “Love By Cartier” in Google or MySpace to get the link to the Cartier MySpace page (at time of posting, algorithm changes or incoming links to Cartier’s page may change that).
Yahoo’s algorithm does select the right page for “Cartier MySpace”:
Though you can’t control how Google matches pages to the search term (duplicate content filter in action), you can build links to the page you want to rank well to help boost its “Page Rank” which may cause it to beat out other pages in the search engine’s index. (If the search engine indexed 500+ pages from MySpace relevant to the term “Cartier”, it only picks 1 to show in search results, 2 if it uses an indented second result).
Cartier could also nag MySpace to tweak its internal search to rank its page tops for “Cartier” searches, especially since this is an advertising partnership between the two.
This is also an example of why brands should really claim their social network profile names / domains / Facebook Pages and Groups proactively, even if they just sit on them. It’s easy for net citizens to beat you to the punch which makes it harder for you to be found in search engines and social network searches.
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Original post by Linda Bustos
Interview on the latest in link building strategies to help retail SEO with Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts from the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.
 
We conducted 16 interviews with various ecommerce vendors at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.
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Free webinar: June 19th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Jason Billingsley, VP Innovation, Elastic Path Software
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Original post by Jason Billingsley
Customer reviews certainly help shoppers, but they are not substitutes for weak or generic product descriptions. Unique product descriptions help your search engine optimization, help overcome your customer FUDDs and ultimately sell more product!
I want to share a few tips for creating unique, compelling product page copy using customer review content - even when your site has few or no reviews.
SEO and Duplicate Content
Our example is the “LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set.” This product is carried by most toy retailers, and many are just using the stock product description from the manufacturer:
Your fridge door is the perfect place to develop a taste for reading. Nobody goes hungry for learning with this set of 26 colorful easy-grip magnetic letters and magnetic letter reader that attaches securely to your fridge. Each letter talks, sings and teaches letter names, letter sounds and learning songs. Put a letter into the reader to hear its name, its sound or a fun phonics song. Your kids might not eat their vegetables, but with the Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set they can learn to spell them. What it Teaches: * Letter names * Letter sounds * Learning songs
Nothing wrong with the description itself, it’s actually very clever. But typing “Your fridge door is the perfect place to develop a taste for reading” into Google delivers 1,520 results, which tells us Google has indexed that many pages using this phrase. The danger to sites using stock descriptions is they may not appear in search results due to the duplicate content filter.
Writing a unique description, or at least modifying it so it’s not word-for-word is a better approach, especially to capture long-tail search traffic.
Address Fears, Uncertainties, Doubts and Deal-breakers
Manufacturer’s descriptions are typically written before the product is sold to the general public. Copywriters don’t necessarily have enough customer research to answer these questions:
But you have access to free market research that addresses these concerns - customer reviews. Plus, you can identify common FUDDs - fears, uncertainties, doubts and dealbreakers that can help you write more persuasive copy, establish trust with customers and convert comparison shoppers - even if yours is not the lowest price.
Start with your featured products, best sellers, highest margin or seasonal products.
Custom copywriting does take time, especially when you’re performing thorough customer research by reading a number of reviews. Choose items you expect will get most mileage for your time investment.
Tip: Check out Amazon’s Bestseller lists by navigating to any category and clicking the Bestsellers link!
Tap into the largest customer review bases for each product.
This could be Amazon, Epinions, Rate-it-All or any other review community. You might want to Google the product itself “{product} + reviews” and start with the first result.
I like using Amazon because I’ve found it not only has a large number of reviews, but the review quality is usually very good. There are great sort tools to help you hone in by star-rating, rank by most-helpful or even search within reviews for keywords. I do find the search feature’s precision to be lacking. If you want to find reviews with the phrase “would not recommend this for” it will match single words, and plurals / alternate endings for the word “recommend.”
Example: Using our LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set as our case, here’s how you can leverage Amazon…
From the product page, scroll, scroll and scroll some more until you find the “See All Product Description” link.
Hello! This product has won some awards.
- Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, Gold Seal and Snap Award, 2003
- Parenting 2003 Toys of the Year Award
- Toy Wishes All Star, Preschool Category, 2003
- Toy of the Year, Nick Jr.com, 2003
These are strong value propositions. Use this to your advantage in home page merchandising zones, PPC copy, email marketing as well as product page copy.
You won’t necessarily find awards for every product, but who knows what gems you’ll find.
Read reviews.
You don’t have to read ALL the reviews, just a handful of reviews voted most helpful buy the community and a few of the lowest rated. As you scan, clip quotes that stand out to you. Look for:
Pay closest attention to negative reviews.
Should you discover (as in this example) that the product is often defective, you need to address this both in your copy and in your selling policies.
Are you willing and able to offer the assurance of free return shipping on defective products? It could be the deciding factor on whether a comparison shopper chooses you or your competition. You could add copy like:
“Though most customers are extremely satisfied with this item, a small percentage of customers report the product does not play the correct letter sounds for some letters. In the event that your product does not work as expected, we will gladly offer free return shipping and send you a new set.”
Use Buzzillions.com
Buzzillions is a popular customer reviews aggregator from the folks at Power Reviews. One feature it has that I haven’t found elsewhere is a “Review Snapshot” that gives you a list of Pros, Cons and Best Uses as mentioned by customers.
Under the pros tab you’ll find fantastic adjectives to use in your copy.
The cons tab lists fears you must address in your copy, or gives you ideas for cross-sells. Hard to clean? Suggest a cleaner. No storage container? Suggest a suitable container.
Best uses helps you develop “Recommended For” copy. You can also add these products to the appropriate gift finder tools, or add product tags if your site uses them.
You may discover different ways of gleaning from customer reviews than the ones mentioned here. The takeaway here is that you tap into the consumer conversation that’s freely available to you, and consider how you can leverage it to improve your product copy. If you want to take this to the next level and use customer reviews to market to the sexes, check out Holly Buchanan’s post Using Customer Reviews to Pick Up Men, Women.
What?!! It’s true. Many of the biggest and most popular online retailers with fat SEO budgets are not showing up for their own names or valuable keywords in Google search results. Most don’t even know it. How can this be?
All the major search engines offer a .com search engine and a number of country-specific engines, like Google.ca, .co.uk, .com.au, .fr, .de and so on. These are local search engines, and often use geo-IP targeting to show the local search engine as the default when a searcher lives outside the United States.
If you’ve never seen a localized search engine, this is what it looks like:
As you can see, a searcher has the option to restrict search results to only pages from his or her country. This is particularly helpful for searchers who are performing transactional searches - they’re looking for products to buy. Using the general “search the web” will often deliver US sites which requires the shopper to dig through the sites looking for shipping information and costs. Searching only pages from their native land, searchers can save time and discover online stores they purchase from over and over again.
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Original post by Linda Bustos
According to a recent study by the Society for New Communications Research, 59% of consumers use social media to vent their frustrations about customer service experience, and research other companies’ customer service before dealing with them.
- 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer-care experiences shared online
- 72% research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes
- 84% consider the quality of customer care at least sometimes in their decision to do business with a company
- 81% say blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% say they believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriously
- Search engines are the most valuable online tools for this research. Those rated of no value include micro-blogging sites like Twitter or Pownce (39%), YouTube (27%) and social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (22%)
Via: Consumers Using Social Media to ‘Vent’ about, Research Customer Service
More than ever I strongly believe each online retailer needs a dedicated social media representative who can perform reputation management by monitoring the conversation on the Web and responding to each concern as effectively as possible. This could be handled internally or by a consultant.
ReadWriteWeb has a great roundup of (free and paid) tools you can use to monitor your online reputation, including Google Alerts, Trackur, Naymz and Monitor This.
Because negative comments on popular social networks, review sites, blogs and forums can rank top 10 in search engines for your company name, it can be very easy for customers to find this information on you. Although you cannot demand, beg or bribe search engines from removing these pages from their indexes for you - you can often join the conversation yourself and speak to customer concerns directly.
You can also contact the owners of the websites and negotiate removal or modification of the content. Some will co-operate, others won’t. Some will ask for money. You may think wiping out the content is the preferred approach, but remember that the community is watching you. It’s possible that the thread starters will be notified of their threads’ removal and warned about mentioning your company negatively in the future. These posters can just as easily move their rant to another website, recruiting other members to repeat your company’s keywords and link to each others’ threads and posts to take you down. I’ve seen this happen.
I learned from the Simpsons that the Chinese use the same word for crisis as they do for opportunity. Homer coined the term “crisitunity.” I would say the same thing for online reputation management - the seeming crisis is actually an opportunity to show that you listen to your customers and are willing to make good on bad experiences.
You can boast about your commitment to customer service in your marketing all you want, but until you have a chance to demonstrate your service, it’s all hype. So I wouldn’t get too hung up that some people had a bad experience with you, but I would certainly do everything possible to make it right with the customer. When consumers click to read the dirt on your company and read how you handle problems, it gives them more confidence that should something go wrong, they can expect you to fix it.
Glen Allsopp has good advice on how to respond to negative blog posts and how to deal with a RipOff Report listing. Glen also does reputation management consulting for a living.
Another opportunity is to push negative results lower in search engines by creating content that will outrank it. From my experience helping a national retailer clear the top 3 pages of Google, Yahoo and MSN I have shared a few suggestions on how to create pages on other sites about your company that are likely to rank well. Online retailers can also take advantage of shopping comparison engines, affiliate programs, coupons and deals sites. You want to choose websites that will allow your company name to appear in the title tag of the page, and you’ll also want to link to these pages from other pages to build up their Page Ranks. You have to get creative with this.
You can research which sites to go for by Googling other retailers and see what ranks highly for their names.
38 Must-Reads on Online Reputation Management
The Key to PPC for Online Retailers
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Original post by Linda Bustos
If an estimated 80% of sales start with a search engine year-round, you better believe consumers use search to find gifts for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and so on. And they often include the holiday name in their search query.
Are you showing up in search results for these queries?
Let’s look at how two heavy-hitting flower delivery sites have optimized for one of their biggest events of the year - Mother’s Day: Proflowers.com vs. 1800Flowers.com.
Notice that both sites rank for “mothers day flowers” with deep URLs targeted just for Mother’s Day. Both have the search term at the beginning of the title tag, although 1800Flowers has added the term “gifts” to rank for more than just “flowers.” Both have keyword-friendly URLs. When you click through to the sites, you’ll notice the navigation menus both include special Mother’s Day tabs at the far left - can’t miss ‘em.
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Original post by Linda Bustos
Colors are search modifiers that can bring a lot of long-tail traffic. When someone searches for a particular product and color, it often indicates someone is close to a purchase, or at least further along the sale-trail than one who goes broad.
But you can’t create a separate product page and URL for each color because that’s duplicate content, and duplicate content is the worst of sins, right? That’s what I thought until I started testing it - and it turned everything my momma ever told me about duplicate content on its head.
(If your momma never had “the talk” with you - you know, *content reproduction,* we recently did a duplicate content post that included a PG13 explanation. I made sure this post was completely different so nobody mistakes it for duplicate content).
Here’s an example:
Jessica Bennett Shoes sells its product through its own e-store and various retailers like Amazon, Zappos and ShoeBuy. One of its styles is called “Harli.” It’s made from burlap and comes in navy, beige and brown.
Shoebuy.com has 3 indexed product pages for Harli – one for each color.
Each page has an identical meta description, and according to Webconfs’ Similar Page Checker, these pages are 100% identical.
But Shoebuy not only owns top spot for each color, Google’s also throwing in some indented result love. When you search for “jessica bennett harli navy” (at time of writing and from my data center):
Top ranking… and for “jessica bennett harli brown”:
“jessica bennet harli beige”:
The only differentiators between the 3 color pages are the URLs (just numbers, no keywords) and the title tag. I’ve scoped out other sites that use different pages for different colors and they all seem to rank fine when color is included in the search query. The technique seems to be create color-specific pages in addition to one main product page (hence, indented results). Since all pages are indexed, the color pages are selected to appear when someone searches for the color, with the non-color, main product page potentially appearing as an indented, second result.
This leads me to believe that as long as your color pages are getting indexed, you don’t need to worry about duplicate content smackdown.
The Key to PPC for Online Retailers
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Original post by Linda Bustos
This isn’t a new topic here at Get Elastic, but since search engine optimization is such a key part to ecommerce success I’m going to bang the same drum once again on optimizing for brand names.
Zappos appears to have covered all the bases and then some in optimizing its brand category pages. For example, its Nine West page (below) includes 272 occurrences of “Nine West” on this page - that’s 4.55% of the entire page copy. This is what is referred to as “keyword density.” Though keyword density is not as important to SEO as was once thought (title tag, keyword rich backlinks from other sites and the domain’s overall authority have more impact), this page certainly is considered highly relevant to “Nine West” by Google.
Like Karmaloop, Zappos includes a paragraph about the brand itself. Most ecommerce sites have category / brand pages that consist of little more than images, links and a page title.
Also included at the category level are customer reviews. Each product with a review appears on the same page. Though the links to the product pages are “nofollowed” (link includes an HTML attribute telling search engines not to crawl the linked page or pass Page Rank), the keywords count towards the overall relevance to the page.
Get you’re scrolling finger ready, you’ll need it.
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Original post by Linda Bustos
Today is my first day back at my desk here in Vancouver after a lovely week in the Canadian Rocky mountains. While at the CWC/Corus Digital Media Career Accelerator program, I enjoyed the best green tea I’ve ever had in my life. The brand is “Higgins & Burke” and this is the only green tea I’ve tasted that hasn’t given me a bit of nausea after drinking it. I must have it here at my home office!
So I turn to my trusted Google search engine to find out where I can get my lips on more of this tea. Typing in “Higgins and Burke” into the search engine delivers these results:
Web Analytics for Online Retailers: Technology Use & Satisfaction 2008
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Original post by Linda Bustos
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