Search Engine Marketing Blog: piloSEO

Medium & large retail E-commerce sites represent an excellent opportunity to rank well across a wide range of keywords with fairly high search volume. On top of that they can provide an extremely focused user experience when their highly relevant product pages are called up for specific searches. The quicker a user can find what they are looking for the more likely they are to purchase from a site. This is the logic behind focused landing pages and landing page optimization in PPC. SEO should follow the same logic. SEO for e-commerce sites should concentrate on specific product level pages as well as the more generic top level pages. Quality SEO will try to capture both the high level searches as well as the myriad of long tail terms associated with specific products.

Customers want to find what they searched for ASAP

For example, if you own a sporting goods store that sells hockey sticks the best user experience would be to show a page selling the specific hockey stick for which a user searched. As a potential customer if I search for an Easton Synergy hockey stick I really want to find pages that are specific to that query. I am more likely to find a page related to my exact query more useful and I will be more likely to buy from that site. If I have to search around for the product I will be less satisfied and will be more likely to move on to another site with more relevant results. As I take a look at results for the search phrase Easton Synergy hockey sticks I find a few sites that are close to getting it right but the majority either send the user to the home page or category level page. While the category level pages are a bit more useful I would prefer to find the specific product level page.

Easton Synergy Hockey Sticks

Why is it so hard to find product specific pages?

The reason it is difficult to rank these specific pages is due to the nature of e-commerce sites. Most medium and large e-commerce sites tend to rely on generic information provide by the manufacturer. This leads most competing retailers to have the same exact content as their competitors. Since search engines want to show unique information that means only the strongest site will show up in the top of the SERPs. As you can see here both of the sites in the following screenshots have the same exact product descriptions. They may be situated differently on the page but the fact is it looks like the same thing to a search engine crawler.

Joes

Dicks

Neither of these pages showed up in the top ten results when searching for Easton Synergy Hockey sticks even though they provide more relevant content for the query. The fact is that since every single page selling that hockey stick has the same exact content it becomes very difficult for any of them to rank well.

Make Every Page Unique

Don’t just focus on the higher level pages simply because they provide the best opportunity to rank well for more popular keywords. The low hanging fruit is in the product level pages. Most medium to large e-commerce sites have thousands of these pages and the competition is less intense. That means there are thousands of chances to rank well for highly relevant keywords that lead to a better user experience and more sales. By adding some unique content to these pages it will be much easier to rank for the highly specific (and relevant) keywords. Don’t simply slap on the manufacturer provided text and images. Add some of your own interesting commentary, allow users to add their own reviews, add some additional images, etc. Make your pages stand out to search engines and visitors and you will be able to grab the thousands of users who are searching for the products your site sells.

Popularity: 34% [?]

At least according to the latest MarketingPilgrim ad:tech Survey. In the latest survey they asked the biggest Internet marketers which tactics worked for them and what they planned to spend the most on in the coming year. In terms of greatest Return on Investment SEO scored the highest for 2007 and had the largest jump from the previous year. In 2006 45% of marketers claimed SEO was their best ROI vehicle and that number jumped 12% in 2007 with 57% of marketers rating it the highest. The previous leader was Paid Search with 49% claiming it their best ROI performer in 2006 but that number dropped to 34% in 2007. Email marketing finished second for 2006 and 2007. Here is a visual representation of the survey results.

Courtesy of MarketingSherpa

Why did SEO jump and Paid Search Drop so much?

The reasons are varied. Paid search has become more competitive so the prices continue to rise. This means margins are smaller and the return on investment is shrinking. Paid Search is an incremental marketing method which means that no matter how well a campaign performs the marketer has to pay for every click. SEO is a long term investment with a hefty cost up front but as the efforts mature and propogate across the search landscape the returns grow while the costs decrease exponentially. As quality SEO efforts begin to take hold the marketer will spend less and less thus increasing the ROI more and more each month.

SEO is well worth the initial investment

Many marketers and business owners are shocked when the see what they consider a high price for SEO. Quality SEO carries a heft up-front expense. It is well worth the cost though. Once that work is done the cost is minimal to nonexistent and the traffic keeps coming (and in many cases continues to grow). Unlike Paid Search, which requires the marketer to keep paying and if they stop the traffic does too. Investing in SEO is a long term strategy that continues to pay dividends long after the initial investment has been recouped. And that is not me saying it. The professionals who are paying for SEO services are increasingly telling us the same thing and the MarketingSherpa survey bears that out.

Popularity: 29% [?]

I have found Twitter to be both useful and frustrating at times. In many cases people use it to relay meaningless information and it can be annoying to read about the tedious minutes of a persons day. That being said there are some fantastic uses for it as well. I followed the Super Bowl Scorecard and found it to be a great way to keep up with the Super Bowl Ads and how each advertiser leveraged search into their overall campaign. I also recently discovered another feed that harnesses the real power of the Twitter system.

Getting stuck in traffic SUCKS

After struggling with my commute home last night and my trip into the city this morning I found a great new feature in Twitter. At least it is new to me and I wish I would have found it sooner as it would have saved me some frustration. Twitter now provides a Commuter Feed. This feed allows users to follow commuters in their metro area as well as provide updates when they encounter delays. This is the type of thing that Twitter is perfectly designed for. It gives users up to date traffic information and allows them to plan their trip into work or wherever they need to go. I have just signed up for it and am very interested to see how it works. If it can help me avoid some of the frustration I have experienced in the past day or two I will be very happy with it.

Give it a try

If you have not signed up for it you may want to try it out. If you have been taking advantage of the Commuter Feed I am interested in hearing about your findings, good or bad. Let me know how well it works. I will continue following it to see how helpful it is. This is a wonderful use of the Twitter system and I would love to see these types of applications expand as Twitter grows.

Popularity: 28% [?]

So I was doing some research today and in the process I was looking at some tools to check the redirect being used by some web sites. In the process I did a quick search for “Redirect Test” in Google and found a strange AdWords listing. I am not sure what the purpose is or even if it means anything. I just found it odd. What I found was an ad placed by under the domain googletest.com. When you go to the googletest.com site I found that it is for sale so it is obviously not a Google owned domain. It appears that either Google has pulled the ad or the owner of the domain has stopped running it so it is no longer showing up right now.

What the heck is this?

Both ads have the same copy and both appeared to be using a Doubleclick tracking URL. It resolves to a page with a 1×1 pixel Gif Image that obviously can’t be seen. Here are the screen shots showing the listings I found. Both search phrases, redirect test and redirection test, both had the same result with the same ad copy, which was “This is a test ad. Please Ignore it.” Of course to me that is the most compelling ad copy ever.

Has anyone seen this?

Or something similar. I am trying to figure out the rationale behind this and am not really sure what it could be. Does anyone have any ideas as to why someone would do this. The landing page was blank so there was no way to monetize the ad. Let me know if you can think of any reason why this was done or what purpose it serves?

Popularity: 25% [?]