The Maine SEO Blog

Eli Goodman, Search Evangelist, comScore, Inc.

What is driving sales?

• Search vs. Comparison shopping vs. Email
• Coupons

SEM on YouTube

• Is it worth it?
• How well is it working?

Search engines vs. Comparison Shopping

• Brands drive what people are doing
• In comparison shopping, brands hardly ever show up. Instead, it’s heavily weighted toward generic shopping
• Coupon sites continue to grow in importance – especially since Summer 2008

Searches on YouTube

• Searches are up 41% in the past year
• Retail searches are mostly generic (branded “commercials” are the exception)
• Great opportunity for video promotion
• YouTube promoted videos marketplace is much less crowded than search engine SEM
• Great long tail search opportunity in Paid Search space

Karon Thackston, President, Marketing Words

Copywriting Ecommerce Facts

• Most attention to design and content is paid to the homepage and individual product pages
• Only 40% of visitors arrive on homepage
• Close to 60% of all product page arrivals leave immediately
• BUT only about 33% of category page arrivals leave immediately

Category pages

• What they do well:
  - Highly relevant
  - Focused on one specific topic
• What they do poorly:
  - Small photographs
  - Sparse copy
• So what do you do? Add copy below the fold, beside the images
• Think of your category pages as your landing pages
• Your golden opportunity: add keyword-rich copy to category and sub-category pages and you’ll:
  - Rank more pages highly in search engines
  - Effectively introduce your site/brand to first time site visitors
  - Improve customer’s experience

Differentiate your site from other options

• Buy direct
• Exclusively from
• Manufacturer pricing
• Offer decision-making information
• Answer questions customers ask when decidiing to buy

Identify service offerings/brand messaging

• Say you offer free shipping
• Add branding

Make sure you test. What works for someone else may not for someone else!!

Khalid Saleh, Co-Founder & President, Invesp

• Average retail conversions: 2%
• How do I convince visitors to buy from me? Visitors are great, customers are amazing.
• The most important question: where should I start?
  - Because starting in the middle of nowhere isn’t a good idea – more often than not, it’s not the right place

Typical Analysis

• Focus on top landing pages
• Focus on pages with high bounce rate/exit rate
• Certain analyses don’t uncover site-wide issues

Important statistics

• Bounce rate
  - Compare pages vs. site average
  - Problem: bounce rates are skewed with high traffic pages
  - SO remove top 10 landing pages and recalculate bounce rate
• Category Pages
  - Goal: funnel to product pages
  - Traffic will: bounce away, exit site, navigate to parent/sibling/category page, navigate to product page
  - Bounce around effect: # of visitors navigate to a parent/ sibling page/total visitors to page (If bounce around is too high, work on product page

Your goal for category page

Bounce rate, exit rate, bounce around all < 5%

Product page effectiveness index

• # people who add product to cart/total visitors to page
• Consider: product page effectiveness relates to: product page design, product price

Product price

• General goal is to get PPEI from 10% to 15%
• Items less than $100 PPEI can increase to 25%

Adam Audette, President, AudetteMedia, Inc.

Smokin Tips:

• Speed
• Recommendations/Upselling
• Definitive product URLs (no duplicate content)

1. Be quick on the draw

What does the load time influence?

• Search engine crawl
• User experience
• Affects bottom line

What to do?

• Content (compress, externalize, expire)
• Service (redirects cause lag, too!)
• Best resource: Yahoo! Dev Network

2. Give ‘em Wind (Recommendations engines)

What can recommendations do?

• Increase average product views
• Upsell

3. Kill dead ringers

What’s wrong with duplicate content?

• Impacts indexation (crawl caps)
• Causes PageRank split
• Causes page duplication

To diagnose, use Google’s intitle: search

How to fix?

• Low intensive: parameter removal, link canonical tag
• Medium intensive: 301 redirects
• High intensive: URL re-structuring

Laura Thieme, President, Bizresearch

PPC Audit, using 13 months of data through AdWords editor:

1. Keywords with zero conversions (cut those terms!)
2. Higher than accepted CPC
3. Broad and/or phrase match
4. Lack of negative match terms

Tools for PPC cleanup:

• AdWords editor
• AdWords “see search term” button
• 4-6 hours to spend on analysis

Other tips

• Look in “many-per-click” in AdWords
• Pay for brand terms!

Jiyan Wei, Director of Product Management, PRWeb

What PRWeb news release customers do well:

• Meet audience demand with relevant topics
• Balance with staying focused
• Use images
  - CTR increases 15-25% when images are used
  - Drive to bloggers/writers; images drive the content
  - Increases your footprint with image search (for one release, 90% of traffic to website came from image search)
• Use video
  - Increases time spent on page –> increases conversions
• “Other stuff”
  - Anchor text
  - Alt tags
  - URL keywords
  - Description tag
  - Title tags

Other release options:

• Businesswire
• PR Log
• PR Leak

Questions

• Image size for PRWeb: they’ll resize it for you.
• More about crawl caps: Google crawls based on PageRank
• Sub domains are treated as new domains – you need to build up authority like you would for a new domain
• Tip for attribution: Google’s paid view through metric, Yahoo assist metric (BUT make sure you look at trend reporting FAR back into the past)
• Reinforce messaging by including [paid] search terms on landing pages
• Don’t allow comparison shopping websites to buy your branded search terms

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 11:51 am and is filed under Expert Advice, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.