Today we recap “What’s New With Retailers & Search Marketing”, presented by Search Marketing Expo (Oct 6, 2008, NYC).
As previous and future blog posts will reveal, SEO for e-commerce is quite a different beast than SEO for an informational website. With the holiday shopping season quickly approaching, Now is the time to really be getting your e-commerce websites marketing in gear.
First topic: Yahoo product submit.
Yahoo’s product submit recently launched a ‘bid for placement’ tool that allows you to bid (a la CPC) for placement among other organic results in Yahoo! Shopping. In our book, not disclosing paid placement to the consumer constitutes ‘black/grey hat’ SEM, and would probably not fall in line with Google’s TOS.However, its hard not to play ‘the game’ with market share is at risk. So lets look at Yahoo’s suggestions for optimizing your product feed at Yahoo! Shopping, in no particular order;
- Maintain a good merchant rating.
- Don’t neglect your feed - make sure to complete product descriptions, with well written product title and photo. Products with complete details get 50x more clicks than products without photos and details.
- Pay for placement using Yahoo!’s bidding application.
Next topic, presented by Epiar.com, discusses the use of negative keywords in PPC.
First, lets address what ‘negative’ keywords are. Negative keywords means we’re telling google what keywords we DON’T want our ad appearing for - note that this is only applicable when our campaign has a broad search applied, not ’specific’ search. Why should we use a broad search instead of an exact search? Exact match is inadequate for reaching long tail words, and often times, Google knows much more about what your user is looking for than you do.
Why use negative keywords?
Studies show conversion rates improving as much as 20% to 40% from the use of negative keywords. Not only will it improve your conversion rate, but it can also reduce overall impressions, bounce rate, and cost per sale.
Negative keywords can improve your campaign , especially when your getting zero conversions, expensive conversions, or poor conversion results as a result of irrelevant keywords in our targeted searches.
An example of negative keyword we may want to try is “cheap”. If you’re offering a quality product, such as a high end luxury hotel, you certainly don’t want your ads to appear for searches such as “cheap hotels”. A broad search may encompass this type of search, and so we tell Google to exclude the keyword ‘cheap’ from any searches for which we want our ad to display.
The next question you may be asking is, how do we find the negative keyword we should use?
A few suggestions:
- Use Google search query report to find phrases that didn’t convert well or performed badly.
- Use Google’s keyword suggest tool (Keep ‘use synonyms’ checked). Or Microsoft Ad Labs.
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Third topic: Optimizing for Google’s product search
Website popularity, pricing, PR, quality scores, merchant ratings all affect your product search rankings. Suggestions for optimizing Google product search:
- Update feed as often as possible. Your website should auto - submit every time you ADD/modify a product (or daily, depending on your traffic).
- Populate as much data as possible about each item - brand, condition, price & photo, for example.
- Use brand names and long tail keywords in title, especially for highly competitive products.
- Seller ratings play a big role in Google - make sure to do well at dealTime, nextag, pricegrabber, resellerratings, and shopzilla.
- Be sure to have good standing at product ratings website such as epinions.com.
- Google converts image to 90 x 90. Submit square photos, so they appear clean and clear when re-sized as thumbnails.
- Accept Google checkout; it can give you an advantage in Google’s product search, among other benefits.
Fourth and final topic: Quantifying SEM Spending
Your SEM efforts mean very little if they aren’t quantifiable. Without tracking your SEM performance, you cannot begin to understand where your model needs improvement , and cannot make the most out of your advertising dollar. The first step in doing so is to establish a unified tracking solution.
In traditional adverting, the old adage says “you need to show a consumer an ad 7 times before they take action on it.” In the internet age, its the 5th ad exposure that begins to show signifigant (28%) ROI over first through third ad exposure. This tells us a few things - First, that even though your ad may not get a click-though, its building brand exposure, and still has a value. Its also tells us that a percentage of your impressions may be shown to the same consumer on multiple occasions, and thats not necessarily a bad thing.
Lastly, it reinforces the need to keep spending that dollar on PPC, as we now see that advertising and revenue should be considered long term instead of just as a CPA (cost per aqusition).
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2 Responses to “SMX: What’s New With Retailers & Search Marketing”
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Thanks for sharing. Search engine optimization is indeed one of the most crucial areas in Internet marketing, it is a perfect bridge between technology and business.
Yeah. This conference had great speakers. I especially liked the session that talked about copy writing for SEO.
Thanks for the update.