Within the past year, outdoor sports gear retailer Backcountry.com has built a base of more than 84,000 customers who post product reviews and other content on the retailer’s 11 e-commerce sites, driving up natural search rankings, president John Bresee says.
“This is the most powerful and trend-setting program we have going on,” Bresee says. “We’re measuring the benefits through customer loyalty, increased sales and additional content indexed by search engines.”
The program’s benefits, he says, include new content on a broad range of products that gets indexed by search engines about every 48 hours; the ability to carry out a long-tail merchandising and marketing strategy, as its broad base of reviewers generate content related to even its least popular products, raising these products in natural search rankings and increasing sales; and providing product reps with an ability to search for product names with customer-generated reviews and question-and-answer content for feedback on how they can make product improvements.
The customer-generated Q&A content supports the ability of web searchers to find what they’re looking for on Backcountry.com or one of its sister sites by typing in a question such as: “What’s the best hiking boot for someone with wide feet?” Posting that question in a Google search window recently produced a link to
Backcountry.com at the top of the ranking page.
“That makes for an incredibly powerful entry to our site,” Bresee says.
Backcountry, which built its customer-generated content management system in-house, enables visitors to scroll down and search through its entire list of more than 84,000 customer content contributors on the Leader Board on Backcountry.com. It offers no incentives to get customers to post content on its sites, relying instead on the interest of customers to share their knowledge and build their reputations as experts in their sport.
Participating content generators also rate the value of one another’s posts, which helps to determine the ranking of each contributor in the Leader Board. The retailer’s web sites cover niche markets including skiing, hiking and biking.
Backcountry.com is a controlled subsidiary of Liberty Media Corp. attributed to the Liberty Interactive Group. Liberty Interactive also includes QVC Inc., No. 11 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
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