Hitting the Target

Guide to E-Commerce Technology

Brand-new web site TotalHealthSource.com was all dressed up with no place to go. Shoppers just weren’t finding the nutritional supplement and fitness gear e-retailer after its January launch. And there wasn’t a big budget for advertising, which meant that TotalHealthSource couldn’t afford to pay for keyword positioning.

The company turned to Position Technologies Inc., a provider of search engine positioning services. Position Technologies helped produce a 125% lift in traffic for TotalHealthSource without paying for a single keyword position. And that lift was right out of the box for the 6-month-old web site. “With more keyword research, I think we can triple those results,” says president Dan Roitman.

While paying for top positions on search engines under targeted keywords is getting a lot of buzz among Internet retailers, advocates of optimization—constructing a web page and attaching data so as to help search engines more easily find and rank it in search results—say there’s more than one way to show up high in those results, and picking the right keywords is, well, key. While some retailers engage in bidding wars to secure top spots under highly competitive keywords in paid engines like Overture Services Inc., others are getting lifts from other keywords that, though less obvious, still can deliver traffic and conversions.

Finding those keywords is something of an art—a science, too, with algorithms developed by keyword positioning firms to identify how the various engines rank search results. Whether merchants pay outright for a top position in search engine results under a keyword, or try for high placement under that word by optimizing it on a page, neither strategy will deliver customers to a site if the keyword does not match what’s in customers’ minds when they go online to search. “It’s critical that marketers understand the language people use when they conduct a search on the web,” says Fredrick Marckini, CEO of search engine optimization provider iProspect. “Keywords are the Holy Grail.”

Swirl marks and tennis shoes

Take the term “swirl mark” as it played out online for a client of iProspect. The client, maker of a compound that removes swirl marks from auto body paint, initially pursued the keyword term “rubbing compound” because it described the product. But that term failed to connect with shoppers looking for the product. Analysis showed they weren’t searching for it under its category name; they were instead searching under keywords like “swirl mark removal” and “swirl mark.”

Swirl marks are one thing, but broader terms like “tennis shoe” are another. It would seem to be an obvious term consumers would use to search for that product online, one reason athletic shoe manufacturer New Balance in April was paying Overture 60 cents per click-through for the top spot in Overture’s search results on “tennis shoe.” And New Balance is hardly alone when it comes to forking over significant cash per click. Consider the $1 per click-through Elitepicnicbaskets.com was paying in April for top placement on Overture under “wedding gift.” Or the $3.40 plus that Esurance.com and Southern California Auto Club were paying in May for a top spot under “car insurance.”

Though paid search is a key component, comprehensive online marketing campaigns shouldn’t stop there, say optimization providers. Marckini notes that iProspect clients typically pay $15,000 to $25,000 per month for a variety of optimization services. By contrast, “Paid search can cost $2 to $4 per click on some of the more competitive keywords. We recently put 7 million visitors on a client’s web site—to do that with paid search would have cost about $1.4 million,” he says.

“Pay for position engines like Overture complement an optimization strategy,” says Andrew Wetzler, president of search optimization service provider MoreVisibility.com. “But the goal is to keep customer acquisition costs as low as possible, and when you are only bidding on keywords it can get expensive.”

Search optimization providers cite 100 or more variables that can be used to optimize a web page so as to make it easier for engines to recognize, grab and rank the page higher in search results. These include the layout of the page, the architecture that the site is hosted on and the way it serves pages, the actual content of the page and more. While different engines give priority to different variables when ranking search results, all search optimization providers say that keyword selection is the foundation of any successful optimization strategy for any engine.

Won’t get fooled again

And finding the right keywords for optimization programs—too narrow to command the high click-through prices paid for top positions in paid search, yet relevant enough to reach the intended audience—isn’t as easy at it looks.

“There are so many more things incorporated into search engine algorithms now. They’re much more sophisticated than they used to be,” says Lisa Wehr, president and founder of Oneupweb, a 7-year-old search engine optimization provider. “You have to continue to modify your processes as things change.”

Some changes directly affect the performance of keywords. Search engines are now digging deeper into pages in ranking results rather than simply depending on metatags, coding attached to each web page that tells the search engine what the page is about. In some cases, irrelevant keywords have been coded into metatags simply to draw more traffic to the page. A few years ago, for instance, “Barney” was popular even on sites that weren’t about dinosaurs or toys. Engines now work to eliminate irrelevant listings with algorithms that go beyond metatags to look at features such as keyword density and themes in a page’s copy.

Search engines have an increasingly complex job as the web universe expands. According to data gathered by B.J. Jansen, a U.S. Army War College researcher, and Jansen’s research colleagues, from web search engine Excite, the number of searched terms at Excite grew 21%, from 1.27 million in September 1997 to 1.54 million in May 2001.

To cut through the clutter and find what they’re after more quickly, sophisticated web users have become more specific in their query language. The number of queries on Excite that used three or more terms rose to 42% of all searches in 2001, up from 36% two years earlier. That makes keyword selection an ever-shifting target. “Sometimes our clients don’t necessarily see the forest for the trees,” says Dennis Pushkin, CEO of MoreVisibility.com. “What they think the customer is looking for is frequently not the case.”

Remember the swirl mark remover? It demonstrates one of the first things e-retailers need to understand in choosing keywords most relevant to consumers. Many online searchers are looking not so much for a brand or product name as the solution to a problem, and they’ll frame their search query accordingly. Less experienced web users or those less familiar with a product or topic often will frame the search as a question rather than type in a brand or product name.

Same product, different paths

Yet others do search for specific brands and products, zeroing in on them directly with search queries such as “Playstation 2.” That highlights the next thing merchants must understand about web shoppers: there can be several audiences for the same product, and they’ll take different paths to the same page. “The veteran backpacker and rock climber is going to search for gear differently than the person who’s just getting interested in rock climbing,” says Marckini. “The retailer has to acknowledge that there are different audiences using different ways to make buying decisions. They need to identify the query language used by each audience, and optimize keywords for both audiences accordingly.”

Even when retailers are armed with that knowledge, keyword optimization remains a moving target. The marketplace evolves, new products are introduced, and the keyword that held center stage can move to the periphery as new terms emerge. While the term “cell phone” might have attracted the vanguard of telecommunications junkies when the technology was new, for example, those early adopters have now most likely moved to “cell phone and PDA” and beyond.

And yet, search optimization providers caution against keywords that are too narrow. If a site begins an optimization program with 100 keywords and six months later only 25 have generated conversions, the first inclination is to focus on them exclusively. But that’s a mistake, says Marckini. “You’re getting down to a smaller and more specific universe, but you might miss a rich vein. Keep it too narrow for too long, and you can miss out on the fact that the market has changed. You need to continually reinvestigate keywords you’re targeting to make sure you’re not missing new categories of terms.”

Suiting to a tea

Re-visiting keywords to optimize search terms that are subsets of more competitive and highly sought-after keywords also can be a cost-effective way to boost traffic and sales. One of MoreVisibility.com’s clients, for example, tea vendor The Republic of Tea, wanted to move beyond “tea” as the most obvious and broadest keyword. “We came up with ‘herbal tea,’ ‘green tea,’ ‘British tea’ and ‘teabag,’” Pushkin says. “The more specific you can get, the better qualified the potential lead and the stronger the conversion rate.”

Choosing successful keywords is about balancing the broadest terms with the highest targetability. Bigger concerns outsource optimization functions, and the client lists of optimization providers include more than a few top retailers and consumer packaged goods manufacturers.

But rather than relying solely on gut instinct, smaller companies and those simply looking for a reality check before drafting a keyword list for an optimization provider can take steps on their own to test whether their perception of how customers search for their products online matches up with the actual behavior of online shoppers.

Optimization providers say companies should first look to their own server logs to find the terms under which customers are reaching them. That exercise also gives clues on how shoppers are not finding their site, which can yield equally valuable intelligence. “If you sell tennis shoes, and you get a lot of traffic through the term ‘Reebok tennis shoes,’ but none through ‘Nike tennis shoes,’ for instance, that may be an area you want to focus on,” Wehr says.

View the source code

Retailers can also look at what competitive web sites are doing. “If they are ranking well under terms that you want to be found under, view their source codes and see what types of words they are using. The source code is basically the metatag,” she adds.
E-retailers can even try their own hand at picking and testing keywords by using the same technology used by a number of the optimization firms. Position Technologies offers Position Pro, a web-based tool that will crawl a site as if it were a real search engine, applying similar algorithms to rank a page. The tool provides a numerical range of values likely to correspond with certain results in a real online search. Marketers can test words, run the algorithms, make changes in real time and see how different words and terms perform. When the tested terms achieve scores within the targeted range of values, PositonPro.com submits them electronically to its partner engine, Inktomi, whose technology powers searches at aol.com, msn.com and other sites.

PositionPro.com and a growing number of other search engine optimization providers now feed keyword data directly into engines via XML feed, a technology that delivers the data in the format and order preferred by search engines. The net effect is that pages are more quickly digested and indexed by the engines. Marketers pay for the expedited submission. “XML provides an opportunity for the retailer to lay its data straight into the engine without having to jump through all the hoops that existed previously,” says Wetzler. “The onus is not so much on the retailers any longer as to how they arrange the data on the page.”

Different animals

As the line between online marketing functions such as tracking affiliate relationships and e-mail campaign results is blurring under the umbrella of customer acquisition, so is the line between providers of optimization services for keyword positioning and paid search.

Providers of both services concede the benefits of the others—and the drawbacks. “The downside of pay for placement is that once the merchant stops paying for that advertising, it has no position in the search engine,” Wehr says. “There’s no brand recognition, and they’ve lost those links from the engines to their sites. The merchants that are taking a foothold in the engines through optimization are going to be harder to dislodge.”

With neither solution offering all the answers on its own, savvy web merchants are combining both. “Optimization and paid search are two different animals,” Wetzler says. “But if a retailer has as its foundation a solid base of optimized keyword positions throughout the major engines, that’s the best platform from which to see where they need to step it up to another level and buy keywords. We have clients that are looking for help in both areas.”

mary@verticalwebmedia.com