Create pages for customers, not search engines, experts urge retailers
Search engine marketing is evolving and keeping up with the changes can be daunting. Yet while retailers benefit when their pages land high in the search engine results, they must take care not to fall into the trap of creating pages for search engines rather than for customers, a panel of search experts told attendees at the Annual Catalog Conference’s “Search Engine Marketing: Top Ideas that Guarantee Results” session Monday afternoon. “Search engines don’t pay your bills; your customers do,” said session moderator Heather Lloyd Martin, president of consultants SuccessWorks. “One of the biggest problems is that copywriters write for the search engines. Don’t stuff the keywords. Make them make sense. If they make sense to your customers, they’ll make sense to the search engines.”
The freewheeling session featured, besides Martin, David Fisher, U.S. manager of AdWords sales and operations for Google, Alan Rimm-Kaufman, marketing director of electronics retailer Crutchfield, and Stephan Spencer, president of Net Concepts, none of whom was shy about throwing out ideas to improve search engine marketing.
Among them:
• “Minimize extraneous HTML code,” Spencer said. Search engines look for relevant content by viewing HTML code. Too much HTML can bury important site information too deep within the code, he said. “Make your HTML sing.”
• “Optimize the site for organic search,” Rimm-Kaufman said. “Sites that are good for people will be good for the robots.” He also told retailers that they need not have the perfect site for search results, so don’t strive for perfection before launching a site or a re-design. “Don’t be horrible, but you don’t have to be great, either,” he said, “You just have to be decent.”
• “Think like a user,” Fisher said. “Ask yourself, ‘What is our user searching on?’ Then do the search yourself and see what comes up.” Fisher noted that an acceptable click-through rate from search results is about 1%. But more importantly, retailers should look at how those clicking through convert to buyers.
• Search engine optimization is not a technical area, Martin said. “Marketers have been afraid of it,” she said. “But search engine marketing is one area where creative and marketing can dictate awesome results.”
• Page rank, achieved by the number of other sites that link to a site, is an important way that Google lists sites in search results, Spencer said. “Links into a site count as votes,” he said. He walked attendees through how to download an application from Google that can tell a user at a click the site’s page rank. But he noted that sheer numbers aren’t the answer. “A link from CNN.com is worth a lot more than a link from someone’s personal page.com,” he said.
• “Know the misspellings your customers use,” Rimm-Kaufman said. He noted that such information will be contained in reports that retailers can obtain. “It’s a fractional piece of data in mounds of data, but it’s worth it,” he said.
• Pay attention to where you direct customers once they have found you in search results. “People want to go directly to a page where they can buy the product,” Fisher said. “Don’t take them to the home page. They’ll just click back to the search results and try another site. They don’t want to bother with navigating a site.”
• “Search engines like text; they rely on text,” Martin said, encouraging retailers not to use more than 250 words in a page. Similarly, Spencer urged retailers not to use graphics for important parts of their sites. “The navigation bar should be text and not graphics,” he said. “If you are using graphics in the navigation bar, you are not communicating the context of the site to the search engines.”
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