Attack of the Spiders

Guide to E-Commerce Technology

As every e-retailer knows, selecting the right keywords is the foundation for a successful search engine marketing strategy, whether paid search or natural. However, even the most carefully chosen words are of little value if they’re buried deep within an e-retailer’s site—where the spiders cannot capture them. This is why more online merchants are investing extra time in SEM efforts to cook up plenty of spider food and serve it just right.

While spiders horrify many people, on the Internet they replace dogs as an e-retailer’s best friend. Online spiders are applications used by search engines to crawl the web and send the engines web pages relevant to a search. But spiders, sometimes called webcrawlers, are very hungry and work very fast. So if they do not quickly identify highly relevant keywords on a web site, they move on to other sites.

To ensure the myriad spiders at work on the Internet—every search engine uses a variety—find keywords highly relevant to its products, online jeweler Ice.com last year launched three blogs that contain numerous links to its e-commerce site. When more web users link to a site it gains a higher profile among search engines. Also on each blog the e-retailer carefully inserts plenty of keyword references in blog entries as well as in the navigation bar.

The big increase in keyword references on the home pages of the blogs combined with an increase in traffic from the blogs to the e-commerce site led to natural search traffic increases between 15% and 30%. And shoppers brought in through natural search purchased $50,000 worth of items during the 2005 holiday shopping season, a 35% increase over the same period in 2004, says executive vice president of marketing Pinny Gniwisch.

Blogs on ice
Ice.com decided to set up the blogs because of the steep increase in search engine marketing prices. “More people have been buying keywords, so you have to become more creative and more relevant,” Gniwisch says.

The internet retailer’s three blogs—SparkleLiketheStars.com, JustAskLeslie.com and Blog.Ice.com—provide information on jewelry fashion trends among celebrities, jewelry care and press coverage of Ice.com, respectively. Someone searching for the latest news on Anna Nicole Smith or Sarah Jessica Parker, for example, might see links to SparkleLiketheStars.com, which features images and text—and Ice.com keywords—about the jewelry the celebrities wear. Ice.com produced the blogs in house but has hired a consultant to develop the material on an ongoing basis.

Visitors to the blog also can click on links for “diamond rings” or “sapphire jewelry”—more keywords on Ice.com—for more information about what celebrities are wearing. They then can click on links to the Ice.com site to see similar jewelry. As more traffic goes to these links, it raises the level of Ice.com in search indexes, placing the site higher in natural searches for jewelry items.

“When we built the blogs, we did so based on the fact that we were going to create links going back and forth from our blogs to the web site,” Gniwisch says. “After they went live, we saw an unbelievable change in our page ranking on Google. We went from a seven to a six in natural search, and our natural search started to collect more traffic.”

The Ice.com strategy plays off a well-known characteristic of the blogosphere—that individual bloggers very often link to other blogs, explains Scot Wingo, president of ChannelAdvisor Corp., a content management company. “You may write an article about the latest and greatest product that you’re going to carry, and that may get another blogger to get ten other bloggers linking to it,” he says. “That’s going to increase your link popularity.”

And that makes it more likely that a search engine spider will find a retailer’s site. The way search engine spider algorithms work is based on popularity of inbound links along with keyword references, Wingo says. “They basically say, ‘Wow! If you have a lot of things pointing to you, you must be relevant because you must be an authority on this topic.’”

Despite the improved results from its natural search program, Ice.com continues to use paid search, Gniwisch says. “We find the conversion rate is a lot higher when you have paid search and natural search at the same time,” he adds.

Keyword tools
While Ice.com found blogs to be an effective tool for showcasing keywords, ToolKing.com took a different approach. It expanded its listing of products and categories to raise its number of indexed pages on Google from 26,000 to 81,800, says Don Cohen, managing partner.

The retailer of power tools and related items is using a product-listing tool designed in-house to enable search engine spiders to crawl more deeply into its site. Using the tool, Tool King turned three-level categories into five-level categories. “We went through the products for about eight months and manually re-categorized everything,” he says. “That allowed us to not just categorize products but to review what we had and then create new categories, as well as do cross-selling for products.”

In addition, Tool King rewrote product descriptions, creating five levels of descriptions for each product and adding more details at each level. “The spiders were actually crawling only the title, but when we entered a keyword into the description on the page, they began crawling deeper into that page,” he says.

By flushing out the category tree, Tool King gave the search spiders more content to index and thus generated more hits, Wingo says. “If you have a category tree that goes three deep and instead of tools says ‘tools, ‘power’ and ‘compression drill,’ someone’s going to find that compression drill tool when they type in ‘compression drill tool’ at a search engine,” he says.

Tool King took another step to make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl its site. It removed excessive characters, such as ampersands and percentage marks, from the content because spiders won’t crawl pages with special characters, Cohen says.

In addition, the retailer launched Advisor.ToolKing.com, an informational content site that provides product details, pricing and operating advice through 76 buying guides for products ranging from air-powered polishers to welding equipment. The site—which eventually will have 325 buying guides—also provides direct links to ToolKing.com to enable visitors to buy a product they’re researching.

“We’re seeing a 5% to 8% increase in volume coming directly from the search engines since we’ve had these pages up,” Cohen says. “And we’re expecting a lot more.”

Beyond categories
Retailers should look beyond categories, though, when attempting to increase the visibility of keywords, Wingo contends. They also should add detailed, multi-phrase terms on the site. “Pioneer Elite 200 is a really specific, product oriented-term that you’re not going to get a ton of searches on,” he says. “But if you get somebody that searches on that, they’re obviously pretty interested in that particular model TV.”

Although Ice.com and Took King have taken different approaches, the results are essentially the same. They’ve designed their sites to give keywords a higher profile to search engines. Central to such a strategy is understanding what the search engine giants like Google and Yahoo consider relevant, says Michael Jones, vice president of marketing and business development at ChannelAdvisor.

This means understanding things like having to ensure important categories and products are on the retailer’s home page where they are highly visible to webcrawlers, Jones says. Site content also needs to be relevant to the product, he adds.

Further, retailers might consider incorporating the product they sell into their URL. “If you do a search on strollers, you’ll find that Strollers.com is No. 1 and JustStrollers.com is No. 2 or No. 3,” Jones says. “A lot of that has to do with how Google thinks; there’s some heavy weight based on what’s in a URL.”

When it comes to effective keywords, one way of developing productive ones is to watch what terms are used most often by people searching for specific products on a comparison shopping engine or marketplace like eBay. In fact, both Google and Yahoo offer services to help paid search clients get the most out of their search marketing campaigns.

Google analyzes a retailer’s site by category, product and SKU to help them determine which keywords are working and which aren’t, says John McAteer, the search engine’s director of retail for vertical market growth. In some cases, categories are receiving little or no coverage in the Google system, “obviously red flags if you’re trying to maximize the revenue you’re getting and your products are in our system,” he says.

Based on such analysis, Google works with retailers to develop new keywords based on their product SKUs. Google also provides free analytics to help retailers make sure their keywords are efficient and providing a good return on investment, McAteer says. “That helps with landing page optimization and helps with knowing which keywords are working and which are not,” he says.

Google also recently began testing a new tool, Google Website Optimizer, which enables retailers to deduce which combination of headlines, copy and images produce the best results. “It’s really an extension of our analytics package—we want to make sure the right keyword lands on the right page and has the right outcome for the advertiser,” McAteer says. “Most savvy marketers understand that minor tweaks to a web site can make huge differences.”

Yahoo is launching a new ad platform that will enable retailers in its paid search program to test multiple ads against a keyword, says Diane Rinaldo, senior director of retail categories for Yahoo Search Marketing. “You can put two or five or 10 different pages up there and ask the tool to auto-optimize—pick the best performing one and turn the others off, if you choose,” she says.

Additionally, Yahoo provides seasonal keyword guides that enable retailers to select the words most likely to produce the best results at different times of the year, Rinaldo says. For example, near Mother’s Day, keywords such as “Mother’s Day gift” or “gift for wife” would produce the best results. “We have lists of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of seasonal keywords,” she says.

For retailers using natural search, Yahoo’s Search Submit program incorporates data feeds from a merchant into its index. “The index will determine which of the retailer’s pages should show up on different keyword searches,” Rinaldo says. “We’re not relying on the webcrawler to go out there and find all of those pages.” Retailers pay a fixed cost per click for the Search Submit program, with the fee based on category.

To be sure, there is no shortage of strategies for improving natural search results. Cohen notes that Tool King plans to find new ways to build on its success with re-categorizing the web site. “The goal was to be indexed on the search engines, and we’ve achieved that,” he says. “Now the goal is to have our products get a higher ranking.”

linda@verticalwebmedia.com