Search Engine Optimization

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Search Engine Optimization

Harness the Power of Content and be the Authority Site in Your Space

By: Beth Lee-Browning

Overview

When was the last time you

• Purchased a product online without researching it? • Used only one online resource to find information? • Made a purchase decision based on brand alone?

• Used a manufacturer’s website to find answers to product questions?

92% of adults use search engines to find information on the internet. Daily usage of search engines is on the rise and has grown from one third of all users in 2002 to a new high of 59%.1

Consumers are spending increasingly more time engaged in pre-purchase research and the number one starting point for them is Google.

Content is at the core of any successful ecommerce website. Search engines utilize strong content to determine which sites are most relevant to the search terms used by potential customers. It’s imperative to incorporate as much content as possible to increase the “findability” factor and drive users to traffic from search results pages. Websites with minimal content will miss out on traffic driven from search engine results and will have a hard time remaining competitive.

The internet explosion has exposed more information than ever before. Product intelligence can be found on a variety of sources that range from manufacturer and competitor websites to social network platforms, aggregators, and web services. While the prospect of researching and compiling all of the information may seem daunting (such as aggregating and standardizing content from multiple resources), the white paper explains why it’s important and describes options and solutions.

Sponsored By: ThanxMedia and Blosm

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The Optimization Challenge – Why Content is Important

The 2011 Social Shopping Study indicate that 50% of consumers spend 75% or more of their total time shopping engaged in product research. This is a drastic increase from 2010 when only 21% of consumers reported spending 75% of their time in the research phase.

An October 2011 comScore study revealed that more than 18.0 billion searches were performed during the month of October, up 6% from the previous month.2 Google continues to lead the pack with 66% of the search traffic.

Designing and maintaining a website that is optimized for natural search is a critical success factor for today’s online retailers and service providers. It is a continuously changing landscape and the one thing that constant is the importance of content. It could be argued that content is more important today than it ever has been.

Search engines rely on content to determine the results that are most relevant to the searcher and consumers depend on the information they find to make a purchase decision.

In addition to basic product information consumers are looking for alternate images, detailed product specifications, accurate pricing and attributes, user guides, and videos; user generated content is becoming an increasingly important part of the pre-purchase research process. This includes user reviews, popularity ranking, social media, blog posts, and any other content featured on the page that is created by other shoppers or industry experts.

A 2011 survey reported that reviews and social media swayed 87% of shoppers when it came to purchasing a product. Nearly 90% of those surveyed say they find online channels a trustworthy source for product and service reviews. 59% also say they are more likely to research products or services online because they can easily find information and public opinions on items. 3

Not only is user generated content important to consumers it has become a key ingredient when it comes to being ‘found’ in search engine results. Chris Stutzman, Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst reports that, “25% of search results for the world’s 20 largest brands are linked to user generated content.”4 Websites that host a breadth of information related to their product offering will be found and considered as an authoritative source by both search engines and consumers.

2_{comScore October 2011 U.S. Search Engine Rankings}

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4 It’s important to bear in mind that ‘content’ that is full of keywords but low on value for the consumer may drive traffic but it will not result in sales and will ultimately have an adverse effect on your positioning. The more relevant the information is to the

customer, the more likely they are to convert and to come back again. The higher the quality the content is, the more likely you will rise to the top of the organic search results.

There is a common misperception that consumers click on sponsored ads more often because they consider them to be more reliable since the company is paying for them, which makes it more ‘official.’ There is an equally common line of thought that

consumers click more often on organic results because the company is not paying for them and therefore the result is more reliable.

The reality is that consumers use both paid and natural search results to find what they are looking for. 18.2% of all click-through-traffic in Google’s search results go to the #1 position on the page and a total of 52.6% of all traffic is distributed across the top ten results.5

A top ten presence on a search engine result page has been shown to benefit not cannibalize the traffic associated with a paid ad on the same page. A recent study shows that even in situations where companies have the #1 organic search result position, 50% of the clicks on the paid ad are not replaced by the organic result when their paid ads do not appear.6

In order to compete in the realm of Natural Search retailers must find a way to capture, compile, and utilize the rich content that is available across many resources. This boils down to finding a way to cost effectively and efficiently gather product attributes and user generated content to enrich existing catalog data and improve search engine visibility.

Product data feeds created by suppliers provide the basics about an item but lack robust information such as detailed product specification tables, stock photographs, user guides, videos, and social media detail.

This kind of rich information and intelligence is available across a variety of sources on the internet, ranging from manufacturer and competitor websites to expert review sites and the thousands of places people online are talking about products and brands. Options for harvesting this information are discussed in the next section.

5_{Google & Bing Study: 2011 Study by SlingShot SEO}

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Options:

There are three viable options to enhancing product information as well as adding new products to a catalog. They include:

• Manual Research and Data Compilation

• Automated Data Collection and Manual Data Compilation • Automated Data Collection and Data Compilation

The first three steps of each process are similar in nature.

Common Steps: Identify Data and Sources

1. Utilize existing sources such as supplier data feeds and product catalogs to identify available data.

a. Product Description b. Product Image c. Price

d. Attributes, e.g. color, size, brand, etc.

2. Identify Information to be added to the existing catalog, e.g. a. Detailed product specs

b. Product scores from aggregate sites c. Alternate images

d. User guides

e. Expert Reviews and quotes (including source) f. Etc.

3. Identify Sources – places to consider a. Competitor Sites

b. Manufacturer Sites c. Amazon

d. Authoritative Sites, e.g. fredmiranda.com, dpreview.com, CNET.com, BBB.org

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Manual Research and Data Compilation:

1. Compile information (options include using internal resources or off-shore teams) 2. Review and standardize information

3. Write detailed product specification tables (if applicable) 4. Write user guides and product uses (if applicable) 5. Update web catalog with new data

6. Repeat steps on a regularly scheduled basis. This process works well for the following scenarios:

• Product catalogs with fewer than 20,000 skus • Products that do not require robust content such as

o Detailed product specifications

o Rich media content, e.g. User Guides, High Resolution Images, Videos, Product Uses

o Competitive intelligence, e.g. product scores, expert reviews, user generated content

Automated Data Collection and Manual Data Compilation

1. Configure the web crawler to collect the information (this can be a self-serve or hosted service)

2. Web crawler extracts data 3. Compile information

4. Review and standardize information 5. De-dupe data

6. Update web catalog

7. Repeat steps regularly scheduled basis. This process works well for the following scenarios:

• Product catalogs with fewer than 20,000 skus • Products that do not require robust content such as

o Detailed product specifications

o Rich media content, e.g. User Guides, High Resolution Images, Videos, Product Uses

o Competitive intelligence, e.g. product scores, expert reviews, user generated content

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Acquire Data from a Third Party Vendor

There are companies that specialize in harvest predefined information, however the coverage is generally low and not all products will have additional information that is not in your current catalog. Additionally, there is the potential for data overlap and

additional resources to de-dupe and standardize the data.

Sources for the content can be anything from manufacturer web sites, aggregation data feeds, social networks, and web services.

These approaches are time consuming, expensive, and limited in the results that can be produced.

A manual process of collecting data with a small team of internal resources is going to produce limited amounts of data, takes precious time, and is extremely slow. The amount of information that can be effectively gathered across the multiple resources is minimal. The prospect of manually gathering the data is also prone to human error and requires additional QA for accuracy, standardization and de-duplication of data.

Utilizing an off-shore team is an expensive way to collect a lot of information; however it will still require manual intervention. Experts within your company will need to cleanse the data and validate the accuracy and quality of the information.

Implementing web-crawling technology or social media monitoring services can provide a robust data set, but does not eliminate the need for manual intervention. Data is gathered in a raw format and requires human intervention to compile the content into a consumable format.

The final drawback to any of these approaches is the data cannot be easily imported into your search platform, your PIM, or database of your choice.

There a way to automate the entire process of discovering where the best content resides, harvesting the information, and merging the data together to produce a content feed that can contain robust product data in addition to user generated content and rich media such as user guides and videos.

The next section explains how Blosm can automate the process and unlock the power of content and transform your website.

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Automated Data Collection and Data Compilation with Blosm

Make the web work for you Blosm helps organizations

• Automate the process of gathering rich and diverse data and content from multiple resources.

• Reduce costs and increase productivity by eliminating the need for manual product research, data cleansing, and aggregation

• Enrich existing product content

• Add new products to their online catalogs efficiently and cost effectively. • Improve SEO

• Improve Customer Experience

The detailed product information may not be in the structure you need it to be in your database, or it might not be in your database at all. However, it does exist on

manufacturer, retail, and aggregator sites. In addition there is a wealth of competitive intelligence through expert reviews, product scores, and user generated content.

1. Blosm starts by building profiles of your current product information. Basic content such as SKU or Model number is all that is needed.

2. Blosm suggests sources that can help fill in the content gaps. These sources can be anything from manufacturer web sites, aggregation data feeds, social networks, and web services. Vetted sources can then be added to the blosm workflow to enrich your existing content. As more sources are added, higher coverage and overlap occurs, further improving the quality of your data. The origin of each value is clearly identified so your team can easily verify the accuracy of the content.

3. Blosm provides standardization, de-duplication, merging, and classification of your product intelligence set. This content can be imported directly into your search platform, your PIM, or any database of your choice. Our blosm harvest option allows regular, fresh intelligence so you can monitor pricing trends and stock statuses.

The end result is that your product can contain the best content available anywhere.

To learn more or schedule a blosm walkthrough, contact us at: [email protected] * 630 469-2929

Search Engine Optimization