Questions and Answers

What about moderating “dirty words” from reviews? How much of an effort is that?
Jason Billingsley: PowerReviews offers a profanity filter and it is basically automatic. Other review solutions like Bazaarvoice likely have the same capabilities. If you are using an out-of-the-box system included with your ecommerce software, it will vary – there will be no 1st level moderation by a service provider so you will be on the hook for ALL moderation. I have seen numbers in the 10% range for the amount of reviews that need some level of scrubbing.

What about spam like “get this product from www.competing-site.com instead of buying it here”?
Jason Billingsley: Retailers often state in policies that linking to other sites is prohibited. In the moderation process, reviews with such content can be flagged and removed or edited. I suggest contacting the reviewer to let them know of the policies and why the review was not accepted. Always follow up with negative reviews if possible. It gives you an opportunity to learn, correct mistakes, and turn an unhappy customer around.

How do you handle negative reviews or low ratings?
Jason Billingsley: We cover this at around the 25 minute mark of the webinar.

Is there any comparative information about the use of overall ratings and broken-down ratings by criterion?
Jason Billingsley: I am assuming this is referring to the benefits of having one versus the other. There have been no numbers published to my knowledge, but I highly suggest using criteria when asking for a rating. Criteria help a user quickly identify what is relevant to their needs. Shoppers place value in different areas. A vacuum that is quiet may be more important to me than one that is versatile, durable, or powerful – criteria based ratings help identify where a product excels or fails.

We are a publisher of education books. I am wondering about how our authors would feel about us publishing comments on their books, as it’s different from a product manufacturer relationship?
Jason Billingsley: Authors must have a thick skin for reviews in general. The truth is, books are already being reviewed on Amazon and other book retailers’ sites anyhow. By working with the author to disseminate the review information, future content can be corrected or supplemented (I am assuming multiple editions if they are educational texts). We were recently at Book Expo America and saw first hand how the author/publisher relationship can be tricky. Likewise, the author is essentially a manufacturer of content (The Book), so the same dynamics should apply as a retailer-manufacturer relationship.

Do you have any examples of reviews being effective for clothing/apparel?
Jason Billingsley: Many top-end apparel retailers are implementing reviews. I worked closely with James Covert on a story for the Wall Street Journal on this topic called Retailers try on online clothes reviews for size (The Post Gazette has the full article re-published without a registration required)

Any experience in not-for-profit or government sectors using reviews to rate customer satisfaction?
Jason Billingsley: None off the top of my head, but there are consumer review sites like Yelp that address services rather than products.

How do you verify someone who bought the product in your store?
Jason Billingsley: There are typically two ways or levels of verification. The first is a check on whether the review was submitted by a human and not a bot. This can be checked with email verification. The second is by comparing the reviewer data with your store data to make sure they have actually made a purchase. This can account for offline purchases as well if you are a multi-channel retailer. No wonder so many stores are asking for email addresses at checkout these days. If the concern is to only accept reviews from YOUR customers and not people who bought the item elsewhere, then you must chose to only display verified purchasers reviews. Keep in mind, this will likely hinder your review acquisition though.

Where can I go to get the CompUSA and Petco case studies?
Jason Billingsley: Both of the companies are clients of Bazaarvoice. I could only find the original Petco case study, the details on the other were gathered from the CompUSA press release.

We can’t spend any time on moderation. How does someone like PowerReviews moderate the reviews? What criteria do they use?
Andy Chen: In addition to automated profanity filtering, PowerReviews provides a 2-level human process. The first level of moderation if performed by in-house, PowerReviews employees. Our analyst team works with clients to develop standards for “constructiveness” (positive or negative) of the reviews based on that specific product category, and we ensure that the review is primarily about the product vs. the service or price. Additionally, we flag reviews with special statuses such as: customer service, safety issues, testimonials, product content error, and many more.

After PowerReviews has moderated the review, our clients have the option of performing a second level of moderation OR they can moderate by exception (low ratings, escalations, etc). Clients can also add a “merchant response” to any review. At any point, the client can log on to their Dashboard to pull down a review that has been published.

If I sell the same product as my competitor, will customers have a greater tendency or inclination to purchase the product from my store just because I have user reviews on my site?
Andy Chen: Great question. We have not studied this in-depth yet. However, we have done a few test with our clients and discovered that the presence of customer reviews greatly enhances the Credibility and Trust for that site (i.e. they help answer both “is this the right product”, but also “is this the right place to buy”).

Any filters for obscene images in reviews?
Jason Billingsley: There are no automated filters for this to the best of my knowledge, but level 1 moderation by a reviews service provider will pick this up. No questionable material should get through to the site as it will pass through a human first.
Andy Chen: Our analyst team moderates ALL images for nudity, obscenity and relevance.

How about rating a user?
Andy Chen: We currently do not provide that capability. In our backend, PowerReviews DOES monitor which user reviews have been flagged as inappropriate/helpful/not helpful, but there is no public display of the user’s “credibility”

For B2B, can there be a way for the buyer to review the seller’s ability on delivering the product with the qualities that they said they will. At the same time, can the seller review the buyer’s performance on how good of a customer they are, such as how often they buy, and how often they return product?
Jason Billingsley: This seems like a marketplace feedback mechanism. Very eBay feedback like. Though reviewing the seller is beneficial (some comparison engines do it and Yahoo! Shopping has seller ratings too), the product is where the review has the most benefit.
Andy Chen: Great idea. However, we do not currently have a robust “eBay style” capability to review the sales process or the buyer.

How do the panelists feel about some type of system that allows manufacturers or brand representatives to discuss a negative review or resolve an issue – something like eBay’s feeback system – to keep the reviews fair for both parties? Has this been done before?
Jason Billingsley: Google just introduced this type of functionality in Google News (people mentioned in a news story can clarify remarks – it is all moderated, but nonetheless). I have not seen this within review content, but I like the idea. Currently, most companies deal one-on-one with negative reviewers. Your suggestion could help them close the loop.

Approximately how many customers will take the time to leave positive reviews? What about when you’re initially start off and have zero reviews? Wouldn’t this give a bad impression to new customers?
Jason Billingsley: Current estimates have positive reviews (4 and 5 star ratings) at over 80%. We talk about acquiring reviews and the impact of having too few reviews at around the 33 minute mark of the webinar.

Will you discuss the need to tie-in ads that show product reviews on them with the relevant product page (or category page) once the customer clicks through? We’ve seen a lot of companies get that wrong lately.
Jason Billingsley: Maintaining a scent for the shopper is really important. If we are attracting a user to the site by dangling review data in-front of them, we better land them on a page that actually contains that information. The folks over at GrokDotCom demonstrate a retailer who is using review data in ads, but do not have review data on the landing page – ouch. We talk briefly about using review data in title tags and seeing what effect it has on click-through and conversions from search engine results pages. We forgot to mention the benefit of social bookmark sites and social commerce sites automatically including the rating data in listings if it is in the title quite often.

What’s your opinion on aggregating Amazon reviews to get your review page started (I’ve seen this on some sites) does this impact SEO postively or negatively? (in terms of duplicate content?)
Andy Chen: As part of Amazon’s AWS license, you must include a “buy it at Amazon” link with the content that you display. This is a good idea if you want the content, but you may inadvertently divert sales away from your site. As for SEO, our believe is that the benefit is mostly attributed to the owner of the content, in which case, that would be Amazon. Our advice would be to send an email to your previous customers to ask them to fill out a review on your site. This generates lots of review volume (~5% response rate to the emails), provides an opportunity for a repeat purchase (give a coupon?), and creates proprietary content for your own site.

How do you keep product reviews from being used for flame wars?
Andy Chen: Because most of the reviews from our clients are generated via a “follow-up email” (e.g. 3 weeks after the order ships, the client sends an email to the customer requesting a review), we have not seen any flame-wars occur. That’s the value of the “Verified Purchaser” concept…the most credible reviews are from customers who have actually purchased the product vs. users who want to rant.

How was data collected about indication that 63% of users are more likely to buy? Is it opinion, or did you look at data of actual buying?
Jason Billingsley: Those numbers were gathered from a study by iPerceptions and CompUSA in a case study on reviews

Does it matter what type of product has reviews?
Andy Chen: PowerReviews has over 180 clients that sell products from Office supplies (Staples) to Furniture (NetShops) to Underwear (Essential Apparel)…and we are always surprised about how reviews are used to help other customers make the right purchase decision. We find that just about every purchase decision is important to that shopper. For instance, this simple Stapler has 18 reviews already.

Do you pre-populate the keywords/tags, or is it entirely from customer responses?
Andy Chen: PowerReviews works with its clients to pre-seed the tags based on the merchants’ expertise. However, we have consistently found that the customers create more relevant and useful tags than even the best merchant can predict. PowerReviews manages over 2000 category- specific templates that would have been impossible for create and maintain without the help of actual customers.

Do you find that because some terms are presented as “these are commonly-used,” that people just tag these in a “lazy” fashion? Are they perhaps just going along with the crowd?
Andy Chen: Yes, we find that there is a bias toward the listed tags vs. adding a new tag. We are continually testing the interface to determine how to best minimize the impact of this effect. Understanding this, as we promote/demote tags, we take into account the fact that a “add your own” entry has more weight than a checked tag.

I think it would be hard to figure out how to keep negative reviews up if you have control over the reviews – isn’t there a great temptation to suppress things that make you uncomfortable?
Jason Billingsley: You are right, so it takes dedication to an increased level of transparency and engaging customers at a new level. There has to be complete buy-in to the strategy that negative reviews help balance positive reviews and add authenticity and realism. They actually help the positive reviews.

Is there any ability for reviewers to re-post reviewed products on their blog/site if their is an affiliate arrangement?
Andy Chen: Absolutely…and no affiliate arrangement necessary. Our clients have been using this functionality since January and have garnered hundreds of blog postings in this manner. Here’s a great example of a camera review blog post.

By the way, this is a tremendous SEO tool because each blog posting links back to your site and to your product page.

What do you believe are some of the best review programs? What are the best freeware ones?
Jason Billingsley: PowerReviews has a ‘free’ option that is performance based and also has an enterprise option. Bazaarvoice is another vendor of review solutions, but is not free. There are some simple JavaScript based apps out there too but no true freeware solution I know of besides what comes bundled with some ecommerce platforms.

About what percentage of posted comments can one expect to be disingenuous, from sites/suppliers attempting to market through review systems?
Jason Billingsley: It really depends on the market. Electronics is a nasty market (vendors) vs sporting goods where it’s very cooperative. Regardless of the market however, it a tiny fraction of a percent.

Video #7 – Abandoned

For online retailers though, abandoned carts are the root of endless worry and concern. These conversion killers piling up in your logs beg questions like: Why did they leave? Were they just comparing prices or features or is it something I did? Maybe there’s something wrong with my site’s usability! How can I make it better? How can I get them back? How can I raise my conversion rates? Would adding “wishlists” or “saved cart” features reduce cart abandonment? and so on …

Well for sure usability is important (check The Ecommerce Checkout Report for more on best practises) and certainly retailers loathe leaving money on the table, but sometimes, cart abandonment just happens. Just hope they come back, right?

Carr’s report, “Improving Ties to Business Partners” explains Aeroplan’s modus operandi, “Aeroplan “sells” mileage credits to partners, such as credit card issuers—who then offer them as rewards to customers. These customers can trade credits for air travel, car rentals and merchandise. SOA enables Aeroplan and its partners to exchange customer and other data in legacy systems to make the rewards program work.”

Last year, we published a case study about Aeroplan‘s implementation of Elastic Path and, in the process of writing the report, I learned a lot about the wide-ranging possibilities within ecommerce. While examining Aeroplan’s project, I focused my attention on the community building aspects of ecommerce – or the art of selling based on relationships.

What I mean is … ecommerce “stores” are easily viewed as virtual representations of their brick and mortar colleagues. Somewhere, (one could assume) the storeowner has an inventory of stuff taking up space and awaiting a situation in which to put on racks and deliver to the customer. However, Aeroplan is an ecommerce storefront indirectly selling non-physical and physical products using a virtual “currency” at a virtual storefront.

As such, the challenges Aeroplan face are rather different than a (dare I say traditional?) “vanilla” retailer. Rather than the primary mission being getting people to the site, then presenting them with the goods they seek, and finally, providing a barrier-free(ish) path to checkout, Aeroplan’s challenge is to educate (both existing and new) members about the myriad ways to spend their accumulated currency then present the choices in a compelling manner so members redeem their points/miles/ducats for services and goods which will please them and maintain their loyalty for future purchases from an increasing kaleidoscope of partners.

It seems Aeroplan’s challenge is to tactfully and efficiently facilitate these “cashless” transactions for the mutual benefit of all parties. No big deal right? No inventory means no warehousing, no frantic calls to suppliers for shipping tracking numbers and no annoyed customers who “were counting on that item for their Mom’s birthday.”Instead, Aeroplan embraces the challenge of managing these multi-party relationships tactfully and artfully. These varied relationships exist with the Members collecting points (with varying levels of passion from incidental to traders), the “Point Vendor” partners who offer points (AKA miles) as an incentive and include financial institutions, retailers, real estate agents, movers, parking lots and car rentals and, oh yeah, … airlines, as well as “Point Spending” partners who include hotels, retailers of every stripe plus indulgences like personal chefs or the aforementioned spa experiences.

In this case, Aeroplan needed to do something to reduce the points customers were holding onto and this was the mandate when they spun off from parent Air Canada.

Carr explains this situation thusly,

“As member account balances swelled, Aeroplan needed to provide alternative ways of allowing members to use mileage credits beyond the limited number of flights available from Air Canada. Otherwise, there would be too many miles chasing too few seats—a common complaint about frequent-flier programs —and way too many frustrated members. Hence, it established loyalty-reward partnerships.”

OK enough background already! How’d they do it? It doesn’t sound easy, in fact it sounds rather complex, especially when interacting with many disparate partners and not-necessarily-cutting-edge travel industry legacy systems.

Carr quotes André Hébert, Aeroplan’s vice president of technology and e-business, “If you look at the Aeroplan Web site today, it’s like a combination of Expedia and a retail store Web site so it’s very complex.”

In short, Aeroplan sorted out the complexity by making a significant transition from existing systems to a Service Oriented Architecture using Open Source technologies including Linux, Apache (web server), My SQL (database) and Elastic Path (ecommerce) and using XML (eXtensible markup language) to pass data from system to system including the existing mainframes.

From Carr: Technologically, this required an evolution from the mainframe-based system Air Canada had created, designed solely to handle flight rewards, to a new architecture that retained the mainframe as a back-end transaction engine but layered on capabilities for interacting with business partners and consumers more flexibly.

Indeed, with the re-engineering, Aeroplan found themselves on the forefront of a fundamental shift in thinking about enterprise technology ecosystems – moving away from the “one systems does it all” idea towards web services approach of assembling a collection of components which understand each other and have the ability to exchange data using accepted standards.

Carr explains, “… the standard way of accomplishing that, using Internet technologies, is with Web services—the family of standards and specifications for invoking functions on remote computers with messages formatted in XML.”

With a plan in mind, Aeroplan needed a way to get products to sell and provide a way to sell them. This started with a relationship with a employee-incentive product vendor who managed sales Aeroplan’s members – for starters.

From Carr: When the system went live in early 2004, Aeroplan wanted to offer non-travel rewards but didn’t have its own catalog of merchandise to offer. … To drive more of that business through its own Web site {instead of third-party product vendor Maritz’s}, Aeroplan needed a more capable Web site and a more sophisticated level of Web services integration with its partners.

More capable, more sophisticated? Enter Elastic Path.

Carr and Aeroplan’s Lafrance break down the some primary advantages succinctly saying,

E-commerce software vendor Elastic Path provided software to manage the catalog of merchandise Aeroplan would be offering as an alternative to flight rewards. Lafrance says he was attracted to the product because of its emphasis on leveraging open-source technologies, which Aeroplan wanted to use where practical to hold down expenses.

Although Elastic Path itself is not open source in the sense of making its source code freely available, it shares source code with its clients under a commercial license, and it incorporates a variety of open-source technologies such as the Apache Lucene search engine. Aeroplan also takes advantage of Elastic Path’s support for the open-source MySQL database to store catalog content.

Bringing it all together required the many pieces to “get along” reliably plus be robust enough to manage a high volume of transactions efficiently. For this, Aeroplan stuck to their strategy of, “small pieces loosely joined” (my words, not theirs) by finding specialized tools to perform specific functions – without getting tied down with proprietary systems, stifling licensing costs and recurring subscription fees.

Carr’s article quotes Hébert on the economic advantages as well as the technical benefits of their strategy.

“We would probably end up paying a few million more in software licenses if not for our use of open source,” Hébert says. Aeroplan also takes advantage of Apache Tomcat to execute Java code running on its Web servers, rather than use a commercial application server on the Web front end. Heavy-duty processing for Java applications, including the Elastic Path and OpenJaw software, is managed within the integration framework provided by BEA Systems’ WebLogic platform.

Works well and cost-efficient equals “Great Success!”

Now, they’ve found other hospitality companies heading in a similar direction – something Aeroplan is ready to leverage – easily.

In January 2007, Best Western became the first hotel chain to support that direct-connect XML interface to its reservations systems, and Lafrance hopes other hotel partners will follow. “For us to add another hotel is no big deal, and most hotels are implementing the OTA standards anyway,” he says, referring to the OpenTravel Alliance, an industry standards group.

Any enterprise, no matter whether the goods are physical or virtual, can follow this strategy of using specialized and open components to reliably pass data between partners, members and vendors to produce a highly scalable, infinitely customizable and cost-effective architecture.

Carr sums up Aeroplan’s strategy saying, “Aeroplan’s experience shows the value to any business of the SOA approach, now widely embraced as a more flexible and adaptable way to build complex enterprise systems.”

Indeed, bundle specialized tools for efficiency and profit – leaving more time for fun.

More from Baseline:

Aeroplan Takes off – architecture diagram

SOA: What You Need to Know

The SOA Payoff

Calculator: Reaping Benefits From SOA

View full screen version at SlideShare

Questions and Answers from the Webinar

Q: What is a branded search?

A: Jason says, “An example of a branded search is someone searching for “Levi’s” (or “levis”) or “Levi’s men’s jeans” rather than just “men’s jeans” or “men’s demin jeans” which are not branded searches (call these “unbranded” searches).”

Q: Is a URL like this SE safe? www.domain.com/index.php/seo/interestingdata

A: Jason says, “It’s safe but not optimal. Ideally the “index.php” would be removed and “interesting” and “data” would be separated by a hyphen (not an underscore) and ended with a trailing slash (which denotes a category or subdirectory to search engines).”

E.g.: http://www.domain.com/seo/interesting-data/

More on trailing slashes at: Slash Forward (Some URLs are Better Than Others)

Q: Can you name the companies just mentioned again for URL rewriting?

Gravitystream is “a turn-key solution that makes dynamic websites search engine crawler-friendly”

Note: At the risk of self-promotion, … Elastic Path’s ecommerce software allows customized URL rewriting by default for all pages (including faceted navigation pages).

Apache mod_rewrite “This module uses a rule-based rewriting engine (based on a regular-expression parser) to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. But all this functionality and flexibility has its drawback: complexity. So don’t expect to understand this entire module in just one day.”

See more info and tools at: Wikipedia Rewrite Engine

Q: What are inbound links? Are inbound links similar to backtracks? Reciprocal links – could you please provide a definition for this?

Jason says, “Inbound links are instances of another (external) site linking to your site. Reciprocal links are links exchanged between your site and another (again external) site. Backtracks (or Trackbacks) are (usually automatically generated) links created by blogs to acknowledge a referenced blog.”

Wikipedia: Trackback & Linkbacks & Pingback

Q: What are link bait campaigns?

Link bait campaigns refer to posted content designed to attract many links by being extra funny, universally appealing, particularly interesting, somewhat surprising or fantastically useful. This barrage of links results in (theoretically) increased page rank and marketing buzz. Examples include Get Elastic’s 107 Add to Cart buttons or Netconcepts’ Word Press SEO plug-in. More from Matt Cutts, Google Engineer and Wikipedia on Link bait.

Q: Will the Million Dollar Homepage be an example for a “link farm”?

A: Yes. This (and many others like it e.g. Million Dollar Homepage etc.) sell “ad-space” by the pixel. The massive dilution causes the links to be worth basically nothing while making the site owner a few bucks.

Q: Do we get to choose IP range?

A: IP addresses (Internet Protocol address) are specific numbers (usually expressed in four-part dot-decimal notation) used by routers to exchange data on the Internet. IP range is assigned by your ISP who obtains IP addresses from ARIN or an upstream provider. When hosting multiple sites at one ISP (or internal corporate server), the content is all served from the same IP neighborhood and is (likely) discounted by search engines as they are considered affiliated. Be wary of ISP’s who host ‘spammy’ sites or sites with questionable integrity.

More: Find IP of a Website + ‘Old Skool’ Internet users know they can use Ping and Tracert commands

Webinar Recap

10:04 – Heading to Q&A mode, there are about 35 questions so we’ll tackle a few of them straightaway

10:00 – Add Jason and Stephan in Linkedin

9:59 – Key metrics to measure include: page yield, keyword yield, spidering behavior …

Check out: Multi-channel magazine article “Beneath the Surface of Search” by Netconcepts’ Brian Klais (Brian at Natural Search Blog

9:57 – Secret #7 – Check your pulse and benchmark

use: netconcepts.com/urlcheck, alexa, search results …

Key indicators to track are search-fueled sales, orders delivered by keywords, conversions – Ergo: hits are NOT the critical metric

9:56 – Secret #6 – Influence the click decision

Make sure description entices click, people only look at first couple of words and listing, first page is implied endorsement – use heat maps to view where folks are looking – have Call To Action in beginning of snippet

9:54 – make multiple copies (canonical sites) of sites – e.g.: with/without “www” – multiple URLs, https version,

9:50 – Secret #5 – Make your URLs optimal

Hints:

• Multiple parameters and complex urls are not good, weakens internal page rage flow
• session ids are very bad
• hyphens are cool, underlines are not
• rewrite URLs using keyword (use proxy if needed or ecommerce which allows this (like Elastic Path )

9:48 – Secret #4 – Rejig your site structure

Tag clouds are awesome! passes page ranks between pages – spend it wisely with relevant links, use faceted internal navigation and site search and rewrite URLs

9:45 – Hints:

• Use Social media (digg etc.)
• Embed links in press releases
• Use blogs (multiple, groups, employees, customers, more …)
• Spend as much time commenting to a-list blogs as you do posting

9:43 – Matt Cutts Google Engineer [mattcutts.com/blog] blogs about building page rank by link bait (funny, useful, interesting content with mass appeal) to encourage many to link to build page rank (and buzz). e.g. Netconcepts gives out at Word Press SEO plug-in

9:41 – Searchlight : An SEO Blog by Stephan Spencer

9:40 – Use caution with internal links, reciprocal links, footer links, site-wide links which are likely to be discounted (use “nofollow” as needed to not dilute page rank)

9:38 – Don’t link to “bad neighborhoods” + link farms, free for all

Netconcepts uses a database with millions of sites and page rank, category, title to show sites which are good to link back and forth too. Note: .edu and .gov have higher authority and result in better page rank

9:36 – Find link targets, Anchor text is very important, use Netconcepts’ Link Popularity Checker – Offer link-worthy content, Use an RSS feed (Note: Dave O loves RSS)

9:32 – Google Webmaster guidelines say less than 100 links. Fewer links weight each more strongly. Lots of tools to measure link popularity Yahoo, Google Webmaster & Toolbar, SEO Chat, SEOBook (Firefox plugin)

9:31 – Secret #3 – Build Links to Improve Page Rank

Not all links are created equal! Links from popular and authoritative sites are worth more – each page in site might have different page rank – not just about quantity, quality is also key

9:26 – Title tag is numero uno important! Home page is most important! – Have at least 200-250 words per page (Quality Content rules!)

Also key are:

• Header Tags are useful (H1, H2)
• Contextual links (make the keyword the anchor) e.g. use “men’s clothing” as link anchor rather than just “men’s”
• Graphical links get less search spider love (be sure to use image “alt” tag to describe
• meta keyword tags don’t help improve ranking (be wary of using duplicate meta tags on multiple pages – give secrets to competitors and flags as ‘spammy’ site)
• meta description helps determine what gets displayed in results

9:25 – Jason advises avoiding tables and using CSS for layout (“where it belongs,” says Stephan + great for user experience as well as search engines)

9:23 – CSSZenGarden.com – Learn Cascading Style Sheets to keep text and code separate and clean

9:21 – Secret #2 – Make your pages sing to the search engine

With keyword focus per page in html (search spiders don’t care if it’s pretty – keywords must be high up in the code, call this keyword prominence)

9:18 – KEI score = Keyword Effectiveness Indicator – higher the KEI , the more attractive the term is to your audience

9:16 – Tools: Google [Keyword, Google Trends, Google Suggest] Word Tracker.com, Overture, Keyword Discovery

9:13 – Hint: Be aware of plural/singular difference – can make a huge change in rankings!

9:11 – Secret #1 – Improve your keyword portfolio

9:10 – Long Tail is a great book/blog by Chris Andersen – Long Tail of Etail with Chris Anderson – Get Elastic #21

9:08 – Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search – Netconcepts report (free)

9:06 – Neopetsfanatic.com is Stephan’s daughter’s site making her $30/day from AdSense

9:00 – we are underway with Jason and Stephan – be sure to ask questions in the Webinar Q&A section

8:55 – Hello All, Dave O here, … just getting fired up and online.

Questions? Comments? Fire away either in the GotoMeeting chat window or in the comment section below and I’ll ask the esteemed panelists, Jason and Stephan, to chime-in.

Beware – As you watch the video, you may experience the dread and frustration of a server bonking out mid-session. You know when you are shopping along and all of a sudden the server drags to a slow crawl and by the time the hourglass/spinny-wheel stops, the site has lost it’s marbles. Your flow is lost and the site seems to have no idea where you were/are, what you were looking for and throws you back a heinous error. Fun over – insert coin to play again. Plus bananas are inherently funny.

Video #5 – Price Checked

Anyhow, this topic of ‘when should sites ask for personal info?’ touches on privacy, ID security, logistics, as well as, well … tact. Not knowing the final tally is a personal pet peeve for me when shopping online … I simply ask for the REAL GRAND TOTAL, with tax and shipping, before surrendering my name, rank and credit card number. Sheesh, is it so hard?

Certainly, some etailers want to capture this info in order to oblige you into making a purchase and also send you newsletters, coupons, offers, … but in reality, this lack of transparency is just annoying (and almost insulting) to increasingly sophisticated shoppers.

My (radical) opinion is: if you show a running total (with tax/shipping estimates) shoppers will abandon less and buy more since the mystery is removed. Of course I might be totally wrong – anyone have a study on this?

Video #4 – Zero Results Found

The article starts by breaking through some of the hype around blogging (“Heck, the blog has gained such widespread popularity that it’s almost become passé in some circles “) and then seeks balance between writing for interest and writing to encourage sales.

The ‘soft-touch’ technique makes his Top 5 Tips list, … {drumroll} … in at #2 is, “Write about subjects related to your business, such as news and trends. Establish yourself as the expert in your field. As you do so, subtly link to pages within your website that showcase products and services.”

Chiming in on that delicate fine-line is EP’s VP Marketing, Jason Billingsley, (followed by fellow BC biz blogger Tris Hussey),

A notable byproduct of blogs is the way they provide websites with a ton of fresh, original content.

Jason Billingsley, vice president of marketing for ecommerce software company Elastic Path, says blogs also give businesses the opportunity to associate their websites with popular keywords related to products and services.

“We still keep it at arm’s length,” he said, referring to posts that could be considered too promotional.

Hussey noted, though, that blogs can still indirectly boost your business.  “People come to the blog to read interesting stuff,” said Hussey, “but you are allowed to earn a living and still blog.”

Read Ryan’s whole article Selling With A Blog at Practical Ecommerce for tips and talking points on effectively using a blog to energize your online retail sales.

Anyone who has chatted with Jason at a trade show or other event quickly learns that he is passionate about search engine optimization and enhancing usability to increase conversions. Show him your site and, after a quick and calculated look, he’ll rattle off a dozen tips and tricks which will increase your site visibility resulting in more (cheap) organic hits allowing you to reduce spend on (often expensive) Pay Per Click ads while maintaining or increasing your traffic levels.

No, Google is not too worried, but your competition will be worried if you study Jason’s tips and follow them.

Anyhow, the article hands out a big concept which is basically a new way of looking at something you are already doing for your site – writing words. The gist of Jason persuasive case is ‘write how your customers search.’

People search similarly to how they speak. The content created should match closely to the content sought and, therefore, will rank toward the top of the search engine results page.

I find watching people use search engines remarkable due to the words they use to search – more often than not, casual phrases and conversational snippets are the norm rather than one-off, specific word strings like found in a products’ technical specifications.

Jason sets up an example of this:

For example, a typical description of a sheet set may read as follows: ’100 percent cotton, 300-thread count, cross-woven machine washable.’ However, the product will be much more findable, and will rank higher in organic searches, if the name and description contained the same language searchers are using.

The shopper would respond much better to this: ‘These winter white soft bedsheets will whisk you off to a comfortable dreamland every night. No other luxury bedding will make your bedroom as regal as the Queen Collection’s 300-thread count, 100 percent cotton sheet set. The only trouble with a luxurious, warm and comfortable set of sheets like this is having to get out of your dream bed each morning.’

As you see, these words are more persuasive and contain sets of phrases shoppers are actually looking for: white soft bedsheets, luxury bedding, cotton sheet set, comfortable set of sheets, dream bed.

So when writing your descriptions, commit the time and energy to doing it right. Think ti through and write a little story for each product. This seems like a lot of work and it is. Writing isn’t necessarily easy and writing well takes practice and well, … time.

As such, seek advice from experienced writers (freelance if needed) and absolutely talk to people outside of your vertical universe. Talk to your nieces, grandmothers and neighbors to find out how they talk about your type of goods (ergo: a ‘couch’ to one person is a ‘sofa’ to another and a ‘chesterfield’ to someone else). Make sure to get out of your company echo chamber where everyone uses and understands the same industry jargon and parlance. By doing so, you’ll find fresh insight into the ways customers search for what you have. By doing so, you’ll attract more qualified buyers, more cheaply.

Make more + Spend less = Great Success! Start by reading Jason’s tips

In the March 8, 2007 article “Voila! PowerReviews lets users review in French, Spanish, Italian and German” by Dianna Dilworth, we are grouped in with PR other partners who are a heavy hitting list of ecommerce vendors.

As regular readers likely know, Elastic Path customers are spread around the globe and many more sell goods internationally – as such, we enthusiastically support cool tools which combine global mindedness and the openness user customer generated content.

Already ready to go along with the French and English used by MEC are Italian and German (apologies to our Icelandic friends) with Chinese, Japanese and Korean coming later this year.

Article snippet after the break to get you started:

“PowerReviews has several customers who sell internationally or support multiple languages, and we need to support their needs,” said Andy Chen, CEO of PowerReviews, Millbrae, CA . “In the short term, PowerReviews will be distributed through its e-commerce platform partnerships such as ATG, DemandWare, ElasticPath, Truition and Venda as the default review engine for their customers. Those e-commerce platforms already have customers in Canada, Germany, Spain, UK and France, so it is critical that we fully support their customers’ needs.”

Power Reviews are also baking in some social media integration to encourage shoppers to post their own content to support the product merchandising from the grassroots on up.

PowerReviews’ platform lets online retailers set up a single, global review platform, rather than one for each language they support. The platform includes complete localization for all review-engine functionality including tag-based review capture, review display, staff and expert reviews, as well as customer images, videos and blogs.

Note how shopper can read separate reviews (in this case the Mutha Hubba tent) written in either language and the review can be flagged for investigation (i.e. thought to be inappropriate or “planted” perhaps) plus you can denote whether the review was helpful.