When was the last time you did a “vanity search” on your branded terms? Did you like what you found?

You’d be surprised what kind of things appear in Google’s top 10 results for Internet Retailer 500 companies. Not to add to any e-tailers’ reputation management issues, but here’s an example. There’s an online petition out there to boycott a toy retailer for carrying a George W. Bush action figure.

Love Bush or not-love him (non partisan Canadian, here) words like “petition” and “boycott” in search listing title tags are never something you want to see, and something you’d like to push down in results if possible.

What would you do if the public revolted against a product you carry, and singled you out in an online petition? Or a YouTube video? Blog post? Facebook Group?

A dedicated online reputation manager’s job is to monitor the web for new occurrences of your brand name in real-time, and ideally come up with a “damage control” plan. In this case, because there may be as many Bush supporters as passionate opponents (and judging by over 100 5-star reviews on the sold-out item it’s likely), the retailer didn’t pull the product (perhaps the retailer is even unaware of the petition). But in your case, a quick response and pulling of a product that customers react to may be a good move - or a public statement regarding the matter on your blog - or a clarification of misinformation…

Of course, this is only one example of a reputation management issue.

Depending on the size of your business and consumer propensity to search for your name, you may require a PR/social media marketing firm or in-house professional to handle your reputation management needs, serving as a community evangelist and corporate spokesperson full-time. Many companies have this and a search on any job board for “Public Relations Manager” or “Community Manager” may include reputation management in the list of responsibilities.

But it may be sufficient for you to hire someone to own your reputation management department on a part-time, contract basis. Like a good web analyst, if you hire the right person, that person can learn the tools and processes quickly and apply creativity, finesse and personality to the job.

I just finished reading Andy Beal’s Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online. For about $20, this book would be the perfect training manual for your reputation manager - it does a fantastic job of framing the “rules of engagment” (with your audience, that is) - explaining how to write for the web, the importance of SEO, common social sites and a range of reputation monitoring tools (among other things).

So whether you hire a savvy or a newbie, the book will guide you step by step to create:

• An online pressroom
• Conduct effective (non-spammy) blogger outreach
• Leverage multimedia content
• Choose the style of corporate blog that’s right for you and establish wise policies
• Measure your blog’s success
• Repair your online reputation
• Measure your reputation management program effectiveness

Alright, maybe you don’t want a complete newbie — here are some basic skills / traits a person should possess to tackle this role:

• An understanding of the social web, including blogs, forums, social networks, microblogs, photo/video sharing, ratings and reviews, RSS etc.
• An ability to manage several social media profiles (an organized person!)
• Exceptional communication skills, fluent in English with proper grammar and spelling
• Someone who comes across as pleasant, positive and polite in online communications
• Attention to detail - not someone who might send a sloppy email reply to all or cut-and-paste without triple checking the recipient email and name
• A ninja at using search engines for research (an understanding of SEO a plus!)
• Experience with web analytics is nice, but someone who can learn new software quickly is essential
• An insanely curious person who keeps up with all the Internet marketing and social media blogs on a weekly basis, and always thinks outside the box

Now, if you’re not sure how many hours your reputation management project will take, you may consider hiring a virtual assistant or Internet savvy work-at-home-mom. Many work at home moms are avid networkers and bloggers and you can find them on WAHM (Work At Home Mom) forums like WAHM.com. You can read their archived posts and their blogs linked in signatures to get a feel for their tone, positivity, manners and English skills also. You can find virtual assistants in the VA Networking Forum.

Another idea is to post a listing on the SEOmoz Job Board and post under the Public Relations / Reputation Management category. SEOmoz readers are typically up-to-speed with Internet marketing and reputation management already, so you can just get them to apply the do-it-yourself steps in Radically Transparent.

I also want to extend the invitation to any Get Elastic readers who provide these services to leave a comment with a link to your site so those looking for online reputation consultants can check you out.

Don’t forget to read Radically Transparent yourself so you know what your business should be doing so you can gage the effectiveness of your Reputation Manager.

Not only that, but this book should be read by everybody, as it goes into depth about your personal reputation, and how you can manage that. All will find Radically Transparent a helpful guide to creating and maintaining a positive and authentic personal brand presence online.

For you PPC rockstars, if you want to go after the long tail of gift finding search this holiday, you can build a massive keyword list using this keyword permutation tool, which will create just under 12,000 keyword phrases to bid on. Permutations are all the possible combinations of your first, second, third terms and so on.

Disclaimer: I’m just posting this to show you what’s possible, this is not a recommendation for your search campaign. You have to consider whether it’s worth your time to manage these keywords - setting bids, creating Ad Groups, selecting landing pages, writing ads etc. I almost want to say “for entertainment purposes only…”

How To Use The List

Copy and paste the keywords from the spreadsheet below and paste HOLIDAYS into List 1, GIFT TERMS into List 2 and RECIPIENTS into List 3. Don’t check off stemmings, and check off “Exact Match” before creating the keyword list.

Sure, some of these terms will be ridiculous - “kwanzaa gift idea for puppy” is likely a dog-keyword. It depends on your PPC strategy - some advertisers make a killing off massive lists of long-tail keywords with low click prices and low competition. Bidding on all these gift recipient keywords is just an idea, not a best practice. USE YOUR DISCRETION.

You can also just remove irrelevant keywords before you do your permutations.

Make sure your Ad Groups are well organized and each keyword points to an appropriate landing page - such as an optimized page in a gift finder.

The original embedded spreadsheet broke the blog sidebar, so here’s a link instead.

To follow up from yesterday’s post on why you should include “free shipping” in your title tags and meta descriptions (only if you offer it, of course) — today I’m going to demonstrate why you should create a unique page optimized for your “brand name + free shipping.”

We mentioned yesterday that people search for “free shipping.” There’s no doubt.

And people search for products with “free shipping” as a modifier.

Guess what else they search on? Your store name plus free shipping. And who ranks? Often affiliates, deals and coupon sites.

Check out the related searches suggested by Google when you search for “free shipping.”

Let’s click on “free shipping JC Penney”:

Now, JC Penney needs a page optimized for “free shipping” so it would rank #1. Of course, JC Penney doesn’t need to offer free shipping all the time to have its own dedicated page. The page just needs to exist, all the time, as a landing page for “free shipping jc penney” traffic.

These searchers are going to find the coupons one way or the other, so why not have a landing page (perhaps a sub-section of customer service) that shows which products qualify for free shipping at any given moment, and has a link to an RSS feed for future free shipping offers, or an email sign-up link? Then you can even segment these cheapo-s out into their own bucket in your email campaigns (I’m kidding, but I’m not kidding).

And don’t forget keywords in the title tag: “JC Penney Free Shipping Offers.”

To kick off our series on holiday SEO tips for online retailers, here’s a tip for retailers who offer free shipping on one or more products during the holidays. (My apologies to those who don’t offer free shipping, but bookmark this anyway - you may offer it down the road!)

Free shipping offers consistently top surveys of what customers want from online stores. And people do search for “free shipping,” and most often in November / December - as you would expect.

Now I’m not saying you have a hope in the North Pole of ranking for “free shipping” alone (though Amazon, Zappos, Shoes.com and Shoebuy have succeeded). The point is people really care about free shipping, even to search for it in search engines. And if you offer it, you should flaunt it when customers do searches for the products you carry — in your title tags and meta descriptions.

Even if you’re not ranked number one in the search results, if your offer is more attractive than the highest ranking link, you can win the click.

And if you offer other guarantees or customer-friendly policies, throw them in too. Yay, Zappos!

We can also assume many customers will append their product searches with “free shipping”:

PS this goes for PPC ads too, “free shipping” in the ad copy is a great offer that would likely increase click through rates. Just triple check that your landing page repeats the offer and the promotion applies to the product and the geographic area the ad is being shown. Don’t bait-and-switch. Same goes for your title tags for your organic listings. And only add the offer to the pages the offer applies to.

PPS If you want exposure on the sites that do rank tops for the term “free shipping,” you contact them to submit your offers or start an affiliate relationship. The top 3 are FreeShipping.org, FreeShipping.com and Shopping-Bargains.com.

Because the AdWords system rewards keywords with high click-through history (relative to competitors) with better ad positions and lower cost-per-click, click through rate is considered an important performance metric. Along with a keyword’s relevance to ad text and landing page copy, click through rate influences a keyword’s “Quality Score.”

Every PPC campaign is bound to have a few (or few thousand) keywords with low click through rates. You can identify them easily enough with web analytics and campaign reports, but what do you do with them?

You have at least 6 options:

1. Do nothing. You’re always going to have stinkers, why major on the minors?
2. Try to improve your Quality Score, which should improve ad position, which may positively affect click through rates.
3. Add negative keywords if you’re using broad or phrase matching.
4. Create a new Ad Group. Pull poor performers out of your current Ad Group and start over with better ad text and landing page.
5. Create an AdGroup for branding purposes. You don’t expect clicks, but using your company name in the headline is free exposure.
6. Pause or delete them. Either way, you stop bidding.

But before you take action based on click through stats alone, it’s important to dig deeper as to why the click through rate stinks.

Potential Reasons for Low Click Through Rate

If your average ad position is high (1-3), it’s probably not a Quality Score issue. It’s more likely one of the following:

• Your organic rankings for the keyword are so good, people aren’t clicking on your PPC ads, and the “double listing” of your PPC ad improves your organic click through rate! You pay nothing for the additional branding, and removing the keyword may even slightly hurt you. Do nothing, except maybe “do a little dance.”

• Your keyword has low commercial intent - meaning people aren’t interested in a purchase, they want information. Are you bidding on “wii news” because it got 22,000 searches in June? Kill the keyword phrase, and consider adding “news” as a negative keyword.

• Your keyword is broad or phrase matched with insufficient negative keywords in your campaign. Use yesterday’s Google Analytics hack to expose the actual search queries that triggered your ad, and add negative keywords as necessary.

If your average ad position is medium (4-10), you may have any of the above problems, plus:

• You’re in the Automatic Match beta. You have been automatically included and your ad is showing up for synonyms to your broad matched terms, while your competitors are not. If you are part of the beta, you will see a checkbox to opt out of Automatic Match from your Campaign Settings. Just opt out, don’t be a guinea pig for Automatic Match.

• Your ad copy stinks compared to your competitors. They have tested and found winning headlines, calls to action and display URLs. They display prices that are lower than yours. They offer guarantees and free shipping in their ad copy. Customers trust their domain names more than yours. Go to the SERPs and see for yourself. And test out different ad versions.

If your average ad position is low (10+)

• You may be bidding too low vs. your competition or for the Quality Score Google has assigned you. You may have set an initial CPC that was low and performed fine, but competition has entered the picture. Or Google simply decided to raise minimum bids for whatever reason. Increase bid as long as it makes sense to, and within what you can afford.

• Your Quality Score stinks because your keyword is in the wrong AdGroup. For example, putting “learning toys” in the “educational toys” AdGroup, means your ad might display with “Educational Toys” in the headline, pointing to a landing page that never references “learning toys”. The searcher is more likely to click on results that use “Learning Toys” - it’s more relevant, though it describes the same thing. And, your Quality Score suffers when your ad text is not as relevant to the keyword. Create new Ad Group, but don’t delete similar keywords like “early learning toys” unless they also have poor history. Otherwise, you lose that history.

• Your keyword is irrelevant to your products. Perhaps you’re a victim of sloppy outsourced keyword research, or a consultant that didn’t fully understand your business. Nix that keyword, and any others that don’t belong.

Can low CTR% be a good thing?

There may be instances you want to lower click through rates. For example, if you sell high end furniture, adding “From $2999″ to your ad for “teak outdoor patio set” will weed out the shoppers looking for Ikea-grade, who are thinking frugal but not expressing it in their search query. Plus, you’ll likely increase click through from luxury buyers. Your conversion rate, cost per conversion and ROI will improve. (It would make sense that Google factor conversion rates into Quality Score, since it is a better indicator of relevance than click through rate. Perhaps it’s one of the “other relevance factors” Google keeps to itself.)

What About Keywords With Low Conversion Rate or Negative ROI?

That’s a bit trickier.

Low conversion rate

Why spend money on keywords that don’t convert, right? The problem is, a keyword may have a 0% conversion rate but still be responsible for many sales. According to a 2005 comScore study, searchers who ultimately purchased online performed an average of 13 searches before converting, resulting in 12 non-converting searches for every sale. If the sales cycle exceeds your cookie expiration dates, some keywords may never get the conversion credit they’re due. (Great article on non-converting keywords by Frederick Marckini at Clickz)

What’s more, online searches can result in telephone orders, or even offline sales - which are even harder to reconcile, since there’s no cookie that tracks those.

Negative ROI

Keywords with negative ROI should be investigated. Are bids too high? Can landing pages be improved? Is broad match burning your budget and could keyword research help? They can even be a blessing. Lessons you learn from attempting to salvage negative ROI keywords may even benefit your campaign as a whole if you can apply “better practices” across the board.

If margin on the products or overall sales are low, you may decide to kill the keyword based on negative ROI to allocate budget for clearly profitable keywords and products.

The takeaway is to never kill a keyword simply because of a low metric. Always investigate the possible reasons for the low metric.

Are you a Google AdWords advertiser using Google Analytics? STOP! You MUST read this post because you are losing money daily and we are going to help you stop the bleeding.

There is a problem with the default functionality of Google Analytics when used in conjunction with AdWords. Google Analytics (GA) doesn’t report the actual phrase a shopper entered into the search bar, only the keyword phrase you are bidding on.

Let me explain:
- You bid on the keyword ’shoes’ using ‘broad match’
- A shopper searches for ‘blue suede shoes’
- The Traffic Sources > Keyword report in GA shows the search as just ’shoes’

Even worse, Google likes to use synonyms when your terms are under the broad match type (called automatic matching or extended broad match).

- You are bidding on the keyword ‘running shoes’ using ‘broad match’
- A shopper searches for ‘Adidas Gazelle’
- Google shows your ad, but wait, you don’t carry Adidas shoes

Why would Google do that?

The shopper searched on blue suede shoes, not shoes! You don’t sell blue suede shoes. You have been making decisions based on inaccurate data.

Follow these simple steps to start seeing the EXACT phrases people are using when they click your AdWords ads.

It will help you find terms to add to your negative keyword list. You can also start honing your ad and landing page copy to better reflect how shoppers search.

The Google Analytics Exact Query Solution…

This solution comes from our friends at VKI Studios, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant and overall great bunch of people (see their analytics blog for some great tools and tips). Specifically, Brian Katz. They have evaluated various means of cracking this nut, and we have their final solution. Credit and comparison of other methods are at the bottom of this tutorial.

1. Create a new Google Analytics Profile

We do NOT want to overwrite any core data, so a new profile keeps everything intact. Even Google says it is a good idea.

Select Add a Profile for an existing domain, select which domain, and enter any name for the profile you choose - the more descriptive the better. You will not have to add any tracking code or tag anything, so no need to get the ponytail guys involved.

2. Create the first filter

Locate your newly created profile and click Edit under the Settings column. Then click Add Filter.

Field A -> Extract A: Referral: (\?|&)(q|p|query)=([^&]*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Medium: (cpc|ppc)
Output To -> Constructor: Custom Field 1: $A3

3. Create the second filter

Locate your new profile again and click Edit under the Settings column. Then click Add Filter.

Field A -> Extract A: Custom Field 1: (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Term: (.*)
Output To -> Constructor: Campaign Term: $B1 ($A1)

As with almost all multi-part filters, sequence is critical and must be ordered accordingly using the “Assign Filter Order” page for the profile.

That’s It!

Here are what the results should look like when you run the Traffic Sources > Keywords > Paid report in Google Analytics:

The following set of results were obtained using an in-line filter to show bid-terms that would be different from the search terms

An unfiltered result would look as follows:

The above technique provides useful data as is but it does have some shortcomings in that it does not associate the newly overwritten Campaign Term field with Transactions, as is shown in the following screen shot:

It is probably the result of using session-based values (e.g.: all the Campaign fields) and pageView-based values (e.g.: Referral). Caught in the middle are the event-based eCommerce transactions.

In his book “Advanced Web Metrics with GA” (Page 199) Brian Clifton documents a method attributed to Shawn Purtell of ROI Revolution that uses 3 filters to show each Transaction with its bid and search terms appended.

We are experimenting with a combination of those filters and the ones described above to extend the solution to include eCommerce and will post the solution when we have it. So make sure you subscribe to the RSS Feed or by Email to be notified when it is available.

Hat Tips to Others Tackling this Problem

The original solution for this came from Brian Clifton, formerly of Google.

The solutions (Using Filters):
- How to Get Detailed PPC Keyword Data from Google Analytics
- NUDE: AdWords Keyword Data Exposed With Google Analytics!

An updated solution from ROI Revolution (Using JavaScript):
This solution uses the User Defined variable so it won’t be appropriate if you’re using the User Defined variable (created with _setVar()) already
- Exact Keyword Tracking with Google Analytics, Revisited
- Exact Keyword Tracking with ga.js

Comparison of the two methods

I checked out the two methods (Filters vs. JavaScript) . Since readers commented saying the filters did not work or “no longer worked”, I took a closer look. The devil is in the detail. Errors in their implementations may have been the cause of the malfunctions.

JavaScript vs. Filters

JavaScript
The two methods both extract data from the and Referrer and Campaign Medium checking the latter for “ppc” of “cpc” using regular expressions. They both concatenate the bid and search terms. The JavaScript method goes 1 step further by looking for the gclid value unique to Google AdWords. That may also be done in the filters but I don’t believe it would enhance the filter solution.

The JavaScript performs its magic at run time. It uses the “troublesome” _setVar() cookie to store the bid and search terms in the User Defined field. It does so using a generally accepted “kludge” to work around _setVar()’s issues (a topic all of its own).

The greatest disadvantage to this method is that it monopolizes the User Defined Value. With all its troubles, it is an invaluable resource that most will (should ?) be using to segment visitors. Since it is stored in a domain specific cookie it cannot store profile-specific data to different profiles (well, it can be pushed to greater limits but that is a blog post all of its own).

It should be possible to rewrite the URL of the landing page before ga.js writes the Campaign cookie (again a topic of its own)

Filters
The filters run at data processing time and so, I expect those may prove marginally more reliable than JavaScript and cookies (although all subsequent visits from the AdWords campaign will rely on the keyword and other campaign data being extracted from cookies by ga.js or urchin.js) so that is no reason to choose one above the other.

By default, however, I am biased in favor of filter-based solutions because they are independent of the implementation and so don’t require updates to a site’s GA coding. Implementation is quicker and easier, as is propagation of the solution across profiles and GA accounts. In fact, in the time it takes to update the code on some sites (those that are not tagged as efficiently as they might have been) or in the time to get a site’s 3rd party developers to make the changes, a GA consultant could implement the solution for a number of accounts, regardless of the level of access the consultant has to the coding.

Note: Analysis and much of the technical write-up done by VKI Studios, Brian Katz

Our last post covered tips on using Google’s free Keyword Tool and how to apply your keyword discoveries to various aspects of marketing: SEO, PPC, site usability and even email marketing.

As promised, today we’re going to dig deeper into negative keyword research. The tools we’ll cover are the Google Keyword Tool, Google Suggest, Google Product Search and some surprises.

Negative keywords explained

If the term “negative keywords” is new to you, it refers to irrelevant or low converting keywords that you add to a pay-per-click campaign which tell the ad system not to show your ad when that keyword appears in a search.

To take advantage of the “long tail of search” (longer query combinations and product searches that are performed infrequently but can convert like crazy), marketers will bid on broad keywords using “broad matching” or “phrase matching.” If you phrase match “learning toys” your ad would appear for “learning toys for 3 year old toddlers.” Broad match would include even more searches like “best toys for motor learning.” The problem is, often times these match types cause you to show up for searches that have nothing to do with your products, or that don’t have a high “commercial intent” behind them. This hurts your overall campaign performance.

Why Google wants you to research negative keywords!

It’s in everyone’s best interest to prevent results like this:

Google makes more money if ads are relevant and searchers click on them instead of organic results, retailer can attract more clicks when there are less competing ads (especially from high budget software companies), and customers don’t get so confused.

Here’s how you use various Google tools to build out your negative keyword list to avoid your ad from appearing for irrelevant searches when using broad or phrase matching.

Google Keyword Tool

When using AdWords, you can access the Keyword Tool from inside your account.

This section assumes you understand how the Keyword Tool works. Yesterday’s post advised you to switch your match type to “Exact” to see exact search counts. Today we don’t care about keyword popularity. We just want to find as many negative keywords as we can.

If you switch the match type to “Negative,” all that changes is the square brackets from exact match are changed to the “-” sign before the keyword, so you can build your shortlist of negative keywords and import right into an AdGroup or Campaign, or save in text or .CSV format. This doesn’t change the keyword suggestions,

But remember that Google’s Keyword Tool does not give you enough negative keyword data, you still have to go digging further. You can manually add additional keywords, and then create one text file or .CSV

(Note that if you add “wooden” once, your ad will not appear for “wooden puzzles,” “wooden blocks,” etc. You don’t need to add “wooden + keyword” to your list. If you do carry some wooden toys, you should consider creating separate AdGroups for only the wooden toys you carry (better landing page selection, higher quality score, better ad text), for which you would add negative keywords for the wooden products you don’t sell - “blocks,” “puzzles” etc).

Google Suggest

Type in your keyword, e.g. “learning games” and Google will drop down suggestions.

Keep in mind 2 things:

1. The numbers that show are not keyword counts, but results of pages in Google’s index. The higher the number, the more competitive the keyword is, actually. But, because Google suggest shows long tail search terms, you can use this tool to pick out additional negative keywords the Keyword Tool didn’t bother to show.

2. You can’t see all the suggestions when typing in your broad match. You’ll need to go through the alphabet, first typing a space and then “a” - if no results, you continue until you hit a letter with suggestions:

Sometimes you have to apply this going-through-the-alphabet system on top of a suggestion, like “learning toys for a…, b…”

You’ll have to make notes on which keywords to add, maybe on a notepad. Make sure you add them to the appropriate campaigns - and you may discover new keywords to bid on in the process.

Google Shopping

Google Product Search is the shopping engine formerly known as Froogle, and confusingly labeled as “Shopping” from the links across the top of Google’s home page, or when you’re in Google Reader, or Gmail…

You can use Google Product Search to find negative keywords in a couple ways. Perform any keyword search, and scroll to the bottom to see more links, and check out the “Brand” and “Related Searches” links.

Clicking “More” expands the lists:

Adding brand names you don’t carry as negative keywords is very important. When a search query involves a brand name, it’s a strong signal that someone is looking to research or purchase a specific item, not check out other brands. So your general ad will have lower click through, which lowers the click through rate of your entire AdGroup, hurting all your keywords’ ad positions and possibly raising your cost-per-click.

Not to mention your landing page quality score will be lower if it doesn’t reference that brand. And, even if you do attract clicks, there a much smaller chance of conversion, though you still pay for the click. And if your broad matched keyword is very competitive, it could be an expensive click!

You can also turn to a review site like Buzzillions to glean brand names. Buzzillions aggregates reviews from retailers using Power Reviews, so there’s a good chance most if not all brands are represented. Simply go to Buzzillions, type in your keyword, and check out the brands listed in the left hand navigation:

(Numbers indicate the number of branded items with customer reviews, not number of customer reviews or keyword popularity.)

Or, use eBay for negative keyword research, as I wrote about for SEOmoz’ YouMoz Blog last year.

Google Analytics

Of course, using your Referring Keywords report, you can mine your Google Analytics data to weed out referral keywords that don’t relate to your business. And you can segment out non-paid and paid searches from your reports.

But wouldn’t you like to know which “long tail” terms your broad match and phrase match terms are bringing in? You can identify them with this Google Analytics hack.

Thanks again to Ryan Gibson from the Rimm-Kaufman Group for sharing some top-notch tips on paid search. If you missed the call, catch up with the full length replay of the Key to PPC for Online Retailers in our eCommerce webinar archive. If you’d like a summary in blog post format, here’s a recap of the main points with answers from Ryan to questions submitted after the webinar ended:

Keyword Development is 50% of Your Success

Keyword research is essential because it ultimately determines which searches your ads will appear for. Keywords must be appropriate, specific and capture the variations of how people search for the products you sell.

“Long tail” terms are desirable. Although they don’t get a lot of clicks, there is not much competition and it’s the specificity that makes them high-converting. You can also get them low-cost, and the lower the cost, the lower the risk. You’re not spending anything unless they are clicked on. Long tail terms in aggregate may be attracting a small percentage of clicks but be driving the highest number of sales because they convert highly.

General (and shorter) queries may indicate one is in research stage and thus, convert lower than more specific searches, when customers are aware of exactly what they are looking for.

Keyword List Tips

Test 3-10 Keywords per SKU

Modifiers don’t count, such as “buy widgets” or “buy widgets online.” Also, branded terms don’t count. Rather, you want to test out unique terms. So start with a URL (product page, right down to the sku - so if you sell blue and red widgets, they have their own keywords, as do different sizes). 2 benefits to this approach are:

1. Ensures you have the product you’re creating the term for
2. Makes it easier to tie up correct landing pages

Continue Reading:
Webinar Recap: The Key to PPC for Online Retailers »

What?!! It’s true. Many of the biggest and most popular online retailers with fat SEO budgets are not showing up for their own names or valuable keywords in Google search results. Most don’t even know it. How can this be?

All the major search engines offer a .com search engine and a number of country-specific engines, like Google.ca, .co.uk, .com.au, .fr, .de and so on. These are local search engines, and often use geo-IP targeting to show the local search engine as the default when a searcher lives outside the United States.

If you’ve never seen a localized search engine, this is what it looks like:

As you can see, a searcher has the option to restrict search results to only pages from his or her country. This is particularly helpful for searchers who are performing transactional searches - they’re looking for products to buy. Using the general “search the web” will often deliver US sites which requires the shopper to dig through the sites looking for shipping information and costs. Searching only pages from their native land, searchers can save time and discover online stores they purchase from over and over again.

Continue Reading:
Top Online Retailers Not Showing Up in Google! »

This isn’t a new topic here at Get Elastic, but since search engine optimization is such a key part to ecommerce success I’m going to bang the same drum once again on optimizing for brand names.

Zappos appears to have covered all the bases and then some in optimizing its brand category pages. For example, its Nine West page (below) includes 272 occurrences of “Nine West” on this page - that’s 4.55% of the entire page copy. This is what is referred to as “keyword density.” Though keyword density is not as important to SEO as was once thought (title tag, keyword rich backlinks from other sites and the domain’s overall authority have more impact), this page certainly is considered highly relevant to “Nine West” by Google.

Like Karmaloop, Zappos includes a paragraph about the brand itself. Most ecommerce sites have category / brand pages that consist of little more than images, links and a page title.

Also included at the category level are customer reviews. Each product with a review appears on the same page. Though the links to the product pages are “nofollowed” (link includes an HTML attribute telling search engines not to crawl the linked page or pass Page Rank), the keywords count towards the overall relevance to the page.

Get you’re scrolling finger ready, you’ll need it.

Continue Reading:
Zappos Secret SEO Sauce For Branded Pages »