In yesterday’s installment of this week’s holiday SEO series, we covered hot product research and how to boost your rankings for these items’ product pages. One of the tactics was to target bloggers and other media for Christmas gift guides or product reviews.

Again, the more quality links a product page has pointing to it directly, the better chance it has of ranking well in search engines. Plus, a diverse link profile (you have some links pointing to deeper pages, not just your home page) makes your site look more authoritative as a whole to search engines.

So when you do acquire these deep links, you want to keep them. But often in ecommerce - product pages come and go. So it’s important to make sure your links still give you benefit even when pages disappear.

Problem: 404 Not Found

I recently searched for “top geek gifts” and found Wired Magazine’s Ultimate Geek Gift Guide from 2005. It links to 26 products - most are deep pages on the manufacturer or online retailers’ sites. Though an old list, it’s likely the page still gets a lot of traffic. It certainly ranks well, and the links are valuable to SEO forever.

But only a handful of these product pages still exist, a whopping 13 (that’s 50%!) of them are now Not Found pages with no links back into the site, and no suggested alternative products.

Bad for customers, bad for SEO.

Solution? 301 Redirect

Only 20% of the pages preserved the link juice by using a 301 permanent redirect. 3 sites redirected to the home page, while Alienware redirected the page to its Desktop Computer category (one more link for you, Alienware - Merry Christmas) and Sonos to its What to Buy section.

The 301 (permanent) redirect does 2 things - it sends a visitor to a real page on the site, and it tells search engines to pass along any incoming link “juice” (Page Rank) to the page that is redirected to. Whether you redirect to the home page, category page or similar product, the link pointing to your domain helps the overall link popularity of your domain. But redirecting to a category or alternative product page other than the home page is preferable for a few reasons:

• It’s more specific for the user. If you redirect the page for a wireless keyboard you no longer carry to all your wireless keyboards, it’s more relevant to the visitor than dumping them on the home page.
• It boosts the rankings for the category or page you direct it to.
• It keeps diversity in your link portfolio. Search engines like to see that not all your backlinks point to your home page - looks more natural, and looks like your deeper content is valuable.

How do you accomplish this? John Honeck has a great technical article for programmers on how to set up permanent 301 redirects on ecommerce templates in ASP.

You never know when someone will link to you or to what page, so it’s best to make this standard procedure for all your pages.

Wanna do some extremely cheap (free) and fast market research? As lovely as Google Trends, Google Insights and Google’s Keyword Tool are - they are not as valuable as Amazon for commercial keyword research. They can’t tell you which products are most wished for and most gifted.

Though it’s hidden amongst a jungle of other links, products and calls to action - Amazon has a Bestsellers department. On the Amazon.com home page, scroll down to Features & Services / Amazon Exclusives / Amazon Bestsellers (or just click our link).

You’ll find every category that Amazon offers (which is pretty much everything) and even sub-categories.

And you’ll notice you can select the Most Gifted and Most Wished For items, based on Amazon’s tsunami of customer tracking and purchase data.

For example, if you’re in the beauty category, you can see the top 3 wished for fragrances are Vera Wang Princess, Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue and Marc Jacobs Daisy.

Comparing to Sephora’s best seller list, this is pretty good data.

So What?

When you understand what customers’ most desired and most gifted items are, you know where to focus your SEO efforts at the product page level as we approach the holiday season. And by SEO efforts, I mean link building.

If I were Sephora, I would head over to the search engine and scope out the ranking situation (making sure I’m signed out of my Gmail account so my rankings aren’t skewed by my frequent visits to the Sephora site). Now it doesn’t really matter what position you are in the results - results may vary based on a searcher’s location, browsing history (personalized search) and exact keyword term (rankings may differ for “vera wang princess” vs “princess vera wang”). And there’s always room for improvement when it comes to link building.

But you want to get an idea of which pages you are competing against. Is it Amazon? The manufacturer’s site? A popular blog review or shopping engine? Also, you want to know if you have a hope in the North Pole to actually rank for the product. If you’re not on page one or two, you may want to think realistically about your chances. Or, aim for a less competitive search like “buy vera wang princess” or “princess by vera wang.”

Okay, keeping with our hypothetical Sephora case:

Sephora is doing really well, and it’s tough to outrank the manufacturer site but we’ve seen it happen. Also, assuming Sephora’s competition reads Get Elastic and is embarking on link building campaignage as we speak, Sephora must protect its position. The key will be to build links (and start soon), and here are some ideas to accomplish this.

Leverage the Blog

Sephora has, in my opinion, one of the better retailer blogs out there. It actually has several posts linking to its Marc Jacobs Daisy page. But linking from a new blog post that includes “Marc Jacobs Daisy” in the title tag and URL will give extra topical relevance to the link. I’d go ahead and write a post on how it’s one of the top sellers, what customers have to say about it or which celebrities wear it.

Blogger Outreach

Why not make a list of influential beauty bloggers and send them a free Vera Wang Princess bottle or sample to review? As long as the review is appreciated but not required, I don’t see how this would violate the “don’t buy links” rule. Of course, I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments.

It works for quirky lounge chair maker Sumo. Top Internet marketing and advertising blogger B.L. Ochman calls Sumo’s blogger outreach smart marketing:

Sumo has used blogger outreach to get their furniture reviewed, and it’s smart marketing. Sending chairs to bloggers is cheap; effective because you feel like you need to review something that costs more than $100; and, unlike a book, way too big to ignore once it gets to your house. They didn’t send some stupid press release, or cutesy pitch. They just sent an email asking if I’d like to try the chair and review it, with a link to the site.

Sumo ranks quite nicely for terms like “lounge chair” and “bean bag chair,” thank you very much.

Search for Conversations

Who’s been blogging about Vera Wang Princess? Two tools I like to use to find out are blog search engine Technorati and reputation monitoring tool Trackur. These both have advantages over Google Blogs search.

Technorati shows you an authority score (higher is better), so you don’t waste time checking out low-quality blogs:

And Trackur lets you bookmark items with “Add to Favorites.”

You may discover some interesting things, like this blog that actually did link to Sephora:

But as you can see in the status bar, the blogger buggered up the link with a cut-and-paste so it reads http://http//www.sephora.com/browse/product.jhtml?id=P212915&shouldPaginate=true&categoryId=5625 which sends people and search engines to a dead page.

Sephora should send this blogger a heads up, and some form of thank you for linking (coupon or free gift). And to build a relationship, ask if she’d like to be an official reviewer for Sephora products on her own blog.

Help a Reporter Out

Get on Peter Shankman’s HARO (Help A Reporter Out), a thrice-daily mailing list of press opportunities. I’ve seen requests for sources from reporters from major news papers, magazines and even network TV morning shows. Several calls for products for gift ideas have come through. Getting on the list to receive the notices is easy, sign up here. You could get a link or great word-of-print marketing.

Don’t Forget Value Propositions

Sephora not only ships for free over $50, but also has free return shipping.

This should be in the title tag / meta description. Especially for searches like this:

This will also improve click through for searches without “free shipping” as we discussed yesterday.

So try out Amazon Bestsellers for the category/ies you sell - and remember, you can apply this insight to email marketing campaigns and merchandising strategies too. If you have additional link building tricks, you may want to keep them close to your chest. If you’re brave and already in the holiday spirit, you may want to share them in the comments here *wink.*

And before you ask why you should bother building links to product pages that may get dropped from your site in a year or sooner, come back tomorrow. We’ll explain how to handle this.

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.

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 Google Analytics, but it requires a hack, which we will cover in depth tomorrow…

By now you’ve probably heard the news, Google has made keyword search counts available to all through its Keyword Research Tool (before it only showed relative search volume in little green bars).

There are many free and paid keyword research tools out there, but until this announcement, none were able to provide Google-only data. But like Avinash Kaushik said last week in his Analytics webinar, “The goal is not to collect more data – it’s about extracting insight from this data.”

So today we’re going to go through some tips on how you can tailor Google Keyword Tool’s data to your needs (much like you would with Google Analytics), and how you can apply this research beyond your SEO and PPC campaign to other marketing activities. We’ll also cover the limitations of this (and all) keyword research tool(s).

Google Keyword Research Tool Tips

1. Select Your Countries

Google will share search volume based on country (not sure if it’s calculated from Google.ca, Google.fr etc only or if they include Google.com searches performed outside of the US). So you can change the default US database to your territory. But if you sell to multiple countries from one website, or you target multiple countries from one AdWords campaign, you can select more than one country by doing a “Control + Click” or “Command + Click” - depending if you’re Mac or PC.

You can also simply select All Countries if you sell globally, anyway. Of course, there’s also multiple language selection - but I’m not sure why you’d want to select multiple languages at once.

2. Generate Keywords

There are a couple options for generating keywords - you can enter your own keywords, or use an existing URL. In the second option, Google will extract keywords off the page and generate related keywords.

Option 1: Keywords

Type in a few off the top of your head, or import an existing list from an AdGroup, for example.

In this case, if you’re a retailer selling “learning toys” - you could type in the obvious “learning toys,” “educational toys,” “baby toys,” “toddler toys,” “children’s toys.”

Choose to use synonyms or not. I’d use synonyms the first time, and if the results are irrelevant, go back and uncheck the box, and redo the search.

You can also apply negative keywords, for example you sell parachutes, you should exclude “coldplay” and “what color is your.”

Then, click “Get keyword ideas.”

Option 2: URL

Here’s a trick - don’t use your own URL. If you sell “learning toys” - choose the top search result for “learning toys” in Google and let Google extract related keywords off that page.

You can also toggle between your 2 options without losing your keyword list or URL input, just click “Get keyword ideas” again to re-run the search. When you’re doing heavy-duty keyword research, sometimes you need to look beyond what you have brainstormed - so leverage your competitors. Just be sure to ignore keywords that are not relevant to your site.

3. Set your match type to “Exact.”

When looking at data, if you choose broad or phrase match, you’ll end up with inflated keyword counts because it will include longer queries that include your keywords. For example, “learning toys” would include searches for “learning to make wooden toys” with broad match, or “used learning toys” with phrase match. Exact match will show you the true keyword count.

Unless you’re using the tool to work on your AdWords campaign (building AdGroups or looking at advertiser competition or estimated bid prices for broad and phrase match), then you don’t need to see broad and phrase match stats.

4. Add or Remove Columns

By default, you can’t all the data available. Simply click “Show All” to see everything, and remove the columns you don’t need, like Average Position or CPC if you’re not doing AdWords. (Some AdWords advertisers don’t trust the estimates anyway).

Removing columns not only simplifies what you’re looking at, but helps you export only the data you need to text, .CSV or with the Table Tools Firefox plug-in.

5. Jump to Data

If you used the URL option, Google will “chunk” out your keywords into smaller groups, but you can navigate them through links:

6. Sort Data

Don’t forget that the Keyword Tool, Google AdWords and Google Analytics tabular data is sortable just like an Excel spreadsheet.

7. Download ALL Keywords, Don’t Build a List

You can click “Add {match type}” to build a list of the keywords you want, but this won’t keep your search volume data. So make sure you’re looking at the data you want to keep (the columns that are relevant), then click download {option} (text, .CSV):

Then delete the keywords you don’t want from there. For this reason, I suggest keeping your keyword lists tightly focused so they’re easier to work with and make decisions from, rather than every single keyword that might apply to your site (choose a category or a line of products). You could paste the data into one big spreadsheet if you want (a worksheet for every group of keywords). If you know of a more efficient way, please leave us a comment.

Applying Keyword Research

Now we’re ready to apply this data to various marketing activities. These are just examples, not exhaustive applications for each activity.

PPC

If you’re researching for PPC and you sort by advertiser competition (click twice to get low-high), you may spot a decent volume keyword that’s relatively cheap, like “learning express toys.” If you don’t carry that product (and you don’t because it’s a competing toy store), you’ll want to make sure you add “express” to your negative keyword list (if you use broad match).

Come back tomorrow, we’ll cover negative keyword research in more depth.

SEO and Site Usability

Sometimes there are two ways to describe the same thing. What are customers more likely to think of - “educational toys” or “learning toys”? “Educational games” or “learning games”?

You could take a wild guess, but keyword research will give you better insight. If you sort by “Approx. Average Search Volume” (not last month’s searches but average monthly search), you can compare synonyms:

• Applying keyword research to categorization and navigation labels

In this case, a toy retailer would do well to use “Learning Toys” and “Educational Games” as text links in navigation menus. Not only does it give an SEO boost to those category pages, but also has a better chance of being spotted by a customer who’s scanning the page looking for that keyword she typed in the search engine to get to the site.

If you discover highly searched keywords, you may even create categories or prioritize which links appear in your menus (to keep menus manageable, some retailers will “chunk” menus into 7-9 links, with a “view all” or “more” link to see all categories).

• Applying keyword research to merchandizing zones

Different types of products may spike in different months, so featuring them on your home page at different times of the year makes sense. You also provide the category or product page links a bit of an SEO boost by linking directly from the home page (makes it look more important in search engine’s eyes).

From content on Wonderbrains.com’s home page

Melissa and Doug and V Smile seem to be in-demand brands - why not feature them on the home page, or in the Educational Toys or Learning Toys category? Even if your sales data shows your sales for these brands are low, it may be because you’ve buried them in your site and you’re not attracting SEO or PPC traffic for these terms.

• Applying keyword research to site search

You can also manually tweak your site search to make the hottest brands appear on top (as long as your site search tool allows you).

You should also pay attention to synonyms that you may not have optimized internal site search for. Perhaps you lost 50 sales last month simply because you delivered “0 results found” for “educational games” because your category is called “Learning Games.”

If you use keyword tagging for products (which may create keyword optimized pages in search engines, depending on how you implement), you can tag with synonyms.

• Other Applications

Boost your SEO by creating new content (or blog content), adding keywords to your title tags, or using keywords in “anchor text” for your internal linking and in external link building campaigns. Or use keywords and hot products in your email marketing headlines and offers. If you’re really daring, register keyword domains and redirect to your site (to capture type-in-traffic) or build out niche microsites.

Limitations

Despite how uber-excellent this tool is, it’s not perfect. Do keep in mind:

• This is historical data, which can never precisely predict the future. Just because V Smile was all the rage last year, doesn’t mean it’s this year’s hit.

• This data can’t show you conversion rates or your “real” click through. It depends on your SEO and PPC optimization, your competition, your product offering, the relevance of your offer, your price, your landing page, the economy…
• This can’t show you keyword profitability. Maybe you’re burning your budget on high volume keywords - the broad ones where people are just researching and not ready to buy (though you can estimate commercial intent with a tool from Microsoft)
• This data is only Google’s - and Google still only has ~60% market share. Maybe Yahoo and MSN traffic converts better for your industry, and your market prefers these engines.
• Some people claim the estimates are way off when reconciling against their AdWords keyword impression counts. But do keep in mind discrepancies can happen for many reasons:
  • you need to apply the proper geo-targeting filters

  • your campaign may be set to show ads more evenly over time, thus not appear for every search
  • you may exceed your daily budget some days and not appear for every search
  • your ad may not appear on page one every time - search was performed but your position was below 10
  • your match types are different
  • AdWords impressions include the “search network” (AOL, Ask, Shopping.com for example), while the keyword tool restricts to Google.com and Google TLDs (.ca, .co.uk etc)

  Got any other ideas how you can use the Google Keyword Tool? Have you played around with it and found it lacking? Discover a hack or have a tip I missed? Please leave a comment.

  And stay tuned, we’ve got lots of tips on how to maximize Google Tools this week.

Luxury retailer Cartier recently launched a MySpace presence for its Love by Cartier campaign. But it faces an interesting reputation management issue: since MySpace already has hundreds of profiles that use the name Cartier (it is a surname, after all).

If you type in “Cartier MySpace” in Google, this is what you get:

If someone really wants to find the page, they may head over to MySpace and use it’s site search box, and still not find the official page:

You have to type “Love By Cartier” in Google or MySpace to get the link to the Cartier MySpace page (at time of posting, algorithm changes or incoming links to Cartier’s page may change that).

Yahoo’s algorithm does select the right page for “Cartier MySpace”:

Though you can’t control how Google matches pages to the search term (duplicate content filter in action), you can build links to the page you want to rank well to help boost its “Page Rank” which may cause it to beat out other pages in the search engine’s index. (If the search engine indexed 500+ pages from MySpace relevant to the term “Cartier”, it only picks 1 to show in search results, 2 if it uses an indented second result).

Cartier could also nag MySpace to tweak its internal search to rank its page tops for “Cartier” searches, especially since this is an advertising partnership between the two.

This is also an example of why brands should really claim their social network profile names / domains / Facebook Pages and Groups proactively, even if they just sit on them. It’s easy for net citizens to beat you to the punch which makes it harder for you to be found in search engines and social network searches.

Say what?

Marketing Experiments has found the highest performing ecommerce sites address customer motivation, and most visitors are either “hunters” or “browsers”:

1. Hunters already know what they want. They want to find the product quickly and easily. Usable site search, navigation menus and filters are essential to convert hunters.
2. Browsers may be contemplating a purchase, or just “window shopping.” Your goal is to get them to click deeper to products with enticing offers like top rated, best sellers, sale items and new arrivals.

I’d like to add a third category: “howsers.” (Hunter-browsers, not underage doctors.) Howsers are customers that are ready to buy from a certain category but they’re not sure what they want/need from that category. This type of customer is the best of both worlds - closer to conversion (needs stuff ASAP) and more open to suggestive selling and cross-sells. Examples would be someone who’s looking for gifts for an 8 year old boy or redecorating a living room.

Let’s take the example of someone planning a family camping trip next month, but has little to no equipment — like a family of four that has waited 10 years until the youngest rug-rat was old enough to rough it for a week in the woods. (Think personas!)

Example: Sports & Outdoors Retailers and Doogie Howser

Let’s call this fictional family the Howsers, and assume daddy Doogie’s in charge of kitting out the clan for camping. A typical Doogie:

• May have little or no knowledge of camping, or it’s been a while

• Wants to create a memory
• Doesn’t want to get “caught without” - wants to ensure he grabs everything necessary for survival and safety in the bush (and doesn’t want to get blamed for forgetting!)
• Is willing to buy multiple products to ensure a) beautiful memories and b) survival without suffering
• Appreciates product guides and suggestive selling
• Is willing to invest in gear for next summer, and the summer after that…

Our second assumption is that Doogie begins his quest for gear on a sports and outdoors retailer’s home page. The first objective of the home page is to guide Mr. Howser to the virtual camping department and to assure him this is the right online shop to do business with today.

Do typical outdoor gear retailers do this effectively?

OutdoorGB.com

• The only slightly relevant links to camping gear are in the cluttered top sellers menu on the left (highlighting mine).

• There is a camping category, but it’s hidden behind the Outdoor menu. Have trouble spotting that tab? It’s second from the left.
• You must click the Outdoor tab (if you predict camping gear is found behind the veil) to see subcategories, there’s no preview with a dropdown or AJAX flyout menu (example of that is coming up…)

Cabelas

• Cabelas has a link, but it doesn’t stand out against other categories.

• Count the competing calls to action: shop the sale of over 2,000 unspecified items, shop the bargain bin (probably winter stock), find a store location, get a Visa, buy a boat, get a gun, request a catalog, pick up in store, find an outdoor adventure…
• The menu link and the search box are the only options to find camping products. Customers who look closely will get to their destination, but this is not optimal usability/design.

Altrec

• Camping Equipment is a featured link, indicating Altrec believes a significant number of site visitors are interested in that category right now.

• Behind the Gear button, camping subcategories can be found, though the menu is very long and even has its own scroll bar.
• There is nothing in the body of the page that speaks to our case-persona, Doogie Howser.

Backcountry

• Camp / Hike is placed at the top of the Gear menu on the left (we can assume this changes with the season).

• For customers who tend to scan text, an image of a tent and a list of camping subcategories helps the visitor hone in on subcategories, and see that Backcountry carries a range of products. This helps reassure the customer of convenience of shopping from one store (save time, effort and perhaps shipping). Backcountry has placed this list above the fold.

REI

• REI makes “Camping & Hiking” the first link in its horizontal navigation menu, and links from the left menu.

• There are a couple references to camping in the body.
• Below: Using a hover menu, you can see the full range of camping subcategories without clicking. It’s nicely organized into Gear, Electronics, Kitchen and Safety - REI likely has everything Doogie needs and he can find it easily.

Cotswold

• Camping & Festivals appears first in left hand navigation, and there are links in body copy to camping products.

• Featured Item and Offer of the Month are camping-related.

• When you click on the Camping & Festivals link, you get a submenu with options that may appeal to our persona: Camping Starter Packs, 3 & 4 Person Tents and The Family Unit. You can tell Cotswold has thought through customer segments and purchase scenarios.

• The starter packs are a great example of product bundling. Remove the paradox of choice and provide expert advice / service at the same time.
• The “Family Unit” section includes products that are not necessarily camping gear but are relevant cross sells, like kites.

I didn’t see anything compelling on these home pages, but I did spot a good example on L.L. Bean’s camping category page. “Our Best Selection of Family Tents Ever” gives purpose to the image and a persuasive message to check out the tents.

I’m not arguing that outdoor gear sites have to cater to campers this month. Rather, if campers are an attractive and profitable segment at this time of year, most of these home pages leave opportunities on the table. Checking out a handful of competitors (wearing the “hat” of your persona) can give you ideas on how to adjust your site for maximum promotions - what to redesign or what to test.

Of course, if you can predict what people are looking for when customers land on your home page you can deliver more relevant offers. Sitebrand’s personalization suite allows you to serve up different home page and landing page messaging based on referral keywords from search engines.

How do you identify attractive customer segments / product categories?

1. Historical sales data, especially seasonal trends.

2. Google Trends keyword search data:

You can research different product categories like climbing gear, fishing gear, hiking gear and camping gear; or even synonyms for keywords like camping equipment, camping gear, camping tents and camping supplies.

The beauty of Google Trends is you can further segment by geography:

You may discover that UK residents are 12 times more likely to use the term “equipment” than “gear.” Make sure your category labels and marketing messages use the most common terms for each market you serve. You may even apply this to your SEO, PPC and email subject lines.

3. Web analytics keyword and conversion data. (Don’t miss our upcoming webinar with Analytics legend Avinash Kaushik July 17th.)

Once you select your focus, you need to brainstorm purchase scenarios where a customer might buy a range of your products all at the same time (cha-ching), especially for seasonal product. Then make sure your home page speaks to this customer, and the rest of your site (categorization, navigation, merchandising, searchandising et cetera) supports the sales process. You may even want to do some usability testing as well.

Interview on the latest in link building strategies to help retail SEO with Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts from the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

See More IRCE 2008 Interviews…

We conducted 16 interviews with various ecommerce vendors at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

1. How to choose ecommerce software and technology - Bernardine Wu, CEO, FitForCommerce
2. How retailers can sell more online with social commerce - Jay Shaffer, VP Worldwide Sales & Marketing, Powerreviews
3. Hackersafe is now McAfee Secure - Rich Murphy, McAfee
4. The benefits of RIA’s for ecommerce stores - Graeme Grant, COO, Allurent
5. Why online retailers should be blogging - Darren Tomey, VP Sales, Compendium
6. How do ratings and reviews help online retailers? - Sam Decker, Chief Marketing Officer, Bazaarvoice
7. When bad people ruin good online marketing - Ryan Douglas, PlumberSurplus.com
8. Direct international shoppers to local sites automatically - Justin Skogen, Director, Enterprise Sales, DigitalElement
9. The state of affiliate marketing in online retail - Larry Joseloff, VP Content, Shop.org
10. Multi-store retailing - Roy Rubin, CEO, Varien
11. How online stores use images to improve customer experience - Stephen Kristy, CEO, LiquidPixels
12. Comparison Shopping Engine Tips for Online Retailers - Michael Lambert, CEO, MerchantAdvantage
13. Link building strategies for Internet retail SEO - Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
14. Direct to consumer manufacturers can reduce channel conflict - Ed Stevens, CEO, Shopatron
15. New eCommerce service lets you shop online with a friend - John Jackson, CEO, DecisionStep
16. Product recommendation engines improve customer experience - Scott Doan, VP Sales, Strands

Subscribe to the Get Elastic RSS feed or by email at the top of the page to be alerted when the remaining interviews become available.

Customer reviews certainly help shoppers, but they are not substitutes for weak or generic product descriptions. Unique product descriptions help your search engine optimization, help overcome your customer FUDDs and ultimately sell more product!

I want to share a few tips for creating unique, compelling product page copy using customer review content - even when your site has few or no reviews.

Death to Stock Manufacturer Product Descriptions

SEO and Duplicate Content

Our example is the “LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set.” This product is carried by most toy retailers, and many are just using the stock product description from the manufacturer:

Your fridge door is the perfect place to develop a taste for reading. Nobody goes hungry for learning with this set of 26 colorful easy-grip magnetic letters and magnetic letter reader that attaches securely to your fridge. Each letter talks, sings and teaches letter names, letter sounds and learning songs. Put a letter into the reader to hear its name, its sound or a fun phonics song. Your kids might not eat their vegetables, but with the Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set they can learn to spell them. What it Teaches: * Letter names * Letter sounds * Learning songs

Nothing wrong with the description itself, it’s actually very clever. But typing “Your fridge door is the perfect place to develop a taste for reading” into Google delivers 1,520 results, which tells us Google has indexed that many pages using this phrase. The danger to sites using stock descriptions is they may not appear in search results due to the duplicate content filter.

Writing a unique description, or at least modifying it so it’s not word-for-word is a better approach, especially to capture long-tail search traffic.

Address Fears, Uncertainties, Doubts and Deal-breakers

Manufacturer’s descriptions are typically written before the product is sold to the general public. Copywriters don’t necessarily have enough customer research to answer these questions:

• Who buys this item and why?

• Did the product live up to expectations?
• How long did the product last?
• What unexpected uses do customers discover for the product?
• What’s the worse thing about this product?
• Would the customer recommend it to people like themselves?

But you have access to free market research that addresses these concerns - customer reviews. Plus, you can identify common FUDDs - fears, uncertainties, doubts and dealbreakers that can help you write more persuasive copy, establish trust with customers and convert comparison shoppers - even if yours is not the lowest price.

How to Use Customer Reviews to Improve Product Copy

Start with your featured products, best sellers, highest margin or seasonal products.

Custom copywriting does take time, especially when you’re performing thorough customer research by reading a number of reviews. Choose items you expect will get most mileage for your time investment.

Tip: Check out Amazon’s Bestseller lists by navigating to any category and clicking the Bestsellers link!

Tap into the largest customer review bases for each product.

This could be Amazon, Epinions, Rate-it-All or any other review community. You might want to Google the product itself “{product} + reviews” and start with the first result.

I like using Amazon because I’ve found it not only has a large number of reviews, but the review quality is usually very good. There are great sort tools to help you hone in by star-rating, rank by most-helpful or even search within reviews for keywords. I do find the search feature’s precision to be lacking. If you want to find reviews with the phrase “would not recommend this for” it will match single words, and plurals / alternate endings for the word “recommend.”

Example: Using our LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set as our case, here’s how you can leverage Amazon…

From the product page, scroll, scroll and scroll some more until you find the “See All Product Description” link.

Hello! This product has won some awards.

• Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, Gold Seal and Snap Award, 2003

• Parenting 2003 Toys of the Year Award
• Toy Wishes All Star, Preschool Category, 2003
• Toy of the Year, Nick Jr.com, 2003

These are strong value propositions. Use this to your advantage in home page merchandising zones, PPC copy, email marketing as well as product page copy.

You won’t necessarily find awards for every product, but who knows what gems you’ll find.

Read reviews.

You don’t have to read ALL the reviews, just a handful of reviews voted most helpful buy the community and a few of the lowest rated. As you scan, clip quotes that stand out to you. Look for:

• Product strengths: “What I love most about this is that because it is magnetic, we do not seem to lose them unlike the wooden puzzle ones my 8 year old used when he was younger.”

• Benefits to the owner, gift giver or secondary users: “It’s great that it’s in the kitchen too so I can cook or clean while she plays.”
• Unexpected uses: “…you can use your washer and/or dryer. We do a lot of learning while I do laundry.”
• Natural cross-sell or upsell opportunities: “Since any magnet can damage your TV, VCR, and other electronic devices, we purchased a large magnetic board for her room, and that helps us encourage her to keep her magnetic items in there.”
• Cautions: “WARNING about the magnet. Keep at least 6″ away from pacemakers, and avoid contact with magnetic computer media, including floppy disks, Zip disks, removable Hard Disk Drives, Televisions, and Computer Video Monitors, other magnetic media including credit cards, ID badges…”

Pay closest attention to negative reviews.

Should you discover (as in this example) that the product is often defective, you need to address this both in your copy and in your selling policies.

Are you willing and able to offer the assurance of free return shipping on defective products? It could be the deciding factor on whether a comparison shopper chooses you or your competition. You could add copy like:

“Though most customers are extremely satisfied with this item, a small percentage of customers report the product does not play the correct letter sounds for some letters. In the event that your product does not work as expected, we will gladly offer free return shipping and send you a new set.”

Use Buzzillions.com

Buzzillions is a popular customer reviews aggregator from the folks at Power Reviews. One feature it has that I haven’t found elsewhere is a “Review Snapshot” that gives you a list of Pros, Cons and Best Uses as mentioned by customers.

Under the pros tab you’ll find fantastic adjectives to use in your copy.
The cons tab lists fears you must address in your copy, or gives you ideas for cross-sells. Hard to clean? Suggest a cleaner. No storage container? Suggest a suitable container.
Best uses helps you develop “Recommended For” copy. You can also add these products to the appropriate gift finder tools, or add product tags if your site uses them.

You may discover different ways of gleaning from customer reviews than the ones mentioned here. The takeaway here is that you tap into the consumer conversation that’s freely available to you, and consider how you can leverage it to improve your product copy. If you want to take this to the next level and use customer reviews to market to the sexes, check out Holly Buchanan’s post Using Customer Reviews to Pick Up Men, Women.