As you could’ve guessed from my involvement in that retail search marketing whitepaper from earlier this week, I’ve been looking at a lot of retail sites of late. And what Aaron is writing about really hit the proverbial nail on the head, specifically his 3rd paragraph:

Some types of filtering are good for humans while being wasteful for search engines. For example, some people may like to sort through products by price levels or look at different sizes and colors, but pages that are almost duplicate with the exception of price point, size, model number, or item color may create near duplicate content that search engines do not want to index.

Exactly. That’s very common on retail sites, especially the major retailers that need to have the same 50 products sortable in 50 different ways, with each way/page chewing up internal link equity. Another similar issue with retail sites is the need to have hundreds of internal links, to category and sub-category pages, for example, across the site. It’s terrible SEO.

And then, on the PPC side, Brad Geddes points out that Google AdWords now has a retail-specific help center. I would assume that could be pretty useful for your PPC campaigns.

Technorati Tags: seo, retail seo, retail search marketing, aaron wall, brad geddes

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Two Quick Bits on Retail SEO/SEM

Marchex/TrafficLeader published the report today, under the title 2007 Search Marketing Insights for Retailers. In addition to my contributions on SEO for retailers, Marchex’s Jake Berry covers shopping feeds and shopping search engines.

As per usual policy on this blog, I’ll just point out the appropriate links and leave any commentary to other blogs and forums.

• Official news release
• Download 2007 Search Marketing Insights for Retailers here

Other coverage:

• adotas: Marchex Publishes Search Best Practices
• Search Engine Land: Free Whitepaper: Search Strategies For Retailers
• Search Engine Watch: Search Presents Challenges for Retailers

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

SEO for Retailers download

MarketingVox recaps a BusinessWeek article that talks about Big Brands pushing small business out of the paid search market: “…brand giants like Best Buy and Zale are diverting more and more of their marketing to search ads, driving up prices and stealing customers from smaller businesses that have in the past bought the bulk of the ads.”

Timely, then, that I recently did this interview with PPC guru Andrew Goodman discussing exactly this topic. And before that, my interview with Lee Odden also covered a lot of ground for small businesses looking for new ways to market online.

As I continue to help my wife do some marketing for her new real estate blog via MyBlogLog, these should come in handy: SoloSEO’s Missing MyBogLog Tools. Very, very cool.

And in some non-news, Google no longer includes links to Yahoo Maps and Mapquest.

Yawn.

Why should they? Yahoo and Mapquest should be grateful for the free link they’ve had all this time. And the outcry from other bloggers is funny. I’m sure they all advise their clients to include prominent links to their biggest competitors right on the home page. “Welcome to our web site. Did you want to visit Competitor A or Competitor B, instead?” Please.

UPDATE: Looks like Simon agrees with me on this one. “It’s just them being a business.” Exactly.

Technorati Tags: sem, ppc, mybloglog, soloseo, google, google maps

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

11:00 pm SEO News (and Non-news)

What shocked me a bit was when I polled the group as to who was currently doing any kind of search marketing. Two people out of the twenty raised their hands. The remaining either were not doing any search marketing of were completely unaware of its existence.

So, so true. This is one reason why I think it’s so great that the SES conferences continue to do our Small Biz session, and I hope Danny’s new SMX conference will, too. (Though, at only two days long and with a stated target of advanced marketing, I have a feeling small biz won’t be on the agenda.) But, really, the conference sessions are geared toward the 10% from Dave’s meeting who know about search marketing.

How do we get the other 90% to hop on board?

For the small biz owners who are doing SEM and SEO: Hats off for being well ahead of the game where small businesses and online marketing are concerned.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Small biz? Doing SEM? You’re ahead of the game…

Of note (i.e., stuff I’d post about in greater length if I could):

• IAC, parent of Ask.com, is planning a new local search destination they’re calling “AskCity,” according to the ClickZ news blog. It’ll integrate information from Ask.com, CitySearch, Ticketmaster, and Evite. And that sounds, to me, similar to Yahoo’s approach with the recent integration of Flickr and Upcoming.org (events) into Yahoo Local.
• Shari Thurow recently completed a 3-part interview Michael Yang, founder and CEO of shopping search engine Become.com. You can read Part One here, then look for links to Pts. 2 and 3 at the bottom of the page.
• If you’re looking for a fun time-killer, David Wallace has a photo trivia contest which shows pix of SEO/SEM personalities with their faces blocked. You have to guess who’s who. I got five right.

That’s all. Off I go!

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Light posting (& couple quick links)

Google Base has already been integrated into the main SERPs for some real estate searches and, if memory serves me correctly, for some job-related searches. But really, the possibilities are almost endless and there’s nothing to suggest we won’t see more of Base being integrated into the main SERPs in the future.

So if you’re not familiar with it, start with what Adam recommended: Google Base Info. & Quick Facts.

Technorati Tags: google, google base, small business, online marketing, sem

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Have you tried Google Base?

Todd Malicoat recently shared on his blog a list of 11 Rising Barriers to Entry for Small Businesses on the Web. It’s a thought-provoking list, and as someone concerned about small businesses succeeding on the web, I find it reply-provoking, too. Unfortunately, there are a couple items on Todd’s list I find ambiguous enough not to be able to reply to with any intelligence. So, here’s how I’d reply to 9 of Todd’s 11.

1. Highly intelligent PPC automation tools and arbitrageurs

Success in AdWords isn’t based strictly on bid amounts, thankfully. Click-thru rate and landing page quality are big keys to PPC success. Yahoo’s new platform will be similar to AdWords, giving small businesses a chance to overcome automated tools used by the Big Boys. I’ll take an intelligent small business owner writing custom copy, combined with a well done, highly relevant landing page any day over a piece of software.

Story: My wife is a real estate agent. 2.5 years ago I launched a comprehensive AdWords campaign for her, targeting dozens of keywords with separate ad copy for each of the cities in the local market. Each ad has a custom landing page that matches the ad copy 100%. (I trust Google scores her landing pages incredibly high on their quality scale.) I started out with ridiculously low bids (for such a competitive industry) and a low monthly budget. Her ads proved very popular and quickly grabbed the top spots, above Big Real Estate sites with bigger budgets and automated tools at their disposal. And her ads have stayed there, even though I’ve never once upped her bid prices. As long as the system rewards quality, a human had better be able to beat a computer program.

2. Age factors impacting trust score

But age is just one factor in determining trust. Great content, quality inbound links, etc. can help even the newest sites score enough on the trust meter to rank well on semi-competitive terms and get traffic organically. (On highly competitive terms, agreed that age is a bigger barrier.)

3. Ad agencies catching on to SEO

Newspapers are also “catching on” to the web, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping online news sites from finding an audience. If I’m a small business owner marketing on the web, ad agencies learning SEO would be among the least of my concerns.

4. User data validation for trust score

Pass. (Unless Todd wants to clarify the direction he’s going with this.)

5. Savvy affiliates with established sites that don’t like competition

If I’m a small business owner selling, say … computer accessories (an industry with lots of affiliates), the sheer quantity of sites using PPC and taking up organic spots would be a challenge to overcome. But that’s where the small business owner can:

A) Work Harder — affiliate sites don’t have physical addresses and can’t take advantage of local search marketing, for example. Affiliate sites also can’t benefit from user-generated content such as customer reviews and ratings that are becoming so prevalent today.

B) Be More Creative — most of the Yahoo Groups I’m on (almost two dozen) don’t take kindly to affiliate folks coming on the list and promoting (spamming) their affiliate sites. But they generally do take kindly to actual business owners participating in the conversation. Most savvy web users and shoppers would tend to trust a real business owner more than Affiliate Guy out to make a quick buck.

6. SE’s shifting of the content revenue model

Pass. More details, please.

7. Diminishing conversion rates for link requests

But the flip side of that is the incredible ease and low barrier to entry of creating a blog as part of your small business web site. For many small businesses, time spent sending out link request emails would be better spent writing linkable content.

8. Just like the “real world” $$$$$$ will again = trust

As quickly as the Big Boys can buy trust, they can and do lose it right back with pitiful customer service. I work for a small ISP / webdev shop. On the ISP side of our company, our competitors are: AOL, MSN, the phone company (DSL), and the cable company (cable Internet). You may start with one of them because they’ve bought your trust, but many of you will end up with us because you need to be able to speak to a human and get help. Have you ever heard anyone rave about the phone company’s customer support? Or the cable company’s?

Hmmm. On the other hand, if Todd is referring to the Big Boys being able to spend a lot of money to build a high-quality web site that people trust … I don’t buy that, either. We just redesigned a client’s web site — a retired mom and pop home business — for very low 4-figures, and since the redevelopment, they’ve had orders from 15 different countries in the past 3-4 months. That’s trust.

9. Ad agencies playing ball with SEO’s

Same thoughts as in #3 above.

10. The day Aaron retires from building free tools

Hee-hee! Very true! We’re all in trouble when the free tools dry up, from Aaron and others.

11. Leveling of information between buyers and sellers

I think this is to the benefit of small businesses. Small businesses are the ones better able to get necessary information out to customers who seek it. They can reply to email requests much quicker, and with a human touch that the Big Boys usually can’t touch. This gets to one of the points I wanted to make at SES, but didn’t have time to discuss in my presentation:

The successful small business has to take perceived weaknesses and convert them into strengths. You’re small? Great. Smaller = quicker. React quickly to new opportunities and challenges.

Thanks to Todd for a good discussion point. Those 11 items are things small businesses should be aware of whether starting out or not.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Barriers to entry … or opportunities?

ClickZ.com re-ran an article by Justin Sanger today that I missed the first time around. He takes a well-deserved shot at the click guarantees offered to small business owners by Internet yellow pages acting as resellers for AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

Not familiar with the concept? Here’s a quick overview:

Guaranteed click packages enable businesses to purchase a predefined number of clicks at a predetermined price, creating a straightforward product that’s easy for customers to comprehend and thereby more easily sold. Today, all major IYPs and most of the larger aggregators of small business accounts sell guaranteed click advertising on Yahoo and Google.

(emphasis added by me)

So you have a small business that wants to use the web to get traffic, but maybe doesn’t have a good enough web site to rank organically — so, enter PPC. But that’s too complicated for many small biz owners to understand, and too time-consuming to track. So their yellow pages rep, or someone similar, sells them a PPC campaign with a guaranteed amount of clicks. The PPC campaign runs on 2nd- and 3rd-tier search sites/networks that no one uses — and, as the story below illustrates, often don’t even have a public web page. Says Justin:

Many of these networks serve millions upon millions of clicks per month. Never mind that these networks are loose configurations of obscure search properties, numbering in the hundreds. In other words, never mind the quality of the clicks generated behind the veil of simplified Google and Yahoo products.

Yep. Click guarantees suck. Here’s the story I mentioned earlier:

A couple months ago I took a call from a small business owner in our area. I’ll call her Amy. Amy had paid for a listing in the phone company’s online yellow pages. The one-year package she bought included a guarantee of XX amount of traffic.

Problem was, Amy never saw an increase in traffic to her site, never saw an increase in phone calls, customers, anything. With about two months left in the contract, she called to cancel after the year was up. She explained that the package she bought hadn’t worked - aside from an expected seasonal jump, the traffic hadn’t increased, etc.

What happened?

For the final two months of the contract, traffic to her site spiked. Unique users were up almost 100%. Page views were up about 75%. Here’s what Amy’s stats looked like:

When we dug deeper into the stats, we discovered some strange things:

• none of the new traffic came from the phone company’s online yellow pages; instead, it came from oddly-named search engines and other domains
• many of these referring sites didn’t actually have an active web site
• many of these referring domains had private registrations so you couldn’t see who owns the domain
• more than 90% of the traffic hit the home page and left immediately — a percentage far too high to be human traffic

The only conclusion we could draw was that automated bots / scripts were hitting the home page to make it look like traffic had increased. Technically speaking, traffic did increase. Just not human traffic. And that’s why click guarantees suck.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Why Click Guarantees Suck

Another well-attended session in one of the big rooms. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org opened up, and his presentation focused on how the algorithms handle link analysis. Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea followed that up with a look at some recent search engine patent applications, and suggested they may offer clues to where algorithms are headed. He also talked about the ways engines are trying to understand a searcher’s intent better, using as an example the ability for an engine to decide if a search for “blues” was intended for the style of music, the color, or the hockey team in St. Louis.

But the best single presentation of the week, in my opinion, came from Jon Glick of Become.com, who spent a handful of years as Yahoo’s Senior Manager for Search. With that background, Jon has inside info. about algorithms that very few others have. Here are my (sometimes paraphrased) notes from Jon’s presentation:

• Search engines keep a history of your site and track how often pages change. Repeated “meaningful changes” can increase the frequency your site is crawled. (Note: This is the concept I discussed in Training the Crawlers back in May.)
• SEs track the rate of change of a page’s links. A sudden jump in inbound links will lead to scrutiny. But the algorithms make exceptions for this combination: a site/page that gets a lot of buzz (news & blog posts) and a lot of searches. (If that doesn’t sound like a recipe for avoiding the so-called “sandbox”, nothing does.) These sites will get an editorial review to make sure they show up in the SERPs.
• Quality Score is a new factor being used by Google AdWords, and will also be part of Yahoo’s new PPC platform.
• SEs evaluate your outbound links, and give a “spamminess score” based on your link profile.
• Personalization — engines are treading carefully and hesitant to rely too much on this.
• Shorter URLs are generally crawled more often, and rank higher, because the algorithm considers them to be more authoritative.
• Sites with an RSS feed are generally crawled more often because the engine assumes the site offers fresh content.
• Yahoo! uses more than 80 factors in its search algorithm.
• The three major factors for ranking across the engines are still
  1. Content - keyword-rich copy
  2. Connectivity - in the form of links
  3. Outside opinion - in the form of anchor text

Now, on the surface, none of these bullet items on their own are too earth-shattering. But put them all together, and consider the source, and you have some real solid information on SEO/SEM best practices.

tags: sessj06, sessanjose06, link analysis, patents, sandbox, yahoo, seo, sem

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

SES notes: Search Engine Algorithm Research

Ding! Ding! Ding! As someone who does not do a ton of PPC work, I found this session to be tremendously helpful and full of great information. In fact, I’m going to retype my handwritten notes word-for-word and cross my fingers you get as much out of it that I did.

PHIL STELTER

(from Range Online Media)

• focus on setting and reaching goals, not clicks; “CLICKS ARE NOT A GOAL”
• test all creative - you only think you know what the searcher wants; what works for your competition may not work for you; creative must match your “brand voice”

TITLES

• most important element of the ad — must catch searcher’s attention
• use keywords
• always use proper grammar (through the entire ad text, too)

DESCRIPTIONS

• customize each description by the creative or the keyword
• clearly indicate your unique value proposition

DISPLAY URL

• use of Nike.com worked better than Niketown.com - better CTR and ROI

TEST

• seasonal creative, promotions, dayparting, geo-targeting
• turn OFF the Ad Optimizer in AdWords

INCLUDE PRICE IN CREATIVE?

• won’t necessarily increase CTR
• sometimes Yes, sometimes No
• high-maintenance

DARREN KUHN

(from Resolution Media)

• Google now the best system to test multiple creative, at least until new Yahoo! platform is done
• ask the engines for CTR averages for your industry
• success is determined by CTR and conversion

tags: sessj06, sessanjose06, ppc, adwords, YSM, sem, phil stelter, darren kuhn

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

SES notes: Creating Compelling Ads