Southern-Fried Search Marketing Secret Family Recipe

Today’s Y!Store blog is another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and developer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, located in sleepy Starkville, Mississippi. Rob blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, is the author of a new book on Yahoo! Store: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies, and conducts Yahoo! Store internet marketing workshops from time to time.

How’re y’all doing? Back in March, I wrote a blog post about my obsession with converting keywords. In that article, you learned what converting keywords are, how important they are to your online success, and how to find them in your Store Manager and other places.

To recap, converting keywords are the search phrases folks look for when buying what you sell. You can find these nuggets of gold in your merchant order emails, inside referrers from exporting your orders, inside your Manager’s Sales reports, in paid search conversion tracking reports (if you buy ads with Y!SM or Google), and inside reports of some third party analytics software (if you use their software). You should have a converting keyword for almost half of your store orders.

This is serious business! My bigger stores have around 5,000 unique converting keyword phrases with some phrases generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in sales. Hey, look! If you don’t track and optimize your store’s converting keywords, you’re giving thousands and thousands of dollars to the competition. In this post, I’m going to show you how to use these money words to crank up your search engine marketing to increase traffic and sales to your Yahoo! Store.

Search Engine Marketing 101

Search engine marketing (SEM) is simply making sure that shoppers find your store when they’re looking to buy what you sell. Search engines (like Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) send millions of visitors a day to sites just like yours. A search engine visitor types in some keywords and presses the search button. A search engine results page appears with two kinds of search results: free search results (also know as organic or algorithmic) and paid search ads (pay-per-click text ads).

You want your store to rank well in both the free results and in the paid search ads for the words shoppers use to buy what you sell. Since you now know your converting keywords, let’s do something with them! I’ll show you what I do for each converting keyword I can find.

Introducing Southern-fried Search Engine Marketing

Now I’m going to tell you a little bit more about what I do with converting keywords to get more traffic and sell more stuff . I cover this in much more detail in my book, blog posts, and seminars, but here’s a taste of our secret family recipe for Southern-fried search marketing. Please don’t tell my momma I told y’all, ok?

• Check your site for the converting keywords: When you get a converting keyword phrase, make sure that the words from that phrase actually appear somewhere on your store, like in the body text of your store’s section or item pages. And then check to see if the actual keyword phrase appears on your site. If not, add the phrase to your site!
• Check your search engine rankings: Check to see if a page from your domain ranks in the top 10 search results for that keyword phrase. Search Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. If your don’t have a page in the top 10, optimize for it. If you do rank for your phrase, optimize anyway! More about this in a bit.
• Check your paid search campaigns: Finally, check to see if you’re buying that keyword phrase in your paid search campaigns at Yahoo! Search Marketing, Google Adwords, and soon at MSN. If not, buy that keyword phrase, cousin!

For example, let’s dig in with a real converting keyword phrase from a sale on one of my sites that occurred only a couple of hours ago: Orange Dog Collars.

Search Your Site for the Phrase

The first thing you should do with a new converting keyword phrase is make sure that the converting keyword phrase actually appears in the text of your site. The easiest way to do this is to search your store using built-in Store Search which looks at the NAME, CODE, and CAPTION fields for every page in the store and then returns a ranked list with every page containing any of the words in that phrase.

For example, on my site a store search for Orange Dog Collars returns a list of all the pages with Orange and/or Dog and/or Collars, which is hundreds of pages.

I also search for the exact phrase by placing quotes around the phrase. For example, a store search for “Orange Dog Collars” only returns a list of pages containing the exact phrase within the text of the NAME, CODE, and CAPTION fields.

Pick the Most Relevant Page for the Keyword Phrase

I believe that for every keyword search, there’s a matching page on your site that has the just the information your potential customer is searching for. I call this page the most relevant page (MRP). The best way to find the most relevant page on your site for any given keyword phrase is to simply ask your favorite search engine. For example, search on Yahoo! for a keyword phrase. Usually whatever page of yours that ranks best for that keyword phrase is the most relevant page on your site for that keyword phrase. What if you don’t rank in the top 10 or so for that search phrase? Do you have to dig down in the search results to find your most relevant page? Nope!

Yahoo has a really cool tool, the site:domain filter. Search on Yahoo! for site: domain.com keyword phrase and your results for that keyword query are limited to that domain. How ‘bout an example using a shameless plug? Search on Yahoo! for site:amazon.com Yahoo! Store Book and my book, Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies comes up first!

Sometimes it’s hard to tell what page on your site is the most relevant page for a search phrase. Sometimes there are too many somewhat related pages. Sometimes there are no related pages! Either way, you now have an invitation to create a page around that converting keyword phrase.

For example, the phrase Orange Dog Collars needed a page created because the 20-odd collars we sell are all offered in orange (and five other colors) and they were sorted by manufacturer or by style (plastic, nylon, coated nylon, rubber, leather, etc.) I created this page http://www.gundogsupply.com/orange-dog-collars-kwp.html earlier this year.

When I search for Orange Dog Collars, this page ranks #1 on Google, #3 on Yahoo!, nowhere to be found on MSN, and #2 on Ask.com. For some reason that page isn’t even in listed the MSN index, so I’ll have to work on it a bit!

Now that you know your keyword phrase and what page you want to optimize for it, in my next post I’ll show you how to optimize the most relevant page for converting keyword phrases. I’ll show you some basic things any merchant can do to optimize for all the search engines, like including the phrase in the most important SEO element – the title tag, adding the converting keyword phrase to the body text, and linking to that page from other related pages using the converting keyword phrase in the link text.

Rob Snell
guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

More Thoughts about SES

I attended a bunch of sessions last Tuesday and Wednesday at the Search Engine Strategies conference. I came away with a lot of information and insights to share, but these topics are so important that it’s going to take me a while to get to them.

However, I wanted to share one quote from one of the presenters, Brian Mark, CTO of Toolbarn.com. During the SEM Retailer session, Brian was showing screenshots of various search marketing ads his company ran and how subtle tweaks to the wording saw dramatic increases in conversion rates. He was trying to explain how his company really wanted to emphasize the value proposition of the products they sell (mainly tools). What was it he said?

Our customers don’t want [to buy] a drill, they want a hole.

If a big light bulb didn’t go off in your head, re-read that sentence. Customers are not so much interested in the products themselves, but rather how the product or some aspect of how you will fulfill the order is a solution to a problem or a need. (Of course there may be exceptions to this so feel free to take issue with my interpretation of his comment.)

What This Means to You

• Consider carefully how your search marketing ads (or any copy on your site) are speaking to the needs of the customer. Are you solving their problem be it by offering more variety, a better value, or unmatched service?
• Anyone can likely come along and match you on price. You can gain a competitive advantage by solving other problems such as shipping orders sooner than the mega merchants, offering phone support, or building a community of visitors.
• As soon as you know what your value proposition is, make sure your customers know as well. Use this test: Show your store to a stranger for 5 seconds and then ask them if they can tell you what you sell and why they would buy from you. If they can’t do this, you’re not making it clear enough to them.

So tool merchants, start selling those “holes”, and non-tool merchants, start figuring out what the “holes” are for your market.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Dispatches from Search Engine Strategies

I am attending some sessions at the Search Engine Strategies conference this week. Here are some brief (very brief) thoughts on one of the sessions I attended.

Search Behavior Research Update

• Anne Frisbee of Yahoo! Search Marketing shared details of a report, The Long Winding Road to the Cash Register. Some interesting findings from that:
  • Search allows for research at every phase of the buying process meaning that instead of a funnel of conversion, merchants need to think of it as more of an hour glass or “tumbler”.Takeaway: It’s never too late to convince buyers to purchase from you if they are researching at each phase. Create compelling content that buyers researching products will find.
  • Buyers enjoy researching and often do not always purchase right away.Takeaway: Give buyers a way to bookmark your site so they can come back, and even better give them a reason to return to your site by offering product reviews, testimonials, and product comparisons.
• Bill Barnes of Enquiro presented some eye-tracking research (where researchers track where users look on web pages when using them). The reports are not available for free but there is more information and sample pages available on the web site.
• David Willams of 360i presented research into search queries and transactions that begin and end with non-branded and branded searches. You can download their latest whitepaper with this research for free (registration required).
• Robert Murray of iProspect spoke about how users search and their behavior when searches are unsuccessful. I wrote a post about this study that includes a link to download it, and what it covers.

Stay tuned for more.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

New feature: Sitemap for your store

As part of our continuous effort to help our merchants succeed online, we are happy to introduce a new feature.  Starting 6/28, you will be able to create a Sitemap file for your store.

What is it?

Residing in the root level of your domain, the Sitemap file contains all pages in your store that were created using the Store Editor.  This includes all products, sections and content pages.  Along with the page URLs, the Sitemap file also contains information on when the file was last updated.

How will it help?

The Sitemap file is used to provide information to search engines in an effort to optimize the site indexing process.  Along with informing the crawlers of all pages within your store, the Sitemap file also reports the time at which the last set of changes took place.

Once the Sitemap file is enabled on the Search Engines page, merchants will also be able to proactively inform search engines about pages in their store by submitting their Sitemap file to programs such as Google Sitemaps.

To further support the benefits of the Google Sitemaps program, we will also be introducing a feature also found on the Search Engines page that allows merchants to verify ownership of their stores with Google.  Once ownership has been verified, merchants will then be able to access additional tools and features from their Google Sitemaps console.

What do I need to do?

Participation is easy. Both of these opt-in features will be accessible from the “Search Engines” link within the Store Manager.  Once the feature is enabled, a Sitemap file will be generated every time the Store Editor is published.

For merchants wishing to participate with the Google Sitemaps program, information can be found at: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

We are very committed to providing you with tools that will make you succeed online, and we encourage you try out this new feature.

Duncan Shen
Yahoo! Small Business

For more information about the Sitemap feature, consult the Sitemap help available on 6/28/06.