In case you haven’t noticed, it’s the age of images in search, as so aptly put in AdAge Digital’s recent article, In Age of Pinterest, Instagram, Marketers Need an Image strategy.

Pinterest, currently hot after two years on the Web, has over 11 million registered users, 9 million of which are monthly active Facebook-connected users.

It’s the only social networking site with a predominantly female audience. With over 100 million unique monthly visits (MOVs) in February, Pinterest is one of the fastest growing sites on the Web.

Experian Hitwise put Pinterest among the top 30 websites in the U.S. A recent referral traffic report by Shareaholic states, “Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.”

Pinterest works for retailers because it gives them the ability to share merchandise with the power of visual imagery. Additionally, a presence on Pinterest gives retailers the ability to listen and learn what consumers want, while engaging with consumers across other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter (reached through Pinterest’s platform).

Pinterest Drives Retail Sales

Rapid adoption of Pinterest is fueled by reports that its users are highly likely to purchase items from the social network.

• PriceGrabber reports 21 percent of respondents have purchased items found on Pinterest boards.
• A Bizrate Insights survey, based on 3,741 online shoppers in March, reported over 1 in 4 shoppers purchased an item directly from image-sharing sites such as Pinterest by clicking an image viewed. Additionally, 37 percent of consumers saw items they wanted but did not buy.

Pinterest Demographics

A large percentage of Pinterest users are women. Google DoubleClick Ad Planner shows Pinterest with an 80 percent female vs. 20 percent male demographic, primarily in the 25-44 age group. Men, however, have started using the site, with sports teams creating Pinterest boards for their male audience. President Obama also pins on Pinterest.

Pinterest Provides A Targeted Audience

Retailers can use information from Experian Hitwise and Google Ad Planner to see exactly who makes up their user base on Pinterest and what products might do well. Women are the core audience, which is good for retailers. Research shows that women make the online purchasing decisions for roughly 75 percent of American households, making Pinterest a good way to reach this highly coveted demographic.

Rise Of Images In Search

Since search became more social, images have played an increasingly important role. The attractive content on Pinterest, and continuing user interest in visuals, may be reasons behind Pinterest’s sudden rise.

The visual aspect is what separates Pinterest from other social networking sites as it allows users to share visual concepts (a picture is worth a thousand words). Visuals remain in the mind’s eye; whereas, text content in tweets and updates can be forgotten tomorrow.

Marketing Your Retail Business

Pinterest is an ideal digital medium for retailers catering to the 25 to 44 demographic. However, the site also has many active users beyond that demographic. Ecommerce websites offering fashion, accessories, food, home decor and other visually-appealing products can use Pinterest as an extension of their site, driving links and displaying products with the use of photos with very little text.

It’s easy for any business to request an account on Pinterest, and many are providing inspiration and product ideas for their customers already. Below are some examples of small and big businesses increasing traffic and business through Pinterest pin boards.

• Lindsay Hopkins of TheDessertSpot blog began pinning in February. “After starting Pinterest, I experienced a 64 percent increase in monthly unique visitors within the first 60-days. While it’s premature to draw conclusions from stats over a short period of time, the traffic on my blog has definitely increased as a result of my Pinterest activity,” said Hopkins. “It helps me connect with my target demographic and people with similar interests,” she added. As an amateur photographer, Hopkins said she gets more pins with better quality photos and when pinning from afternoon to evening.

• The Gap has many different boards on Pinterest, including the GapFit, which markets its new line of athletic apparel. Users interested in learning more about a product can click through the image to a product page for information and ordering. Note The Gap’s board includes links and images providing relevant information and resources on fitness and health motivation in addition to its products. This helps consumers connect and presents the company as more of a resource than just an advertiser.

• Surya, a rug and home décor company that sells through Macy’s and other retailers, launched 24 boards on Pinterest the week of April 19. It didn’t take long before the company had 148 followers on Pinterest, with one board gaining 270 followers as of the morning of April 26.

For more ideas on how merchants are using Pinterest, check out these boards : American Eagle, Etsy, Gilt Groupe, ideeli, Lowe’s and Nordstrom. 

Optimizing & Testing Your Pin Boards

To optimize your images, see the infographic by Pinnable Business shared on Mashable. It illustrates the important optimization areas for your images. From file name to description length, it’s important to craft and optimize. And don’t forget to test, measure, and track your efforts for fine tuning.

Optimizing For Pinterest Search

Pinterest users search the site to find the pins they are interested in. Following are a few tips to help optimize for Pinterest Search, making your boards more visible.

• Pin It Button: Place the pin it button on your product pages to help increase visibility and sharing on Pinterest directly from your site.
• Your Profile: Optimize by completing your entire profile, which makes your business and products/services more findable. Your name and location help in brand and location searches, while your description helps fuel traffic for relevant keywords to your profile.
• Your Boards: Optimize your boards by creating meaningful, keyword rich titles. Categorize correctly to help increase visibility in Pinterest search.
• Your Pins: Optimize your pins with strong descriptions, prices and keyword use. With a 500 character limit, you can use keywords several times, which helps with search prominence in Pinterest. However, don’t overdo it and make sure keyword use is relevant.
• Image Optimization: Use traditional image optimization techniques whether the image comes from your site or via an upload. Google Webmaster Central Blog recently posted tips for getting your images indexed.
• Quality Photographs: The better the quality of your photos, the more pins you’ll get.
• Video Optimization: Pinterest has a special section just for videos. Currently, only YouTube videos can be embedded. Use traditional video optimization techniques.
• Pins on Facebook and Twitter: Pinterest integrates with both sites. By including your pins on two of the most popular social networks, they could go viral.
• Copyright Infringement: Pin only images you own or have a license to, as users and re-pinners can be liable for copyright infringement. Pinterest has a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) policy, which provides a safe harbor, protecting sites from liability as long as they provide the means for copyright holders to report alleged infringement and then remove the infringing content.

In closing, smart retailers will want to get out there and share their company’s products and services while providing relevant information and resources on their Pinterest pinboards. Go ahead: connect with consumers, make your company a resource, drive more traffic and sell more product. Many consumers will see your beautiful pins and share them with their friends, while others will discover your images in the SERPs.

Search Engine Land author and Ontologica semantic services provider Barbara Starr said, “It’s inevitable that lots of verified structured data will give rise to the ability of search engines to become answer engines.” And that’s happening now. Google wants to better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of entities on people, places and things that the company has been collecting over the last two years, while focusing more on structured data.

With this algorithm enhancement, Google hopes to provide answers to certain queries by using structured data and leveraging semantic technology such as structured markup from the ecommerce ontology it supports (GoodRelations and Schema.org).

This is great news for online retailers, because now your products and services can display more completely and prominently with rich snippets in search results when you use structured markup.

As part of its algorithm change, Google will add semantic technology to its keyword search system. Right now, keywords play a dominant role in the algorithm for ranking websites, along with authoritative links and the person searching (personalization). Adding semantic search technology allows the understanding of actual word meanings.

With semantic meaning in the algorithm, users can differentiate between words with more than one meaning, such as a mustang car vs. a mustang horse.

Google wants search to include semantic meaning because that’s the way humans process and understand information. Therefore, when providing answers on entities not currently in its database, Google will blend new semantic search technology with its current system.

This will increase its ability to recognize the value of information on websites for ranking purposes. In the future, the Googlebot will be looking for more than keywords and authoritative links; it will be able to identify more meaningful information e.g., structured data or semantic markup. That means better search results for users, and better exposure for retail sites.

RDFa Structured Markup

The foundation of structured data is the Resource Definition Framework (RDF), “a standard model for data interchange on the web” that permits data to be shared across different applications, and supports the evolution of different schemas over time. RDFa provides a set of attributes that allow the embedding of rich metadata within Web documents, e.g., the addition of machine-readable attributes to standard XHTML.

GoodRelations RDFa is a semantic markup technology designed specifically for ecommerce. It allows retailers to send precise data on their products, items or services when communicating it to search engines.

Without RDFa, retailers send only unstructured text, even though they may use precise data when creating item pages, making it hard for search engine’s to extract, interpret, and properly rank their individual pages.

With RDFa, retailers can add a small, yet rich piece of structured data (e.g., small product datasheet), which search engines, browser extensions and mobile applications can use to precisely inform potential customers about your products.

GoodRelations markup can be used for displaying price, product, store, payment, and delivery information on search engine listings. This ontology language can be used by retailers to precisely describe what their business offers. Retailers can use GoodRelations to create a small data package that describes their products, features and prices, in addition to their stores and opening hours, payment options and so forth.

Just simply paste your data package into your webpage using W3C’s RDFa format, or use the snippet generator to generate GoodRelations-specific markup for you page. And, that’s it; you’re done.

When adding GoodRelations to your webpages, you increase the visibility of your offers in search engines and recommender systems. While traditional SEO attempts to put you on top of search results, the reality is not everyone can be on top. GoodRelations gives top visibility to buyers looking for your retail products and services. That means your offer becomes visible to those with a matching need.

GoodRelations is supported by Google Bing and Yahoo!, which render your product pages better with GoodRelations data on your site. It is being used by companies like BestBuy, CSNStores, and thousands of retail shops with great success.

Why Use Structured Markup?

As reported on SemanticWeb.com, Webnodes AS content management system version 3.7 with schema.org support resulted in tests showing a 30 percent increase in organic search-engine traffic to websites using Microdata or similar technologies.

From a GoodRelations case study:  “There is preliminary evidence that search results with respective extensions get a 30% higher click-through rate (CTR).”

How To Apply GoodRelations RDFa

You can learn more about RDFa in this 15 minute presentation titled, Extending Schema.org with Good Relations and Productontology.org, which includes Martin Hepp’s Presentation of September 21, 2011 at the schema.org workshop, indicating how schema.org and GoodRelations can be used in combination for sending richer data on retail sites to search engines and browser extensions, helping retailers articulate their value proposition as data.

For more information on semantic SEO for Google with GoodRelations and RDFa, you can use this modification, which shows you how to add additional mark-up to your pages so Google can use the information to substantially enhance the rendering of your pages in search results.

Below are some additional useful links with information about using GoodRelations.

• GoodRelations extension for VirtueMart, the OS ecommerce solution of Joomla CMS.
• Quora (Q&A) on web ontology for ecommerce
• Strategies for Building Semantic Web Applications
• SemTech 2011 Presentation by Barbara Starr

Additionally, SMWCon Spring 2012 will be held in Carlsbad, CA, April 25-27, with presentations and discussions about state-of-the art applications and future development of Semantic MediaWiki and its extensions. The conference brings together developers, users, and organizations from the Semantic MediaWiki community around the world.

With Google changing its algorithm to ameliorate the shortcomings of its current technology by incorporating semantic search technology, retailers have an excellent opportunity to fully exploit this change by incorporating structured data on their websites and product pages. It is rumored these changes will be among the biggest in Google’s history. Don’t miss this opportunity to get ahead of your competitors.

Disclosure: I am not affiliated with GoodRelations in any way.

To succeed, retailers must avoid missed opportunities. This article identifies three opportunities retailers can take advantage of: (1) use every available local search tactic, (2) have your site ready for smartphones and tablets, and (3) be able to identify new, incremental sources of traffic and conversions.

The Marketing Sherpa 2012 Search Marketing SEO Edition Benchmark Report, which surveyed over 1,500 organizations, found that local business listing tactics are underutilized.

Since local business listings and reviews are displayed before natural search results, it’s now more important than ever for retailers to be found in local search.

This report indicated only 37 percent of the businesses  surveyed claimed their local business listing on search engines. Of those that did, many did not use every available listing tactic, as shown in the chart below.

Local Business Listing Tactics Used For Local Search  

While many businesses optimize for local search as part of their SEO strategy, few utilized every local search tactic such as encouraging customer reviews on Google Places and Yelp, posting directions, store/product images, etc.

This is an opportunity retailers don’t want to miss, as local search gains more visibility in the SERPs with more local searches conducted by consumers on smartphones and tablets.

The Future Of E-commerce

Every retailer should know by now the future of e-commerce lies in tablets and smartphones. A new study, Mobile and Tablet Ecommerce: Is Anyone Really Ready?, by mobile services provider Zmags found that only one-third of the U.S. top online retailers are optimally ready for mobile e-commerce today.

That means two-thirds of U.S. top retailers are overlooking this market opportunity. Many retailers aren’t ready for today’s shoppers on tablets and smartphones and also don’t have the ability to identify new, incremental sources of traffic and conversions.

Readiness For Tablet & Smartphone Shoppers

Tablets and smartphones are used more than desktop and laptop computers to make purchases today. Additionally, tablet users spend more per purchase (Adobe Digital Marketing Insights).

Other studies show that people are buying and spending more from tablets and smartphones. A new study by comScore, 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus, reports smartphone and tablets are drastically altering “consumers’ digital media consumption,” concluding the majority of mobile phone owners used their devices for accessing the Web in 2011 for surfing, shopping, banking or any desired action.

The increasing number of U.S. tablet users is gradually changing the way people shop by purchasing online rather than visiting stores. Twenty percent of all mobile e-commerce sales now come from tablets, wutg 60 percent of tablet owners using them for purchasing goods. Evidently, this beats the heck out of fighting traffic and standing in line in crowded stores.

By 2016, mobile commerce is expected to increase to $31 billion in the U.S. – a substantial increase from $3 billion in 2010.

While most retailers are not ready for today’s’ shoppers on tablets and smartphones, another opportunity is being overlooked that can be even more costly.

Retailers make blind commitments in Local, Organic and Mobile search. Armed with little or no data, they engage in optimizing these channels without knowledge (or measurement) of their local, organic and mobile presence.

Ability To Identify New, Incremental Sources Of Traffic & Conversions

It’s important for retailers to run a search for their primary keyword/s in every city and state where they have physical storefronts, offices, dealers or franchises, etc. All three major engines will display performance and coverage.

The above example shows an automotive retailer without first page coverage in 39 of 100 top metropolitan store locations.

Assuming a $50 Average Order Value (AOV) and one percent (1%) market share, this retailer has the opportunity to be in front of an additional $16,309.00 of monthly local market opportunity, per location.

The second example shows a department store accessories retailer without first page coverage in 72 of 100 top metropolitan store locations. Assuming a $20 Average Order Value (AOV) and one percent (1%) market share, this retailer has the opportunity to be in front of an additional $9,090.00 of monthly local market opportunity, per location.

It is valuable to identify what percentage of improvement is available, and which locations have no coverage. Incremental monthly unique visitors (MUVs) are available when you define a very specific missed market opportunity. Without this information, retailers are moving forward blindly.

Local Market Opportunity

When we drill down to the local level, we can identify the local market opportunity.

Assuming a $250 AOV and one percent (1%) market share, the insurance company above has the opportunity to be in front of an additional $76,576 in monthly local market opportunity, per location.

Specific Measurable Results

Once a retailer has identified its lack of coverage, it can begin to track the improvements moving forward, while capturing incremental MUVs in local, organic and mobile search.

Analytics at the local store level reveals valuable information, e.g., the number of coupons downloaded for the store, the number of click-throughs to weekly ads, the number of users clicking on map directions and other in-store related events specific to an individual storefront location.

Lack of coverage translates to a local market missed opportunity.

• 82% of local searches result in an action (phone call, store visit, purchase). Of these, 61% made a purchase. (TMP/comScore)
• 76% of Internet users first look at Local Search or maps area of the 1^st page, then Organic and last, Paid Search. (Neilson)
• 73% of online activity is related to local content. (Google)
• 63 percent completed a purchase offline following their search activity. (comScore)

Proprietary software, such as digital storefront software and mobile store locator software, can uncover these opportunities, providing insight to discover sources of new and incremental traffic and conversions. However, this type of software is only available to interactive and traditional agencies. Contact me if you’re an agency interested in software solutions, or if you’re an end user and would like to be put in touch with a licensed agency.

Disclosure: I advise enterprise level organizations and interactive/traditional agencies on local search and semantic SEO and am not a licensed agency selling software solutions.

In fact, the Internet and search engines have changed the nature of retail marketing forever. And that’s good news for retailers.

What can retailers do to take full advantage of Internet marketing?

Here are three marketing strategies that, when combined, can give you enhanced visibility in search engines and more traffic to convert to sales: optimize for local search, the mobile Web and organic search listings.

1. Reach Consumers Through Local Search

PEW Internet conducted a survey of 1,087 adults on local business and search engines in December 2010. Below are some of the findings.

When viewing the numbers, note that respondents could fill in more than one option. All were asked where they get news and information about local businesses (other than restaurants and bars).

• 47% said they relied mostly on the Internet for local information
• 36% rely on search engines
• 31% rely mostly on newspapers
• 22% rely on word of mouth from friends and family
• 8% rely on local TV
• 5% rely on local radio

The takeaway from this research is that you need to market to every local search site on the Web −sites like Google Places (maps), Yelp (reviews), Internet Yellow Pages (business listings), City Search and a number of other key business information aggregators.

There are three primary Information Services for retailers on the Web: Info USA, Acxiom and Localeze. When feeding your business information to these services, you must ensure that all the data is optimized for each service and that the information is consistent.

If the information varies, it won’t help your local search listings as much as when all the information matches. Your business information includes the company name, address, local phone number, map directions, optimized images, rich media, coupons, social sharing, reviews and more.

2. Reach Consumers Through The Mobile Web

We know more consumers will access the Internet by mobile devices than by desktops and laptops by 2013. With over 300 million smartphones in the U.S., consumers are ready for mobile content.

Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley also estimated mobile commerce will account for approximately 2 percent of U.S. retail sales by late 2012, while Internet retail will account for 5 to 6 percent. We could have a fast rise in U.S. mobile commerce similar to what happened in Japan where leading retailers were getting 19 percent of their sales from mobile devices back in 2009.

Consumers are moving toward tablets and smartphones for every kind of personal task, from banking to shopping, because of the ease, convenience and time savings.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that the retailers who handle mobile inquiries and sales expeditiously will be those that prosper. Hence, my oft repeated recommendation to use mobile storefront software that automatically builds an entire mobile Web-formatted store locator, while providing data fidelity between the Bots, Information Services and IYPs.

3. Reach Consumers Through Organic Listings

Another strategy retailers can use to compete more effectively is to optimize for organic listings. While not all retailers are optimized for the mobile Web, many also fail to optimize for organic listings.

Optimized static location pages for every business location, in addition to optimized city and state web pages will increase your digital footprint and retail visibility. The SEO elements to apply include:

• Local Title tags
• Local Description tags
• Keyword Meta tags
• Locally optimized content
  • Local keyword anchor text
  • Locally optimized ALT tags for images
  • Headline tags (H1, H2)
  • Localized body content
  • Breadcrumbs
• Schema.org Microdata mark-up
• Semantic RDFa and Facebook OpenGraph tags
• Localized Mapping and Reviews feed
• Local links to Places and Maps (Google,  Bing, Yahoo,  Facebook, Yelp and more)
• Optimized bulk feeds to IYP and Local Search Engines for relevant consistency

From Zero To 500,000+ MUVs In Local, Mobile & Organic Search

MUVs (Monthly Unique Visitors) are the lifeblood of new business year over year. Every business buys MUVs in the form of print advertising, paid search advertising, search engine optimization, direct mail, TV and radio advertising, affiliates and other forms of marketing and advertising.

Multi-location businesses operating physical storefront locations in hundreds and thousands of cities have a unique value proposition and some very serious hurdles to overcome quickly if they want to stay ahead of the competition.

Businesses in retail, services, financial, real estate, dealerships, franchises, manufacturers, medical and legal directories must get control of their Web and mobile Web data.

Google, Bing and Yahoo!  love to consume accurate, updated, verified business data, and these engines are rewarding those businesses that optimize their data at the local store level. I call it a relevancy reward. If you publish the most accurate data in a way the engines can consume it… you will grow significantly more and more MUVs.

Local, organic and mobile Web searchers expect to find accurate, updated business information on the go, and they reward such businesses with  phone calls, walk-in traffic, coupon redemptions, rich media views, social shares, check-ins and clicks to shopping.

Manufacturers with dealerships nationwide, e.g., windows, carpets, power tools, bikes, motor vehicles, etc., all have this unique opportunity to provide the search engines with their most recent, updated business information at the location level.

The same thing goes for services like “credit repair,” servicing the entire U.S. geographic population down to the neighborhood level. Franchises with physical storefront locations in various city locations. Insurance companies with thousands of individual agents at different office locations.

Building materials stores like Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Lowes, etc. Electronics and computers stores like Frye’s and Best Buy − they all stand to gain by providing search engines with recent, updated business information at the local level.

Build and optimize a location landing page for each individual location. Make sure to arrange for the instant publication of any changes on the Web and mobile Web with consistency and accuracy.

• Edit Operating Hours as needed
  • Holiday hours
  • Manage Coupons
    • National, Regional, Local
    • Manage Local Pictures/Images
      • Storefront Locations, Managers, Employee of the Month
      • Monitor and update Social Networks via analytics data
      • Text to phone promotions
      • Add local Call to Action

Include a breadcrumb for all the state, city and location landing pages. Link each location landing page with all social links from CitySearch, Yelp and others. Ensure that you take the time to optimize your business data and bulk feed to the Information Services: Info USA, Localeze and Acqiom, as well as all the IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages etc.).

In closing, a bit of good news: comScore just reported $50 billion in U.S. retail ecommerce spending during the last quarter, up 14 percent vs. 2010. Online retailers sold almost $50 billion worth of goods to U.S. consumers in the last quarter. That made it a solid year, as 2011 ecommerce sales increased 13 percent over 2010 for a record $161.5 billion in sales.

The future could be promising for retailers, and it will be more so for those that optimize for local search, the mobile Web and organic listings.

With mobile usage increasing dramatically in 2012, it’s important for retailers to start accommodating mobile shoppers.

This article will review mobile trends of interest to retailers, offer some tips for going mobile, and include some information on Mobile Store Locator Software for multiple location retailers.

First, let’s start with some mobile stats that impact retail sales:

• Over 1 billion of the worlds 4+ billion mobile phones are smartphones with 3 billion SMS enabled
• In the US, 9 out of 10 people are mobile subscribers
• 79 percent of smartphone owners use their phones to help with shopping
• In 2011, over 50 percent of all local searches were conducted from a mobile device
• Tablets are rapidly replacing laptops and will total 100+ million globally by year end
• Tablets made major inroads in retail: 77 percent of all mobile traffic is from tablets
• In 2014, mobile Internet usage will overtake desktop Internet usage (est.)

• 86 percent of mobile users are watching TV while using a mobile phone
• More than 350 million active users access Facebook through mobile devices
• On average, Americans spend 2.7 hours per day socializing on mobile devices
• 29 percent of mobile users would scan a mobile tag to get coupons to be redeemed instantly in store

Consumers Use Mobile Devices In Store To Check Prices & Inventory

Next, we want to talk about how consumers are using mobile devices when shopping. In the future, it will become common place for consumers to use mobile devices to guide purchasing decisions as retail employees use them to check inventory and pricing.

According to the Motorola Solutions 2011 Holiday Shopping Survey, consumers and retail employees want to use smartphones to find product information inside stores.

The trend toward using mobile devices to find prices, product reviews and item availability, and then using that information to make purchase decisions was highest among consumers in the mid-20s to mid-30s age range, said the report, which also found:

• 43 percent of shoppers want to use a mobile app to find items in the aisles
• Nearly 11 percent of consumers have used smartphones in store for purchase decisions
• Retail employees (71%) want to use store-provided mobile devices to check inventory for shoppers

“The majority of retail associates feel they would benefit from a widely deployed mobile device with inventory and price-checking applications,” said the report.

Tips For Reaching Consumers Across Devices

The average consumer uses multiple devices and/or browsers during the purchase cycle. For that reason, retailers must ensure a good consumer experience on all devices.

When it comes to advertising, retailers must plan targeted campaigns to reach shoppers on mobile devices. Text messaging (SMS) is one option for providing instant communication to shoppers on the go.

It’s important to offer your customers something of value with a strong call to action encouraging them to buy. Retailers could reach out to their customers once a month with mobile coupons, discounts or other incentives and rewards.

Tailoring your advertising campaigns to mobile users is also important. Retailers must reach the consumer in a manner consistent with the way their devices are used. For instance, focus on short text as query length is generally shorter.

• Text messages get read over 96 percent of the time with 8 times the redemption rate of email
• Create focused, mobile-only campaigns that reach your audience with unique offers
• Schedule text messages to coordinate with important events and promotions
• Send automated followup messages when mobile users have engaged in a transaction
• Reach mobile users when they approach your store using geo-locating technology

Before you advertise, first ensure you have a mobile friendly website. With more consumers using mobile devices, retailers must maintain a user-friendly mobile presence. Your conversion rates will double from your previous rates once you optimize for mobile users.

Optimizing Your Website To Accommodate Mobile Shoppers

Despite the increases in smartphone and tablet traffic, retailers are not yet prepared to accommodate mobile shoppers. Many retail sites have text and images that are not suitable for the small screen, making pages slow to load and hard to read with minimum functionality.

In a survey of over 4,000 mobile Web users, 74 percent said they would only wait 5 seconds or less for a single webpage to load before leaving the site. You need a mobile site that offers a good user experience and seamless transactions.

Retailers with multiple locations may consider employing mobile storefront software which automatically builds an entire mobile web-formatted store locator platform based on your existing business location data, accommodating mobile users by GPS location, IP address, city, state, zip code, neighborhood or street address, and promotes social sharing.

As you can see below, the user experience with the mobile store locator allows users to see all tabs on one page rather than having to click through several mobile pages to find what they’re looking for. Not only that, all tabs have user analytics reporting the number of clicks to Maps, Directions, Specials, Coupons, Rich Media, etc.

When it comes to your mobile presence, you have three options of mobile functionality to choose from: 1) redirecting your website for mobile users to a mobile version of your site, 2) building a mobile website and, 3) building a mobile app.

You’ll get your greatest reach with a mobile website, and many of your loyal consumers will use your app. Below is a quick checklist.

• Style Sheets: To render your mobile website properly on mobile devices, you’ll need two style sheets: one for the iPhone and one for all other handhelds.
• Think Small: Because mobile users have little patience, make your site simple and user friendly for the small screen. Consumers want basic information like product, price, hours of operation, specials, coupons, etc.
• Webpage Design: Create mobile pages for a screen size of 320 by 240 pixels. Use Alt tags for images. Don’t use tables, large images, frames or lengthy text.
• Mobile Sitemap: Create a site map so crawlers can find you and include the sitemap link in your robots.txt file.
• Local Search Submission: Display your business on Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Business Portal with map,  directions, etc. in search results.
• Test: You can submit your site to the Gomez Mobile Website Performance Test to see how well it performs.

In conclusion, 2012 will certainly be the year that retailers must focus on mobile users by reaching out to them across devices with a mobile optimized website. Being aware of the many trends reviewed above can help you increase retail sales throughout the year.

Disclosure: I advise firms that provide and/or distribute digital storefront software.

Implementing structured data requires the skill of adding a few extra lines to the HTML code of your site. Once implemented, you will immediately feed Google and hundreds of mobile and recommender applications with all the information consumers are looking for when they shop for your products. Your detailed information is displayed right in search results, as shown in the before and after examples below.

Many retailers aren’t aware that only about 5 percent of their potential customers will see their offers in the SERPs when they shop. That means 95 percent will never get beyond a brief description of their products and services as shown in the first example above without structured markup.

Below are a few illustrations showing how retailers have used structured markup for improved search results.

• Dutch car insurance website Independer.nl realized an increase of 28 percent in SEO search share (CTR).
• The implementation of Rich Snippets by Autoverzekering resulted in more revenue with higher returns.
• Yfrog added GoodRelations markup and within five days, its Rich Snippets were showing up in Google results.
• Volkswagen UK demonstrates car features and component information with GoodRelations achieving excellent results.
• Renault UK uses GoodRelations to get better rankings for its merchandise shop.
• Peek & Cloppenburg uses structured markup for publishing information on all its European stores in addition to the brands available in the stores.
• CSN Stores is uses structured markup for rich displays of all its 2,000,000 item pages.
• Arzneimittel.de, one of Germany’s leading mail order pharmacies, uses GoodRelations in RDFa on all of their 250,000 item pages.

Google recommends GoodRelations and supports Schema.org Microdata to send structured information for Google Rich Snippets to Google. Additionally, Bing and Yahoo support Microdata and recommend GoodRelations for sending structured data to display in their SERPs.

Best Buy used Microdata, RDFa to increase Doorbuster sales on Black Friday.

Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy Jay Myers started working with schema.org last June. Myers recommends participating in a schema.org workshop. This type of workshop would be useful for retailers before implementing structured markup on their websites.

To gain wide adoption, semantic markup must be easy to implement, and it’s important for the search engines to support multiple syntaxes. With the support for schema.org by Google, Bing and Yahoo announced in June, it was assumed that Microdata markup would eventually emerge as a standard. However, that has not been the case as other markup languages are also supported and used with excellent results, namely GoodRelations.

Expect a bit of a learning curve when you start using structured data. It’s not that the markup is so difficult; it requires a mindset for delivering human readable code while visualizing what a machine might get out of the rich markup.

Your developers may find Microdata syntax straightforward to implement; but the challenge is keeping the code pristine to ensure that machines can parse it and create accurate RDF triples. Also, with a number of different coders, it can be hard to maintain more stringent markup standards.

Despite the initial learning curve in implementing structured markup, the rewards are that consumers will benefit from your descriptive data being visible in search results. In ecommerce, reviews are important for your customers in assisting them to make informed purchasing decisions.

While there are challenges in implementation and it takes a little extra time, retailers will find it is very beneficial for creating loyalty and increased conversions.

Content Management System With Microdata Support

WebNodes AS came out with a Content Management System that provides Microdata support. Version 3.7 of the WebNodes CMS is said to be the world’s first CMS with fully integrated and dynamic Schema support. Starting now, all content classes and properties in WebNodes can be mapped to corresponding types and properties in Schema.org dynamically.

WebNodes uses dynamic mapping for adding Microdata to the HTML of your web pages. As a result, all major search engines will immediately understand the meaning of your content, improving your search results listings dramatically. Tests show a 30 percent increase in organic search engine traffic for websites using Microdata or other technologies like GoodRelations RDFa.

Another important feature of Version 3.7 is that the WebNodes CMS now fully supports load balancing in a number of different configurations. To quote from the company’s press release:

“Load balancing makes it possible to distribute traffic between different servers, making it possible to use WebNodes on sites with extremely heavy traffic. In addition to supporting regular load balancing where different instances of the CMS are running on different servers, many of the performance critical parts of WebNodes has been componentized, so you can split the performance critical components of a single instance on multiple servers as well.”

In conclusion, it’s time for ecommerce merchants to embrace structured markup to get ahead of the competition. Retailers can now get a CMS with fully integrated and dynamic Schema support. What’s not to like about a 30 percent increase in organic CTR?

It’s possible to cash in on this trend with a Google+ business page, ecommerce mobile pages and traditional local search optimization or automated local SEO with digital storefront software for multiple-location brands.

Since Google+ was launched earlier this year to compete with Facebook as a social networking platform, it has now expanded to include business pages. The official Google Blog announced Google+ Pages so customers can connect with all the things they care about, including places and brands.

In today’s competitive Web environment, e-retailers can prosper by gathering customer recommendations using Google+ Circles and an emphasis on social-local-mobile trends.

Google+ Pages Can Make Brands More Popular

Since Google Plus introduced the Google+ Page feature for creating a business page, businesses, brands and organizations can extend their popularity by creating a business page on the new Google Plus social network. Retailers can enhance relationships with many stakeholders and even add new customers to Circles, update their status, and host video conferences.

By adding a business page into Circle, businesses, brands and websites can connect with their customers and fans, allowing them to keep informed on new products, sales events and more. All the retailer needs to do is start sharing, and they can reach fans and loyal customers that really want to know more about the brand and its products.

According to Christian Oestlien, Google’s head of social advertising products, Google+ being listed in the organic SERPs will benefit brands with increased click-through rates. A number of pages are already available for brands like Pepsi, Burberry, H&M and Macys, but any organization can join the community at plus.google.com/pages/create.

There’s a big advantage to Google+ Pages for retailers because billions of users search on Google daily, and many times they are looking for businesses and brands. Google+ Pages can help users transform their queries into useful connections.

Google now has two ways to add Pages to Circles.The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect, which takes users to a brand’s Google+ page when they search for {+} followed by the page they want (like +Macys). That would take them to Macy’s page.

Currently, Direct Connect works for a limited number of pages, but more are coming soon. So, get yourself started with a Google+ business page if you haven’t already.

Social-Local-Mobile Trend Continues

Since people are leaving their computers and laptops behind for mobile devices and tablets, it’s time for e-retailers to optimize their sites for multiple devices in order to capitalize on ecommerce revenue.

By mastering ecommerce on all devices, e-retailers can increase brand engagement and product conversions. The object is to exploit the convergence of people, information, products, services and places with today’s smartphones and tablets, which drive online orders in addition to purchases from brick-and-mortar stores.

The convergence of Social Local and Mobile will have a big impact on the way your customers do business and spend money as the use of multiple digital devices becomes mainstream.

E-Retailers Lack Mobile Page Functionality

While it may sound easy to gain momentum with a Social-Local-Mobile focus, the problem is that only 19 percent of the 100 top e-retailers have ecommerce web pages with mobile functionality. Additionally, of the top e-retailers that do have mobile functionality, few offer mobile versions of every ecommerce page. We can likely assume smaller retailers also lack mobile ecommerce functionality.

A new survey by Sybase 365 and the Mobile Marketing Association reveals two-thirds of holiday shoppers would make a purchase from mobile phones if prompted by coupons, discounts, text alerts, gift cards or loyalty points. That’s an increase from the 32 percent that responded positively last year.

The study also found 38 percent of users would use a mobile device to find a store location, 34 percent to compare prices, 28 percent to research deals and coupons, and 27 percent to find a product review.

Job One for retailers is to create mobile functionality for their ecommerce website, including all product pages, to take advantage of shoppers using social, local and mobile resources. Additionally, when providing mobile ecommerce pages, e-retailers need to ensure mobile searchers click links that go deep into their webpages to view mobile –friendly content.

If searchers can’t get to deep content, retailers lose mobile sales.

Testing Your Mobile Site

If you want to test your mobile site for mobile-friendly content, Pure Oxygen Labs created a tool called the Mobile Site Analyzer, which it offers free to merchants. The tool crawls and identifies the webpages that lead smartphone searchers to mobile-friendly content and those that don’t. Retailers can enter a URL and email address, and the tool performs the analysis and sends a report by email.

Next Generation Technology

The next generation of mobile devices will be capable of interacting with every aspect of retail transactions by using technology such as Near Field Communication (NFC), augmented reality, commodity card swipe accessories and local search. Right now, Google Wallet is using NFC for contactless payments.

Integrating all these new systems into your site can be expensive, and not all retailers are doing it today. However, it’s wise to think about the possibility of opening your physical infrastructure and your brand to becoming a platform for next generation transactions.

The Power of Local Search

Smartphones and tablets put users a few taps away from information on the web such as Google local search, competitive pricing, reviews and more. It’s important for retailers to be optimized for local search, and we wrote about that in How To Boost In-Store Traffic & Sales By Optimizing Your Digital Storefront For Local SEO.

Retailers with multiple locations can benefit from digital storefront software as these tools can optimize and manage multiple local business listings and provide page one local search results. The software creates individual location landing webpages for each business location while applying SEO best practices techniques with a focus on local keywords.

Whether you do it yourself or use SEO store locator software and Mobile store locator software, it is important to be optimized for local search to take advantage of the Social-Local-Mobile convergence to enhance your brand and sell more product because that’s the way people look for and buy merchandise in today’s digital environment. You don’t want to miss the Social-Local-Mobile opportunity.

Disclosure: I advise firms that provide and/or distribute digital storefront software.

Research by Brand Anywhere and Luth Research found retailers can increase consumer engagement 85 percent by having a mobile-specific website.

Other key findings include:

• 51 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase from retailers that have mobile-specific websites
• Only 4.8 percent of U.S. retailers have mobile-specific websites
• A mere 22.8 percent of the top retailers (ranked by Alexa) have mobile-specific websites

Since consumers want to do business with stores that have mobile websites, and less than 5 percent of all U.S. retailers have optimized mobile websites, there’s a big gap between retailers providing mobile access and the large number of consumers who would like to shop mobile.

Building A Mobile Website & Mobile Store Locator

Consumers are making more purchase decisions based on information they get on their smartphones and tablets. Because consumers are asking for it, there is a window of opportunity for brands and retailers to embrace the mobile Web with enhanced mobile store locator software to gain a competitive advantage.

Research shows people want to know the following information when they shop:

• Coupons and special offers
• Product pricing
• Store location

Consumers are using their smartphones as a research tool to make purchase decisions, save money and comparison shop. They expect to see the same information and conversion tools on the Web and Mobile Web.

Managing Your Digital Storefront

If you’re a retailer, it behooves you to make your promotions, prices and locations available in a mobile environment for mobile devices, and on the Web for desktops, to have a better chance of engaging new and existing customers. Retailers can do this by managing their digital storefront.

Let’s drive by a few storefronts on Main Street USA… every physical store, dealership, franchise and branch office you walk or drive by displays their business hours on the front door, and there’s a sign identifying their brand and logo out in front of each storefront location.

When you walk in, you can easily find their business offerings, specials, sales, and discounts, all posted at eye-level in creative formats, arrangements and colors. The shelf-space is well organized by category; you might see Co-Op advertising, a circular flyer with local weekly specials for that particular store, or national magazine advertising deals that are updated and valid in every store location.

The physical storefront has a manager or GM responsible for all the details of operation, making sure the store and its employees are working efficiently to assist walk-in and call-in customers.

The construction of the physical storefront location is usually a cookie-cutter version of all the other locations. If you walk into a Sports Authority in Encinitas CA, chances are you will have a very similar experience at the Sports Authority in Boca Raton FL, Dearborn MI or Albany NY. However, the promotions, inventory, pricing, business hours, etc., may differ from one location to another.

The process of building and operating a physical storefront location or managing numerous dealership or franchise locations requires specialized, well-trained, experienced staff and personnel. We call ‘em brick ‘n clicks, a brand with multi-locations that has both a physical and online store presence.

It’s taken a while for brick ‘n clicks to make the transition online. The Web and Mobile Web side of the business also require the same specialized, well-trained, experienced staff and personnel to build, operate and manage the digital storefront software.

It is critical for Brands to understand that their new and existing customers online expect to see and experience all the same conversion tools they see offline.

A link to click to the shopping site from Web and Mobile Web location landing pages is a conversion tool and should be consistent across both Web and Mobile Web.

A comScore study found that 82 percent of local searchers follow up offline with an in-store visit, phone call or purchase, and of these, 61 percent made purchases.

Providing mobile recognition and the capability to search each individual business location page by IP, city or zip code will increase your walk-in traffic and offline sales. Users expect to see the address, click to phone, product descriptions and links to each location landing page.

A link to telephone and map directions is a conversion tool and should be consistent across both Web and Mobile Web. Customers will call you if it’s convenient to click and call. If you don’t provide accurate telephone numbers online for each business location, you will lose customers to competitors who have maximized their digital storefront data.

Customers want to find and drive to your location when it’s convenient to click to map directions from their mobile device, tablet or desktop.

Posting your rich media videos and social sharing buttons is a conversion tool and should be consistent across both Web and Mobile Web. Customers like to see consistency when they’re on a mobile device or laptop, and it’s very important to provide accurate information. Those who don’t will lose customers to competitors who have maximized their digital storefront data.

Allowing customers to redeem Print Coupons using QR codes converted from print, or Web to Mobile device, is another conversion tool. When a direct mail campaign coordinates with online marketing, customers will snap a picture and drive to your location to redeem their discount in a physical store location.

Additional conversion tools include Gift Cards, Loyalty Programs, Reviews and more − these are all conversion tools to be managed in your digital storefront, just as similar conversion tools are managed from your physical storefront.

In conclusion, when big retail brands maximize their conversion tools and create consistency across their brick ‘n mortar, digital storefront and mobile web presence, they will increase consumer engagement and conversions in time for the coming holiday shopping season.

This is the best way to drive conversions and crush the competition as the stats don’t lie; you’ll be ahead of over 75 percent of U. S. retailers.

Disclosure: I advise firms that provide and/or distribute digital storefront software.

Bricks and clicks are aggressively expanding their online channel, as shown in the statements of the following leaders:

“45% of in-store visitors pay a visit to homedepot.com first.”

– Hal Lawton, President Home Depot Online

“We know that 60% of our U.S. store sales are influenced by our customers’ experience on bestbuy.com.”

- Brian Dunn, CEO Best Buy

What are all these consumers looking for? First of all, they’re searching with a mobile device. A Performics / ROI study reported 32 percent of respondents said they used mobile search “more than I use search engines on my computer.”

Consumers constantly want to know locations nearby or how far they need to travel to find what they need.

They frequently search for operating hours, telephone numbers, products and services offered, coupons and special offers, purchase and in-store pickup info – and these questions are being answered quickly by savvy retailers through their digital storefronts.

What Is A Digital Storefront?

A digital storefront represents a single or multi-location brick ‘n mortar business online. Each store location is represented by a store location landing page that users see when they search for your business on Google, Yahoo, Bing and business information directories like YellowPages.com, SuperPages, Yelp and others.

Below are a few examples of the places where your digital storefronts can be displayed:

• Your Store Landing Pages
• Google Places
• Yahoo Local
• Bing Maps
• YellowPages
• SuperPages
• IYP’s  and other business directories

When you manage and enhance your presence in the above engines and directories, displaying all of your business data and maintaining consistency, the results are twofold: the engines and directories deliver accurate information to users; subsequently, you achieve higher search rankings, more traffic and more conversions.

Optimizing Your Digital Storefront

Scalable digital storefront optimization is key for increasing search traffic through local and organic search results. People will see your digital storefront, whether you manage it or not.

By not optimizing your digital storefront for Local SEO, you are getting fewer conversions and lower customer satisfaction while diminishing the value of your brand. You will also significantly reduce the market opportunity for each location or dealership.

Since 20 percent of searches across Google properties are local, and that jumps to 40 percent on mobile, why miss the traffic and conversion opportunity?

It’s important to optimize your digital storefront displays, which you can do manually or by using digital storefront software. (Disclosure: I advise firms that provide and/or distribute digital storefront software.)

Most retailers currently do not optimize their digital storefronts for traffic and conversions, and their listings are missing many of the informational components users are looking for.

For instance, the example of a poor digital web storefront for “Smart and Final” shows very little information and no mobile version.

On the other hand, below are examples of retailer “Sports Authority” optimizing its digital storefront on the Web and Mobile shows this retailer has truly maximized its marketing opportunity.

Since this retailer has multiple locations, it used scalable digital storefront software.

Web Version

Mobile Web Version

Because Sports Authority optimized and enhanced its digital storefront so well, its regional stores achieved multiple 1^st page positions for the keyword sporting goods, in the market locations it serves.

Note how this provides the best user experience and obtains placement in the top preferred position on page one of the SERPs for Local and Organic.

Tips To Accomplish The Above Results

Provide users and search engines with the features and information about your company they are looking for. There are six basic features users want and search engine look for on a local digital storefront page:

1. Images: storefront, employee of the month, manager, products, services.
2. Location Information: address, phone number, hours of operation, holiday hours, in-store services provided, local descriptions, manager announcements.
3. Promotions: coupons, loyalty programs, COOP branding/promotion, events, tent sales, community events, sponsorships.
4. Social Influencers: Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Yelp and others, check-ins, Likes, sharing, share via email, share via text, text to phone.
5. UX (user experience) Features: click to call, click to driving directions, text to share, loyalty sign-up, m-commerce, gift card purchase/management.
6. Rich Media: video, YouTube, product images, COOP advertising/promotion, reviews.

You can perform five basic steps to optimize your digital storefront for search engine and directory visibility:

1. Location Pages. Build a location page for every location using relevant and updated content. If you have one or one-thousand store locations the process is the same however, using a Web Store Locator Software to generate store location pages is much more scalable and cost efficient.
2. Mobile Pages. Build a mobile location page for every location with user friendly mobile calls to action.
3. Local SEO Best Practices. Optimize and add all six of the above features to each location landing page, ensuring you include updated information such as local descriptions, content and Microdata or RDFa mark-up to help the engines and directories understand every detail about each of your business locations.
4. Submit To Engines and Directories. Submit all of your individual location landing pages to each local search engine and directory. Make sure to enhance your Maps and Google Places pages, linking your location landing page URLs.
5. Submit To Information Services. Submit each of your individual location landing page URLs and all of your updated business information to Information Services that feed IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages). For instance, you can create bulk feeds and submit to InfoUSA, Axciom and LocalEze.

In closing, this may be a lot to digest, but it’s important for retailers that want to compete aggressively in today’s marketplace to do due dilligence.

You can optimize your digital storefront for prominent visibility manually, or with automated local SEO software as done by Sports Authority; either way, you must optimize to compete in today’s marketplace.

While it’s an age-old saw that you need to make your content findable, a huge percentage of retailers don’t know how to maximize product findability. SEOs have been optimizing websites for over a decade; yet, product findability is still a significant challenge for merchants and consumers alike in today’s crowded SERPs.

How can retailers stand out from the crowd and make their products findable?

The answer lies in verified data and semantic SEO technology using structured markup language. When structured markup attributes are added to static and dynamic pages, this gives your content enhanced semantic meaning that will make your offers visible.

However, very few retailers know what structured markup is, and this puts them at a significant disadvantage… Why? Because, without structured markup on their content, they’ll be left behind in the digital dust in the not-too-distant future.

What Is Structured Markup?

Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), coined the term semantic web in the 1990’s, referring to a web of data, interconnected and forming databases online, much like the graphic below from Wikipedia. Linked data is a significant component of the semantic web community, as is structured markup (embedded structured data within HTML pages).

Structured Markup Is Not New

The W3C community has been encoding academic documents with structured markup to make Web content machine-readable for the past decade, as well as commercial documents for the past few years, using many types of structured markup formats.

For example, “rich snippets,” considered somewhat old-news by early adopters, are embedded structured markup on HTML pages that were initially used by Google in 2009 to enhance SERP displays of products, reviews, people, events, business organizations, recipes, local search, videos and images.

Look at what rich snippets can do to a Google recipe listing – you get an image, reviews, cooking time and more. This listing stands out, and you can see why it would garner more clicks.

Many Types of Structured Markup Formats

All of you late adopters, listen-up: microformats are structured markup codes used to identify very specific types of content on webpages (e.g., details about products, people, places, events and more). You saw the recipe listing with its rich description and image. That content was coded with hRecipe tags using microformats attributes.

Other examples of microformats include hMedia (audio-video content), hNews (news content) and hProducts (products), to name a few. By adding these attributes to static and dynamic webpages, you give search crawlers machine-readable metadata resulting in more detailed displays for users in the SERPs.

Another type of structured markup is RDFa, developed by the W3C community and used in ecommerce, biotech and other verticals. GoodRelations, developed by Dr. Martin Hepp, (Professor at University of the Bundeswehr Munich and Hepp Research GmbH CEO) is a Web vocabulary used for product, price and company data expressed as RDFa attributes.

GoodRelations can be used on static and dynamic pages to enhance product visibility in the SERPs, recommender systems and applications, and is now adopted and supported by Google, Bing and Yahoo via Schema.org. Incidentally, the Facebook “Likes” are expressed in the Facebook Open Graph protocol as RDFa.

Schema.org microdata are the latest structured markup formats to become newsworthy. Vanessa Fox wrote about Google, Yahoo and Bing supporting schema microdata in an effort to standardize structured markup across the Web. With microdata structured markup on product pages, retailers can make every important product detail machine-readable by the googlebot and other crawlers.

This, in turn, makes your products findable by consumers. Shoppers will get an accurate and complete description for their queries because microdata markup attributes make offers visible to humans by enabling machines to read underlying content.

The Promise Of Structured Markup

This is the promise of structured markup: search robots will better understand Web content that’s made machine-readable by the markup vocabulary; therefore, when search engines answer queries, they do so with a better understanding of user intent. Shoppers are happy campers because with less effort, they get relevant results they can trust.

Search engines are pleased because they improve relevancy and usability while reducing spam and manipulation. Retailers are delighted because they get more traffic and conversions – but only when they use structured markup to add semantic meaning to their product pages.

This is not black magic folks, and far from black hat SEO. It’s strictly 100 percent compliant white hat, and Google will be glad to give top visibility to pages encoded with structured markup attributes because the googlebot then knows what the content is really about − it’s verified data.

Not only that, this makes Matt Cutts’ and the Spam Team’s job easier on a scalable basis as structured markup can eliminate a lot of manipulation that is currently taking place to gain high rankings.

How Can Retailers Achieve Findability?

Most of you understand the principles of white hat SEO, which are based on a good understanding of what the search bots want from a technical and editorial point of view.

Starting now, you’re going to need good structured markup on your X/HTML in addition to your white hat tactics. I see structured markup as being equally important to authoritative inbound links as a ranking factor when optimizing content.

Why? Because search robots are designed to serve search engine users by matching their search query expectations, known as user intent. These bots are machines, and they’re trying to discern the human mind’s evaluation of information in answer to human-entered keywords.

To do that, the machines run a very complex algorithm that weighs the value and interaction of many different factors. And while machines have increasingly improved their answers to search queries over the years, users still get a lot of irrelevant non-specific results.

Semantic markup on your static and dynamic product pages provides content meaning so the machine can do a better job of understanding all the details of your product pages. At the same time, a multitude of inbound links tell the machine this is a good site because a lot of authority sites link to it.

These two things together are going to differentiate your site from those that don’t have semantic markup and powerful links. Therefore, if you focus on these two factors when optimizing your site, this will improve your products’ findability. Structured markup is another step forward in helping search crawlers satisfy user intent.