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.

If the C-level executives in your company are having any doubts about the value of SEO and are hesitating to release more funding, it’s time to perform a cost-benefit exercise. It’s your job as an in-house SEO manager to reestablish their confidence in the value of SEO as well as your value and the value of your team.

When funding gets in the way, having a narrow focus, putting it on the table, and describing company goals you are committed to are all very important.

1) Leverage Your Paid Search Data

To demonstrate implicit value for SEO, start with a baseline. Show where your key terms currently rank in organic and multiply by the cost-per-click value. Run the numbers for the value of direct clicks with high search intent.

One way to go about this is to calculate an Effective Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) for your organic listings:

1. Access the Keyword Tool within your Google AdWords account.
2. Type your best performing (for instance, 20) keywords.
3. Select descriptive words or phrases and synonyms.
4. Click Get Keyword Ideas.

This will produce a report; select Exact within the “Match Type” field and click on Approx Avg Search Volume.

1. Look at the Cost-Per-Click column to acquire the CPC value (let’s assume it’s $2.00).
2. Go to your web analytics data and identify the number of organic clicks for these keywords (let’s assume 20,000/month).
3. Multiply the two (CPC times the number of organic clicks (in this case $40,000/mo)).
4. Create a spreadsheet with your best performing keywords and make the statement, “if we paid for this organic traffic it would cost us $40,000 per month. This is your SEO eCPC.

Our internal research tells us that about 56% of search engine users are clicking on the top four organic listings while about 15% of users are clicking on the paid ads. This means you will also stand to benefit from additional traffic when your organic listings for targeted keywords are in the top four vs. poor organic performance.

2) Leverage Your Content And Social Network

Most businesspeople acknowledge a competent SEO strategy is mandatory to be competitive in today’s online marketplace. A long list of studies we’ve collected over the years attest to this. For instance:

• Search has the lowest cost-per-lead of any marketing strategy (Piper-Jaffray PowerPoint presentation)
• Search marketing is cost-effective in terms of conversions and ROI (Marketing Sherpa)
• Not only does search traffic drive offline sales (Yahoo!), organic traffic yields more conversions (Marketing Sherpa)
• 60% of searchers click on an organic link over a sponsored link (iProspect & Jupiter Research)
• Organic clicks outnumber PPC clicks by 5:1 (Marketing Sherpa)

Most recently, we are seeing third-party surveys record ranges between 56% and 70% of Internet users begin a shopping quest on a search engine before buying a product or service. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, there are 157 million active Internet users in the U.S., and 127 million of them are active search engine users. Let’s spare any more numbers; it’s easy to show your C-level execs that they can’t afford to miss all the potential opportunities with organic links.

Now that we have Google universal search with its demand for the indexing and ranking of vertical content (blogs, video, news, images and products), and all the user-generated content from social computing and networking, search engines are gathering new sources of traffic. So you must continue by optimizing your blogs, press releases, videos, images, and all the content creation that’s relevant for your business and consumers.

Explain to your C-level management that while you are doing this and creating secondary sources of traffic, you are also increasing your visibility in the SERPs. This in itself is cost effective. In addition, you can economize by consolidating your optimization tactics through implementing best practices across all of your content channels (blogs, video, news, images and products).

Conclusion

While the global economic crisis is preying on the minds of both companies and consumers, SEO is a top-performing marketing tactic that has a history of producing large dividends. It’s time to stand behind your SEO strategy so it continues to perform during periods of consumer belt-tightening and waning consumer confidence.

Paul J. Bruemmer has provided search engine marketing expertise and in-house consulting services to prominent American businesses since 1995. As Director of Search Marketing at Red Door Interactive, he is responsible for the strategic implementation of search engine marketing activities within Red Door’s Internet Presence Management (IPM) services. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Previously, I wrote about the importance of in-house teams utilizing all relevant search marketing tactics for maximum ROI (see "Total Search Marketing," Part 1 and Part 2). This month, I’ll cover the importance of using offline media to enhance the effectiveness of your in-house search efforts.

I’m sure everyone is aware of the ubiquity of URLs on TV, billboards, print, radio, direct mail, etc. But did you ever stop to think how these offline ads influence online search behavior?

The Influence Of Offline Marketing On Search Behavior

A 2007 iProspect survey revealed 67 percent of search engine users were influenced to conduct a query on a search engine in the previous six months as a direct result of exposure to offline marketing. Of that 67 percent, 39 percent ended up buying a product or service from the company that brought about the original search with its offline ad.

Increased conversions are a pretty powerful statistic. But it’s not the only reason to use offline media to enhance your online search campaigns. It costs less to process a transaction online than to process it in-store or by phone or mail. The more your offline efforts drive consumers to search and convert online, the better your company’s bottomline.

Are marketers getting this? Not really. A new iProspect report conducted by JupiterResearch (now owned by Forrester) shows that only 55 percent of search engine marketers are integrating their search marketing efforts with offline channels. Maybe the other 45 percent just don’t realize the power of offline ads to drive consumers online and sometimes convert.

There can be a number of reasons for failing to integrate online and offline marketing, such as not enough budget and not enough human resources. A lack of senior management buy-in is also a factor, as well as the fact that separate groups manage search marketing and offline marketing efforts.

Integrating Offline With Online Marketing

Most companies that have in-house SEO/SEM teams will also conduct traditional marketing campaigns. But how often are the online and offline campaigns integrated? This requires close coordination. For instance, you need to coordinate the keywords, messaging and calls-to-action within your offline campaigns to match the keywords, messaging, and calls-to-action that you find most profitable within your SEO/SEM campaigns. This kind of integration technique can produce more conversions and better marketing ROI for all campaigns.

Many companies find this a difficult endeavor, especially the way online and offline marketing teams are siloed and each team has its own specialized marketing tactics. The one advantage the online team has is the availability of data that can be used to show the offline team how they’ve optimized their messaging to maximize ROI. That’s a task your in-house SEO/SEM teams can undertake to gain buy-in for the marketing integration process.

Planned Coordination

It’s important to plan ahead with any kind of marketing, and more so when you’re coordinating your offline and online marketing efforts. Usually, the URL is what counts in offline marketing, because the consumer has to remember this to use it online. Get creative, help trigger memories that relate to your brand and non-brand terms. If consumers hear your ad on the radio, they can’t just reach over and type it on their mobile right away. They’ll do it later when convenient and input what they remember. This is how branded terms can help.

By working basic keywords related to your campaign into your offline ad URL, you could help strengthen your marketing campaigns in other channels. For instance, a hypothetical radio campaign for American Express with a URL like "myamericanexpressrewards.com" is too long to remember. However, "American Express" and "rewards" are two fairly memorable terms. You can optimize and buy these keywords and link them to your offline campaign landing page. This should improve the results of your radio ad and likely drive conversions on your site.

That’s just one example with a radio ad, but the same principle applies to TV, billboards and many other offline channels. Use the ubiquity of URLs in the environment to enhance both your online digital and offline traditional campaigns.

Paul J. Bruemmer has provided search engine marketing expertise and in-house consulting services to prominent American businesses since 1995. As Director of Search Marketing at Red Door Interactive, he is responsible for the strategic implementation of search engine marketing activities within Red Door’s Internet Presence Management (IPM) services. John Faris, who co-authored this article, is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Analyst at Red Door Interactive. Faris’ primary role is to create initial SEO recommendations and execute strategic recurring SEO for Red Door’s Internet Presence Management clients. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Because it’s important for in-house search teams to be effective in all search tactics, we emphasized the need for “total search marketing,” covering organic natural search, paid search advertising, paid inclusion, international search, local search, vertical search, social search, mobile search, universal search and search personalization. We discussed the first five tactics in Part 1. Below are some tips for exploiting vertical search, social media optimization, mobile search, universal search, and personalized search. Your in-house team should be proficient in these tactics to extend your online reach, generating more traffic and conversions.

Vertical search engines

Business users who need industry-specific information, as well as shoppers and consumers seeking information on niche topics, are increasingly using vertical search engines. You may recall the 2006 Outsell study reported a 31.9 percent failure rate among business users on general search engines. Jupiter also did a study showing 41.2 percent of professionals found irrelevant search results on general search engines. Since then, vertical search has been on the rise, so it pays to get a listing or advertise on B2B vertical search engines like Business.com, depending on your industry and site goals.

Check out audience demographics to see which verticals might be of value for your business. Selecting the right vehicle for vertical search advertising is key to success. It’s important to inquire about the engine’s user base and income level, bid management tools, and click fraud protection policy. Potential verticals should also be tested for ROI before committing large sums of money. Below are some of the advantages of advertising on vertical search engines:

• Lower per-click costs than Google, Yahoo and Microsoft

• Less competition for competitive keywords
• Easy to test ad copy and suitability for your business
• It can provide an additional source of traffic and conversions
• Because they’re smaller, you’ll get personalized customer service
• Because they serve a niche audience, you’ll reach highly-targeted audiences

Social media optimization (SMO)

In its simpliest form, SMO is the process of driving traffic to your site from social networking sites and online communities. By leveraging large social news sites with millions of users, you can make your story popular enough to be noticed by hundreds, or even thousands, of bloggers looking for such content as fodder for their own site.

Social media optimization can drive huge amounts of traffic to a site, making it possible for your site and ideas to be noticed. You’ll be driving traffic through new channels because search engines are no longer the only way to drive traffic. From an SEO perspective, your objective is to create hot content that will spread virally and naturally collect links. The top social news sites include Digg, Mixx, Newsvine, and Reddit, to name a few. Tips: Post hot content on your blog, make tagging easy, reward linking, and participate on related blogs.

Mobile search marketing

By 2009, over 95 percent of the US population will have a mobile phone, and there will be more mobile phones than PCs. As smartphones proliferate, it’s important to develop and optimize a separate site for the mobile screen. Don’t transcode your wired site into mobile because it won’t provide the user experience needed for the small screen. Tips for creating your mobile site:

Design: Place navigation buttons below important content, displaying content above the fold while making nav buttons visible to users. Put text links on top for main navigation. Provide a site map. Keep important inner pages within three clicks of the homepage.

Coding: Write correct code in XHTML, avoiding unnecessary code. Use external CSS and ensure correct display across multiple devices. File names should be short and keyword-rich.

Mobile SEO: Traditional SEO best practices with targeted keyword copy, meta tags and links to accommodate the small screen. Keep in mind that mobile queries are shorter when selecting keywords. Avoid pop-ups, frames, and Flash. Solicit links from relevant mobile sites. Go easy on embedded objects (images, scripts) as they don’t download well. Test across devices and validate your mobile site with mobile code checkers. Submit to mobile search engines.

Universal search

Universal search rankings are advantageous because you can get more visibility by creating and optimizing content in multiple formats resulting in multiple search listings. Below are some suggested formats you can use to create and submit content for increased visibility.

Google Blog Search: Communicate with your customers and stakeholders through your blog. Tag your posts and submit to Google Blog search.

Google Image Search: Create and optimize relevant images on your site to demonstrate products and services. Optimize images with descriptive, keyword-rich file names and ALT tags, using accurate descriptions.

Google Video: Create and optimize relevant video content using descriptive, keyword-rich file names, title tags, description tags, and a video site map. Create a web page to launch your video, optimizing content for organic rankings, using anchor text wherever possible. Submit to video search engines, directories, and video sharing sites.

Google Maps: Give your site a local presence through the Google Maps Local Business Center where you can get a free basic listing and increased visibility in the SERPs.

Search personalization

The impact of user-generated content in search results has increased since the advent of Web 2.0. Google introduced personalized search, using information from users’ location, search history, bookmarks, personalized Google homepage, and Google services to personalize search results for Google account holders. Personalized search results are more relevant because Google infers intent by looking at previous behavior, eliminating much of the information that makes general search results irrelevant.

Search personalization creates an opportunity for you to gain rankings by optimizing for long-tail keywords. Personalization also minimizes the importance of ranking reports. It’s more useful to rely on relevant metrics rather than on keyword rankings. Web analytics can provide more granular information for optimizing a search marketing campaign, and your site can gain insight by setting up a dashboard of key performance indicators (KPIs). You can then track performance to improve your search rankings, web site performance, and ROI.

Conclusion

Taking advantage of online lead generation is important for many businesses. Don’t be among those who fail to exploit this marketing tactic. Ensure that your in-house search team is knowledgeable in and takes full advantage of all the SEO, SMO, and PPC tactics covered in Part 1 and 2 of “total search marketing.”

Paul J. Bruemmer has provided search engine marketing expertise and in-house consulting services to prominent American businesses since 1995. As Director of Search Marketing at Red Door Interactive, he is responsible for the strategic implementation of search engine marketing activities within Red Door’s Internet Presence Management (IPM) services. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Survey says: Natural search generates more online leads

1. Natural search (79%) is the most frequently used online marketing tactic for lead generation, followed by email marketing in-house lists (75%) and paid search (71%).

2. Over half (52%) of company respondents said natural search was “very effective.” Just under half (48%) said paid search was very effective.

While online lead generation is becoming more important for many businesses, only a little over half of the company respondents in this survey felt their company wasn’t exploiting this type of marketing as effectively as it could be, illustrating that online lead generation delivers results but could be utilized better.

Paid search advertising gets more of the budget

The report found a greater proportion of online lead generation budgets are allocated to paid search advertising despite the fact that natural search is perceived as providing the best value for the money. Companies haven’t invested in natural search over and above other internet marketing tactics because it requires more effort, but don’t make that mistake in your search marketing efforts.

As an-house search marketing manager, you need to make sure you are doing “total search marketing” by taking advantage of all search marketing tactics. And don’t forget the superior benefits of natural search when allocating budget. Below is a review of all areas of search that need to be covered for maximum ROI.

Total search engine marketing

To truly understand the role of search marketing, your in-house team must be knowledgeable in a wide spectrum of search services, including organic natural search, paid search advertising, paid inclusion, international search, local search, vertical search, social search, mobile search, blended search, and search personalization. We’ll elaborate on the first five in Part 1, and finish up with the last five in Part 2. Below are the activities your in-house team can engage in to reach your audience via the internet.

Natural search: The methodology for driving traffic through organic natural search optimization requires a wide-range of best practices surrounding all aspects of web site development, including server configuration, site architecture, page construction, type of content, target personas, link profiles, and internal linking structure. This involves multi-disciplinary teams with experts in technical services, user experience, creative direction, and search marketing expertise. Natural search is the bedrock and cornerstone to all search marketing functionality (discussion for another article).

Paid search advertising: The practice of driving paid search traffic has become increasingly more difficult with respect to the number of keywords being managed, landing page optimization/testing, and Google’s Quality Score. It has been proven now that bid wars are a useless strategy, and positions 1 through 10 paid are on equal ground when measuring ROI. The most sophisticated in-house paid search teams are working in silos without the benefit of networking and exchange of new information in managing their account/s. Those who have gone outside for advice are seriously impressed with the results.

Paid inclusion: This may also include comparison shopping engines, re-targeting programs, or CPM related search engine ad buys. Google recently announced Ad Planner to help media planners mix display and search, a close relative to paid inclusion. Although paid inclusion has very limited application for most companies, it remains effective for some situations involving large databases.

International search: Highly specialized area requiring global experience beyond translation services. There are only a handful of people who have nailed this area down, so it will be very important to network with all of your contacts and consider multiple options before embarking outside of the US in search marketing and optimization.

Local search: There have been significant areas of improvement in Local Search strategy and tactics over the past 12 months. Again, this is an area requiring ‘experience in Local Search’ if you want to avoid all the mistakes and capture all the quick wins.

The takeaway is that search marketing is no longer just having a proficiency in paid search, and natural search is no longer just an on-page and off-page tactic that emphasizes keywords or press releases and linking. Paid and natural search require multi-disciplinary teamwork focused on your specific business goals and integrated within your entire media mix. Visit this space in a few weeks for the conclusion of this article, where we review what in-house search marketing teams can do to improve overall operational efficiency with vertical search, social search, mobile search, blended search, and search personalization.

Paul J. Bruemmer has provided search engine marketing expertise and in-house consulting services to prominent American businesses since 1995. As Director of Search Marketing at Red Door Interactive, he is responsible for the strategic implementation of search engine marketing activities within Red Door’s internet Presence Management (IPM) services. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.