Load speed issues affect all websites, but we’re retailers, so today, I’ll cover some retailer specific issues that didn’t fit in last month’s column.

I reduced my homepage bounce rate to 15% last month using the following method.

Load Speed Is A Big Deal, But Now What?

Here’s how I worked on the load speed issues for my stores:

• Set a baseline for site’s current condition
• Determine acceptable load speeds for different types of pages
• Make sure hosting and files load fast
• Measure load speed monthly and track results

1.  Set A Baseline For Your Store

• Start with your homepage because most folks enter there
• Next, measure at your top 20 entry pages
• Then, look at your top 20 best-selling product pages
• Look to Google Webmaster tools to see your site’s averages
• Finally, compare your top pages with competitors

Google Webmaster Tools has a cool report that shows you your overall average load speed for all your pages and gives you a few specific examples.

2.  Set Acceptable Page Sizes & Load Speeds

Google says a page that loads in 1.5 seconds is fast.

E-commerce and usability expert Michael Summers says 3 seconds is fast.

Summers has watched over 1,000 real shoppers buy online from real stores in his usability / eyetracking labs. I put him on the spot, and he told me things start to get ugly after 3 seconds, so that’s my new baseline. I want my average e-commerce page to load in 3 seconds or less.

Last month, I got my own site down to an average load speed of 2.0 seconds, which is pretty damn fast for an e-commerce site. All sites are different. Some industries need more icing on their cake than others.

Determine acceptable load speed ranges by page type:

• home page  – 4 seconds
• top 20 entry pages — 3 seconds
• category pages — 3 seconds
• product pages — 3 seconds
• content pages — 2 seconds
• detail pages — 5 seconds

Compare your stores to your strongest competitors to get a good idea of how fast your store needs to be to keep up with the Joneses.

3.  Make Sure Your Store’s Files Load Fast

Size matters, but load speed is determined by both sizes and number of files, and quality of Web hosting.

Last month, I did an experiment weighing 30 different Yahoo! Store developers’ homepages, and the slowest pages (5000KB) were the ones with dozens of images and javascripts and Flash.

However, rounding out the 10 slowest sites were some tiny web pages  (200KB) on really, really slow Web servers.

4.  Get The Fastest Web Hosting You Can

There’s a reason I use Yahoo! Store for my online store-building and hosting — so I don’t have to think about a lot of propellerhead stuff I don’t understand. I am a retailer, not a network administrator or server jockey.

For comparison, I also have sites on other hosting solutions — some blogs and a message board or two, and the load speed of hosting varies from vendor to vendor. Shared hosting (where your site is on a box with 100 other sites) can be painfully slow!

Do your homework on your hosting provider. Upgrade to the fastest hosting they offer.

5.  Use Content Delivery Networks (Or Services That Do)

CDNs or content delivery networks are services that host your files (images, video, etc) on multiple servers all around the world so the files are physically closer to the end-user.

For example, when a shopper in Mississippi looks at a product page on my store, the images load twice as fast as they would if they were hosted on the server that hosts my online store pages.

Yahoo! Stores have CDN baked in for product images and default icons. If you use custom image variables, your logos and badges and store elements load blazing fast!

6.  Be Smart With Page Design & Number Of Files Per Page

For example, don’t have 800  product thumbnails on a section page. Ouch! Think 20 or maybe 50.

• Limit how many elements you put on a single page
• Break up pages into smaller blocks of pictures and text when it makes sense
• Re-use images and icons as much as you can
• Optimize individual files before you upload them

7.  Bake Fast Load Speed Into Your Templates By Default

Set a maximum file size for an empty template for html, run of site scripts, browser chrome,  and other icons / elements / logos that exist on multiple pages of your site.

Take advantage of how browsers cache or reuse files already downloaded, so once a user “pays” for a logo or CSS file, re-use it on every page you can.

Optimize your HTML code with CSS at the top and javascripts at the bottom of the page.

Don’t use a lot of widgets or tools from third party websites. Make sure your pages can fail gracefully when 3rd party services don’t load by putting that code at the bottom of your pages and outside of any design elements or store structure.

8.  Make Sure Your Images Are Optimized

Determine acceptable file size ranges for images:

• number and size of images on a given page
• size of thumbnail images (dimensions in pixels and file size in KB)
• size of product images (dimensions in pixels and file size in KB)

Optimize your product images from the start:

• Make it a company policy to compress your images
• Optimize all your files as you upload them
• Make custom thumbnails for category pages
• Don’t rely on built-in image compression or resizing tools

9. Measure Your Site’s Load Speed Monthly

Measure and evaluate load speed of top entry pages on a regular basis, as often as once a month. Pages change as people add code on top of code on top of code.

10.  Evaluate Your Average Site Load Speed

Google Webmaster Tools will show you how your site performs overall. Google only shows you a rolling 90 day graph, so I email myself this table and sample pages every time I’m in Webmaster Tools to archive it.

11.  Measure & Track Individual Pages

I use Tools.Pingdom.com to look at individual pages. It’s free! Saves history so you can see load speed over time and see load speed at different time of day

12.  Watch Bounce Rates On Entry Pages

Look in your Analytics to see the impact load speed has on your bounce rates. I shoot for a bounce rate in the teens for my homepage and have been lucky this year.

Remember “Fast” At Your Office Isn’t Always Fast Everywhere Else

Nowadays, most folks have broadband at up to 30-Mbps, but many will be browsing your store on a much slower connection. Sometimes good bandwidth is clogged with too many users, like at a search conference hotel. Wireless connections are closer to dial up speeds than broadband. Many rural customers settle for satellite or dial up connections.

Increasing the load speed of a page is the easiest way I’ve ever seen to increase conversions.

All things being equal, faster pages out-convert slower pages. If you have a slow-loading store, more folks will bounce or exit from your pages than if it loaded faster.

Make sure the most popular entry pages load lightning fast and move folks to interior pages. Every feature needs to prove itself. Any decrease in load speed must be offset by that feature’s boost in revenue.

Finally, be cutthroat about how skinny and fast your pages are. Your business depends on it.

But in recent times, load speed has become more important than ever because site performance now affects SEO. How fast your pages load now potentially affect your store’s rankings in Google’s organic results.

Slow loading sites often provide a bad user experience, and if it’s bad enough, Google could tag your domain as a low quality site.

Load Speed Back In The Dial-Up Days

I’ve always been a little obsessed with load speed, probably because we started selling online back in the dial-up days, when the Web was really, really slow! Back then, the limiting factor on page size was low-bandwidth Internet connections.

In 1998, I used Yahoo! Store’s online store builder over 28.8K dial-up that was easily 50 times slower than the connection I’m using to write this article today. We retailers were painfully aware of how slow a webpage could load as we waited for all the thumbnails and product images and other files to download and display on the screen.

Even in 2011, load speed directly affects your store’s ability to convert browsers into buyers. And while adding social media plug-ins, video, and pimping out your store looks great, piling code on top of code may result in unintended negative consequences.

Slowing your site’s load speed can shoot your sales in the head.

The Law Of Unintended Consequences

Last month’s column covered managing wild swings in revenue and how I diagnose a problem store. This month we get to see our plan in action.

Here’s a real world example of trouble-shooting a store in jeopardy! Recently, I got an email followed by a phone call from yet another store owner whose sales are way off. Had to let all her employees go. She’ll have to close the business if sales don’t improve very, very quickly.

I know how that feels. In the Pre-dot com days, we were losing $1000 a day at one point. I volunteered an hour or more and dug in. We looked at her site and dove into her stats.

I took the history of the site to see if anything clicked. It’s a seasonal business and sales are down a little in July, but last year, the MAY DAY update really did a number on them.

This graph shows daily revenue over an 18 month period.

The owner commissioned a redesign and as the graph shows revenue (and both traffic and conversions) have been off ever since. People say, “Correlation does not imply causation,” but I get antsy when I see traffic and sales tank that soon after a redesign. There are multiple issues, so let’s dig in.

Usually, I walk through the process I discussed in last month’s column, but sometimes when sales fall off like this, there might be an easy answer. Now, I was looking for “parking brakes” to undo — simple fixes that result in faster loading sites which usually result in more sales.

Just How Fat & Slow Is My Site?

Just curious, I wondered how fast the homepage loaded, so I ran it through tools.pingdom.com. This is a free tool which downloads a webpage, tells you how long it takes, and gives you all kinds of stats about files and download speeds.

When you use it, remember to scroll to the bottom to find that gray box with all the totals in it. The huge list of files can be confusing for retailers or other folks who don’t see these files every day!

You want to look at two things: TOTAL LOADING TIME in seconds and TOTAL OBJECTS which shows the number and combined file size of the HTML, images, scripts, and other files that make up a webpage.

Also, I always sort by FILE SIZE to see if there are any fat images I can compress or huge javascripts I can consider moving off a page to boost the speed.

And The Survey Says…

The tool said the homepage was both fat and slow. Total file size was 1.5MB which is pretty fat. Load time was 12 seconds. Ouch! That’s really, really slow.

Google says a fast webpage is one that loads in 1.5 seconds or less, and that 20% of pages on the Web are that fast or faster! So, 12 seconds to load a single page is slower than ~95% of the other pages on the Web.

The background image alone (line 5) took 2.75 seconds to download. I doublechecked it by testing the image itself.  What really stuck out in the report was weird lag on a lot of images — see the yellow in the image below.

This graph is a screenshot from the tools.pingdom.com report on a test page calling the secure version of the images.

Here is a screen shot of what the time bar means:

The CSS file calls 19 template elements on the secure server. The only valid reason to do that I can think of is to recycle images for a faster cart and checkout —  which is smart. In this case though, her cart was the old design and used very few of the new elements.

Cage Match: Two Pages Enter. One Page Leaves…

To test the lag, I made two sample pages — one calling secure versions of the images and one calling regular versions of the images. I compared the load speed of the two at various times during the day.

The added lag of secure encryption resulted in a delay of an additional two seconds for every single entry page on her website. And has done this for the past 10 months.

The graph below is a screenshot from the tools.pingdom.com report on a test page calling the regular version of the images (which is not secure and therefore faster).

It also shows the 75K background image, which we decided to pull.

We decided to stop and fix it immediately.

Although the designer was adamant that there’s no lag on images with a secure server, the graphs and dramatic decrease in download time with regular images showed otherwise.

Once the client emailed her designer specific instructions, it took the designer less than 5 minutes to implement these changes.

Results

Removing the background image and changing the path from the secure server to the regular server dropped the homepage load time from 12 seconds down to 4.5 seconds.

Look…You don’t know what your designer doesn’t know. Or what their employees don’t know. You have to pay attention because it’s your business on the line any time someone makes changes to your online store.

The funny thing is that radical change came from one thing: just looking at the homepage and load speed.

To be fair, the site also has some merchandising and SEO issues, but after a couple more hours on the phone, I think the owner has a handle on them and is in a position to get things back to the good old days with a little work.

Fingers crossed.

Homework: Weigh Your Top 20 Entry Pages

1. Login to your analytics.
2. Run a report to list your top 20 entry pages by revenue for the past year.
3. Go to tools.pingdom.com and run the first page.
4. Sort the files by file size.
5. Look at each file on each page and make sure each file is necessary.
6. If necessary, make sure the file is optimized.
7. If not necessary, remove it from the page.
8. Repeat for the next 19 pages.

In a month, run them again to see how well you optimized them. Compare the post-tweak bounce rate on these pages to the month before you optimized them. Now do the next 20 pages. Rinse and repeat.

Next time, unless Google does something insane this month, I plan to detail a process you can use to improve the load speed of your online store by doing the following:

Setting a baseline to establish where you are now by:

1. Establishing acceptable ranges for load times and file sizes
2. Optimizing various types of files
3. Tweaking your HTML to take advantage how browsers work
4. Creating an optimization work flow for new pages
5. Regularly measuring results

Keep your hand on your wallet and your eyes on your stats!

Signing off from somewhere in sleepy Mississippi where it’s 101 degrees with no breeze and 90% humidity…

This time of year, I get one or two retailers a week calling or emailing me, sometimes totally freaking out because their sales are way off. Usually it’s about 6-8 weeks after some event when they realize that this major drop in orders wasn’t a fluke. Now with the reality of the second Panda update setting in, my phone is ringing off the hook.

In today’s column, I’m going to give you a framework to diagnose sudden unexpected revenue drops. I’ll show you how I use analytics to quickly isolate the source of the problem. I’ll reveal several of my mistakes and examples of mistakes I’ve seen retailers and developers make and how we fixed them.

First & Foremost, Don’t Panic!

It may be easier said than done, but first, don’t panic. Keep a calm head and isolate the problem. Half of the time if you can find the sales leak, you can patch it pretty fast. Once you know what’s off and where it is,  you have a better idea what to work on.

Is it one big thing or death by 1000 cuts? Is something broken on your site or is it outside your store? Is it changes in your marketing channels affecting traffic, or industry trends, or the economy?

Usually a drop in sales is a combination of lots of things. It’s  rarely just one little thing wreaking havoc, but retailers don’t notice until they feel like sales are half what they should be or sales have dropped off. Sometimes, the event that killed your sales is something that’s been happening for a while, and the update just pushed sales into the danger zone where they got noticed.

Place A Real Test Order Right Now!

The first thing I do is place a real test order with a real credit card and see if something is obviously wrong with the checkout process.

When you’re troubleshooting, make sure you’re using the same browser as most of your customers  (Internet Explorer) and use the operating system, version, and even screen resolutions that most of your customers use. I love Macs, and I’m running Chrome on my Mac right now. The major problem with that is you can’t see certain error messages that Windows users running IE see.

For example, on one cart redesign I did recently, one logo in the secure checkout used the path to the normal version of the logo (not the one on the secure server) so some browsers gave error messages warning that some items were not secure.

You could only see this on the published version of the cart and only in some browsers, but we caught it about 15 minutes after deploying around 11pm one night. That  error alone could totally nuke your conversions for the next day!

Houston, We Have A Problem…

Usually, when there’s a problem in the cart/checkout, especially if you have a high order volume and/or lots of repeat customers, someone will give you a heads up that your cart is down. Make sure your customer service folks know to let you know immediately if there’s a problem.

Smaller stores have to be more careful. If you get less than 40-50 orders a day, you realistically don’t have enough order volume to get a phone call or an email as soon as your cart goes down. If your credit card processor goes offline or has a huge lag, not every prospect is going to let you know there’s a problem. Most folks just move along to the next guy selling exactly what you sell.

For short-term trouble-shooting, Yahoo! Web Anaytics runs in real time, so it’s easy for me to see what the immediate problem is. Is it traffic? Or folks are adding to cart but not checking out. If I have a disproportionate amount of dropped carts, it’s usually something in your back end. For longer term issues, we have to dig in a bit.

Look At The Numbers Over The Long Haul

I’ve learned that many times you can’t trust a retailer to tell you what’s really going on. When someone cuts off the money machine, retailers start freaking out and lose all objectivity. There are bills to pay, cash flow is tight, and orders are way off. Remain calm and we’ll get through this together.

After making sure the site works, I build a simple model of how the business works by the numbers. I dive into my stats in Yahoo! Web Analytics and/or Google Analytics and look at the previous years to see the normal cycle of traffic and sales over the selling cycle of a full year. Looking at multiple years will show you patterns.

For example, how many orders should Tom get this July, if July is traditionally about the 75% revenue of normal April traffic? If he maintains his 2% conversion rate with a 50% completed cart rate with an average sale of $100, how much traffic does he need to get these orders?

Examine Long Term Trends Over 90 Days To See The Big Picture

I’m not a math-person at all, but I like to look at rolling averages over time to smooth out the bumps that happen over time. I also like to compare periods of 90 days (at a minimum) when I’m trying to see what’s happening.

Huge variation in sales in normal comparing day-to-day. Holidays fall on different days every year. Huge news events can distract folks. Freakish weather can disable large parts of the country for days at a time. People get paid on different dates than last year. Take all of this into account when “sales are way off!”

Many times retailers look at their sales in the first half of the year coming off a big fat Christmas season and exclaim, “Our sales are down!  Our sales are down!”  Well, your sales are down from your peak, but how are your sales are  compared to the same exact month last year?

The default date range on Google Analytics is the last 30 days. And if you click compare to past, it compares  that range with the previous 30 days which drives me nuts. I guess in a dot-com tech start-up universe, you might need to beat last month’s numbers every month, but retail is a little less insane.

Traffic Metrics I Watch

For traffic metrics, I compare visitors and revenue from a specific channel over past 365 days to the previous 365 days. If there’s a big drop I dig in deeper. I look at individual keywords and/or entry pages to see if something is broken that I can easily fix.

Conversion Metrics I Watch

I look at the following over time for seasonality and compare year-to-year:

• Unique visitors
• Product view rates
• Add-to-cart rates
• Proceed-to-checkout rates
• Completed cart rates
• Number of orders
• Average order size

Remember: Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

Just because you changed something right before sales tanked does not mean that is the cause of your problem. It might be worth looking into, but remember that correlation does not imply causation.

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

Many times a problem pops up because somebody changed something and didn’t realize what the unintended consequences would be. Maybe it’s a store redesign gone bad which affects traffic and/or conversion. More often, it’s checkout-related.

You need to know what’s different today compared to when sales were good.

Compile A List Of All Site Changes

I like do the following:

• Keep a log of changes to your site.
• Archive HTML copies of VIP pages
• Take screenshots before you make major changes.
• Mark big changes in your analytics package for better reports.

Changes That Could Affect SEO Traffic

Have you done a site redesign that may not have affected your search engine traffic, but it may have affected your conversion rate? Are your pages are a lot fatter with more graphics and information, they are slower to load, or a lot of CSS, or using Ajax and JavaScript?

• Have you radically changed your ROS NAV and/or internal linking? aka, lose 20K links…
• Have you increased the size of your boilerplate template?
• have you added NOINDEX, follow on all your low content pages
• Have you doubled the size of your site with a datafeed?
• Are you sharing your content via shopping feeds?

Here’s an  example of a traffic drop caused by a site redesign:

A retailer switched from a run-of-site template with 20 category links to a flyout menu navigation with a links to over 250 different pages.

On a site with 20,000 pages that radically redistributed the link popularity, but it also quadrupled the size of the boilerplate of the template. My take was that Google saw so many really empty category pages and very thin product pages with more template than content and removed most of his site from the index.

You want to be really careful when you’re doing a site redesign that you don’t have so much boilerplate that it overrides your really thin category and product pages.

How Close To The Ground Are You?

Occasionally, I’ll see someone who doesn’t have so much traffic that they’ll drop from 500 visitors a day to 250 visitors a day. And that’s one of those situations where it’s so little traffic that the slightest change in algorithm or page layout on the Google search engine results page can kill you.

Changes That Could Affect Your Add-to-Carts

Have you changed your shipping rates or “free shipping” model?

Another thing I look at is whether you have changed your shipping model recently. Did you used to have free shipping and now you don’t?  Have you increased your shipping rates?

Have you changed prices on best-sellers?

One example I use pretty often is a manufacturer raised our cost on one SKU, so we passed them on to the consumer and sales of that SKU instantly dropped by 60% even though all our competitors did likewise. We actually made more money, so you need to watch revenues and profits. Like my daddy used to say,”It ain’t what you gross, it’s what you net.”

Sometimes it’s more than price…

In one of our stores, all our competitors were offering a free gift with the purchase of a MAP (minimum-advertised price) protected product. It was a pretty lame free gift, but when we added that, sales jumped up. Are any competitors outdoing you here?

Changes That Could Affect Your Checkout Completion

Have you done something in your cart that would have possibly impacted your sales?

For example, one store I helped last year had this “Dropped Cart Catcher” that would offer you a 5% coupon when you were bailing from the site, but when you elected to stick around, if you were in the cart, it would “forget” to give you your discount. Another example of something implemented but not tested by the developer or the retailer.

Here are some other quick additions I’ve seen kill checkouts:

• Added COUPON fields
• Requiring a checkbox for terms and conditions
• A/B testing software that was slow to render the pages
• Increased shipping rates
• Handling charge or other extras to monetize shipping
• Shipping calculators on sites with a free shipping model

Adding All These Third-Party Features Sounds Cool, But Is It?

Try not to run too many different external services in your cart. It’s just one more thing that can mess up and prevent your customers from giving you money!

On one of our stores, we were in the stone age and processed credit cards offline just up until a year ago so we could catch the folks with declined cards or when there was a problem with the gateway.

Also, I don’t use the UPS shipping calculator, real-time inventory, external address correction software or many other features that require another company’s server to work for my customers to give me money.

Your Homework Is To Place A Test Order

Right now, I want you to order something from your online store.

1. Go to products.google.com
2. search for site:yourdomain.com to show only your products
3. sort by price from lowest to highest
4. find the second cheapest item you sell.

Stop. Don’t click that link!

Now, try to find this item on your store by browsing or searching and then order like a customer would with a real credit card. Start making a list of things that might be hurting your sales!

EXAMPLE

Keep Your Head While Others Are Losing Theirs

It’s a little too late for folks already on fire to do this, but here are some tips that may help you avoid the next sales drop, or handle it better and sooner than you would have otherwise.

• Have your finger on the pulse of your store’s metrics.
• Place a real live test order once a week.
• Know which channels drive traffic and more importantly, revenue and profit.
• Make changes slowly and one at a time so you can see the impact of each
• Network with platform providers and fellow merchants who share the same service.

Don’t take double or triple digit growth for granted. If your business model is dependent on growth like this, you’re gonna have some problems! Sock some cash back when things are fat.

Don’t panic and you’ll make it! I’ve been there. It sucks, but you’re tough enough to handle this!

Today, I’m going to cover how you can optimize customer product reviews to make more with your online store. By asking your customers to give you feedback on the products they buy, you get inside your customers’ heads and you get killer content for your product pages.

Before my column ran last month, I was embarrassed that I didn’t have any reviews on the example product I was writing about! I decided to go all out and email every single person who ever bought this product to see how many reviews I could get before my next deadline.

Well, Shazam, Pee Wee! I got hundreds of reviews! And it worked so well, I started rolling this out to some other products immediately.

In this week’s column, I’ll share what I’ve learned so far.

Benefits Of Products With Reviews

Products with reviews convert better

• Social proof: People buy this and it works!
• Real people actually shop with you
• Show additional benefits
• Stories sell stuff

Product reviews have SEO Benefits

• Get more unique text content with reviews
  • Beef up existing product page content
  • Sometimes enough text for an additional page
  • Panda-proof: reviews not syndicated via feeds

• Get more keywords with reviews
  • Better long tail SEO
  • Customers use different keywords than you do
  • Rank for your best keywords + “reviews”
  • Get  activity related keywords:
  • Excuse to get breeds of dogs worked in to the page

First, just offering product reviews isn’t enough. We’ve been doing that on the store for over a year. A certain percentage of your customers would love to give you feedback on what they bought and why, but you just need to remind them. Email is perfect for this.

Mamaw used to say, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get!” She’s right! Take one SKU at a time. Start with your best-sellers, and fire up your email software.

What Do Customers Really Think About This Product?

Seeing all the feedback for one product from dozens and dozens of customers was mind-blowing. It’s easy to see trends when product feedback comes in one big blast in one afternoon.

After we got over 250 reviews, I stuck them in a text file where I was looking for three different things in the text:

• Customer success stories
• What people liked and didn’t like
• Customer keywords — the language regular people use to describe this product.

Customer Success Stories

I like customer stories and reviews. The more I feature them on a product page, the more conversions I get!

Here are three examples:

Example  1 – Being able to see the improvement has helped my sanity greatly. Especially when dealing with my neighbor who believes he is entitled to utter and complete silence living in a condo. I have yet to tell him that he sounds like a rhino when he walks around upstairs.

Example 2 – I bought this to train my Jack Russell Terrier because we were gong to be taking her on a long flight from Tokyo to the US. Anyway, she learned very quickly, on level 1, that barking was a no no while wearing the collar. Now, I just have to show her the collar when she’s barking and she gets quiet. This makes the product worth the extra price.

Example 3 – I work the night shift, & my german shepherd / black lab mix never barks when I am home. However it turns out when I’m away he goes into guard-dog mode and barks at everyone (even my landlord neighbor). …  It turns out this amazing little gem trained him to stop barking after only 3 corrections. 3 corrections, on level 2 no more barking. Worth every penny!

What Customers Like & Don’t Like

The second thing that I like to look for in these customer reviews are recurring themes. After you read 250+ reviews, you’re going to start to seeing the same things over and over again. And with this product there were several recurring themes.

People liked:

• Quick results – stops barking now
• Multiple levels for different dogs
• Sleep feature saves battery life
• Bark odometer/counter shows it’s working

People didn’t like:

• Smart dogs can become collar-wise
• Too sensitive for some dogs
• Short product lifespan (after warranty expires)
• Buttons aren’t very user friendly
• Contact points too short for thick hair

I got this summary over to our customer reps and product experts for feedback, and got several pages of notes to update the product page to reflect what prospects want in this product.

Language Lesson: Customers Use Words You Don’t

One of the advantages to asking your customers for these reviews is you actually get to see the keywords that real customers use to describe what you sell. We got over 15,000 words from our customers in these 250+ reviews of user generated content filled with keywords, filled with customer stories, using different words that customers use to describe these products — including misspelled words.

Customers wrote 15,000 words of unique text:

Content                        Length                        Unique Words

---

Original text                ~1,000 words                 400 unique keywords

---

Reviews text                ~15,000 words                1,600 unique words

---

Keyword cloud from original product description

This tag cloud below shows frequency of  keywords from the product description. I wrote an extended caption field. Notice how it focuses on brand, features, and benefits.

Help Yourself By Asking For Types Of Keywords

In the reviews form itself you can ask questions designed to get keyword loaded answers.  In this example, we asked for breed of dog and activities owners did with their dogs.

Here are just the ABC’s of the breeds customers volunteered:

aussie shepherd, australian shepherd, beagle, bearded collie & cavachon, beauceron, belgian tervuren, black lab, black labs, black & tan, blue heeler/bull terrier mix, bluetick, bluetick coonhounds, border collie, border collie mix, bouvier, boxer, boykin spaniel, brittany, brittany spaniels, cairn terrier, cardigan welsh corgi, cattle dog/aussie and border collie, cheasapeak bay retriever, chesapeake bay retriever, chesapeake retriever, chihauhau, chocolate lab, cocker spaniel, collie, corgi mix, corgies…

This  tag cloud shows the frequency of keywords from 15,000 words of text in 250+ customer reviews. All the words here were not contained in the original product description. Notice how this keyword cloud focuses on dog breeds, problems, situations, and results.

Once we get this page spidered, based on previous successes, this will likely more than double the number of keywords driving traffic and sales to this page.

Homework For You

Email every customer who ever bought a SKU and:

• Ask for a review
• Put the reviews form in the email itself.
• Have a contest to increase response rate
• Ask product-centric questions
• Ask for success stories
• Give folks plenty of room to write

Deal with customer service issues:

• Don’t do it on a Monday
• Let customer service know it’s coming
• Respond to problem reviews as they come in
• Fix customer service issues
• Address product issues in page content

Organize review content:

• Pull out good customer stories
• Organize content into themes
• Grab “quotable quotes”
• Summarize pros and cons
• Make sure reviews are in plain HTML on the page

As retailers, we deal with products on a daily basis. We are jaded. We may talk to customers, but we are not customers. Customers have a completely different vocabulary.

You need to learn how customers view a product, use the terms that they use in your product page copy, and solve the problems they have in their terms if you want to sell more on the Web. It’s that easy!

In my first installment, I told you about how I spent less than thirty minutes optimizing a single product page, which resulted in a 300% explosion in sales on that SKU.

That column pressed the right buttons for some folks. I got emails from vendors wanting me to optimize their product page next. The collar’s manufacturer emailed to thank me for cranking sales. Got some Twitter love. I even got an email from a direct competitor thanking me for some new ideas. Doh!

To recap, back in November of 2010. I cloned a popular product page, and named it what normal people would call it instead of using the manufacturer’s brand/model/name just to see what would happen.

And to make things easier, throughout this column I’m going to refer to the original page as OLD SKU, the new optimized page as NEW SKU, and the leather collars subcategory page as SUBCAT.

After doing some lightning fast keyword research, I chose the generic product keyword: “Leather dog collar with name plate” as my primary keyword phrase which would also be the name of the product for this test.

To optimize the page for this phrase, I did the following:

• Made the URL leather-dog-collar-with-name-plate.html
• Wrote a decent Title tag and Meta Description
• Made the Headline “#1 Best-seller: Leather Dog Collar with Name Plate”
• Wrote 500 words of keyword-rich content
• Linked to it on both the subcategory page and category pages
• Linked to it from a couple of external domains

This was originally intended to be an SEO project, but it turned into an attempted conversion improvement project as well. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between what is search engine optimization and what is conversion rate optimization.

What content am I adding for SEO benefits, and what content is to educate and compel my prospects to open up their wallets and buy? When there’s a conflict between the two, these days, I tend to do what’s best for conversions!

Today, we’re going to look at the results. In this column, we’ll cover:

• How much SEO traffic drives sales
• What SEO keywords generate revenue
• How additional content in product descriptions helped
• What tools I used to measure results
• How you can apply all of the above

I’m most excited about what this experiment taught me about subcategory pages. At the end of this column, I’ll disclose what’s really responsible for at least half of the success of this increase. This revelation has changed the way I tweak pages on all my sites using Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Traffic Is Up 600+%, Sales Are Up ~300%

Five months before the experiment, the old SKU generated $6000, and in the following five months, the NEW SKU + OLD SKU generated $17,500. Sweet! The ~300% increase is still holding up after 5 months.

In the past 6 months, the NEW SKU and the OLD SKU combined got more than 10,000 unique product views. During the previous 6 months, the OLD SKU alone got less than 1,500 unique product views, so traffic to these pages is up over 600%.

I’ll Admit It.. Some Mistakes Were Made

One thing I promised was to show “how much better the new page converts than the original page”. Well… uh, it doesn’t.

You know how the more organic traffic you get, the more bad, non-converting traffic you get as well? The NEW SKU and the OLD SKU now both convert less than just the OLD SKU by itself, which makes sense, if only because the same product is featured with two different names.

We also had a much higher bounce rate on the Leather Collars subcategory page, which also got a boost in traffic after we changed the content. To be candid, our site is a hunting dog store, and some dog owners don’t like sites associated with hunting.

A third problem is that we keep selling out of stock! You can see by the graphs that there are gaps in sales. I’d rather lose online sales than tick people off by taking their money then putting them on back-order. We remove sold-out sizes on the product page as soon as inventory is gone, which is killing me!

Where Is All This Traffic Coming From?

The boost in traffic is completely organic — a combination of Google with a little Bing & Yahoo! thrown in.

Some of the sales come from Google Adwords. I didn’t specifically buy an ad for this NEW SKU, but some more generic keywords drive traffic to pages where both the NEW SKU and the OLD SKU are featured. We also got a smidgen of sales from Google products feed, but not enough to comment on.

To my surprise, we also got a lot of internal traffic from other pages on the site. More on this in a bit…

Overall SEO Efforts Of Old SKU vs New SKU

Since November 2010, 113 of my NEW SKU orders tie directly to SEO efforts compared to 18 SEO sales for OLD SKU for same time period before the experiment. Don’t get too excited! All that means is that I was doing a horrible job as an SEO on this product page.

OLD SKU:

In the past 21 months (since I was running the new version of Yahoo! Web Analytics) the OLD SKU page only had 1079 organic clicks from 83 different keyword phrases, of which seven phrases which converted.

NEW SKU:

In the first 5 months — 1372 organic clicks from 200 unique keyword phrases, 25 of which converted.

SEO efforts targeting one phrase worked pretty fast, too. Before we launched NEW SKU, we accidentally ranked #1 on Google with another really crappy page, so it was no surprise when the NEW SKU page featuring “leather dog collar with name plate” replaced it within the first 10 days.

Google Webmaster Tools is great for showing you the value of various position(s) for each search query. For example, for the specific query: “leather dog collar with name plate” we have two pages listed on page one of the search results.

As I write this, the NEW SKU page is in the #1 position, with 170 impressions, 60 clicks, and a 35% click-through rate. My collars.html category page is in the #2 position with 170 impressions and 16 clicks (9% CTR).

What’s really cool is that I can see that having two pages on page one as clustered results nets me an additional 30% in traffic, as well as pushing my distinguished competition down the page. Sorry, fellas!

Google Webmaster Tools data is very useful, but it frustrates me that the data rolls off after 35 days or so. If you don’t live in there, you might miss something! C’mon, Google! Data storage is SO cheap! Charge me for it if you must, but let me see more than a month!

More Keywords In Content Matters For Traffic & Revenue

The OLD SKU has 50 words of unique text in the product description. The NEW SKU has 500 words of unique text.

Wordle.net is a great tool for visualising keyword frequency in a set of keywords with keyword clouds.

Rankings and traffic are great, but I’m after conversions! The phrase “leather dog collar with name plate” was the best performing converting keyword phrase for NEW SKU, but a #1 ranking on one phrase isn’t everything. We actually made more money on secondary phrases (combined) and on long tail phrases (combined) than on our primary phrase.

Primary Phrase

leather dog collar with name plate — 10 orders

Secondary Phrases

dog collars with name plates — 9 orders

dog collars with name plate — 8 orders

dog collar with name plate — 7 orders

leather dog collars with name plate — 4 orders

leather dog collars with name plates — 3 orders

leather collar with name plate — 2 orders

leather collars with name plates — 2 orders

dog collar nameplate — 2 orders

Long tail phrases (1 order each)

leather collars with name plates

leather dog collar with brass name plate

dog collar name plates

leather dog collars brass name plates

leather nameplate collar

nameplate dog collar

hunting dog collar with name plate

hunting dog collars with name plate

name plate leather dog collar

leather dog collar with brass id plate

leather o ring hunting dog collar with id riveted

leather dog collars with brass tag

dog collers with nameplate

hunting dog brass dog name plate

mendota leather dog collars

Takeaway:

It’s better to have a wide keyword portfolio of converting phrases than it is to live and die on a few phrases and pages. Your main takeaway here is that the more content you have, the more long tail keywords you’re going to rank for. Pimp out that content!

Ask Customers For Product Reviews For Content With New Keywords

So I was on deadline for this column and I noticed that I had no product reviews for the NEW SKU. No reviews?!! I panicked and sent an email to everyone who had ever bought an OLD SKU or NEW SKU in the past 5 years asking for a favor, and within 24 hours we had 121 reviews consisting of 4400 words of unique text. Holy cow!

One cool thing about these reviews is that the keywords used are different from the keywords I wrote in the product description, so I’m sure I’ll see a growth in converting keywords once this content gets indexed.

Wordle.net Keyword Cloud for NEW SKU review. The word “collar” was removed so you could see the secondary words.

Also, my buddy, Bryan Eisenberg gave me some good advice last month about leveraging content in customer product reviews to increase conversions. He said to take what your customers say in reviews — what they like about product features and benefits — and use the exact language that they do to rewrite and improve your product description, headline, and calls to action. Great tip!

What Really Moved The Needle Saleswise?

Here’s the secret: It’s impossible for browsers to buy unless they actually make it to a product page. The biggest contribution of the NEW SKU was to get more folks to click the NEW SKU thumbnail on the category or SUBCAT page and make it to the product page.

At least half of our sales increase came from existing visitors already on the site looking at something else, but buying a “leather dog collar with name plate.”

Every visitor to gundogsupply.com probably has a dog, so at some point they’ll need a collar. The collars page always had a lot of drive-bys but no purchases, but I wasn’t quite sure why.

I’ve always started my optimization and the bottom of the funnel in the shopping cart and checkout pages because that’s the place where you get the biggest bang for your buck. A 10% improvement in checkout is 10% more revenue, but sometimes there is low hanging fruit higher up in the funnel.

Confession: I totally stole this from Khalid Saleh at Invesp, my conversion optimization guru and sometimes fellow panelist.

Sometimes you can do more good on category and subcategory and send more traffic down to the product pages, and it’s a lot easier to get real results on an already optimized cart.

We drove more internal traffic to the NEW SKU page via a combination of things:

• using very customer-friendly link text: Leather Dog Collar with Name Plate
• including the free nameplate offer in the thumbnail image
• positioning best possible position on leather collars page
• adding 5-star rating under the thumbnail
• listing NEW SKU thumbnail on the master category page (collars.html)

Positioning the NEW SKU thumbnail first row, top left doubled traffic.

Just like in the SERPs, the position of a thumbnail on a subcategory page affects the traffic to that page. I’ve believed this for years, but Michael Whitaker at Monitus proved it to me with some A/B testing he did last year on Yahoo! Store category pages. Thumbnails above the fold (top two rows) get more clicks, and the upper left thumbnail is the best position.

Last year, on the SUBCAT page, the OLD SKU was first thumbnail on second row (6% clicks). This year, the OLD SKU is 4th thumbnail, top row (4.4% clicks).

Now, the NEW SKU is in the best position: 1st thumbnail on top row (11% next clicks). Last year, a different product in same position got 9% of clicks, so this NEW SKU is a better thumbnail and at twice the price, drives much more revenue.

Position alone is not enough to drive clicks and sales when the products featured are not what folks are looking for. For example, the smaller, puppy-sized 3/4″ collars get almost no clicks, no matter how well positioned they are. I need to move these to a separate page ASAP.

When making decisions where to send potential shoppers, I like to segment by customer types and look at where folks who spent money went on the site. One thing I noticed was that both shoppers and browsers seem to click the same thumbnails based on position.

Takeaway:

Shift your best sellers to the top of category pages and put your very best performers in the very best positions.

The Bottom Line

By adding this Keyword Clone of the product page this year, with NEW SKU and OLD SKU, we’ll generate more than $20K in additional revenue (which accounts for any cannibalization of OLD SKU sales).

$20,000.00?!! Not bad for one page with about 30 minutes worth of work!

Homework:

Report on your results. I gave out an assignment or two in the first installment, so a lot of you guys have some homework to show me. Hopefully, you got similar results. Let me know in the comments below or via @robsnell on Twitter. And show your work!

P.S. – For the record, it takes more time to write about SEO than it does to do the actual work. I spent around 20 hours writing and researching these two columns, so now I figure I owe my baby brother $400K in additional sales! I gotta get to work!

So this week, I was supposed to share the results from that 300% sales increase of that leather dog collar with nameplate example from last column, but this is a little more important.

I was out of the country and out in the jungle the week the Google Panda/Farmer update hit. None of our sites or client sites were really affected, but that meant I had no real information on the direct effects of Panda other than what was reported in the press.

Less than 1% of Yahoo! Stores were impacted by the update, which makes sense because the update was aimed at content farms, not e-commerce sites.

As it turns out, several large Yahoo! Stores made the Sistrix list of domains hardest hit, and after a couple weeks, I picked up some new clients and a few other stores shared information with me.

After digging into all this data for the past 10 days, I’m more convinced than ever that creating compelling content is paramount for SEO for online retailers, which is why I wrote this column.

Reality: SEO Is Hard For Retailers

Managing product page content is one of the biggest SEO challenges retailers face, especially for folks who sell thousands or tens of thousands of products. Does anyone expect you to try and write unique content for all these products? (Yes.)

In this week’s column, I’m going to cover the top mistakes I’ve seen many seasoned retailers make that have contributed to the impact of the Panda update on their stores, as well as how major algorithm shifts seem to expose the weaknesses of different methods of managing all this content, unique or otherwise.

I’m not sharing domains or company names so I can’t talk details, but these are real stores owned real people — small business folks with dozens of employees selling millions and millions of dollars worth of products to folks all over the world.

These merchants aren’t spammers in the least bit, and they are trying to do things within the search engine guidelines. It’s been very frustrating watching these guys deal with huge drops in their organic Google traffic, when in their minds, they’ve been playing by the rules all along.

10 Common Mistakes Many Retailers Make

These are the main problems I’ve seen across many online retailers, and to protect themselves from major algorithm changes like Panda, they need to address these issues now.

1.  Little Or No Original Product Text Content

Some larger retailers have tens of thousands of products with little or no detail on product pages. And when there is content, the text is verbatim from the data feed provided by the manufacturer or other vendors.

It’s only a problem when dozens if not hundreds of other stores sell the exact same product with the exact same content. Then hundreds if not thousands of shopping portals, affilates, coupon sites, etc. promote the same products linking to the above retailers. If 75%+ of your products are word for word from a data feed, you now have a problem.

2.  Little Or No Original Category / Section Page Content

It’s not just product pages. Many category pages on online stores are only a list of product links with thumbnails. Sometimes there will be a sentence or two of unique content on category pages, but that’s not enough.

On one retailers’ top 100 category pages, only 4% of the text was unique text. The rest was template boilerplate or lists of product links. Bad retailer, no back link for you!

3.  Same Template. Page After Page After Page

Lots of stores use the same template on every page. Same header. Same footer. Same 100 text links in drop-downs on tens of thousands of pages. One of these stores had the exact same template on over 50,000 pages.

I prefer stores with multiple templates, and not just for SEO. Think in terms of departments within a bigger store. If a product category would have its own department in a real store, consider giving that category its own template.

4.  Really, Really, Really Big Boilerplate Text

Sometimes I call this the “Ain’t No Meat On That Sandwich” problem. All template. No content.

An ecommerce site looks a lot more like lower-quality shopping engine sites or content farms when a page has a big template (lots of words), especially on pages that are light on content or have no unique content. If most of the pages on your site are like this, you’re toast.

Even when you write unique content, the value is diminished when the content is such a small percentage of the page’s total word count. Put that big boilerplate on a diet.

And write original content for your store on category pages. If a page is a top entry page, the unique content (by count of words) needs to be equal to the the template/boilerplate text.

For example, if you have 400 words of boilerplate on every page, you owe yourself one hundred 400-word category descriptions.

5.  Same Run Of Site Links On Every Single Page

When you have the same template with the same 100 text links to your top categories on every single page, there’s a point of diminishing returns. It’s not 2001 anymore when all you had to do was put you keyword in link text in your run of site navigation, and top rankings would be yours.

For example, say I’ve got 20,000 links with the anchor “hunting dog supplies,” I think at a certain point Googlebot says, “OK, Rob, I got it. That page is about hunting dog supplies.” And don’t have same exact same anchor text in links to a specific page. Have multiple anchor text for text links on your own store for internal link anchor diversity.

6.  Writing Unique Content But Giving It Away

This is a new one for me. I’ve always been pretty stingy with my content on my retail stores, and when I did provide feeds for shopping engines, I wouldn’t share every field on every product, especially my custom content.

One of my new retailers has lots of unique content, but when we searched for some of his sentences on pages that were bitten by the Panda, we found these exact phrases on dozens and dozens of shopping sites and affiliates’ pages all over the Web. Many times, the better shopping portals outranked him for his own content!

When retailers share all of their original content via feeds for shopping and/or affiliate folks, there’s the serious danger of Google seeing that content as “low quality,” probably because it’s on so many different sites.

Don’t share your best quality content with affiliates or shopping stores because the worst are just going to whore out your content, stick it on multiple doorway pages based around popular / valuable keyword phrases, and hurt your SEO efforts.

When you do write compelling content, keep it for yourself!

7.  Great Unique Content Buried On Pages Not In The Index

Sometimes there are pages buried so deep in your site, Google will never find them. These pages just don’t have enough PageRank to get indexed regularly, much less to rank for more competitive phrases, so any unique content on these pages is wasted.

Put your unique content on pages that matter — the top 100-1000 entry pages from Google organic traffic. These pages are in the Google index, rank for somewhat competitive keywords, get clicks from real visitors, and drive revenue to your online store.

8.  Unique Content Hidden From Spiders

One client had a lot of user-generated product reviews, but it was hidden from spiders because it was delivered via javascript. Google can’t give you points for content it can’t see.

Another had reviews stuck in an iframe from one of their subdomains. The result was that search engines can get to it, but don’t credit the main domain for the content. Since this subdomain had no authority, the reviews didn’t rank on their own, and the links back to the product pages didn’t even pass anchor text.

Display customer reviews on product pages using simple HTML that can be spidered and indexed by the search engines so you get credit for all your customers’ love.

9.  Multiple Pages On The Same Domain With The Same Content

Maybe this is the old duplicate content problem. This retailer had the same unique content, but he placed it on multiple pages selling different products, resulting in multiple pages on the same site competing against one another for the same keywords. This couldn’t be solved with a simple 301 or canonical URL.

Another retailer had section pages that displayed full product descriptions on the category level, and these competed directly with the product pages.

I prefer to show snippets on category pages, just like a Google SERPS snippet. Give me a 90-character snippet of the text under thumbnails. For example, Yahoo! Stores have the ‘ABSTRACT’ field which works great for this.

Have one page with one URL for each piece of content.

10.  Competing against yourself with multiple subdomains

Another store had their own static search engine results pages displaying the full product description but on their subdomain. Several companies selling custom store search products sell these pages as way to generate “search engine friendly pages,” but the reality is that you’re competing against yourself and devaluing your content.

I’ve been talking about these exact issues for over six years. So what do you do when you’re doing some or all of the above? I’ll tell you…

What To Do For Your Online Store Post Panda

Is your online store getting attacked by a Panda? Don’t panic.

First, look at a tool like Google Webmaster Central. See if you’ve even been bitten by the Panda or if it’s something else. If you don’t show a huge drop-off in impressions and clicks starting February 24, 2011 – then maybe it’s something else.

Panda Bites A Few Online Retailers

Second, look at a drop in revenue, not traffic. Lots of these folks bitten by Panda  lost up to 40-60% of their Google traffic, but lost less in revenue. Maybe the quality folks at Google knew what they’re doing if those visitors you lost didn’t really convert.

Next, make a damage assessment. Was every page affected? It helps to know that some pages got hurt worse than others. Look at organic entries before and after the update to see where you got burned. Do you see any patterns?

Even though everyone in the press was saying this was a domain-wide penalty, on multiple sites I looked at, pages with content shared on multiple sites got hit much worse than pages with content that was only available on the store’s domain.

Now, take out the trash. You know that you have some low quality content on your store. Nuke it. Seriously. Get rid of it.

One one site we made a list of any trash pages that had external links and/or sales. We’re recycling these URLS, add content, and get some good links. Nuke the rest.

Finally, work with what’s left.

Prioritize your pages based upon revenue. Your Top 100 Google Entry Pages probably drive the most traffic and revenue your a site. Identify your top 100 best-selling products.

• Make sure these pages have unique text, written for humans, but uses keywords and modifiers specific to that one page.
• Make sure these pages load fast. Think 100K total file size or smaller.
• Make sure these pages are extremely relevant to the searches that drive traffic to those pages.
• Make sure these pages get links from the homepage,  run of site navigation links, and deep embedded links inside page text on other.
• Get links on other sites to these top 100 pages..
• Make sure the TITLE and the H1 and the ANCHOR TEXT are a little different. Don’t just use the manufacturer supplied text. Actually write something that makes sense.

The moral of the story? Don’t look like a content farm when Google’s out hunting for content farms. And avoid scary Pandas.

I’ve lived by this rule since 1997: If you name your products using the keywords customers search for to find and buy what you sell, you’ll do better selling online than if you use the manufacturer’s name or industry jargon for your product names.

I’ve been working on product pages on online stores for a long time, and I don’t get too excited about new techniques or tricks for boosting sales by optimizing product pages.

I think I’ve near ‘bout tried everything I’ve read about or seen online. We’re always testing stuff, and trying new things, but every once in awhile something sneaks up and gets me!

In today’s episode, I’m going to share how I spent less than thirty minutes optimizing a single product page which resulted in a 300% explosion in sales on that SKU, which rocked my world a little bit. It made me wonder what else I’m missing out on!

You Broke The Product Page In IE8

Back in November, I got an email from my production manager that a product page was messed up in some browsers. What looked fine in my Google Chrome on my Mac looked broken in Internet Explorer on a Windows machine.

Whoops! Bad dog, no biscuit. Here’s the original product page.

My philosophy is that any time I touch a page on my Yahoo! Stores, I try to fix everything else that hasn’t been updated in a while. After all, who knows when I’ll be back in there!

After fixing the broken HTML, my assistant Nikki and I sat down and looked at the page and made a list of what could easily be improved. This page had never been optimized or customized, but was still a very popular item in a not-so-popular product category.

Here’s what we saw…

The name of the product wasn’t very helpful:

1 in. Mendota Hunt Dog Leather Center-Ring Safety Dog Collar

The <Title> tag was created from the name, so it was pretty poor as well.

The caption was less than perfect:

Hunt Collar – Leather. A must for the distinctive working dog. Great looking and extremely durable. Center “safety” ring relieves pressure when caught on an obstacle and is also a handy place to attach a lead. New fully stitched design with solid brass roller buckle, center ring and dee ring.

Boilerplate text about collar sizing was on dozens of collar pages, and was three times as much text as the unique text about this specific product, so it was doubtful this page was a good SEO entry page.

Finally, there was no compelling headline or call to action that illustrated the benefit of buying this product once we did get someone to the page.

Send In The Clones

Instead of fixing these issues on this existing product page, I decided to do a little experiment.

What if we made a clone of this product page, named it what people called it instead of what the manufacturer called it, and pimped it out even just a little bit? How much better would this product page perform?

My original concept here was called the keyword clone. Build a duplicate of a product page around a generic product keyword to target both organic Google traffic and shopping feeds.

You don’t want to do this on too many products (or even multiple times on the same product) because that’s a little spammy, and you’ll probably get whacked. Instead of cloning products, just name your products what real people call them!

Target Generic Product Keywords

Most generic product keywords that don’t reference a brand name or a specific SKU are simply too broad to apply to a single product, and often the most relevant page on your site for that term is a category or sub-category page. Sometimes, the second or third most popular term is more suited for this approach.

First, we had to pick a phrase. Google Search Suggest – those keywords that pop up when you start typing in the search box — is a great way to do quick and dirty keyword research, but you could probably pull better data out of your Web analytics.

Go to Google and start typing the name of a common phrase to see what Google suggests, then type the whole phrase plus a space to see additional terms.

For example, when we searched on Google for “Leather Dog Collars,” Google suggested several additional, more refined terms:

Leather dog collar with name plate

Leather dog collar with bones

Leather dog collar kit

Leather dog collar custom

“Leather dog collar with name plate” was perfect for this experiment. Now that we had a keyword, we need to pimp out the product page a little.

Building The Product Page

First, we created a second page. I made the page name leather-dog-collar-with-name-plate.html for whatever boost that would potentially give us SEO-wise for keyword in URL.

Name: Leather Dog Collar with Name Plate

The way our templates work, unless we override them with custom tags, the name generates the TITLE, the H1/Headline, and the anchor text of  links pointing back to this page on category pages.

Headline: #1 Best-seller: Leather Dog Collar with Name Plate

This product is a best-seller in its category, but it’s a dinky little category. It’s a big fish in a little pond.

Subheading: Get your free, 4-line brass ID plate

Here’s a call to action with the main reason folks buy our collars. They love those personalized ID plates.

Remember, this page experiment was supposed to be a quick hit, but when I looked at the caption (what Yahoo! Store calls its long product description field), I realized we were very light on text content on the page.

I didn’t want to turn this into a major project, I only wanted to spend maybe 30 minutes tops, so I called my brother Steve (the product expert in-house) as he was driving home from the office and got some answers to some pretty basic questions about this type of dog collar.

• Why do some customers prefer a leather collar over other materials? Is it just the appearance?
• Why buy this leather collar and not one of the couple dozen other ones we sell?
• Why is this specific SKU a best-seller?
• What benefits does it provide?

Steve told me about the training benefits of using leather collars. He said that there was some maintenance involved when you used leather collars, but some folks didn’t mind that. He explained these were our bestsellers because they looked so good, were a relatively good buy, and why they were better quality than the cheaper leather dog collars we sold.

The hardware was better quality as well, and this collar came with two different pieces of hardware which wasn’t mandatory, but was pretty handy for folks training their dogs.

Finally, he covered the main advantage of a center-ring / safety collar for folks who let their dogs run around unsupervised – if the dog gets hung up on a fence, it’s that dog’s best chance not to hang themselves.

I actually knew most of this information from growing up in the dog supply business, but it would have taken me over an hour think of it.

After maybe five minutes on the phone with an expert, I had some killer content. In less than 15 minutes, I turned those notes into around 450 words of unique, somewhat compelling product page content.

Example Caption:

WHY A LEATHER DOG COLLAR? Some dog trainers prefer leather collars when training their dogs because it won’t pull on a dog’s neck like nylon or other synthetic material when you’re working with a dog. Leather has a different kind of friction. Leather doesn’t spin on dog same as nylon. Doesn’t tangle. Moves better on the dog’s neck when cornering. The collar turns easier.

Many dog owners like look and feel of leather dog collars. Leather is one of the world’s strongest materials and lasts a long time when taken care of properly. Leather is very durable.

On the downside, you have to care for leather collars a little more, especially if you’re working your dogs in water and the leather gets wet. You can clean a leather dog collar with a leather cleaner such as SADDLE SOAP. You also don’t want a collar to dry out, so keep it clean and oiled with neatsfoot oil or other leather conditioner. If you have a dog with a light-colored coat like a yellow Labrador retriever, don’t put something on the collar that will stain the dog’s neck!

Leather has a smooth, finished side and rough unfinished side. On some of the cheaper leather dog collars we sell (which run around $5-$6), the smooth, finished side is used for the outside and the unfinished leather faces the dog’s neck. This Mendota stitched Leather collar is a medium-priced collar. This leather collar is made of 2 pieces of leather stitched together, so the finished slide is on the outside and the inside which makes a great looking collar.

LEATHER COLLAR: BRASS HARDWARE — SOLID BRASS hardware which is pretty and strong. Brass is not only looks good, it’s also good because it doesn’t rust or turn. This collar hardware is made from solid brass not a plated finish, so it won’t wear off. Simply clean with BRASSO. THe hardware matches the FREE BRASS ID NAME PLATE that comes with the collar.

This Mendota Leather Dog Collar has both a center ring AND a d-ring brass collar hardware. Multiple rings are great for training your dog because you have plenty of options to attach leads, leashes, checkcords, and other training tools. For example, if you have your dog on a stake out chain hooked to the brass d-ring, you can hook your leash to center ring w/o unhooking from the stake until you have control over your dog.

Center-ring collars are safety collars, and if worn loose enough, a dog can roll out of a center-ring collar if it gets caught on a fence or hung up.

Once we built the page, I put links to it on both the Leather Collars category page and the Collars category page to try to get the new page spidered as quickly as possible. I also linked to it from a couple of external sites because I wanted it to rank ASAP.

Results Not Typical, Your Mileage May Vary

My office is in the same building as the shipping warehouse, but I never hear from the warehouse folks about changes we make on our Yahoo! Stores unless we blow something up.

I knew we had moved the needle on this one because I started hearing comments from the guys who pick the orders about “sales of this new product that looks the same as an old product.”

Next, the guys who make the nameplates for the collars were complaining about being backed up…“Rob’s doing something with the leather collars on the Yahoo! Store.”

Then, the inventory folks started complaining about how we were selling out of different sizes and the manufacturer was out of stock. We had several hundred on order and my stats kept getting screwed up because we were out of stock of half the sizes for the past 90 days. Now, we’re finally caught up!

Your Homework Assignment:

• Pick a keyword phrase that’s relevant for a specific product page.
• Clone that product page.
• Optimize the name for that keyword phrase. If you don’t have a Yahoo! Store, that means:
  • Write a great <TITLE> tag
  • Link to this page internally with that keyword as the anchor
• Write a compelling Headline with a benefit and call to action.
• Write 400-500 words of unique Content for the body text
• Link to this new product from another domain
• Deploy this today

Using popular keywords in product names and links to those products is simply good search engine optimization. Well-named product pages will rank better in organic searches.

Good product naming is not just for SEO. Good SEO just gets the prospects to your online store. Product pages using common terms in sales copy will also convert better.

Some people call it scent or continuity when folks see their search terms on your landing page, but customers call it “Hey! That’s exactly what I’m looking for!”

In 30 days, we’ll look at my stats on this particular experiment, and you’ll see:

• how much better the new page converts than the original page
• what channels buyers come from
• how much SEO traffic drives sales
• what SEO keywords generate revenue
• what pages drive buyer entries
• and my big, big secret…

When you make it easy for folks to realize you do sell exactly what they’re looking for, you’ll sell more stuff than if you just upload a data feed from the manufacturer’s product catalog.

Next month, I’ll disclose what I found to be responsible for at least half of the success of this 300% increase – this revelation is what blew my mind. This secret was supposed to be my big finish for this column, but I’m way over my word count, so you’ll have to wait until the next episode to find out. Now, go do your homework!

In this column, I’m going to show you. We created compelling content which drove traffic and established our expertise, while building trust which substantially increased our conversion rate.

Howdy! (Yes, I do speak with a southern drawl…) My name is Rob Snell. Thanks to the folks at Search Engine Land for giving me the opportunity to hop up on a soapbox and talk about my favorite subject: search engine optimization for online stores. I grew up in retail, have been selling online since 1997, and spend way too much of my time thinking, writing, and speaking about this stuff!

My writing for Retail Smarts will focus on how to get more high-quality converting organic search engine traffic to your online store by creating compelling content that’s friendly for both search engine spiders and your customers. Every year, these techniques generate millions and millions of visitors to our stores — who in turn, spend millions and millions of dollars.

SEO Is Too Important To Turn It Loose

Today, I’m writing about SEO. I’m writing this column for the online retailer, who either does their own SEO, has staff to help do it, or works directly with an outside SEO consultant.

Retail is hard enough! How in the world does anyone have time to deal with customers and vendors and still do SEO? There’s not enough time in the day, but SEO is way too important to completely turn it over to someone else.

In this article and future ones, I’ll cover how to focus your efforts on things that matter most, how to get the biggest bang for your SEO buck, and what numbers to watch to keep you on track. My e-commerce background is almost exclusively Yahoo! Store-based, but these concepts apply to virtually any e-commerce platform that generates HTML pages for categories and products.

SEO tickles my brain. I have a lot of theories about why things work the way they do, but I’ll keep those thoughts to myself and only show you real-world strategies and tactics that have proven to put a little more money in your pocket.

When folks are looking to buy what you sell, can they find you?

The first really important marketing idea that I learned 13 years ago when we first got online, is this pretty simple idea: When folks are looking to buy what you sell, can they find you?

Nowadays, 80% of my customers are looking on Google so when I say SEO, I still mean SEO for Google. Bing is getting 20% market share now that it powers Yahoo, but I still focus on “The Google”.

An overview of how I do SEO for online stores in 2011:

1. I collect converting keywords with Yahoo Web Analytics and Google Analytics.
2. For every converting keyword phrase, I optimize the two most relevant pages on my online store with Title tags, Meta descriptions, and unique keyword-rich content.
3. I maximize internal links to these pages including navigational links, breadcrumbs, and embedded links in the text on relevant pages.
4. I optimize my product feeds to include that phrase.
5. I buy paid search ads for that keyword phrase when it makes economic sense.
6. I build links like a crazy person!
7. I also track rankings, traffic, revenue, number of orders, conversion rate, and revenue per visitor.

We’re still a small shop, and I still do most of my own SEO.

It’s 2011, and by now, I have around 30,000 unique converting keyword phrases. Our online store has close to 20,000 pages, and I know lots of folks who have 10 times or even 100 times as many products as we do.

How do you get it all done? Well, besides automating as much as you can by making SEO-friendly product page templates, I’ve come up with a few ways to prioritize your work.

Putting A Dollar Figure On SEO

When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of SEO, lots of retail folks still only look at rankings. How does my online store rank in a given search engine for a specific keyword phrase? It’s hard to put a dollar figure on a specific keyword ranking.

Lots of retailers track a pet phrase or two, or 20 phrases, or maybe even 200, but have no idea how much overall traffic and revenue they get from organic search engine traffic.

As online retailers, we have some major advantages over other industries that don’t have as clear cut a definition of success on the Web. When we get a conversion on our website, we usually wind up with some money in the bank.

Most retailers can easily tie a dollar amount to a keyword phrase and an entry page, even for conversions with multiple sessions. Once you have this revenue data, it’s easy to prioritize your SEO because some keywords and some pages generate more revenue than others.

For the past 10 years, I’ve prioritized my converting keywords looking at both quantity metrics (total revenue) and quality metrics (revenue per visitor). Last year, I ran into a situation where we needed another metric to measure the impact of an algo change at Google because the implications were harder to see…

When the Google MAYDAY update rolled out last year, a fellow Yahoo! Store owner emailed me looking for answers.

He wrote, “We looked at our top 5,000 keyword phrases, and our rankings were unaffected by Mayday, but we’ve seen a 15%-20% drop in our traffic. How are we going to figure out what happened and what we need to do about it?”

He knew the drop was in long-tail traffic, but he wasn’t sure if he was losing good traffic or bad traffic because sales were very steady. We fired up Google Analytics, and filtered entry pages from Google organic traffic that actually produced revenue, and compared a period before and after Mayday.

This gave us a quick hit list of what pages to work on first. Turns out, a lot of the traffic he lost to that update was from more informational queries based around manufacturer terms, not transactional queries.

How To Use Analytics To Prioritize Pages

This revelation seems pretty obvious looking back in hindsight, but focusing on improving the pages that were already in Google delivering traffic and revenue instead of looking at overall keyword rankings or individual keyword metrics made a real difference in how I approached SEO.

Instead of worrying about tens of thousands of pages, I was free to concentrate on dozens of pages.

For example, one of our Yahoo! Stores, Gun Dog Supply, has about 20,000 store pages. About 5,000 of those pages are product pages, 5000 are additional photo pages, 5000 are PPC or ad landing pages, and the rest are category, subcategory, or content pages (like buyers’ guides or reviews).

More than half of those pages have no content, content copied from manufacturer pages, or are not really intended to rank organically in “the Google”.

Out of those 20,000, Google has around 4,500 pages in the index (which I found using the site:domain.com query) which means I have 4500 pages which can possibly rank for any given keyword phrase.

Looking at my analytics, the cold reality is that only 2,800 of those pages are actually driving visitors to my site, but even worse, I have 575 pages that are actually driving traffic and revenue. And then, after digging into the numbers further, I find that my top 100 pages are actually driving about 70% of revenue from organic Google traffic.

This is actually very liberating. Instead of worrying about 20K pages, I’ve got a much smaller bucket of pages to work on. And here’s what I do with that…

I use total revenue / revenue per visitor to decide:

• What interior pages get links from the homepage with what anchor text.
• What pages get run of site navigation links.
• Where pages sit in an online store’s hierarchy.
• What pages I write unique content for.
• What products get stuck using the manufacturers’ product description.
• What pages get handwritten titles and Meta descriptions.
• What pages get links from other interior pages.

When it comes to SEO, we retailers need to pick our battles. Most of our traffic and conversions from organic comes from Google. Most of our converting traffic enters our sites through a very small percentage of our pages. We need to concentrate our SEO efforts on those pages already in the game.

Make your templates SEO-friendly, and write as much unique content as you can, but when it comes right down to it, spend your time on your best and brightest keywords and pages and you’ll make more money!

Homework Exercise: Make A List Of Your TOP 100 $$$ Entry Pages

Set the date range for a period of no less than 90 days. Make sure these pages are completely optimized.

Now evaluate your homepage links using this list:

• Are all the pages you link to from your homepage in your Top 100 SEO Entry pages?
• Are the keywords in the anchor text the most valuable SEO keyword for that page?
• Do your image links have alt text using best keywords?
• Are you redundantly linking to the same URL with multiple links?
• What SEO TOP 100 pages are missing?
• What low-value SEO pages are you wasting link juice on?

I didn’t realize that lobbyists help Congress the way they do. I always had this vision of a cigar-chomping good ol’ boy buying round after round of drinks, but these folks weren’t like that at all. Funny thing is, lobbying looks an awful lot like search engine optimization.

As an SEO, you want to make sure a search engine knows what your site is about by marking up the page the right way and making sure your inbound links have the right anchor text, and all the while coloring inside the lines so you don’t get penalized (or even banned!). I think lobbyists work the same way, educating lawmakers and their staffs about their particular topic while playing by the rules (at least the white hat lobbyists).

In the end, I think the folks in Congress at this hearing “get search.” They understand how important Internet advertising is to small business folks like us. And while I think the jury is still out on the Google / Yahoo! deal from an anti-trust perspective, I think that search advertising specific regulation isn’t going to happen.

D.C. Travelog (Continued from Part 1)

Previously on Search Engine Land: Search Marketer Rob Snell got a phone call asking if he wanted to testify in front of Congress at a hearing of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business, and less than a week later, he’s packed up and about to fly out to Washington to speak before Congress about the benefits of search marketing for small businesses.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. It was almost 4:30 in the morning, and I had just emailed Danny my Search Engine Land article from the Copy Cow (my copy shop). I locked the door to run home across the street to pack with 30 minutes to spare. I packed the car and picked up my girlfriend at 5:00 a.m to have plenty of time to get to the airport for our 6:15 flight. The scenery was ethereal. We drove east as the sun came up, watching the mist rise from the dozens of catfish ponds with almost no traffic for the 20-mile drive.

We checked in, checked our bags, and made our way through security. I got the customary pat-down search that seems to happen almost every time I fly through GTR. We made it to the gate. Thirty minutes later, Delta announced that our plane had a mechanical difficulty and the flight was canceled. I love living out in the country, but one of the downsides of living in rural Mississippi is our tiny little airport. I may joke about Uncle Earl running the cows off the runway so the plane can take off, but I’m not exaggerating that much.

After waiting in line for 45 minutes, we found out that all the other flights that day were fulls and the busted mechanical part would be in later that afternoon. I went back home for 9 hours to catch some zzz’s.

Later that day, I awoke to my phone buzzing with text messages. The Search Engine Land article was published, and all my SEO peeps were texting or emailing.

We hurried back to the airport, caught our flight, and made it to Atlanta. Our flight arrived at Washington-Dulles by midnight, and we made it to the JW Marriott by 1 a.m. thanks to our cab driver, the Jeff Gordon of Uzbekistan.

The next day, I slept like the dead. We got up pretty late and delivered 75 printed copies of my written testimony (pdf) to the Small Business Committee. LINK: http://www.house.gov/smbiz/. I felt like I was finally ready to testify. Afterwards, we played tourist for a while and walked around D.C. looking at landmarks and enjoying the great weather.

A buddy had a good friend who testified to Congress several times before. She called to give me pointers on what to expect, what to say, and, more importantly, what not to say. Most of it boiled down to “be yourself.” As an invited witness who didn’t have an agenda, I was pretty safe as long as I was polite. Other folks suggested to just say what I thought when Congress asked questions, and to just jump in if I wanted to get a word in the conversation.

The night before testifying, I kept going over my speech with my timer. I had five minutes to hit the highlights of my written testimony. Even though we had over an hour and a half on the schedule for Q&A, I wanted to make sure I covered several important points. I made a “big print” version of the third version of my “final” testimony and called it a night at about 1:00 a.m. And I was pretty excited. And nervous, too! I could barely sleep. I kept waking up every hour checking the time.

The day of the hearing

Architect Pierre L’Enfant did a spectacular job designing Washington, DC. The United States Capitol looks particularly intimidating when you’re riding down Pennsylvania Avenue about to testify to Congress.

To start the day, I had a 7:00 a.m. breakfast meeting with the Yahoo! who nominated me to testify to thank her and to grab a little oatmeal before heading to Congress. I made my way back to the Marriott to get my notes, and then we caught another cab who dropped us off at the Longworth House Office Building, right across the street from the Capitol. Security was tight.

Every official building we visited in DC had airport-like security with a bag x-ray and super-sensitive metal detectors. We cleared security, made our way to the hearing room, and waited for the hearing to start. My good friend, Andrea Harris of CarFax, showed up for moral support. I also fired up TWITTER on my iPhone and got some really cool attaboys from a few industry giants. I was pumped!

About 9:45 they opened up the hearing room. I introduced myself to the other panel members: Tim Carter of AsktheBuilder.com, Paul Sanar of SkyFacet, Randall Rothenberg of the IAB, and Richard Lent of AgencyNet.

Chairman Gonzales walked in at that point and introduced himself. He recognized me from either my caricature in the Snell Brothers logo and/or the photo on my biography. The testimony hadn’t yet started and here I was already familiar to the Chairman.

The members of the Subcommittee sat down at a long table across the back of the room. All five witnesses sat at another table facing the Congressmen and their aides. There were three microphones with speaker timers on the witness table. A huge flat-panel TV monitor hung on the wall to the right of the witnesses. Witnesses could see the monitor out of our peripheral vision, but the monitor was so the Congressmen could tell whether they were on TV or not.

Chairman Gonzales (D-TX) made an opening statement. Ranking member Westmoreland (R-GA) made his opening remarks. Next, the Chairman introduced the five witnesses and we gave five-minute oral summaries of our written testimony.

When practicing my testimony, I averaged about a minute per typed page of 18-point type. When I spoke at the hearing I was much slower. I was wrapping up page 2 and noticed the timer was at 3:15, so I had to summarize the rest off the cuff, editing while I was reading!

Here’s my last-last-last script for my oral presentation.

After the oral presentations, we got into the Q&A portion of the hearing. I’ll cover the entire hearing in detail in another article, probably after the official transcripts are posted later in July, but here are some of the points I covered in my portion of the Q&A session:

How do retailers deal with all these keywords?

• While a company like General Motors may buy millions of keywords, retailers who focus on a particular retail niche may still have thousands or even tens of thousands of keywords.

• I manage my keywords using my Indextools analytics software.
• Newer retailers without all this history can use online keyword tools. The paid search folks provide free keyword tools and there are some really good paid keyword research tools available (Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery).

Would I sell my keyword lists?

• No! My converting keywords are proprietary!

• I think competitors selling the exact same products usually have related but still very different keyword dictionaries, depending on what they sell and how they sell it..

How can small firms get into buying paid search ads?

• First, retailers can do paid search themselves.

• Later, they can hire consultants to help write ads, find more keywords and tune campaigns. These folks work on an hourly basis and perform audits for flat rates.
• Larger companies can outsource their paid search campaigns to agencies, many of which charge a minimum fee and a percentage of monthly ad spend like a traditional advertising agency would.

How easy is it to get online? And launch paid search ads?

• MYTH: Businesses think it’s hard to make SE-friendly web sites. 60% of small business folks think it’s difficult to get online, according to a survey. I thought that was a cop-out. Now more than ever there are more free or extremely affordable tools for the little guy. Yahoo! Store for e-commerce. WordPress for blogs. Free keyword tools. Google Website Optimizer.

• Example paid search ad: “Orange Dog Collars.” I spent maybe 5 minutes the night before to show how fast I could make and run an online ad. Cranked my bid up to $2 a click to get that #1 position on Google. Set my daily limit to $100 so I wouldn’t get hammered on clicks. Asked folks in the audience to play along at home, search to see my result in the free search results, and click on my ad to see my landing page.

Are you afraid of Google’s domination in the search engines?

• Nope. Google is under too much scrutiny from the government, the media, their advertisers and their publishers to get away with anything for too long.

• I advise retailers not to be solely dependent on search engines for their marketing — paid OR free. Email marketing is very powerful. Send postcards to your customer list. Sponsor web sites. There’s more to the Internet than Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
• I talked about how the anti-trust issues of the Google / Yahoo! deal were above my pay grade, but I liked the idea of having Google ads run on Yahoo! when Yahoo! didn’t have any ad inventory and/or Google ads converted better than Panama ads.
• I’m not worried about Google being on top forever. Google had Google Video, but still had to buy Youtube. The social sites have sprung up from nowhere in spite of Google and Yahoo having similar products. The game is always changing. These companies will either innovate or have to acquire those that do if they want to remain on top, and some folks don’t want to be bought out.

What are the differences in free search and paid search?

• Explained differences between SEO and PPC. Showed how a page one position is important because 90% free clicks come from the first page of results.

• Examined the anatomy of a search engine results page. Pointed out what parts are free and what parts are paid
• Looked at local search for local businesses. I suggested also looking at paid search ads targeted for broad keywords, but using geo-targeting and only running those ads in markets their brick and mortar stores served. Example was buying the keyword “books,” but only in San Antonio, TX, for a Texas book store in the district of Chairman Gonzales.

What did we think Congress should do? What should Congress not do?

We spent most of the day trying to convince them not to legislate something that was working just fine. My suggestion was for them to create a Small Business E-Commerce Czar with the job of getting the word out to let all small business folks know about all the different ways to sell and market online.

Long-time Yahoo! Store owner and developer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of the Yahoo! Store book: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies.

The committee needed a witness that had a good search marketing experience to balance out the panel of witnesses, some of whom had been banned from Google. The committee wanted a full range of witnesses, all with different experiences from using search marketing. I think they wanted me because I was a retailer, and an author, and a consultant, so I had a pretty wide range of search marketing experiences to draw from.

Our family business is Gun Dog Supply. We sell dog training collars. I’m a retailer, as well a consultant for other Yahoo Stores and have seen a lot of folks do well using what I call a two-fisted approach to search marketing: maxing out paid search while still cranking up the SEO to get as much free traffic as possible.

The previous week I spoke at Internet Retailer in Chicago on a Yahoo Stores panel, and I think the folks at Yahoo were happy that I said what I thought, even when I was praising Yahoo’s competitors or giving Yahoo a hard time about something I thought they needed to fix. They wanted a witness who was somewhat objective about search marketing, but someone who had generally had a positive experience.

My problem was the hearing was a week from tomorrow, and I had gotten home from two full weeks on the road going to SMX Advanced in Seattle, speaking at Internet Retailer 2008 in Chicago, and playing in Kansas City between shows. I was pretty beat and two weeks behind at the office, but I said I would do it if I could get a .gov link from Congress!

Yahoo’s lobbyist called me and gave me the skinny. She forwarded my info to Bill Maguire, the Counsel for Technology Policy for the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business. He called me late on Wednesday to interview me as a potential witness for the hearing. Bill picked my brain about search marketing, and how it worked for us and our clients, and I just fell into the conversation like I tend to do. After about 30 minutes on the phone, Bill said I was in and to expect an official invitation to testify at the hearing.

I got this cool official letter from the Chairwoman of the Committee:

Dear Mr. Snell:

I am writing to invite you to testify at a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business, Subcommittee on Regulations, Health Care and Trade, entitled "The Impact of Online Advertising on Small Firms." The hearing is scheduled for 10:00 a.m., Wednesday, June 25, 2008, and will take place in Room 1539 of the Longworth House Office Building.

The entire written statement will be entered into the record. You should be prepared to summarize the written testimony in a five-minute oral presentation. The Rules of the Committee require that testimony is submitted at least two days prior to the date of the hearing, as well as a copy of witness’s curriculum vitae (or other statement describing education, employment, professional affiliations and other background information pertinent to the testimony), and a completed witness disclosure form (enclosed).

The Rules of the Committee also require that an electronic copy of the testimony is submitted for the Committee majority and minority staff by sending it to: [DELETED]. In addition, please provide 75 copies of your testimony for distribution at least one day prior to the date of the hearing. Testimony should be delivered to the Committee’s office at 2361 Rayburn House Office Building and a copy should also be delivered to the office of the minority staff in Room B-363 Rayburn. The Committee looks forward to your participation. Should you have any questions, please contact Bill Maguire, Counsel, at [DELETED].

Sincerely,
Nydia M. Velázquez
Chairwoman

The Committee is Chaired by Rep. Charlie Gonzalez (D- TX), and the Ranking Member is Lynn Westmoreland (R- GA). Here are the other members of the Subcommittee

• William Lipinksi (D- IL)
• Rick Larsen (D- WA)
• Jason Altmire (D- PA)
• Melissa Bean (D- IL)
• Gwen Moore (D- WI)
• Joe Sestak (D- PA)
• Bill Shuster (R- PA)
• Steve King (R- IA)
• Mary Fallin (R- OK)
• Marilyn Musgrave (R- CO)
• Vern Buchanan (R- FL)
• Jim Jordan (R- OH)

So now that I had an official invitation, my girlfriend and I decided to make a week of it and do the tourist thing in DC, so I booked my flights and hotels with less than a week to go.

I was told that "the hearing on the 25th is intended to highlight both the benefits of on-line advertising to smaller firms and the concerns that some small companies have raised about the challenge of making on-line advertising work for their businesses." After talking with an aide, it sounded to me like we would be doing a lot of explaining of basic concepts behind search marketing and giving our opinions After writing my Dummies book, Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies, I had gotten pretty good at breaking things down to a third-grade level.

I also was told to expect questions about pricing issues and models, the Yahoo/Google deal, fallout from the Yahoo/Microsoft non-deal, click fraud, and any other potential concerns of advertisers.

I think the Committee also wanted to hear how a small business can get national exposure with SEM in ways they could never afford with traditional marketing models like broadcast or newspapers. They also told me to bring "evidence of the cost-effectiveness of web advertising for small businesses versus other forms of advertising, particularly yellow pages, and estimate of costs to small business for SEO and PPC campaigns."

I prepared my written testimony, and was ready to summarize it in an oral presentation. I had to fill out some paperwork regarding my government affiliations and contracts (I have none), and bring 75 copies of my written testimony, and get all this info distributed to various Congressional office two days before the hearing (which means later today). Here’s my preliminary testimony:

Good morning. Thank you for asking me to appear on this panel. I’m here today to talk about how search engine marketing has transformed my family’s business, my clients’ businesses, and to show how other small businesses can take advantage of this effective and affordable way to drive visitors to their Web sites.

My name is Rob Snell. I’m from Starkville, Mississippi. These days I wear quite a few hats. I am a co-owner of Gun Dog Supply, our family retail business that sells supplies for hunting dogs. I’m also the managing partner of Snell Brothers, the consulting company my brother, Steve Snell, and I started that helps Yahoo! Store owners with their online marketing. A couple of years ago I wrote a book on Yahoo! Store: “Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies.” I’ve included information from a few of the marketing chapters at the end of my written testimony for your review.

Today, I’m going to share real numbers with you, so you can see the impact of search marketing on a real small business in dollars and cents. Every year our Yahoo! Stores get millions of visitors from the search engines. Tens of thousands of those visitors convert into paying customers. This year we will sell over $10 million dollars though several different Yahoo! Stores.

The Internet levels the playing field for small business folks like us. As a consultant and speaker, my job is to teach the little guys how to compete with the big guys. We use the Internet to leverage the strengths of small business: unparalleled product knowledge, enthusiasm for what we sell and do, and outstanding customer service and support. Bigger retailers cannot compete when we go head to head, product to product. They sell too many things!

Background

My parents, Warner & Anne Snell, started GUN DOG SUPPLY, back in 1972 on their kitchen table in Jackson, MS. They ran tiny display ads in hunting dog magazines and went full time with the business in late 1970s. Slowly, the business changed to a retail store with less emphasis on mail order sales.

In 1996, Petsmart opened across the street. 50% of our competitors went out of business overnight. Our sales dropped, too. We dusted off our mailing list and put together a new catalog. Unfortunately, our list was stale, and we lost money on every single catalog sent.

In 1997, I built a 5-page Web site. I wrote a killer Yahoo! directory listing, and we started getting tons of visitors from Yahoo! We had to figure out how to sell online and fast. Fortunately, we found the online store builder which is now Yahoo! Store.

For my family, selling on the Internet has literally changed our world. We went from a retail company doing $400,000 a year and struggling to pay the bills to a multi-million dollar retailer in a few short years.

Search Marketing = Free Search + Paid Search

Search marketing is the one-two punch of free search and paid search together. By performing search engine optimization on your Web site, you rank better and get more free traffic. Buying paid search ads insures [sic] you control your advertising message, and you’re not at the mercy of shifting search engine ranking algorithms.

Almost 40 percent of the traffic from the Big Four search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, and Ask) comes from paid search ads. I believe you should buy paid search ads when you already rank well for your keyword terms in the free search results. Why? When do you normally get two chances to make an advertising impression with a prospect who is ready to buy? It’s like buying an ad in the newspaper that runs right next to your feature story. You can’t control what they write about you in the paper, but the ad is all yours!

Using all the content from our print catalog for our online catalog was the secret to our initial success with the search engines. Those 50 pages of text covering hundreds of products would help us sell our dog training collars, Garmin Astro GPS, Tri-tronics collars and retriever dummies.

Originally, half of our traffic came from banner advertising and half was free traffic from search engines. My Yahoo! Store stats would tell me not only where the traffic came from, but what keywords folks were searching for. This information was gold!

For example, someone would buy a leather dog collar and the source of the order would show the sale coming from a search on Yahoo for “leather dog collars.” Another order would come in with a search for “retriever training supplies” and they would buy some training dummies, and/or a book or video on training retrievers.

I caught on pretty quick that keywords were important. People were buying the things they were searching for, so I started to obsess over our keywords and their search engine rankings.

By 2003, the search engines started selling text ads based on keyword searches. The free ride was over. I opened an account with Google Adwords and started buying ads on different keywords. I also had a Goto.com account which later became Overture and is now Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Paid search is good, too! With an online store, a small retailer can instantly have access to millions of potential customers. With as little as a $5 deposit in a Google Adwords account, a small business owner can buy targeted advertising and get instant traffic to his Web site.

Retailers can run national ad campaigns targeted only to folks searching for what they sell. You can buy ads but only for keyword searches relevant to your product mix.

Local retailers can also target their ads to run only in the specific markets they serve.

Selling on the Internet via an online catalog is much cheaper than sending catalogs through the mail. Advertising on the Internet is more cost effective than any other medium we’ve tried.

Search marketing is extremely efficient because you are ONLY marketing to those interested in your products. It is the least obtrusive form of advertising as the customer is literally asking for your ads when they perform a search. No other marketing method can touch search engine marketing for targeting the right prospects in the right places at the right time – when folks are ready to buy.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before this committee. I look forward to answering any questions you may have.

Free Search & Paid Search Resources

• Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Resource
   
• Google AdWords Learning Center
   
• Google AdWords: (2008 Edition), by Andrew Goodman (Page-Zero)
   
• Matt Cutts is a senior engineer at Google in charge of search quality. Read his unofficial, but extremely relevant search blog
   
• Brett Tabke’s WebmasterWorld.com
   
• Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com
   
• Danny Sullivan’s SearchEngineLand.com

From “Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies.” (Wiley, 2006)

Chapter 17: Driving Traffic That Converts

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making changes to your Web site to rank better for relevant keywords in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Most effective SEO is done in two ways: by implementing the current best practices and by testing new methods, tracking your results, and then keeping what improves your rankings.

The two basic building blocks of search engine optimization are text and links. Text refers to the words on the page — visible text you can see and a search engine spider can read. If you can see it on your screen and highlight text with your mouse and cut and paste it in a text editor like Notepad, then it’s visible text.

A link is a hyperlink pointing to the page from other pages on your site or from other sites. I go into a lot more detail about SEO in Chapter 19, but here’s what you need to know:

• Text: You want to have keyword-rich text on each of your pages using your most relevant keywords in well-written product descriptions and other useful content such as product reviews, articles, FAQs, and more. These keywords also appear in various HTML elements in places like your title tag, meta keywords and description tags, inside header tags, body text, and links on your site.
   
• Links: You also need links pointing to each page. The links can come from your site (internal links from your other pages or navigational text links), or the links can come from other people’s Web sites linking to you. Good examples of other folks linking to you are directory listings, resource pages, reciprocal link exchanges with similar sites, suppliers and manufacturers linking to their retailers, product review sites, and even people linking to you from their blogs.

Chapter 18: Buying Your Way to the Top

The instantaneous gratification of pay-per-click ads can be tempting. Here’s how paying to get listed in the top results beats hoping to be listed in the free results:

• With paid search, you’re totally in control. You choose the keywords, write the ads, and pick which pages get promoted. With SEO, the search engines (and sometimes the spammers) are in control of the rankings.
   
• With paid search, your ads appear almost immediately. You don’t have to wait weeks or months for your site to appear in paid-search ads like you do in the free search results.
   
• With paid search, you’re not at the mercy of search-engine spiders and ranking algorithms to determine the most relevant page. Just get out your wallet and buy your way to the top, because (like in the real world) the highest bidder gets the best real estate.
   
• With paid search, you choose what keyword phrases you rank well for by how much you’re willing to pay. Free search-engine rankings for keywords sometimes seem almost random, even though you optimize for your best words. For example, my #1 referring keyword phrase from Google on my dog-supply site is Dog Boots, but we sell only two kinds of dog boots and have around 1,500 other kinds of products. Go figure.
   
• With paid search, you can test keyword phrases that you don’t rank well for in the free results. That way, you can see whether you want to optimize for those words, too. Sometimes very competitive or expensive keywords don’t convert like you think they should.
   
• With paid search, you also write the ads so that you determine what users see. You choose the link text (title) and the little snippet of text (description) that appear on the search results pages. With the free listings, you have little or no control over what the search engines display.
   
• With paid search, you also choose what pages folks land on for each keyword. Instead of hoping that your best landing pages rank for your best keywords, you get to pick where folks go on your Web store. You can also change your landing pages as often as you want to maximize their effectiveness. When your pages rank really well for your best keywords in the free search results, you’re almost afraid to touch the pages.

Unfortunately, paid search has a dark side as well:

• Paid-search advertising is expensive and consumes a lot of time. Babysitting your ad campaigns takes a lot of time and mental energy. If you don’t closely monitor your campaigns, a good campaign can go down the tubes fast.
   
• Customers trust the free, natural, organic results. Free results are seen as independent and more authoritative than ads. More sophisticated surfers seem to avoid clicking ads.
   
• Competitors can be foolish and bid insane amounts, thus temporarily making your search-ad campaign ineffective or unprofitable. Competitors can also click your ads. Click fraud can be costly and frustrating.
   
• More retailers lose money than make money on pay-per-click ad campaigns (in my experience). This loss is probably due more to egobidding, mismanagement, or neglect than from evil-doers.
   
• Keywords just keep getting more and more expensive! The average cost per click just keeps going up. Two or three years ago, most traffic was free. You can still get thousands of people per day to your Web site at no cost-per-click with good old-fashioned SEO. There’s nothing like free traffic from search engines. Develop some good unique content, get a ton of links, and that’s pretty much it.

Right now it’s 4:07 a.m. on Monday. Thank goodness I own a copy shop, the Copy Cow, so I get a discount on my printing and have 24 hour access. My flight leaves in less than two hours and I haven’t slept much since I got the phone call. Time to go pack. Wish me luck!

Rob Snell is Managing Partner of Snell Brothers, a consulting firm specializing in search marketing for Yahoo! Stores and a co-owner of Gun Dog Supply. He posts somewhat regularly in his Yahoo Store blog and guest posts from time to time in the official Yahoo Store Blog.