Online Marketing Blog

Online retail websites face a unique set of obstacles when it comes to improving sales through better search engine visibility.  Repetitive product descriptions, a lack of content and frequent churn of products can all be hurdles to overcome. But with these specific tips for retail search engine optimization, online retailers can turn those challenges into opportunities and maximize their organic search traffic.

1. Add fresh content to the website. Many online retail websites focus on selling products rather than informing and providing value to customers, and hence severely lack content. It’s a good idea to include pages on a retail site that are purely content-based. Not only will informative, optimized content improve search rankings, it can help retailers sell more products by engaging customers.

Nothing will turn readers away more quickly than blatant errors, boring copy and long-winded writers. Recognizing the deadly sins of SEO copywriting—and identifying ways to avoid them—is essential whether you’re drafting a blog post or creating an article to submit to an online directory.

Critical? Yes.

Difficult? It certainly can be.

But simplify the task and reduce the risk of losing your readers by following these 5 tips for avoiding the deadly sins of SEO copywriting.

HINT: Make yourself a checklist based on these tips and your own. Refer to that checklist at the end of every writing project.

1. Stop going on and on…and on and on. As a writer, one of the biggest challenges is removing yourself from your story in order to determine when enough is enough. To make your writing more concise and to the point:

Just as with Leverage Your Brand Lovers, the “Branding and Search” session gave the SMX West audience much to think about.

Bob Tripathi, Search Marketing Specialist at Discover Financial, reinforced the need to understand your brand as it relates to SEO/SEM.

Brand Recognition: Do searchers recognize your brand?
–ex. McDonalds’ arches are recognized worldwide

Brand Perception: Do searchers know what you do?
–ex. Discover Financial doesn’t just offer credit cards, but they offer a slew of other financial services

Brand Loyalty: Are searchers loyal to your brand?
–ex. Google and its VERY loyal followers

Brand Affinity: Are searchers aspiring to be part of your brand and culture?
–ex. Mercedes and the status associated with the brand

Monday night, Jessica and I represented TopRank at a Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Event in Minneapolis.

In the first of a series entitled ‘Conversations About the Future of Advertising’, Jan Leth from Ogilvy & Mather gave a presentation entitled ‘Dada, Data, Alpha and Beta’ in which he highlighted how marketers can take advantage of the digital age.

In particular I found interesting, the idea of momentgraphics versus demographics. Marketing of years past would have concluded that we need to know the age, race, income and interests of each of our prospects.

Momentgraphics focuses on the periods of time in which we need to target prospects. For example, someone searching for the phrase ‘cold medicine that works in less time’ is the prime target for a company producing cold medicine. The demographics of that person are irrelevant because we know they are in a ‘target moment’ making them the target market.

Social Media Keyword Research is Here
Whether it’s a phrase entered in a search box on a standard search engine, on a video sharing site or tags assigned to your friends’ shared social bookmarks and shared images, the meaning and intent inferred by keywords is paramount to any kind of “pull” online marketing effort.

For search marketers, that means using keyword research tools on an ongoing basis in order to adapt to trends, seasonality and changes in what’s important to the target market.

With the “participatory web”, consumers expect not only to be able to go online and search for information and products, but they fully expect to be able to contribute content and socialize as well. Keywords come into play with search engines that crawl and rank content as well as with the folksonomy of content organization that comes with consumers tagging social media with words that are meaningful to them.

Early in my marketing career I sold classified advertising for a large and influential alternative weekly newspaper in the Twin Cities.

A true benefit of this job was experienced by friends of mine, met through occasional dabblings in the local comedy scene, who turned to me to get the word out about an upcoming show via a line ad on our back page.

Anyone familiar with an alternative news weekly’s back page is certainly no stranger to the type of ad typically represented there. Without providing too much in the way of detail, let’s just say that anyone – ANYONE – will say anything – ANYTHING – just to get found.

It was this type of environment that fostered a good friend’s idea for an ad regarding his upcoming sketch comedy show – which appears word for word, minus identifiable info, below:

The success of an entire Search Marketing Campaign is rooted in the selection of keyword phrases and contrary to popular belief; the selection of these phrases is not contingent upon popularity and competitiveness alone.

Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance led part of the discussion on search term targeting at this year’s SES.

Perhaps the most important message of this session, one often overlooked by clients and SEOs alike is the idea not to choose solely what you would like to be found for, but also to select phrase for which you are being found by your target audience.

There’s more to selecting keywords than comparing popularity and competitiveness scores. It’s important to be aware of the needs of your target audience and the service offerings of your website. It’s also important to consider the terms that fall beneath the three types of searches.

The poll is closed and the results are in with 154 votes for the most recent TopRank OMB Reader Poll: Best Keyword Research Tools. The two long standing tools of choice for many search marketers, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker, battled it out and in the end, tied.

What surprised me was how popular the old Overture tool continues to be despite not being updated since January 2007. Perhaps that should spell an opportunity for Yahoo to somehow use the url for a new and improved keyword tool with ads for Panama on it.

• Keyword Discovery (18%)
• Wordtracker (18%)
• WordZe (15%)
• Google Keyword Tool (14%)
• SEO Digger (12%)
  
• Overture Keyword Selector (6%)
• SEO Boook Keyword Tool (3%)
• KeywordSpy (3%)

With any kind of online marketing you need a place to start. Find out what kinds of search queries people are typing into the search box and you’ll know what kind of content to optimize, create and get links to.

For the most part, keyword research software and tools fall into a handful of categories. Paid and free are two as well as those that are specific to SEO or for PPC. There are a few dominant players in each category but with some interesting innovations in the past year or so it’s worth re-visiting what’s out there and which tools our dear Online Marketing Blog readers prefer.

The popular keyword research tool, Keyword Discovery, has announced several new updates today. Here are the updates that stand out the most:

• Keyword Database Update: The KD global database now has 35 Billion searches and the premium database has 10 Billion searches from the last 12 months. This is in contrast to 300 million queries in the past 90 days with WordTracker.
• Plural Search Feature Release: KD should have had this feature a long time ago.
• Import to any KeywordDiscovery keyword database: Another long overdue feature recommended by KD users.

Upcoming enhancements to Keyword Discovery include:

• More keyword databases, such as French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
• Wildcard and “contains” search functions
• Adult search term database
• KEI improvements

A new keyword research tool called WordZe has launched this week and here is a quick review:

WordZe is a keyword research tool that shows detailed keyword searches, plus ways to track keywords well past their estimated daily search volume. The user data that powers WordZe comes from Internet portals and ISP logs from around the world.

“The tools that WordZe provides do more then just give users a general idea of how often a keyword is being search for, they also allow the user to track daily trends as keywords or industries fall and rise in popularity due to seasons or events in the news.”

WordZe also offers insight into the difficulty of ranking for certain phrases through a tool called WordRank.

Keyword Research Tool

As I was discussing the challenges and opportunities with a new client SEO project recently with one of our staff, I realized how much times have changed in regard to how we generate and apply keyword research.

In the late nineties and ‘01 it was pretty much a process of mapping keywords to web pages, citing popularity and competitiveness. We used the KEI information provided by the WordTracker keyword research tool to uncover opportunities with ideal keyword popularity to competitiveness ratios. Things like keyword density, prominence, position, etc were mulled over for each search engine in excessive detail.