Mississippi Meets Manhattan:Rob Snell Gives the Low-down on SES NY

April 13, 2007 | In Marketing/Promotion, SEO/SEM |

The following post comes courtesy of Rob Snell, long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketing guru. Rob has submitted posts before but this time I asked if he could give his thoughts on the Search Engine Strategies New York conference going on this week. If you couldn’t make it out there, the following is a great distillation of Rob’s takeaways from the sessions, parties and conversations.–Paul

Search Engine Strategies 2007 New York is off the hook! I don’t see how anyone gets everything done! Most of the sessions I attended were wall-to-wall marketers. There are so many new folks interested in search marketing.

I’m impressed by the number of companies sending their employees to SES. So many retailers, ad agencies, and Fortune 1000 companies are sending their staffs here for an introduction /crash course in selling though the search engines. It’s not cheap! My flight from Mississippi was $800, hotel around $1000, and tuition was $1500 even with the coupon. SES is easily worth every penny because implementing even one good idea will pay for the trip ten times between now and the next show in August in San Jose.

Lots of the sessions are covering the basics, and there are tracks for SEO (Organic), Paid Search, Retail, Metrics/Tracking, and more. There was an entire track yesterday dedicated to Conversion. Bet you know where I spent my time!

What’s new? Optimizing video and audio (podcasts) is still new, but a big deal. There was a class on using Wikipedia for SEO earlier today. Social Search is booming, too! Folks are talking about using MySpace and Facebook and other “social” sites as yet another way to attract and communicate with customers. If you sell anything related to entertainment, music, books or popular culture, open up a MySpace account and start signing up your customers as your MySpace friends.

Paid Search a.k.a Pay-per-click (PPC) is bigger than ever, and it keeps on changing!
I read a Marketing Sherpa report last year that around 40% of the sales for the top e-commerce sites came from their paid search campaigns. And then I heard this interesting statistic at SES today: More than half of smaller online retailers are not buying paid search ads (PPC) on Google or Yahoo! Seriously! Fewer than half of merchants have pay-per-click accounts on. That’s just wrong!

If you’re a merchant and you’re NOT buying paid search ads, you’re leaving money on the table. Pick your top ten best-selling products, grab your best converting keywords, figure out what can pay for an order, and dive in there.

Yahoo!’s Panama rocks! Lots of folks are buzzing on Yahoo!’s brand spanking new Panama platform for paid search ads. Merchants are seeing their PPC costs drop with some of new features. Keywords are easier to organize and manage. Bids and budgets are easier to control. It’s still pretty new, but the word on the street is that Panama is a hit.

Quality (Score) is Job One. Man, things change so fast in this industry! PPC is no longer an auction where the best ad placement goes to the fella with the fattest wallet. Yahoo! and Google (and soon MSN) are using a new factor called Quality Score which is a number indicating an ad’s relevancy. How Quality Score is determined is a trade secret, but the search engines do reveal some tips.

Each ad’s Quality Score is somehow derived from the keyword you’re bidding on, your PPC ad text, and your store’s landing page for relevancy for that specific search. Quality Score combined with bid price and click-through rate (CTR) to determine the rank of your PPC ads, so the higher your quality score, the cheaper your ad / better you rank.

• TIP: Organize your keywords into similar campaigns and adgroups focused on narrow concepts. A good rule of thumb is that if all the keywords use the same URL as the landing page, group those keywords into the same bucket or adgroup.
• TIP: For relevancy, make sure the keywords you bid on appear in your ad’s headline, description, URL, and in the text on the landing page. If the same URL is used for radically different keywords (say “tongue cleaner” versus “cure bad breath”) break those separate concepts into separate groups of ads.
• TIP: Quality sites disclose who they are and how they collect and distribute user data, so make sure your landing page has links to your About Us page, your Contact Us page, and your Privacy Policy page. Use the FINAL-TEXT field in VARIABLES to list your contact info or link to your info.html and privacypolicy.html pages.

RESOURCES

Mona Elesseily from Page-Zero.com is my Goto Girl (pun intended) for all things Yahoo! Search Marketing, and she has a new book coming out in a month or so that is a must-read if you want to make money with your PPC on Y!SM. Mona works at Page-Zero.com with my good buddy, Andrew “Iron Man” Goodman, who is the author of my favorite book on Google Adwords: “Winning Results with Google AdWords.”

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still the most cost effective way to get customers to your Yahoo! Store, but there is so much bad information out there. And where do you start? After attending more SES sessions on SEO than I can shake a stick at, I can throw a ton of tidbits out for you:

Search-engine friendly pages need well-written TITLE tags (keywords in the NAME field), good keywords in your site-wide navigational text links, header tags around product names (H1), keyword-loaded body copy, good intra-linking of products between pages, and unique meta descriptions for every page.

(Most of this is done with the new Yahoo! Store templates, so thanks, Paul & Co.

And all Web sites need high-quality in-bound links from highly-trusted, authority sites like the DMOZ.org and the Yahoo! Directory, but the biggest SEO issue for Yahoo! Store owners is not links, or RTML templates, or 301 redirects. It’s this:

Merchants must write unique, relevant, and compelling text in their product NAME and CAPTION fields if they want free search engine traffic. Period.

Seriously! Most Yahoo! Store retailers are still using the text from manufacturer’s catalog copy for the text in the CAPTION fields on product pages. The search engines HATE that! And customers need more info, too.

TIP: Rewrite the CAPTION fields on (at least!) your top 20 best-selling products to avoid the duplicate content filters on your favorite search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

You’re probably not a copywriter, but just paraphrase the manufacturer’s text and then answer these questions and a great CAPTION magically appears in your Yahoo! Store:

• Who would use this product (types of people)?
• What all do I get when I buy the product?
• What else do I need to use the product?
• What benefits do I get from the various features of this product?
• Which of my problems does this product solve?
• How do I use the product? Is there a buyers’ guide?
• Who makes it? Where are they located?
• Why should I buy this product instead of similar, competing products?
• How does this product compare to other products (Good/Better/Best)?
• How soon can I have it after placing an order?
• What happens if I don’t like it, or just want to return it?

There are so many other questions you can answer in a product CAPTION field, but this will give you a head start.

TIP: A good rule of thumb is that more expensive or more complicated a product is, the more information you need to inform customers. Write a sentence for every $10 in the retail price. For example, an item that retails for $80 would have at least 8 sentences in the CAPTION.

ANOTHER TIP: Every time a prospective customer emails you a question about a specific product, stop and check the product page and add the information if missing or clarify the existing info. When folks have to email you with product questions, either the customer is being lazy and didn’t read to find the answer, or the information is missing or confusing on the Web page.

Well, tomorrow’s the last day of SES and my session on SITE REVIEWS starts at 9:00 a.m. Wish me luck! All the booths are being packed up, and by the way my Treo is vibrating from all the texts I’m getting, the search marketing parties are already jumping, so I’m out of here! Thanks for reading. Now go out there and sell something!

Rob Snell
New York City, NY USA
guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

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