E-Commerce for All

Last month Google announced that they changed their “ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site”. This change affects searches with a “strong user interest in a particular domain”.

Many in the community have voiced concerns for the smaller websites and businesses who may lose more searches and search real estate. I want to take a minute to give you my thoughts on this….

1. Only VERY relevant searches will trigger this
2. Even small businesses with this type of search can and will trigger this
3. It doesn’t matter, done is done… adapt and overcome

For example if I search for pro-webs or pro webs, I get the following enhanced result.

Enhanced SERP

Now this is perfect for us, because we have taken great care to promote our “brand”. Essentially, both pro and webs are tough terms, even together to rank for. So, we use our brand consistently throughout the web and in everything we do. The result is that between, pro-webs, prowebs, pro-webs.net, pro webs company etc… We get a great deal of these very relevant searches for our business and domain name.

While this type of brand consistency is certainly the best practice for everyone, we learned this lesson the hard way.

Early on (2003), when we just built a few websites here and there and we started PRO-Webs, we were I was dumb! Yes, I personally own all of my mistakes… and the knowledge I have gained from them. Lets cover a few of the things I screwed up.

• Dash in the domain name (very bad!)
• Registered the .NET and not the .com (Remedied last year, for a chunk of change)
• I marketed PRO-Webs.net, instead of PRO-Webs
• I used link text that I thought was helpful for my SEO efforts… Never using “PRO-Webs”
• I answered questions and blogged without regard to branding myself as “PRO-Webs”
• I changed the logo several times over the first 5 years (Finally our graphic designer took all of the “versions” and made our current logo, which we put on EVERYTHING!)
• In content I used we, us etc… Now I use “We at PRO-Webs” for example, more frequently
• I used a silly nickname for logins and IDs instead of PRO-Webs
• The list goes on… But I think you get the point

What the result was… IF anyone thought I had helped them, or remembered PRO-Webs…. They NEVER remembered the address. Worse yet, if the “Googled” PRO-Webs, we were on page 5… UGH.

Remedy: We started and continue to use consistent and aggressive branding for our company. This means every opportunity you have to get your brand out there (email sig, forum sigs, blogs, directories, social media, etc.) you do so! Simple huh?

Some can find it challenging due to some poor uninformed decisions early on, but regardless of the past mistakes you must take the initiative to “own” your brand… This may even mean re-branding if the issues are insurmountable. Nevertheless, you cannot ignore the need for branding. As we move forward in to this mashable, social media controlled web you will start to feel the pain of poor branding more and more. Don’t wait… Do this now, it matters!

So in closing, we still very much consider ourselves “little guys” ( we like this ), but we have benefited from Google’s change nonetheless. Maybe it’s not so much the “big business” or “little business” that is really the issue here… But rather the effort to brand.

Melanie E-Commerce SEO

Google Caffeine

Google officially announced the completion of the new Google index, dubbed Caffeine for it speed and freshness. This new index has been a long time in the sandbox and even longer implementing, but it seems to deliver faster, more relevant and fresher search results. While as website owners this has complicated our job on many levels, I think the positive experience for searchers is profound. Less frustrated searchers are more likely to buy, complain less and tolerate more.

Google’s new index is faster, larger and far more comprehensive. Media results, news, blogs…. They are all fresher.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

Back in August of 2009 Google began the undertaking of streamlining and bug fixing the Caffeine update… They even provided all of us an opportunity to use the development index in the sandbox and provide feedback. How nice that we, developers, searchers and rubber neckers could see, touch and participate.

In the “future web” we see everyday feedback, transparency and trust are commanding factors… Google seems to have a solid grasp on this concept. They expect it from you and demonstrate it themselves in the way they run your business. So caffeine is very simply put, Google’s effort to grow effectively and deliver the best product (search) to their visitors. I think aligning yourself in this type of mentality is the key to your Internet success.

Melanie E-Commerce SEO

Below you will find what Matt Cutts had to say regarding this algorithmic update which has been dubbed Mayday, but I hope to provide some resources and insight in to the conditions and solutions if you lost a great deal of Google organic traffic as a result of the Mayday update.

To summarize, between 4/28/2010 and 5/3/2010 Google made an algorithmic change affecting the organic rank/traffic for long tail searches. Head searches are not as widely affected, but some have been reported. This change is in fact a quality update which has passed all the normal Google department approvals and testing. It is not part of or related to the Caffeine update, but the goal is similar, as in any algorithmic change the target is to improve search results. Lastly, this change is not temporary, so if you have lost traffic, you will need to make some changes to recover…. they are not going to just come back.

You will find that solving this issue for your site is going to be primarily accomplished through quality, specifically content quality. With relationship to ecommerce, the longtail keywords will generally exist only in the product/page title. Ideally, this does not provide the relevancy needed to rank this page for the longtail.

Longtail keywords have traditionally been an easy target for ecommerce… Just pop the longtail in the page title and bingo you rank. Easy pickens. However, as many already know, this allowed pages to rank for longtails, which were not necessarily the best result. Essentially, some pretty low quality, content lacking and non-authoritative pages were allowed to rank. Google seeks to now make the criteria for longtails more closely matched to the criteria for bigger box searches.

Ok, so your traffic is way down… You’ve determined that the majority of the loss is in 3 to 5 word keyword phrases (longtail), what can you do?

While the answers are pretty clear, there is no escaping the hard work and time which will be needed to resolve this issue. As noted before the most effective use of your time will be spent on content, quality content.

Quality Content for Ecommerce Tips

• Write unique, descriptive and substantial product descriptions for your products. Include several variations of the longtail keyword in your copy. For example if the longtail keyword is bright red light bulbs, you might include red light bulbs, bright red lightbulbs, bright lightbulbs: red…etc. These inclusions support the longtail keyword and are adding relevance to the search query.
• Link specific longtail variations in the link text from your other pages, especially category pages above the longtail product. (internal linking)
• Make a concerted effort in your pages to keep the content topical. Unfortunately, for ecommerce this can mean you will need to limit unrelated marketing on page, or wash it with more topical content on the page. For example, a product page for a green banana may be cross selling many other products on the page… These products, even if related, dilute the main theme or topic of the page, the product.
• Concentrate on product pages to start and then work your way towards the top. Product pages inevitably have more ability to rank, as ideally these pages have a more targeted content base. So your time working on these pages is the most “bang for your buck”.
• Now might be the best time to consider getting a blog going. A blog hosted ON YOUR DOMAIN (domain.com/blog) will provide additional longtail opportunities, internal linking, popularity and of course help to boost your authority. Post things like reviews, tips, holiday or seasonal trends, product suggestions and even a coupon or 2. Don’t forget to promote your Facebook fan page and Twitter accounts as well.
• Make sure products have unique page titles and Meta descriptions. Titles should be short (about 65 characters), relevant, direct and unique to every page. Descriptions should be 100 to 250 characters, relevant to the page and of course unique to the page. While the Meta description does not help you rank, it certainly can cause duplication and quality issues with Google if ignored.

I think the most logical explanation of Mayday is to say that Google finally recognized the fact that longtail searches were slipping through the cracks. Longtail searches have never had even close to the same relevancy, quality and authority requirements as shorter, bigger box phrases do. As a result, many, even if unwittingly, have cheated the system by having low(er) quality pages able to rank fairly well for longtail searches.

Truth be told, as we look through our SEO client’s analytics…. The only ones who have dropped, are not creating the quality, unique and descriptive content on their product pages which we have always required. Those sites that are spending the time to have unique, quality descriptions are pulling the same or more organic traffic in their longtail searches.

No doubt that creating this level of content is hard work, but when you think about the increased convertibility of longtail search referrals…. How can you not allocate the time and resources needed to eliminate duplication and create great content.

Melanie E-Commerce SEO

We have been looking hard at speed optimization lately, and I am testing, analyzing and segmenting the results for the sites we super optimized. One of them is this very website.

Since the optimization, we have seen a small boost in traffic, which is potentially unrelated, but also some meat and potato, hard core statistical responses to the optimization from Google. We are going to share these with you today, so you can better understand the benefit of optimizing your site’s speed.

Bet, hardly any of you noticed this cool new tool in your Google Webmasters account…. Site performance. In your Google Webmaster Tools account (selected domain), expand the “Labs” menu to see “Site performance”. At the top of this page you see the following description.

This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users. Learn more

Then below a graph and some incredible information with regard to your site’s speed performance. We will share ours with you here.

PRO-Webs Performance Chart

Performance overview

On average, pages in your site take 1.4 seconds to load (updated on May 12, 2010). This is faster than 82% of sites. These estimates are of medium accuracy (between 100 and 1000 data points). The chart below shows how your site’s average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

Then below you will find a wealth of information and data on some specific pages within your site, including PageSlow reports and other suggestions to improve your speed! See example below:

URL PageSpeed Report Details

These detailed reports contain information to improve the load speed of the pages. Some of these things just cannot be accomplished for every website, but that which can be done will improve your performance.

So what about those hard core results?

Got them right here, how about a nice increase in “Pages crawled per day”, a decrease in “Kilobytes downloaded per day” and the bottom fell completely out of “Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)”.

So, we allowed Google to crawl more pages, use less resources and get it done faster…. Nice!

PRO-Webs Crawl Stats

What more motivation could you possibly need to start thinking speed optimization?

Melanie E-Commerce SEO