Day one of eTail2010, in Palm Springs California, covered in-depth two critical areas of retailers’ marketing success: search and email.

These two areas are number one and number two respectively in importance to a retailer and their ROI in digital marketing. Both were covered with a full day of workshops, panel discussions and presentations. As US retailers continue to refine their strategies in these areas, the message was to “tune and prune”.

The Search stream covered in-depth paid search, organic search, search feeds, attribution, ROI, strategies, technology and new innovations. Presentations were given by eBay, Gap Inc. and Drugstore.com. Highlights included insights into strategies for new innovations from search engines; such as personalised search, real-time search and product search. The importance of optimising your product feeds, integrating SEM and SEO strategies and reporting; and properly attributing further forward than the last click were illustrated with real case studies and figures.

The Email and Personalisation stream continued to highlight the value of this channel for any retail marketer and the payoff for offering personalised, relevant messages to your customers. Key presentations from the very successful eBags and Dell were complemented by a series of focused round-table discussions with key vendors and retailer partners. This was an opportunity for retailers to discuss individual issues and ask key questions. The key outtakes of the day were consistency of data, case studies and research. Best-practice email and personalisation techniques were clearly communicated along with meaningful hints, tips and strategies on how to achieve it.

Paul Marshall

The importance of location for physical stores is replaced by the importance of search ranking in the online world. There are two ways to get onto the first page – a paid listing and natural or organic listing. Today let’s talk about natural listings, but don’t assume they don’t come without cost. 

The art/science (yes that old debate is applicable here also) of ranking naturally high in search engines like Google and Bing is called SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. I’ve asked our in-house search specialist, Maurice Peigna, to put together a few pointers about SEO for your retail site.

SEO is an ongoing process

The first thing you should understand is that SEO is not a one-off tactic; it is an ongoing process. Your website is (or should be) continually changing with pages being deleted and updated on an ongoing basis. SEO should therefore be seen as a long-term ongoing process, with constant evaluation and updates where necessary. Behind it must be a well thought-out strategy and plan. For example, the question “what are you optimising for?” is a surprisingly difficult one to answer, but one you must answer upfront. These keywords will become the “anchor text” for the hyperlinks that will later be used for link building.

Using tools such as on-site web analytics as well as the range of tools made available to you (such as Google’s insights for search) will reveal changing search behaviour and opportunities for SEO improvement over time. This won’t stop. You will need to plan and allocate resources to this ongoing.

Search engines care about relevance

Your challenge is to make the search engines understand that you are relevant. Your web pages must use the users’ language and contain the words and phrases that their target audience types into search queries. These pages will have a relevant unique keyword focus. Building relevant content on the site will contribute towards ranking higher on search engines results pages; allowing it to get crawled earlier, faster and deeper by the search bots. In addition, ensure your website internal linking structure makes sense and has a clear hierarchy that is visible throughout the site. For example, breadcrumb navigation: Home > Electronics > TV > Plasma TVs.

Search engines care about popularity

Links to your site indicate that other sites find your site relevant, for something. The higher the quality of the sites linking in, the better it is for your site. It contributes to what is called Page Rank by Google. Think of a link like a recommendation; and the more trusted the recommender, the higher value placed on the recommendation.

Be wise with your link building. When selecting third-party sites to obtain links from (to build your page rank), focus on the quality of the links you are building (ie from a trusted page using the anchor text your want to rank for), rather than the quantity. On the other hand, linking from too many sites in a short period of time could be interpreted as link-spamming. “Spamming” (or “Black Hat SEO”) may get you blacklisted by the search engines and throttled to the nether regions of the Web. Other spamming techniques include: creating fake pages not related to the website’s real content; hiding key words on the page by having their colour the same as the background colours; creating duplicate pages; and reciprocal linking to commercial “Link Farms”. Read more here.

Look the part; and keep your house tidy

It is important to optimise your URLs. Search engines are not fans of dynamic URLs or complex URLs with multiple parameters and session IDs. The URL should describe the content and hierarchy of the page and be readable to humans. Ensure that your URL structure is clear and relevant to page content. In addition, when a page has been permanently removed from one URL to another, use a server side redirect (known as a 301-redirect), which will tell search engines to go to the new page and drop the old one.

Be an individual

Search engines do not like unoriginal content. Ensure your content is unique and refreshed on a regular basis to provide maximum exposure for your SEO endeavours. Use social media to help with your content generation and SEO. Creating a Facebook, Twitter and blogging presence all increase SEO visibility.

SEO should be part of your business review, every month. If you do manage to get to the top of a search result naturally, pat yourself on the back; then get back to work on SEO to stay there.

Paul Marshall, CEO

Lasoo.com.au