Internet Retailer Survey: Search engine marketing remains a top priority as new engines and techniques arise

Things are looking up for retail marketers searching for customers online.

28.0% of merchants report more than 25% of their site traffic stems from paid search advertisements while 51.5% say more than a quarter of their traffic comes from natural search. In the past year, 44.9% of merchants report that the conversion rate on pay-per-click search advertising went up, 16.3% say it went down and 38.8% say their conversion rate held steady. And 47% report more than 25% of their web sales stem from search engine marketing, according to Internet Retailer's new search engine marketing survey of 102 web-only retailers, chain retailers, catalogers and consumer brand manufacturers.

On top of that, 44.6% increased their paid search budgets in the past year and 49% say they will increase it in the year ahead.

"2009 was a peculiar year for search engine marketing. The first two quarters were exceptionally slow. It wasn't until back-to-school season that things really picked up, and then the holiday season was very strong," says Udayan Bose, founder and CEO of NetElixir Inc., a search engine marketing firm. "For the year, for our more than 60 online retail clients, the overall average conversion rate was up 15%. And January this year was a very strong month. All of this positive movement has resulted in exceptional confidence among search advertisers today."

The fundamentals

Search engine marketing is one of Internet retailing's fundamentals. It's the way a huge chunk of online shoppers find retailers and the products they're looking to buy. This is why web merchants keep pouring money into advertising on search results pages and on search engine optimization projects to move up in natural search results.

37.7% of respondents spent more than 50% of their online marketing budget on search engine marketing, both paid search and search engine optimization combined, according to the Internet Retailer survey of IRNewsLink e-newsletter readers conducted last month with e-mail marketing and survey firm Vovici Corp.

24.8% of respondents spent 5% or less of their online marketing budget on search, 3.0% spent 6% to 10%, 7.9% spent 11% to 15%, 2.0% spent 16% to 20%, 6.9% spent 21% to 30%, 13.9% spent 31% to 40%, 4.0% spent 41% to 50%, 5.0% spent 51% to 60%, 11.9% spent 61% to 75%, and 20.8% spent more than 75%.

And money's coming back. 27.0% report more than 50% of their online sales are attributable to search engine marketing. 3.0% report 41% to 50%, 9.0% say 31% to 40%, 8.0% say 26% to 30%, 9.0% report 21% to 25%, 7.0% report 16% to 20%, 11.0% say 11% to 15%, 9.0% say 6% to 10%, and 17.0% report 5% or less.

"Everything we see from the retail side indicates a considerable interest and investment in search related to the overall goal of driving more online sales," says Shar VanBoskirk, a vice president and principal analyst who specializes in search engine marketing at Forrester Research Inc. "All types of retailers are focused on driving more web sales, and search is a terrific way to drive that online sales goal."

A changing landscape

Google dominates the search engine landscape. 19.4% of respondents to the Internet Retailer survey say more than 90% of their search engine traffic comes from Google. 43.9% say 71% to 90%, 25.5% report 50% to 70%, and 11.2% report less than 50%. Yahoo has been the perennial second-place finisher.

But a relative newcomer on the scene, Microsoft Corp.'s Bing, has been making inroads since its launch in June 2009, and it's gaining increasing attention from retail marketers.

In the coming year, 43.4% of merchants plan to shift some paid search spending to Bing. That's no doubt because Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed that Bing will become the search engine used on Yahoo sites, a switch expected to occur within a year. Bing will then become the clear No. 2 to Google in traffic.

In terms of conversion, Google produces the highest conversion rate, says 69.4% of those surveyed, versus 14.3% for Yahoo and 11.2% for Bing. But some experts say Bing is performing better than those survey results suggest.

"For 40% of our online retail clients, Bing even surpasses Google in terms of conversion rates," says Bose of NetElixir. "And for those 40%, we are seeing a very clear shift from Yahoo to Bing. And the only reason is because the conversion rate derived for Bing is significantly superior to Yahoo and in many cases superior to Google."

And there's more, Bose says. "Bing has a higher average order value in most of the cases compared with Yahoo," he adds. "All of this would prompt me to advise any web retailer to look very seriously at Bing as your No. 2 option to Google. Perhaps those in the survey ranking Bing next to Yahoo and Google rate Bing lower because the overall budget is miniscule in comparison to Google. In 2010, more and more online retailers will shift more and more of their search engine spend from Yahoo to Bing."

Picture this

2010 may also see more retailers getting graphic with their search programs. Images in search results have begun popping up, especially on Google, whose Google Base, formerly Froogle, has been testing the use of product images when consumers search for product-related terms.

Type "wheelchair" in Google and within the high-value area of natural search results one will see under the headline "Shopping results for wheelchair" images of wheelchairs along with their names, prices and corresponding retailers. This service is in beta and select retailers provide their images and pricing to Google Base.

One service out of beta is Google Plus, which adds a plus sign to a paid search ad that consumers can click on to drop down images of products with more information. On a paid search ad for wheelchairs from SpinLife, a click on the plus sign displays images of six wheelchairs along with their names and prices. A click on the image or name takes the consumer to the page on the SpinLife site where they can make a purchase.

In the survey, 36.4% of retailers say they are working with search engines to incorporate images into paid and natural search results. 40.4% say they are not, but plan to; 23.2% say no and have no plans to do so.

The image effect

Images seem to be having an effect on consumers searching for products. 23.5% of retailers using images report a 1-5% increase in click-through rates, 17.6% say a 6-10% jump, 11.8% report an 11-15% boost, 2.9% report a 16-20% increase, 5.9% say a more than 20% jump, and 38.2% report no improvement.

"I find it surprising that 38% can have no improvement. You are boosting the text; an improvement has to be there," Bose says. "Images definitely have a positive impact on the overall return. The overall click-through rate has gone up for our clients 11-15%. As long as they are proving to be helpful to the marketer, images definitely will go up in importance in 2010."

Forrester's VanBoskirk agrees that images can enhance the click-through rate for a paid search ad or natural search result, and that the number of images consumers see in search results will increase. However, she feels retailers can make better use of their time elsewhere.

"There are a lot more sophisticated things a retailer can be doing than just throwing an image in the search results," she says. "How can you better tailor the content of your ad to the users' intent, for example. I'm a lot more cynical on the image front. The ultimate value images will show will be tempered by better keyword strategies and better deciphering of users' intent."

Whether it's digging in and enhancing paid keyword strategies, better optimizing an e-commerce site to appear higher in natural search results, trying out new search engines like Bing or testing new techniques like incorporating images into search results, one thing is clear: Retailers have to stay on top of search engine marketing because it is a marketing channel that not only brings in the customers but brings in the cash.

The typical question that gives many SEO professionals a bit of a gut-check is, "How long will it take for you to show me results?" Typically, the answer will vary based on the age of the site in question and the level of competition for high volume keywords, if boiling it down to two major factors.

However, there are considerably more elements to a fully-fledged answer. These are also split into new vs. redesigned or reformatted (URL) Web site.

When dealing with a brand new domain, it will likely be difficult to gain the necessary "trust" for rankings for broad competitive terms for at least three months, but often closer to six to nine months. This isn't always as clear cut -- if you have and continue to put out useful content, and if you're fortunate to benefit immediately from authoritative and consistent links (or are willing to cheat), you could see results sooner.

Of course, if your technical infrastructure doesn't support good crawling of your pages and understanding of your content, you'll be dead in the water before you even start.

When dealing with either redesigns or post-launch SEO, the best thing to do is never give, or accept, a response "from the cuff." Setting unrealistic expectations will only lead to disappointment. Not only should people take time to project the best and worst possible scenarios, but these projections should be updated post-launch at least once, as crawling and indexing patterns get established.

How Quickly Do Search Engines Crawl/Index a Redesigned Site?

Recently, we helped relaunch a fairly large site with thousands of pages. A major directory level was gone, and it wasn't possible to implement all redirects prior to launch.

Within 12 hours, Google had indexed and was returning well over 1,000 of the new pages in its results. We started seeing a few dozen new pages in each directory level off the root that we were monitoring, within about four hours after launch. I can't claim as dominant of a performance by Yahoo, and look forward to our first Bing-monitoring, which has to be better than the last.

The catch to this process is that, at the same time, the search engines are ridding themselves of any no-longer used URLs, through new robots.txt files, 404 errors, and in a pattern that appears to indicate an "as we can" programming attitude. They will also continue to index those with rankings, fortunately.

If the site relies on a lot of home page rankings for top keywords, then a redesign usually won't hurt, even if the new home page URL now resolves to the root instead of a prior directory-appended version, based on a number of sites.

How Difficult is it to Maintain Current Rankings After Launch?

For new domains, brand terms should rank nearly immediately after the first crawl -- maybe not first however, as Rosetta experienced after launching and finding Apple and the language software ahead. A unique brand name should have relatively no problem ranking number one very soon.

Benchmarking is crucial to understanding how post-redesign crawling behavior is treating a Web site. Monitoring "cherry" keywords, such as the top 10 to 50-plus branded and non-branded referring terms, and measuring them by search engine, can give you insight into this.

This is also an important high-level indicator of how much the search engines initially trust your new domain structure. It happens a lot quicker when you're shifting URLs on the same root domain, than when you're moving to a new one.

How is Traffic Affected After Launch?

The classic answer to this question is often unfortunately accurate. There's always going to be at least a slight drop in traffic, even with SEO.

On a percentage basis, this can equal dozens, or even hundreds of traffic-driving rankings. The better you do with maintaining your high-volume keywords, the more likely the dip may be being caused by other factors as well, including an unexpected or seasonal dip in branded traffic.

The best ally in monitoring post-launch success rate is, of course, analytics. As long as it's been properly configured, very important data can be gleaned from 404 reports and high-bounce pages or referrers. Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer are important allies in the quest for new or continued rankings.

Lastly, level of implementation is probably the single worst enemy to SEO success. Lack of SEO implementation is so dangerous because even what seems like the smallest de-prioritization during a launch cycle can often be a very big wrench in the spokes.

In a partnership with an SEO provider, or in dealing with your own SEO team, you have to remember the "fear of flying" analogy. If you're afraid of flying, simply ask your captain if he's planning to get you there safely. Chances are very likely that any partner you entered into an arrangement with, and even more so an internal SEO team, is just as concerned about ranking and performance as you are.

For a new site, the first goal should be to rank for brand and potentially some local or other modified long tail searches. Give the process time and continued attention, and rankings should be visibly rising after six months.

For redesigns, the primary first goal should be to maintain current rankings for high-traffic terms immediately post-launch. Next, establish that your optimization is in place and start working to develop trust in the new pages and understand how the search engine sees them. From this, you can either increase or decrease your expectations for incremental success over the old site.

Length of time it takes to get ranked is always something you get asked, and it is a hard one to answer. Competitiveness, domain age, and brand level are the three things I look for at the start -- after that it becomes an endless endeavor.

How do you know when content quality is good enough? This question is interesting because it's rooted in a mindset of "What is required to get the best SEO results?"

However, this same question can be applied quite a bit more broadly. Here are some of the ways you can evaluate that question.

1. On-page SEO

Years ago, content developed specifically for on-page SEO purposes generally meant some level of artificially inserting keywords into the content. When you hear people talking about SEO copywriting, they essentially mean "What keywords do you want to make sure are included in the article?"

Two problems here: the resulting articles often don't really read that well (bad for users), and the search engines are getting increasingly better at detecting when content isn't written completely naturally. There is little win in having the search engine conclude that your content is either poorly written or written with the intent to manipulate search rankings. Think of this in the light of the search engine's goals to provide a quality experience to their users, and you can see that this easily could be a negative ranking factor.

Those concerns noted, there is a lot of reason to think about on-page SEO in creating a well structured content strategy. It helps feed the long tail of search and can increase the search engine's perception regarding the quality of the pages of your site.

2. Conversion

Content can also be developed with a focus on conversion. This is often done through A/B testing or multivariate testing, using conversion optimization software. A free product that does this pretty well is Google Website Optimizer.

The concept is to do a lot of testing of various versions on your pages, measure which ones convert the best, and then pick the best converting one. Often, simple changes can have the best impact. One common principle that people espouse in conversion optimization is that "less is more," or that one thing worth testing is reducing the amount of distractions on the page (e.g., links to other resources or the presence of much text on the page).

While conversion optimization is extremely valuable, it only looks at part of the question -- how your site converts visitors to a page or set of pages on your site. Also, it doesn't take into account the obvious search engine benefits of having text on your page.

For example, you wouldn't want to increase your conversion by 30 percent but cut your traffic in half because you took the content off the page. Clearly, you want to strike a balance between SEO and conversion optimization.

3. Link Worthiness

When pursuing links to your site (without buying them or doing link swaps), one of the key questions is why someone should consider linking to your site. Recognized opinion leaders and recognized brands (e.g. Coca-Cola) get links because of who they are. If you don't fall into one of those two categories, then you need to fall back on providing something unique and compelling on your Web site in order to get links to it.

Some people use the term "link bait" to the concept of generating content solely for the purposes of attracting links. However, care is needed here too, because if you become too focused on using the content to attract links, you may create content that isn't relevant to your site, or otherwise not good for the image of your site.

4. Social Media Environments

Will users of Twitter and Facebook start sending around links to your content? Will StumbleUpon users stumble it?

On the other side of the coin, you don't want these networks to have a negative reaction to what you produce. The impact of how this will affect your content development strategy is growing. In a few years time it could well be a dominating consideration.

Summary

When you're considering your content development strategy, and how much effort to put into creating high quality content, consider all four of these factors. There certainly can be individual pages on your site where only one or two of the above factors apply, but, for your Web site overall, make sure your content strategy take all four pieces into account.

How Google's Algorithm Rules the Web

When it comes to finding stuff, there's Google -- and there's everyone else.
Photo: Mauricio Alejo

Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world's most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter. This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting the results you get when you use Google's search engine to look for anything -- "Samsung SF-755p printer," "Ed Hardy MySpace layouts," or maybe even "capital Burkina Faso," which just happens to share its name with this conference room. Udi Manber, Google's head of search since 2006, leads the proceedings. One by one, potential modifications are introduced, along with the results of months of testing in various countries and multiple languages. A screen displays side-by-side results of sample queries before and after the change. Following one example -- a search for "guitar center wah-wah" -- Manber cries out, "I did that search!"

You might think that after a solid decade of search-market dominance, Google could relax. After all, it holds a commanding 65 percent market share and is still the only company whose name is synonymous with the verb search. But just as Google isn't ready to rest on its laurels, its competitors aren't ready to concede defeat. For years, the Silicon Valley monolith has used its mysterious, seemingly omniscient algorithm to, as its mission statement puts it, "organize the world's information." But over the past five years, a slew of companies have challenged Google's central premise: that a single search engine, through technological wizardry and constant refinement, can satisfy any possible query. Facebook launched an early attack with its implication that some people would rather get information from their friends than from an anonymous formula. Twitter's ability to parse its constant stream of updates introduced the concept of real-time search, a way of tapping into the latest chatter and conversation as it unfolds. Yelp helps people find restaurants, dry cleaners, and babysitters by crowdsourcing the ratings. None of these upstarts individually presents much of a threat, but together they hint at a wide-open, messier future of search -- one that isn't dominated by a single engine but rather incorporates a grab bag of services.

Still, the biggest threat to Google can be found 850 miles to the north: Bing. Microsoft's revamped and rebranded search engine -- with a name that evokes discovery, a famous crooner, or Tony Soprano's strip joint -- launched last June to surprisingly upbeat reviews. (The Wall Street Journal called it "more inviting than Google.") The new look, along with a $100 million ad campaign, helped boost Microsoft's share of the US search market from 8 percent to about 11 -- a number that will more than double once regulators approve a deal to make Bing the search provider for Yahoo.

Team Bing has been focusing on unique instances where Google's algorithms don't always satisfy. For example, while Google does a great job of searching the public Web, it doesn't have real-time access to the byzantine and constantly changing array of flight schedules and fares. So Microsoft purchased Farecast -- a Web site that tracks airline fares over time and uses the data to predict when ticket prices will rise or fall -- and incorporated its findings into Bing's results. Microsoft made similar acquisitions in the health, reference, and shopping sectors, areas where it felt Google's algorithm fell short.

Even the Bingers confess that, when it comes to the simple task of taking a search term and returning relevant results, Google is still miles ahead. But they also think that if they can come up with a few areas where Bing excels, people will get used to tapping a different search engine for some kinds of queries. "The algorithm is extremely important in search, but it's not the only thing," says Brian MacDonald, Microsoft's VP of core search. "You buy a car for reasons beyond just the engine."

Google's response can be summed up in four words: mike siwek lawyer mi.

Amit Singhal types that koan into his company's search box. Singhal, a gentle man in his forties, is a Google Fellow, an honorific bestowed upon him four years ago to reward his rewrite of the search engine in 2001. He jabs the Enter key. In a time span best measured in a hummingbird's wing-flaps, a page of links appears. The top result connects to a listing for an attorney named Michael Siwek in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's a fairly innocuous search -- the kind that Google's servers handle billions of times a day -- but it is deceptively complicated. Type those same words into Bing, for instance, and the first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, there's no direct referral to Siwek.

The comparison demonstrates the power, even intelligence, of Google's algorithm, honed over countless iterations. It possesses the seemingly magical ability to interpret searchers' requests -- no matter how awkward or misspelled. Google refers to that ability as search quality, and for years the company has closely guarded the process by which it delivers such accurate results. But now I am sitting with Singhal in the search giant's Building 43, where the core search team works, because Google has offered to give me an unprecedented look at just how it attains search quality. The subtext is clear: You may think the algorithm is little more than an engine, but wait until you get under the hood and see what this baby can really do.

Why your web site may no longer appear on Google, Yahoo or Bing?

• Changes to the search engine algorithms
• Use of black hat techniques in your SEO strategy
• Sudden loss of inbound links to your website
• Bad linking strategy
• Your site has been hit with a Google Penalty

Vayu Media search engine experts utilize the latest techniques to diagnose and correct these and any other problems that could be causing a search engine penalty on your web site. For more information about any of Vayu Media's Atlanta SEO Services, feel free to contact our Atlanta SEO Company Vayu Media.