Product Description
Rob Snell: My name is
Rob Snell and today I am going to talk about Yahoo Stores and search
engine optimization, specifically how our Yahoo stores get millions
of visitors a year that generate millions of dollars in sales from free
search engine traffic.
Several years ago I wrote a
Dummies book. I have been a retailer online since '97.
My brother Steve and I are in business. We are second generation
running our family business.
We had 100's of questions
come in through the forum. If you go to Robsnell.com, I have got
a forum on there. I think it is SEO-Webinar.html where I got a
lot of people who are on my mailing list and friends and clients to
sign up and give me some feedback on what kind of stuff you guys were
looking for today.
And it was really interesting
to me because most of the folks who filled out that survey have been
in e-commerce for either two or three or four or five years, they have
multiple Yahoo stores, they consider themselves intermediate search
engine optimization folks.
What I am going to do is I
am going to talk about some stuff. I am actually going to go through
my Yahoo Store Summit presentation that was a five to seven minute presentation
to kind of hit some high points.
Since 1997
This is Gun Dog Supply, a Yahoo
store. This is a business my parents started in 1972 on their
kitchen table. We have had this Yahoo store since 1997, since
even before it was Yahoo Store.
We sell training supplies for
hunting dogs like Click. This dog is Click. This is one
of my brother's 13 hunting dogs. If you see the orange collar
on Click's neck, that is a GPS tracking collar, which is how my brother
Steve tracks Click when he is out hunting birds in the field.
Click is a big running bird dog. He is going to run a mile when
he sees some birds.
Track your Converting Keywords
It is kind of like analytics
for hunting dogs. Just the way Steve tracks his bird dogs, I want
you to track your converting keywords. How do you do that?
Well nowadays it is extremely
easy because Yahoo Store has Yahoo Web Analytics now baked in.
I have been running Index Tools, which is YWA, for almost five years
now. But now it is free for the upper tier Yahoo Store owners.
And there is tons of information in there. We are going to talk
all about that kind of stuff today.
When someone is searching for
something that you sell on a search engine, you want your store to show
up in the search results. So let's say somebody has got a dog
and their pads on their dog's feet are hurting. They say, "My
dog's feet hurt. I need to order Tuff Foot for dogs," which
is a foot balm.
Yahoo Search
So they go to Yahoo Search
and they type in Tuff Foot for dogs, and that comes up. What you
are seeing now is a search engine results page for a search for "Tuff
Foot for dogs". And if you want to follow along at home, feel
free.
I want my store to appear on
the first page of search results. Why? Because 90% of all
the clicks that come from search engines come from the first page.
And 80% or so of those clicks come from the first five results.
So you really need to be on the first page and above the fold in the
first five or six results.
Notice that on this search
engine results page that the words that somebody searched for are bolded
actually in the listings. And if you will see our listings, we
are actually listed three and four on this page right behind the manufacturer,
which it is really tough to compete with the manufacturer these days.
The words in the link to our
page come from the <title> tag. The snippet of text comes
from the Meta description or text on the page. Also notice that
we have two listings on this page that are cracking the top 10, and
that is extremely tough to do.
Yahoo Web Analytics
When somebody clicks on that,
Yahoo Web Analytics tracks that keyword and says, "OK. This
person came from Yahoo and they searched for Tuff Foot for dogs, and
now they are on the product page." And let's pretend they
go to the product page, they see it and they buy it, and the place an
order. Yahoo Web Analytics keeps up with it and they store this
information.
One of my favorite reports
from Yahoo Web Analytics is the converting keywords report. And
the reason I like that is because it actually collects all the converting
keyword phrases and it gives you not only the returning visitors, the
number of orders that are placed, but also the revenue that is attached
to those keywords so you can see that some keywords are more valuable
than others.
One of the things I like about
all this information is that it helps you prioritize what things you
want to work on when it comes to search engine optimization.
Top Terms- 75% of sales
The top three terms for this
one product, "Tuff Foot," "Tuff Foot," and, "Tuff Foot for
dogs" generate around 75% of the sales for that product, which is
pretty typical. You are going to see that across a lot of different
pages and a lot of different products.
39 Terms- 25% of sales
But, 25% of our sales come
from the 39 terms under that. So you want to chase those terms
as well. How do you do that? Well, you want to put the converting
keywords in the caption.
Put Converting Keywords
into Captions
What I have done here on this
slide is I have taken a list of these 39 terms and I have just boiled
it down to the unique words. And then I deduped the list so that
I made sure that I am just weaving these words back into the captions.
These are the unique words that I want to have in the caption page.
Write Unique Product Descriptions
Now that you know what these
words are, I want you to write a unique product description. And
this is extremely, extremely important. Folks ask me all the time,
"How much should I write?" I want you to write one new paragraph
for every $10 in item price. This is just a good rule of thumb.
The main reason why I want you to write unique content is because it is good for your customers. Folks are going to buy stuff…I mean you don't want to look like every other store online.
Google loves Unique Content
But the other reason is it
is awesome for SEO. Unique content is one of the main drivers
of all of our millions of SEO customers that come through our sites.
For example, if you do a search for one of our best selling keywords, "Garmin Astro", it is a very competitive keyword and we rank on the first page, and we had 20 or 30 pages of content because of that. Here is the Google search results page for the Garmin Astro.
Don't be lazy (like most retailers)
Do you want to find out how
many people are actually lazy retailers? Most retailers are lazy.
They take a manufacturer's product description from one of their better
selling products. And it was really easy to find how many people
are being lazy by taking the first sentence of this description, and
there are 1,770 retailers who are just copying and pasting or getting
their information out of a data feed. 1,770 lazy retailers and
I am competing with these guys.
Well so now that you know that
you need to collect your converting keywords and write unique content,
what do you do? Well, I want you to create compelling content
as well as unique content.
We found that we got 50% higher
conversions when folks visited our site and came in on a buyer's guide
compared to coming in on a typical section page. And man, we got
religion pretty fast about this, so we started writing buyer's guides
about everything.
Tired of searching for your
dog in high grass or dense cover?
One of the best things that
Steve does is he takes the conversations that he has on the telephone
with folks and he boils that down into the most important stuff, and
he actually puts it on the website. And he will actually say,
you know, "Tired of losing your dog? Buy this tracking collar."
We put Steve's name on these things and it works.
This is a sales graph of the
past nine or 10 years on one of our stores. You can tell when
we started providing opinions on the website, telling folks what to
buy, more content drives more traffic.
Also, when you tell folks what
to buy, you are going to increase conversion rate. People are
busy. They don't have time to sort through hundreds and hundreds
of similar products. If you say, "This is the product that will
solve your problem. This is what you need," conversions go up.
And the secret to creating
this content is that we are always creating content no matter what we
do or where we go. Steve and I are riding around in his truck,
we are on the farm, we are training dogs, and we are recording everything.
I have got a video camera. I use my iPhone. I have got some
pretty high fallutin cameras. We photograph everything.
We transcribe everything.
Transcribe Everything
I have got a guy in Alabama
that about once a week I send him an hour or two of video. He
types it up and we put it on the website. I actually get to play
the straight man. It is like, "How do you teach a dog how to
sit?" Steve says, "Well, blah, blah, blah, blah."
And I am like, "Well how long does it take him to learn?"
"Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And this is stuff is keyword
loaded. This stuff is awesome for search engine optimization.
Steal all Manufacturer Content
Now I am about to tell you
something that is the opposite of what I told you as far as creating
unique content. I want you to steal all manufacturer content.
What do I mean by that? Well, manufacturers do a really good job
of creating content, but they don't do a good job of getting it out
there. So I want you to liberate content that you are going to
find in like owner's manuals and PDF files. I want you to transcribe
DVD's that come with products. Online videos-I want you to get
the text out of that.
A lot of people have Flash
movies. I want you to go and look at their Flash movies and have
somebody transcribe what is in that and get that information out in
simple text HTML where people can see it.
Another thing we have done
is we have repurposed product packaging. We actually will take
a box and I will give it to one of the production assistants, and she
will type up the information on the box.
And the point of purchase materials
are awesome. Look at that little flip book down there. There
is tons of stuff in there that is not on the web or anywhere else.
There is Sage looking at you
there. Steve's GSP.
SEO Elements-Title tags
and Text Links
Search engine optimization
elements haven't really changed in the past five years. I mean
ranking comes down to mostly two things: <title> tags, which is
text on the page where you have your keywords inside your <title>
tags. And what I tell folks is when you are naming your products
on the Yahoo store, make sure you use your best keywords, what folks
actually call these things, in the name field of your products, because
for most Yahoo stores, the <title> tags are created from the name
field. And it depends on who designed your Yahoo Store, and if
you have a Legacy store, and if you are using a version 3 store.
It is a little bit different, but we are going to touch on that in just
a minute.
The second thing for ranking
is text links. You want other pages pointing at pages you want
to rank with keywords inside the links. That is how Google's
tells what a page is about. It is called Reputation Analysis.
It is what other pages say about your page. It is <title>
tags, text on the page, and anchor text.
I actually went in last night
and I completely redid my slides at 4 o'clock in the morning because
I wanted to do some hands on things.
If I could only do five
things?
This is the second part of
the presentation, actually getting in and getting your hands dirty.
Paul, one of my good buddies over at Yahoo, he said, "Dude, don't
be telling all this theory stuff. Actually give them some stuff
to do. Give them some tactical things so they can go in and get
their hands dirty. What if you could only do five things on a
Yahoo Store and you are starting from day one?"
And some of this stuff is going
to be basic, and I am going to go as deep as I can based on the amount
of time that I have got. It looks like I have got another 30 minutes
or so.
#1 Install YAW
If you can only do five things
on your store, what would you do? Well the first thing I would
do: install Yahoo Web Analytics. You know why. We talked
about it a minute ago, so I will skip through this.
Configure Domain Redirects
The second thing I would do
is I would configure the domain redirects. Mr. [16:31] and I bumped
heads over this about three years ago, four years ago maybe, about how
important it was. And it is like he got it. It was awesome,
because back in the day when ViaWeb was made, when Paul Graham made
ViaWeb, you could have four of five different URL's pointing to the
exact same content, like store.yahoo.com/accountname/
Well now they have these domain
redirects. And I would be willing to say that half of the people
on this phone call don't have their 301's configured correctly.
So I went in and did some screenshots this morning.
You go to your store manager
page, and they have a help file that is really helpful as far as doing
this, but you then go under site settings to the domain names link and
then you check the "redirect all host names to my domain," and you
pick one domain. And whether that is www.yourdomain.com or store.yourdomain.com, or just plain
old yourdomain.com, you want to pick one domain and have one URL for
your content so there is only one URL pointing to your content.
And what happens is this means
that instead of having three or four versions of your site in the Google,
and in Yahoo, and in Bing, you are going to have one version, and one
page is going to get credit for all of the links. So you will
get credit for the 301 redirect. All the link juice flowing to
the store URL's will get redirected to your main URL. All of
the link juice pointing to the non-www will get redirected like in our
case of the www. I mean it is really good for consolidating your
link popularity. And after about three months of doing this, you
will see an increase in your Google traffic. I mean this is probably
the most valuable thing that I could tell. Out of the 45,000 Yahoo
Store owners, who knows how many people are not doing this?
Homepage <title> tags
If I could only do three things,
the most important on page element for SEO is the <title> tag.
The most important page on your site is your homepage. Therefore,
your home page's <title> tag is it. If I could only do
one more thing, that is what I would do. I would pimp out your
homepage <title> tag.
And <title> tags are
hard. I mean you get 65-70 characters to work with. On your
homepage you are working with broader keywords. I recommend going
for three or four overlapping phrases.
One of my spammer buddies is
awesome. He said that a <title> tag is not a wish list.
If you are not ranking top 20 or better for the terms that are in your
<title> tag, you are wasting one of your most precious resources.
If you want to go check out and see how good an SEO is, take a look
at somebody's homepage, like a Yahoo Store developer or an SEO, and
go see on Google, do they rank for the three or four keyword phrases
that are in their <title> tag? And if they are not in the
top 20, they don't know what they are doing, me included.
Homepage: Write intro text
500-1000 words of body text
If I could do a fourth thing,
I would put 500 to a 1,000 words of body text on my homepage.
So many Yahoo Store owners that I see, they have these beautiful graphics
and they have these pictures with these specials, and they have their
contents, and they have like maybe to or three sentences, and they have
their final text, but there is no meat on the sandwich.
On your homepage, I want 500-1000
words of text. And one way to do it is to put snippets to explain
what you sell and have a welcome message. But load that sucker
up with keywords.
Here is an example on my homepage,
Robsnell.com, where I just wrote an intro letter. And I basically
talked about what I do and have some information in there.
The fifth thing corresponds
with this. This is so impotent nowadays because since you homepage
is your most important page on your site, because most of your link
popularity is flowing to it, the links coming off your homepage are
your most valuable links.
If I link to something from
Robsnell.com with anchor text in it, I need it to rank for that relatively
quickly. I mean even really competitive phrases. I use it
all the time to get other pages on other domains to rank. It is
awesome.
You want to link your 40 best
pages using information from your Yahoo Web Analytics using you 40 best
keywords in the anchor text. And I just picked 40 out of a hat.
Google is going to count 100 or so links on a page, but if you don't
know HTML, you need to learn how to hand code these little bitty links.
Email me and I will show you
a place. I know it is in the book. If you don't know HTML
and you are just using "specials", you can throw you 20 best products
and specials on the page, and you can use the contents to have your
20 best category links. Here is an example further down the page
on Robsnell.com where I have embedded these little bitty HTML links
inside my body text.
This is the most important
thing. This is why I didn't sleep last night. I stayed
up all last night because at about seven o'clock yesterday evening
I had an epiphany on something I have been working on for the past three
to six months as far as how to put a dollar amount on SEO.
CKWP
CKWP-you will see that in my
notebooks. If you know me, see me at conferences, every conference
I have been to has a notebook. I have dozens of these little black
notebooks chalked full of SEO stuff. And the thing that I finally
wrapped my head around, CKWP is Converting Keyword Phrase. That
is a keyword phrase that if somebody searched for in a search engine,
came to your site, and placed an order and bought something.
I have 21,000 of those on Gun
Dog Supply as of last night. 21,000 converting keyword phrases;
little bitty oil wells. Some are worth more than others.
The most awesome thing is now, because of Yahoo Web Analytics, now we
know what the dollar amount is, the value of a visitor.
There is a statistic called "revenue per visitor". You divide the revenue by the number of visitors for any given keyword phrase. And once you have 1,000 or so visitors and maybe 100 or more sales, you have a pretty good idea of what the value of a visitor is.
So on any given keyword you are going to see pretty consistent revenue
per visitors. If you got $5 revenue per visitor and you have 100
people coming to your site a week, you have a pretty good idea that
you are going to be able to get…if you double that, you will be able
to double your sales for that one individual keyword.
Well that is the first part.
The second part is, and I will talk about this more in a minute, is
that we have a pretty good idea where folks click on a search engine
results page. If 90% of the people who are visiting a search engine
results page are coming from the first page of results, and it is about
30% from number one, 12% from number two, 9% from number three, and
it just drops off like a stone after that, most people are clicking
in the top three to five places.
I can tell you that you can
double your traffic if you are in four, five, or six if I can get you
up into maybe two or three. And if you know revenue per visitor,
you can multiply that and go, "Gosh. I will make an extra $50,000
in sales off this one keyword if I go from number seven to number three."
And you can say, "Well OK. What is my profit on that?
Gosh. If I keep this up, if I actually do a good job of building
up some content and getting some links, I could probably spend $10,000
on developing content just for one keyword phrase," one of your best
keyword phrases.
So what I want you to do is
once you have Yahoo Web Analytics and you have got more than three months
worth of data, I want you to go in and export all of your converting
keywords. And I do this about every 90 days, and I love this.
Paul asked me what I was going
to run. I go in and under marketing in the tab, I go down to conversions
and then I select "SEO and SEM", and then I click "by search phrase",
and I get a list of my converting keywords. This was early in
the morning. These were my converting keywords. And normally
when you log into YWA, you have that one day on your calendar.
Well the first thing I want
you to do is I want you to go set the date range as long as you can.
And in one of my index tools accounts I have got five years worth of
data.
The second thing I want you
to do is I want you to go set the results per page to a number higher
than 10 so you can see a whole bunch of stuff in one fatal swoop.
I had to strip the keywords
out of here because I want to show you guys some real data. I
appreciate what you guys are doing. You guys want to learn stuff.
Talking about theoretical stuff is BS. You need to see real data.
I am actually going to show you stuff from a real store. And once
I get away from the super, super money keywords, I am going to talk
real numbers on some real keywords.
Look at these different keywords.
Keyword number one: I have got 35,000 visits, $175,000 in revenue, my
conversion rate for that one keyword is 2.4%, my average sale is a little
bit over $200, my revenue per visitor is $5.
Now go down and compare that
with keyword nine where I have got one tenth of the traffic and it is
a much smaller amount of revenue. But look at my revenue per visitor-
$12. And I have got a pretty good idea of what keyword that is.
And I know that I can increase my traffic and sales by concentrating
on that one keyword. Look at that revenue per visitor and the
average sale. I mean I look through this and I am looking for
opportunities inside all of these keywords. I get real excited
about this, and I apologize if I am going too fast.
Look at keyword seven.
Not that much traffic, not that many orders, a pretty good revenue number.
I mean it is the seventh biggest keyword in the history of the company.
About a 1% conversion rate. But that average sale is $639.
And I know for a fact that people are calling on the phone to place
orders that aren't getting tied back into Yahoo Web Analytics.
But this is the information
that you can take and then match it up with your position in the search
engines to figure out what your opportunity is, and this is the epiphany
that I had. And Whittaker, we have some work to do. We got
to build this thing out.
One of the first things I do
when I have these…I had 100,000 and I did a full export. Not
just a full screen; I did 100,000 keywords last night. One of
the first things that I did was I took out my company name and my domain
name.
Some people call these branded
terms and navigational terms. But they are keyword phrases that
have your company name in them and then have your domain name in them.
What happens is people come
to your site and they don't bookmark you, and they remember they bought
from you company, but they don't remember your URL, or they are lazy
and instead of typing in your domain in the address bar, they will actually
do a search for it and unfortunately overwrite that first keyword.
So I am seeing about half of
the keywords across Yahoo stores, all the different Yahoo stores, getting
overwritten with these terms. So I pull these terms out and I
separate them.
I had about $6 million worth
of sales with these keywords I was looking at last night, and I can't
remember what the date range was. It was a pretty big…it was
more than a year.
$1 million of sales were tied
to these company name/domain keywords, which was a pretty big amount.
I mean it was more than 20% of our sales, but it wasn't that many
keywords. It was only 200 some odd keywords.
Getting this information out
allows you to prioritize based on RPV, revenue per visitor, and average
sales. So you can go in and say, "OK. Well gosh.
I made $20 per visitor on this keyword and I make $1 per visitor on
this keyword. What is the upside? I am going to test that
big keyword." You might be a little more competitive.
All right. This graph
right here that is about to show shows my top 45 keywords during this
time period. Look how it drops off. They talk about the
long tail. I bucket my keywords into anywhere from three to five
different buckets. Probably the first 15-20 keywords are what
I call like the "candle" keywords; just the very…Oh, they are
awesome. I mean they are $20,000 plus keywords. And then
you will see this kind of levels off. And then the next part of
the…like the "candle." And then the next batch is the icing.
The middle batch is the cake. And then you have got the crumbs
for like the onesie, twosie keywords.
The next thing I do is I take
these 21,000 keywords and I actually tag them by category and brand
by doing some filtering in Excel. And Excel is a tool that you
need to know a lot about.
This is actually one of the
smaller buckets that I got out of these 20,000 keywords last night.
One of my programmer buddies came over last night and he was laughing
about he could do this in five lines of code and it took me two hours
to do it by hand. But I learned a lot about my keyword phrases.
I got about 40 different brand buckets and about 20-30 different category
buckets that help me look at these keywords. So instead of looking
just at the top of the mountain, I am actually able to take a specific
keyword like "Odor Mute", which is a product that we sell, and get
all the "Odor Mute" converting keywords in this one bucket.
Look at the numbers on the
left hand side. You will see that Odor Mute…I mean it is number
143 in our converting keyword phrases for this time period. It
generated $4,000 in revenue from that one keyword phrase.
The second base phrase is OdorMute
without a space. And then a more specific kind, "Odor Mute C",
and then you will notice these numbers start getting bigger because
there are not that many sales because they are pretty obscure keywords.
But this is awesome.
Instead of just working with one or two keywords, I like working with
about 20 at a given time, because you can optimize for multiple words
at a time.
All right. Then you target
segments with the greatest opportunity. I talked about this earlier,
but I actually go in and Revenue Per Visitor…I don't even know if
you can get that out of Yahoo Web Analytics. I never get it.
I just divide revenue per visitor and get these numbers.
And you will notice that if
you don't have a lot of visits, that RPV number is just unrealistic.
I mean there are some keyword phrases in there with one search and a
conversion, like, "Odor Mute Kennels", and it has 100% conversation
rate. That is totally unrealistic. You are not going to
replicate that the next time somebody comes searching for "Odor Mute
Kennels".
But you are going to get all
kinds of ideas for more ways to generate traffic, so I am only looking
at the icing and the candle and the flame keywords for an accurate Revenue
Per Visitor and conversion rate.
All right. I call this "SEO Upside", and I have gotten some of these ideas from Aaron Wall. He is a guy that I follow. SEO Book; I am a member of that. I play around with SEOmoz. They have some tools. Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land has some really good articles. And from all these different things I have kind of stitched together a….If I know what the revenue per visitor is on a given keyword, and I know how many searches there are on Google thanks to a Google keyword tool…
Google has a free keyword tool. I use to have to pay $200 or $300
a year to get Word Tracker. Well now with Google Adwords, anybody
can just go to Goggle and search for "keyword tool." You can
put your keywords in. And you type in your little ransom message
there.
One thing I do recommend is
set your match type to exact so you are not seeing broad match.
I think exact is a lot more accurate as far as the number of folks per
month searching on Google for these keyword phrases.
And then under "show/hide
columns," I like to see what the estimated average cost per click
is, and sometimes that is even higher than my revenue per visitor, so
I can't sometimes afford to pay for these clicks.
But I just took one of our
keyword phrases, "Doghouse heater", and threw it in there just to
see what would happen. And you can see, the estimated average
cost per click. I can see how many advertisers there are competing
for it. I can see the global monthly search volume.
It is not a lot. But
if you do this for each one of these little bitty thimbles and add those
into the buckets, and then you do the buckets, you can totally build
your campaigns out because of this.
The next piece of information
that I want to know is, "How do I rank on Google?" 70% of
my free organic search engine traffic comes from Google. Yahoo
is great. I love Yahoo. Bing is new, it is neat, it is shiny.
You know, it is Microsoft. I mean I get a little bit of traffic
from them, but it is like it is almost 10 times as much from Google,
so I am going to concentrate from Google. And if I get some Yahoo
traffic, if I get some Bing traffic, that is great. But I am not
going to do anything that is going to mess up my Google traffic tracing
these little bitty fish.
What I do is I use some alternative
methods for getting this, and you may know what I am talking about.
The search engines do not want you to pound them with thousands of requests
per day to see what your rankings are on keywords. So be very
careful. You can get your IP address banned from Google.
I mean Yahoo will ban me after 50 searches. They are notorious
for hating people looking at their search results.
But I will go in and hand check
these. And look at the third line. You know, I am number
one and two for Odor Mute C. The first two keywords on the first
two rows, "OdorMute" and "Odor Mute", I am number two and three
right after the manufacturer. But if you go down to the fourth
line, "Rider Odor Mute", I don't even rank. I don't even
know how I got a sale for that because I don't have the word "Rider"
on the page. Maybe from broad match PPC buys or something.
But you can see a lot of these
I am two and three, two and three. And I will show you some search
pages in a minute. But these show me the opportunities I am…Look
at Ryder's Odor Mute. I am number eight. I mean number eight
gets 3% of the traffic from the first page of results compared to 30%.
You can get 10 times the increase if I can get that up to the first
or second position, and that is what I want to do.
Then I go over to my Google
keyword tool and I want to see how many people a month are searching
for these keyword phrases. So I paste all of these Yahoo Web Analytics
from my site, keywords that have generated traffic for me, over into
this Google keyword tool, and there are only four keywords that Google
even knows about, which means my competitors probably don't know about
these, which means there is gold hidden inside your Yahoo Web Analytics
in your converting keywords. I mean there are thousands, and thousands,
and thousands of dollars. And if you are not interested in getting
the thousands, and thousands, and thousands of dollars or the value
of it, give me a holler. We will set up a revenue share deal.
I will be happy to go in and mine the gold out of your land and split
it with you.
Look at the cost per click
on some of these. I mean they are paying $2 a click for Ryder
OdorMute? I will be getting the free traffic. But I mean
there are only 22 people a month searching for that according to Google,
so who knows? But I have got 21,000 converting keywords, so I
am going after any keyword that has got Odor Mute in it.
All right. One of the
most important things that you need to do, beginner or advanced, you
need to start with a clean web browser. Thanks to personalized
results, if you are logged into your Google Adwords account, or Gmail
account, or any Google account, or if you are on a computer where you
have done multiple searches, Google starts to customize the results
based on what things you click on and similar keywords terms.
Google is getting really smart about this.
So if you want to see what
most people see who are just starting to search in a category, you need
to go clean out your browser. And what I do is I use Safari.
And I am like a Macintosh person sometimes and a PC person sometimes.
But there is a version of Safari for the PC now. And Safari has
this awesome thing. You go into Safari and you hit "Reset Safari".
And it makes all of you history go away. It empties the cache
and removes all of the cookies. And the only thing that you have in
common is that you are on the same IP address. You don't have
to reboot your computer or anything. So you just go reset Safari
and you have got a clean version of Google.
All right. All positions
are not created equal. We were talking about this earlier.
When you look at a Google search results page…go to Google and search
for "Odor Mute" and log out. You will notice in this screenshot
I am actually logged in, so I am kind of embarrassed by that.
In the screenshot you see 10
results, 10 links, 10 blue links to different websites when folks searched
for Odor Mute. All right. Odor Mute the company is number
one in the free search results. I don't know if you can see
my mouse over here or not. I am going to move my mouse, my pointer,
because I haven't got everything checked.
All right. The second
and third are me. I have got clustered results, which is really
cool. You need to ask me about that. I am above the shopping
results. And then you have all these others after that.
And if you are a Yahoo store
owner and you see, "Oh, I am number seven or I am number eight,"
and you go, "Well that is OK. I am on the first page of results."
But if you realize, most people's browsers don't even show the stuff
below the shopping results. And what happens is what you see and
what makes you sleep at night is different. What your customers
see is this. And 30% of them click on that first big one, and
12% of them click on that second one, and then 9% on that third one,
and then it just drops off like a stone.
Look at those little micro…l
just resized these based on the percentage of clicks that those actually
get. Seven, eight, nine, and 10 don't get any traffic at all.
You gotta get above that shopping results. You have got to be
in the top five minimum and you better be one, two, or three.
You better have two in there.
The next thing I do is I check
several keyword rankings. I have got a new version of Safari opened
and I pop on over to Google and do a search for Odor Mute, which we
saw a little while ago. It was a pretty good keyword. And
they are already trying to tell me that I don't know what I am looking
for. But I still rank. I got two pages ranking two and three.
That is great.
All right. And then the
next page comes up. We do a search for "OdorMute" as one word,
which was my second best phrase in this bucket, and I am ranking two
or three. And over on the right hand side you might see my safety
out there, my pay per click ad. I got broad match on OdorMute
in case there is a keyword phrase I don't optimize for yet.
All right. And then here
is one I don't even rank on the first page. I am not even showing
up for broad match. What the hell is going on, Google? Ryder
OdorMute. So what I did last night at about three o'clock in
the morning is I started adding the word "Ryder" all over the OdorMute
pages. And I don't know if it is published yet or not.
But you can see that all my
competitors here are showing up. OdorMute C; hey, I am number
one and number two. And every 10 or so searches I will go reset
Safari, because I don't want Google to start thinking for me and I
want to see what most other people see.
"OdorMute dogs"; I am ranking
two and three. I am sucking over here in the shopping search results.
I have got to learn more about that. For "Buy OdorMute".
OK. Amazon does a really good job about ranking for "buy"
plus a keyword phrase. And I am not disappointed that I am three
and four, because that is tough to compete with Amazon on a generic
product like that. And then "Buy Odor Mute" I am actually
trumping Amazon there.
All right. I am going
to throw Yahoo some love. I will actually go search on OdorMute,
and I actually got some good ideas for some more keywords here.
All right. So now we are moving on. Actually, I know have this information. I want to actually do the optimization. I have all this data. I have this spreadsheet that keeps crashing because it has got 100,000 lines in it. I actually want to optimize on the page. So what do I do?
Well, I find the most relevant page, the MRP's. Sometimes you
will see MRP written out like I write CKWP out. The most relevant
page, and that means that from any given keyword phrase on your site,
there is one page that is the most relevant page. And usually,
that is the page that ranks the best in Google, because you are linking
to it more, you have more content on it. You know what I am talking
about. For any keyword phrase there is probably a most relevant
page on your site. And if there is not, that gives you an excuse
to make a page.
All right. The way I
find the most relevant pages is I do a site colon query. If you
type in site:yourdomain.com and do a search on Google or Yahoo for a
keyword phrase, it is only going to show you pages on your site that
come back. I have got 57 pages on Guddogsupply.com that have OdorMute
on the page, and here is a screenshot of that just so you can see.
And so you will see the first
two or three pages. I am like, "OK. Well those are the
pages I think I want to optimize for." One of the things that
I do though is I examine the Google cache. If you will notice
in the search results pages off to the right of the URL is a link that
says "cache" sometimes. And when you click on that, you actually
see a copy of the web page. And this is what Google saw when they
spydered your web page.
You can see the word OdorMute.
I counted 17 times where the word OdorMute appears on this page.
Frequency is a big deal. You want to have multiple occurrences,
a high frequency of converting keywords on your product pages.
You don't want to keyword stuff, but you know, you want to do a good
job. And actually, when I saw this page I was embarrassed, because
this is not our text. This is actually text from the manufacturer.
And I apologize if anybody is eating lunch, because we are talking about
getting rid of pet odors here. But this is a good product for
us, and actually I can give you some real data here.
One other thing when you are
looking at the caches, I want you to look at the cache date. And
this is about two weeks ago. This is a good indicator about the
health of a page.
Now the problem is that you
could have your page…your page could be spydered once a year and it
just so happens it was two weeks ago. So I won't know until
I look again that this is really a two week old page.
Look at the cache date on your
homepage, and that is a very, very high indicator of trust. If
you have a very short cache date, if it was yesterday or the day before,
or even a week ago, Google thinks your site is good. That is awesome
to look at.
One of the other things about
the cache is that there is a link on the page two slides back that actually
shows you the text version. It takes away all the HTML images
and just shows you the text. And you can actually see on here
what the Alt text is in images. You can see my H1 tags.
You can see all my text. And I wish I could scroll down, but it
is in PowerPoint, not an HTML page. But you can actually page
down three or four times because there is so much text content below
the fold here.
All right. I want to
optimize this page. I now know what the most valuable page is
on my site. I want to examine the default SEO elements, so I actually
go to the page. I don't know if you can see this on your monitor
or not, but at the very top of the page that is about to appear on my
other laptop over here is the actual product page. There we go.
At the very, very, very top underneath my tabs here, I see that the
<title> tag actually show at the top of the page. So it
is "OdorMute C extra concentrated for kennel use. Well if you
look in the red text above the picture, that is also the headline.
Well that is also the name. This is my default built in RTML Isvan.
And Michael Whittaker taught me everything I know. Dave Burke
over at Visual Future has helped me a bunch, too. But I mean most
of this is my own RTML that I have done that is SEO friendly.
And you can get your RTML jockey to do the same thing.
I want to look at the source,
though. So you see in the right hand corner I have got "View
Source." So right click and let's view source. Let's
look at the different original SEO elements. Well the <title>
tag. There is my <title> tag. That is coming from
the name. All right. You see that.
All right. When the next
thing loads, and the slides are a little bit delayed, the second thing
that loads is the rel=canonical, which is a new tag that came out.
And if you are already doing your 301 redirects and you are an advanced
store, if you are doing $1 million a year or $500,000 a year and you
know what you are doing, you need to have canonical set up on your site.
Any RTML developer worth a flip can do this so easily. I did a
template in like 10 minutes. I will probably give the template
away at one time or something. I just have that hard wired in
there.
The Meta description, I am
just grabbing the name of the product…actually, the name of the company
plus the name of the product, plus the first 200 characters from the
caption, and then I add whatever items are in the contents field.
I got a funky RTML recipe for doing that.
And then finally, I have got
my Meta keywords tag, which I just have that in there. Meta keyword
tags don't really do anything for you, but they don't hurt you,
and I just throw the name or some keywords in there.
All right. Let's jump
into store editor. Just so that I can make sure how these RTML
templates are generating these very important SEO elements for me, I
just throw in some things like, "This is the name" and, "This
is the caption" inside the name and the caption fields. All
right. See how there is nothing in the headlines and there is nothing
in the code?
All right. Then I go
back to the…I hit update and then it actually shows me, it writes
in, "This is the name." You see it up there in the bread crumbs
in the top of the page. You see it at the very bottom with the
start of the caption. "This is the caption." So I am
like, "OK. Well that is where the…I know it is doing this.
Let me look at it." So I view source again a different way.
OK, well actually you can see. This is the name, pipe, pipe, pipe,
pipe, pipe, and then whatever was in there. Meta description:
you can see this is the name and then this is the caption. So
I am generating my Meta descriptions from my name plus my caption.
All right. So I want
to override my SEO defaults. And this is one of those things where
it depends on who built your Yahoo Store, whether you are a Legacy store,
whether you are a custom Legacy store, whether you are a Version 3,
which has got some really cool SEO stuff built in, or a custom Version
3. I mean there are so many ways that you could do this and a
lot of them are very good, but you want to override your SEO defaults.
And one of the ways I do that, page-title, I create a new property on
my edit page called "page-title". I think it is built in on
the Version 3 stores, but in the Legacy stores and in the new stores,
I think this will trump and make this the title.
Before I do that, I actually
do some quick keyword research, because besides all these OdorMute keywords,
I am like, "You know there are some other keywords that people are
searching for when they are searching for OdorMute, like solving their
problems." And I found this when I was doing some keyword research,
like Google suggests. When you type something in the taskbar of
your browser, Google will actually suggest different keyword phrases
in ascending order by popularity. So I am like, "Oh. Well
I might have to have the words ‘views" and ‘Canada' and ‘Ryder,
which is not on my page, and ‘where to buy.'" I actually
might need to have that on my page. So I grab those and then I
go over to Yahoo, and Yahoo has got two different awesome things as
far as…it is the "also try" stuff.
Yahoo will actually suggest
other keyword phrases for you to add to your site. So go there
and do a search and get some ideas for keywords there. We talked
about using the Google keyword tool. If you go to the Google homepage
itself and you have the right browser, it will actually do this.
And I was going to talk in "pet OdorMute" and all these other pet
odor things come up. I was like, "Dang! That is a bunch
of keywords. I need to look at that."
So I went in and did keyword
research, three or four slides back, and per month there is $110,000
worth of pet odor smell removal keyword phrases that generate 70,000
visitors a month. And I am spinning off a micro site.
I was telling Paul that I don't
know what to do with micro sites anymore. But man, there is some
serious revenue there. There is multi-million dollar revenue because
that is just one small niche inside this…you know, for one product.
So I took all those keywords
and actually sat down and spent five or ten minutes and wrote something
for my caption and my Meta description. And you will see here
at the same time, I also wrote a compelling headline. I said,
"Hey Ryder's," and you see my keyword in there, "OdorMute C concentrated
power works," and, "eliminate pet odors." And there is a
good keyword phrase. "Remove dog urine smells from almost any
material." And I apologize if anybody is eating. "Order
yours. In stock and ready to ship." You know I have got a benefit,
I have got a call to action, and that is a compelling headline.
I mean I have got a dog. I need to order some of that stuff today.
So I am pimping this thing out.
Put your converting keyword
phrases in the name of your products. On the left hand side you see
my somewhat dynamic navigation. Isvan helped me do this as far
as figuring out in my head how to do it. I hand code the RTML
and it is hilarious watching him look at my code. It is very bad
code, but it renders awesome pages.
Depending on where you are
on my site, you get different navigation. It is not just hiding
with JavaScript. It is actually hard coded different navigation.
You see the cousin pages and brother and sister pages as well as the
parent pages. And if you will notice the fourth keyword phrase
from the bottom, "Ryder OdorMute C for dogs" is an alternate keyword
phrase or a short name that is on the product we were just looking at.
But if you see the thumbnail on the right hand side, the picture of
the thumbnail and the name underneath, that is actually the name.
So I have got multiple fields that I am pulling from. And then
finally, these are the SEO elements that I finally settled on in optimizing
this one page. And the <title> tag, it has got plenty of
keywords in it. Actually, I don't have Ryder in there.
I probably want to go back and do that. And I actually hand wrote
the description that went along with my caption. And I still keep
my Meta keyword name. And I just took out rel=canonical that was
in there.
All right. That is one
bucket of keyword phrases. That is 21 keyword phrases out of 21,000.
I mean it took me probably 15-20 minutes including keyword research
with 75 tabs open on my laptop.
You want to be able to scale
your efforts. And I want to give a shoutout to my scrapbook girls
and Julie, who I wrote this template for her because I wanted her to
see what her SEO elements looked like on her site. And I have
got this, and I will probably end up giving this thing away too because
it is pretty easy to make. You have to know how an individual
store generates these SEO tags, but this is what I call a utility template.
It only shows up in the editor. I have got one page. I got
take 100 ID's. I dump them in this field and then it generates
the SEO elements in text where I can see it.
Then the cool thing, and I
am really proud of this, is it actually counts the number of characters
in the <title> tag and it tells me how much I have got left and
if I am over. It actually shows me what the Meta description is
and it tells me if I need a caption. And here are two pages…there
are 98 more below this. And Julie has done an awesome job of going
in and actually writing out these awesome captions. But Julie,
your homepage needs a caption there darling. But you are doing
a good, good job. And I have put that on several other stores,
and it is just really helpful because you can see it all in one spot.
You can see the caption field is the body text.
Let me start off from the top.
The big purple thing is the <title> tag. You can see the
Meta description, which is just the name, which that is not good.
That is using that old Solid Cactus Meta description. Fix that.
Rip that sucker out.
Then in the Meta keywords it
looks like you are using the same Meta keywords across the entire site,
which that is not good. Actually, I don't know if that hurts
you or not. Meta keywords really don't matter, but it makes
me a little nervous.
All right. Optimize on site.
We have done optimize on page, but now it is optimize on site.
Time wise, I think I am running a little bit tight. I am sure
Mike will cut me out. I got two minutes. All right. Great.
Basically, what that means
is find good store pages for embedded links. And so like if I
wanted "remove dog smell"; if that was my keyword phrase that I
wanted to rank for, I would search my entire site for that phrase for
pages that don't already link back to my OdorMute pages.
And what I will do is I do
a query on Yahoo, which is site:yourdomain, which limits the pages returned
to just your store, minus link to whatever URL that you want to get
keywords to because you don't want to show pages that you already
have links from, and then plus your converting keywords phrases.
So there are three elements that you search for on Yahoo, and this was
one for "orange dog collars," one of my favorite pet phrases that
gets no traffic, but the guys in the house of representative seems to
like it.
Then you want to optimize offsite,
and here is an example of what we live with out here in Mississippi.
You guys think we all live out in the swamp and don't wear shoes,
but actually, sometimes we do have possums everywhere. We had
a possum break into one of my brother's birdcages. And you can
see I have got embedded links. This is on a blog that is off the
site. I like having multiple sites. I have got my own networks
of sites and I am real open about it. They are not link farms.
They are actually different content sites and I do lots of text links
back to my stores for my content. You can see a link to Johnny
House, and a Quail funnel, and a Predator proof funnel, and just a whole
bunch of text below this and not that many links. Tons and tons
of pictures. That is at Stevesnell.com if you want to see that.
And that is it. That
is the end of my slides. And man, I nailed it. I got one minute
to go. I am going 100 miles per hour. Man, I have got 193
slides to cover.
Yeah. We got Mac, and
we got Apple, and spam.
Thank you.
All right.
Yep.
Yep.
If you have got $60, get an
Olympus VN6200 PC. It is my fifth digital recorder and it is the
perfect one for recording content.
Well the main thing is make
sure that you got Analytics turned on. And whether it is Google
Analytics or Yahoo Analytics, that allows you to…Once you turn it
on, you can go on vacation for a year and come back and you have got
a year's worth of data. I mean it is always connecting data.
And since it is hard wired into the store now, you don't have to worry
about the implementation being right. Is it recording all my transactions?
And Whittaker had to do all these triple back flips to get GA to work
with the Yahoo Store. You guys have got it baked in now.
I run GA and Yahoo Web Analytics on all my stores so that I can kind
of see two different kinds of reports and kind of watch things.
But run Analytics so that you
can collect these SEO...You can see other words in it, but I mainly
use it for getting 21,000 converting keywords.
Right. Well Yahoo Web
Analytics is so much more powerful than GA. I mean GA is playing
catch-up. And let me brag here for just a minute. Buying
index tools was awesome. I have used them for four years and it
is so powerful. I mean I fall off into it. I have got 100,000
keywords.
Now Google, it is easy.
It is kind of easy to use and there are some pretty graphs and stuff
like that. But man, if you want to dig in, get you an IT guy and
let him dig into your stuff.
But for my top tips, optimize
your homepage. Get your <title> tag, it is text on the page,
like 500 to 1,000 words, and hyperlinks embedded in that text to your
most valuable pages with you most valuable keywords. I mean if
you do that, that is 80% of the battle for most Yahoo stores for SEO.
Yep. Yep.
It is a never ending battle.
I mean the thing is I like to give a lot of this information away because
we have been doing this for 12 or 13 years now and so many people helped
us get to where we are, I feel it is my responsibility…You know that
is why I wrote the book. That is why I put a lot of information
out there.
Figuring out what the SEO website
is, that is a $5,000 or $10,000 consultation with some of the guys that
go to these conferences we have.
Yeah, absolutely. Go
to Amazon and search for Yahoo Store and Starting a Yahoo Business for
Dummies. It came out in 2006 but there is still some pretty good
information in there. I make $1, so buy a book.
If you go to Robsnell.com you
can sign up on my newsletter. Email to info@ystore.com gets you on my auto-responder for
six emails and then you are on my newsletter. I send out two or
three newsletters a year. But that is probably the best way to
get in touch with me.
Let me add one thing.
I have about 100 people that I owe links to, and I will hook up with
you all. I have been up for 36 hours, and so I am going to bed.
And I promise I will email all of ya'll in 18 hours when I wake up.
Thanks Mike.
WHEN: Wednesday, October 14 10am PT / 12noon CT / 1pm ET
WHAT: SEO Tips & Tricks for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions with Rob Snell.
You will learn SEO best practices for Yahoo! Stores. Drive customers to your store through organic search engine optimization (SEO).
BONUS: If you're one of the first 20 people who answer these 10 questions AND participate in my Webinar next week, I'll give you a free link with the anchor text of your choice -- ROB SNELL
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