TKG SEO Blog

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

Shopping Search Tactics

Moderator:

• Brian A. Smith, Analyst, ComparisonEngines

Speakers:

• Aaron Shear, Partner, Boost Search Marketing
• Brian Mark, CTO, Toolbarn.com
• Greg Hintz, General Manager, Yahoo! Shopping

Brian Smith leads off with an overview of the shopping search landscape. One third of the US internet audience passes through a shopping search engine during a peak buying season. A data feed is a list of your products that can be submitted to the individual shopping engines.

Aaron is now talking. He starts out by talking about e-commerce sites and their traditionally poor layout. People normally navigate through e-commerce sites by using their site search because there is too much information to navigate through. The best shopping sites have multiple ways of navigating to a particular product. Aaron then starts talking about sites like ShopWiki.com that have benefits like the user generate content and suggests that e-commerce sites either leverage their network or do it themselves if they can. He ends by clean urls

Brian Mark is now up from ToolBarn.com. Conversions from shopping search engines can be high. He says he sees 3-5 times the conversions from these types of sites. Using these shopping search engines can be a backup for regular organic search results. ToolBarn.com had been removed from Google’s index at one point and they could have been out of business but they had the shopping search engines to back them up. One recommendation he had is to find where your competitors are to give you an idea of where you need to be. It is also good to test these sites to see what works and what doesn’t. An important thing to do is to make sure you are tracking the results of what you are doing. There may be an increase in the generic searches for your brand name as well due to placing your products on the shopping search engines.

Next up is Greg from Yahoo. Yahoo Shopping is getting 30 million visitors a month with around 250 million monthly pageviews. The main site is shopping.yahoo.com. He says that products can also show up across the Yahoo network. He gives and example of their gaming section. If someone is looking for Halo 3 reviews, Halo 3 product results will show up on the page as well. Yahoo Stores will automatically get their products uploaded and all others can do it through the data feeds. The interesting point he states last is that you are charged based on CPC (cost per click).

It is interesting that Yahoo charges for their product submit and Google doesn’t. Google doesn’t have the content network that Yahoo does though to be able to leverage these products across it. Google is just using the products to get them placed in their universal search results. A couple of the speakers said that people could realistically get at least 50% of their traffic from shopping search engines.