Speak Wholesale and Buyer. Not Just Spider Talk.
SEO gurus know how to pull buyers and sellers to your merchandise web site: Sprinkle the right key words on pages and in the site’s Meta Data (behind-the-screen) codes. Keep those keyword-to-web-page-content ratios high, helping blind search spiders find you, so they can boost where you rank on results pages. Focus on useful, updated content: SEO sensei say nothing draws desirable customer eyeballs and search spider bots like practical content that refreshes often.It’s tempting in this world of search engine optimization to talk about talking mostly to the spider. But beware: Ignoring hominids (buyers seeking products) for software arachnids (search engine spider bots) could give you a language penalty. It might land your web site in Supplement Jail for infractions like “keyword stuffing” and other attempts at gaming the search spider. (Cell block “Supplement” is where the big general search engines send your site to be indexed on a schedule of Seldom or Never. No one comes to visit, not even the spiders.)
Here are highline tips to keep search marketing multi-lingual, talking to both Customer and Spider:
· Free-Range Key Words: Yes, key words are key. They trigger pay-per-click ads and context ad serves that list your site next to a topical article on the web. They embed themselves in links that draw spiders to index your site and return it in organic search results.
But not all searches are equal. Google’s Peter Norvig discussed the difference between keyword-based statistical searches (which is what Google excels at) versus natural language search. Jason Hekl, corporate marketing at InQuira, notes in “The Google bamboozle” –
“The pioneering keyword engines were particularly effective in getting people to use search in the first place. But we are still early in terms of search innovation …”
Hekl suggests business users, in particular, are moving towards more natural language searches (rather than the one- or two-word basic search), and more in-depth specialized search (“longer more explicit queries that align closer to what you are actually thinking”). In other words: longer key word search strings, so-called long-tail key words.
· Long-Tailing the Key Word Donkey: An example of long-tailing key words for better search marketing results is afoot at a site like Zappos. Not content to simply load the basic key word, shoes, into web page heads and Meta Data tags, this footwear site developed content keyed to search strings that use types of shoes, plus brand names, plus target shoe-wearing group, plus customized shoe features.
1st: Zappos’ top web page offers three on-site search boxes (Search Men’s Shoes, Search Women’s Shoes, Search Kids’ Shoes). Each of those search boxes drills down into choices (Color, Price, Width, Style, Heel Height).
2nd: The site’s Popular Searches list offers examples of how basic key words get stemmed and long tailed: uggs, ugg boots, ugg, ugg wide shoes. OR boots, frye boots, cowboy boots, womens boots. OR shoes, womens shoes, womens wide shoes, womens wide shoe with low heel.
· Order Up Refined Search Results: There is a shift underway in search technology that talks both spider and customer. Existing keyword-based statistical search, the standard, is defined as “to Google” and talks in spider-friendly terms. But Natural Language Processing search is what business and specialized searchers do when they search for buyers, sellers, distributors and manufacturers. Natural language search engines are different – They use more context clues, word associations and longer search strings. They understand how customers and people actually talk. And they’re not as “fixated” on key words. Natural language search engines do match queries to keywords; but they also return more precise search answers to more specific queries, rather than returning a broad exploratory list of results that may be irrelevant. (Because, after all, the search spider found the keyword in 15,000,000 exploratory caves.)
Right now, you cannot ask your search marketing manager or media buyer to look exclusively at Natural Language Processing Search Engines. But you can look at verticalized industry sites, vertical search engines that serve a trade or industry at human-filtered search sites.
Examples include Thomas.net for industrial products; Business.com for corporate and management services; TopTenWholesale.com, and its network of search/advertising sites, for the wholesale-to-reseller apparel and merchandise market. (You Are Here: At the Top Ten Wholesale Newsroom site.)
Trade and industry sites – verticalized sites – refine their search results or product directory searches to return user-relevant results. They know their customers and user expectations up and down the product supply chain; relevant search results are filtered out of the general, and likely off-target, search results you’d get from big general search engines.
Top Ten Wholesale is going next step with refined search results in the S.A.S.E. upgrade. This vertical search feature – Synonymous Algorithm Search Enhancer – uses industry expertise and patterns of buyer/seller search behavior tracked from 200,000 product searches a week at the TTW network of sites. Refined S.A.S.E. results merge vertical search database technologies, web site analytics and search log data with human judgment (from staff experience in the wholesale and search marketing fields). Refined search results correct misspellings, connect buyers and sellers to related product categories (even if they did not enter the precise keywords), and scrub out sounds-like terms or irrelevant results a searcher would get from a general search engine.
As Jason Hekl, quote above, put it:
“Don’t be bamboozled by Google! Don’t confuse internet search for an enterprise or business solution. Are your customers, employees and partners ‘exploring,’ or do they have more specific objectives in mind?”
In the action mode of wholesale buying and selling, searchers get very specific. Those are your potential customers, who don’t have time for “quick” key word search matches that don’t return the information they need. Not everyone speaks fluent spider.
