I recently read an article that touted the increase in search traffic this holiday season. This holiday, search traffic was up 6% vs. 2007. It is great to see search continue to contribute more and more to retailers during a difficult and challenging period.  Here is a graph the shows the key take-away from the article:

While this increase was good, I wanted to see how UGC was helping our clients land more organic search traffic. After reviewing our top 40 clients (excluding any client that wasn’t live for at least a year), we found that our clients on average were seeing 135% more organic search traffic from user-generated content January 2009 versus January 2008. This growth is due to a lot of factors including more content, more review related queries by consumers, and clients purchasing our enhanced search products.

It’s great to see UGC combining with search to deliver significant results for our clients.

I love to watch the kid at the fountain drink machine who puts cola, root beer, and orange drink in the same cup.  It seems like a good idea, but whether the kid admits it or not, the mixture tastes gross — worse than any of the three would taste on its own.  This is similar to the way that some of us forget about segmentation in our search engine optimization.

One of the best ways to think about natural search segmentation is that you (the marketer) are in partnership — not in competition — with the search engine.  You want to publish interesting, unique content and you want to make it as easy as possible for the search engine to determine the meaning or "theme" of that content.  If you truly have the best piece of content on the web for a given search query, both you and the search engine want your page to rank number 1.  Segmenting content means that you publish content with different themes on separate pages.

Consider the venerable product page.  Most product pages contain many of the same elements: the name of the product, a description of the product, a list of product specifications, a list of product accessories or services, and pricing, shipping and contact information, to name a few.  Marketers invest much time and expense in optimizing each page for product-specific search queries and in editorial review to ensure accuracy, to correct grammatical mistakes, and to ensure brand consistency.  When a search engine crawls a product page, it can tell that every word on the page is related to the product, spelled correctly, and written in the same tone as the rest of the site, so it is easy for the search engine to determine the theme of the page.

Now, suppose the marketer decides to add a new type of content, such as product reviews, to the product page.  Intuition says that, because review content is product-related, it should live inline on the product page.  From a search engine standpoint, though, this is not a good idea — you will actually drive more traffic by segmenting your content into two parts.  One content segment focuses on "product" content, and the other focuses on "review" content.

To understand why, consider three ways review content differs from product content:

1. Review content is written by customers of your product.  This means the size of the contributor base (and thus the variance in tone) is orders of magnitude larger for reviews than for products.
2. Review content goes through little to no editorial review, which means that it will almost always contain more spelling or grammatical mistakes than formal product content.
3. Review content is focused on a customer’s experience with a product, so it contains more "personal" statements like "I did …" and "My experience was …"

Does this mean that review content is bad or inferior to product content?  Of course not — it is just different content written in a different style by different people to accomplish a different objective.  Standalone review content presents a very consistent theme to the crawling search engines, just as standalone product content does.  Because each type of content has its own theme, each will ultimately rank well for its own set of search phrases. 

Although a much larger percentage of review content search referrals come from phrases that include words like "reviews", one of my favorite examples of how review content drives traffic comes from a misspelling:  as of this writing, a page on reviews.overstock.com ranks number 1 on Google for a search on "odasity of hope".  Overstock actually receives referrals for this search phrase, but only because their searchers and one of their reviewers are misspelling the same word ("audacity").  Such a misspelling would be edited out of formal product page content, but it is a terrific way to reach down further into the long tail of search using review content.

What would happen if this review content was not segmented onto separate pages, like the one on reviews.overstock.com?  The product content and the review content would dilute one another and the resulting theme would not be as easily discernible as the theme of either of the two pages standing on their own.  Failure to segment different themes will result in an opportunity cost of missed traffic, or worse, cannibalization of existing traffic.  Segmenting different themes not only increases your aggregate traffic, but also provides you an easy opportunity to share links between two very related pages — the product page and the review page for that product.

I encourage you to identify segments in your content, just as you might identify segments in your markets.  You will be happy with your increase in search traffic, and we will toast your success — you with your cola and me with my root beer — separate cups of course.

The first reviews shown are from Dell, a Bazaarvoice client. Because of the direct relationship with have with shopping sites such as Live.com, our clients are assured proper product matching, brand awareness, clicks, and natural search in-links from the Web's largest shopping sites. Our syndication partner network is the largest and most diverse customer reviews network, including portals and shopping comparison engines such as Live.com, Smarter.com, Google Product Search, and about 20 others.

Best of all, Bazaarvoice just announced syndication to these major portals is FREE through August 2008 to existing and future clients of Bazaarvoice Ratings and Reviews. Clients do nothing but sign a short agreement (after all, with Bazaarvoice the client owns their data). But as a service, we feed these reviews in different formats to our network of SyndicateVoice partners.

To learn more, or to sign up for free syndication to sites like Live.com, please talk to your Community Manager (if you are a client) or email us at info @ bazaarvoice.com or call 866-522-9227.  

Bazaarvoice clients learn a lot from Jeff, and through the SyndicateVoice and SearchVoice program they have also gained a lot of revenue impact. Jeff will share key findings across many large multi-channel retailers as well as strategies (such as segmented content and avoiding duplicate content) that is critical to making user generated content effective for boosting natural search traffic. There will be time for questions at the end as well. Click on the link below to register — there is a limited number of 'seats'!

Boosting Natural Search Traffic Through Consumer-Generated Content

Join us for a live webinar on August 29th to hear Jeff Watts, a veteran search engine optimization strategist and product manager for Bazaarvoice, explain how you can employ consumer-generated content to help drive down your acquisition costs and improve the efficacy of your search engine marketing.

This webinar will cover:
* Why user-generated content indexes well with search engines
* Performance of review content in the long tail of search
* The Bazaarvoice approach to search engine optimization
* Sample case studies and best practices

Date:       
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
       
Time:       
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM CDT

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.3.9 (Panther®) or newer

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/513013753

It seems that just about everyone is publishing something these days:  Technorati claims to be tracking 92.7 million blogs, Wikipedia has around 5 million articles, and more and more sites are facilitating the creation of consumer-generated content.  But publishing and publishing effectively are entirely different.  A site can have the greatest content on the web, but if it is not discoverable by the masses, it will yield little traffic.One of the most important types of content marketers should focus on publishing effectively is customer ratings and reviews.  After all, 77% of online shoppers are seeking review content online before they buy according to Jupiter Research.  Recently Bazaarvoice launched SyndicateVoice, a product that helps our clients dramatically increase the amount of traffic their ratings and reviews receive, particularly through search engines, by using an effective publishing strategy. 

In a nutshell, SyndicateVoice does the following:

1. Publishes a standalone, review-centric microsite that targets long tail search traffic for review-centric key words.
2. Retains visitors to the microsite once they’ve entered.
3. Syndicates excerpts of reviews to a broad network of search engines, shopping portals, price comparison engines, and RSS outlets.

Several clients who have gone live with SyndicateVoice have seen fantastic results.  For example, in a sample of three clients for the first 27 days since their respective launches, SyndicateVoice results show the following:

• Pageviews per session rose as much as 33%
• Bounce rates (the percentage of single page visits) declined by as much as 21%
• Search engine referrals rose by as much as 156%

There are three reasons for these results. 

First, the search engine optimization (SEO) methodology – especially with regard to the page-level search optimizations – is based on significant keyword research, and because it is a 100% “white hat” approach, the search engine traffic it yields will be less susceptible to loss due to changes in the search engines’ algorithms.

Second, SyndicateVoice is an open platform.  On an opt-in basis, clients may take advantage of the Bazaaarvoice syndication network, which includes not only RSS syndication and sitemaps, but also 25 premier portals and shopping comparison engines like Google Base & Google Product Search, Smarter.com, and MSN / Live.com.  This syndication not only drives direct traffic back to clients’ reviews, but also builds inbound links to that content that help the SyndicateVoice pages rank better in search engines.

Third, the SyndicateVoice microsite includes helpful navigation keys that provide context to the visitor and increase visitor retention.  For example, every microsite page displaying reviews also displays a list of the “top rated” products for the same category.  If you are looking at a set of bath towels, for example, and decide that it is not the product you want to buy, the list of top rated products will include links to other sets of bath towels that have been highly rated by other customers and, therefore, might be worth checking out before you leave the microsite.  This is great for consumers because they can take advantage of the reviews written by others like themselves.  It is also great for retailers, because it increases the amount of time a visitor will stay on their site, which in turn leads to higher conversions and more sales.

Consider these three things when you publish your own content:

1. Are you using a world-class SEO strategy?
2. Are you open with your content and using that openness to drive inbound links and traffic?
3. Are you providing a multitude of reasons for your visitors to choose to stay on your site once they arrive?

SyndicateVoice clients are already doing this with their review content.  For these retailers, a new product review is not just another thing to publish – it is a traffic driver and a conversion tool.  

We hired Jeff Watts, a nationally-recognized search engine marketing expert as Product Manager for SyndicateVoice and our natural search optimization functionality. Jeff has spoken at many search engine marketing events and managed global search optimization for National Instruments, a $600M company.Through Jeff's leadership, we optimize the Bazaarvoice SearchVoice and SyndicateVoice capabilities every 6 weeks through our rapid  development lifecycle. We have also launched the Bazaarvoice Microsite solution that furthers the impact of natural search through brand and category-related pages.

One of the many factors unique to Bazaarvoice's successful UGC search strategy is segmenting the content from the product pages, so that review content is optimized for the 'long tail' searches related to product reviews. This is a superior strategy compared to embedding review content into the product pages because product pages already carry so much other content and markup that dilutes the opportunity for reviews-focused keyword searches.

Jeff's recently released whitepaper, Boosting Natural Search Traffic using Ratings and Reviews, explains this strategy and shares some of the findings from our clients about user-generated search. Many clients give us access to their web metrics platforms which helps us understand the behavior of search keywords into their site vs. the SearchVoice landing pages. Through analysis by Jeff, our market data analysts and Community managers, there are several findings in the whitepaper of how and why UGC generates high quality traffic. Here are a few of the findings:

• Search engine queries to review content are substantially more likely to use "generic", rather than "retailer-specific" words, which indicates that review content outperforms product content in driving first-time customers to a retailer.
• Search engine queries to review content contained about 1.5 words per query more than queries to product content. The longer query strings indicate that review content does a better job than product content of driving higher converting visits.
• Referrals from ratings and reviews content generate 97% more revenue per referral than referrals from natural search engines to product pages.

Reviews are an effective word of mouth marketing method and can provide substantial natural search traffic. By intelligently publishing ratings and reviews in a search engine friendly manner, marketers can reach a broader set of searchers who are close to the point of sale, educated about the product being offered, and ready to buy.

If you are interested in receiving this whitepaper, visit our site. Or, if you are a Bazaarvoice client, simply email or call your Community Manager.

Question: What do the following silly things have in common?

1.    what is the approximate size of a banjo
2.    redheads and the men that love them
3.    how to hit the sasquatch
4.    used men’s hunting socks

Answer: they are all actual phrases that searchers have typed in to discover various Bazaarvoice clients’ review content.  (For the record, I cannot fathom why someone was searching for “used men’s hunting socks”.)

The long tail of search engine data tells a fascinating story that smart marketers are listening to.  It is not just silly phrases like those above, but obscure and unique terms – perhaps used only once or twice – that give insight into what your visitors are really looking for.  Long tail search terms might not match your page titles or your carefully crafted page descriptions, but they do match some other combination of words on your page – even when you are not anticipating them.   For many sites, the unanticipated terms account for over 80% of the search terms and over 50% of the referrals, and this makes it imperative to understand how best to target those terms.

With consumer-generated content, targeting unanticipated search terms is easy.  Consumers writing reviews, for example, are using their own words to describe their experiences with a product or service.  Their reviews do not go through a formal editorial process to correct misspellings or to remove personal words like “I”, “me”, and “my”.  The reviewers themselves are not employees who must adhere to the official company marketing message in what they write.  Further, a typical page of reviews is written by multiple, unrelated authors who have different perspectives on the product being reviewed, and these different perspectives result in a greater variance in the words used in the reviews.  This variance means that pages of reviews are more likely than homogenous product pages written by one or two authors to drive search terms from unanticipated combinations of words, that is, long tail search terms.

For example consider the following excerpt of search terms from one of our clients’ long tail data.  Each of the following words was searched on just a few times during the reporting period.  Notice the variance in the words and phrases used:

•    nike free trainer 7.0 review
•    nautica jeans colorblocked polar fleece pullover
•    love tease pleated rhinestone-trim dress
•    desperate housewives perfume
•    simmons beautyrest adrian
•    dz7064
•    love tease beaded organza halter dress
•    alfani safari field jacket
•    belique cookware
•    arturo chiang umiko
•    nike free 7.0 review
•    tools of the trade cookware reviews
•    dkny draped swimdress
•    reviews on benefit firmology
•    towelbuyer
•    love tease beaded babydoll dress
•    nike free trainer 7.0 reviews
•    keds mosaic slipon

Lists of long tail terms like this are typical for publishers of reviews:  some are product names, some include keywords like ‘review’ or ‘reviews’, and still others are brand names or generic descriptions of products.  Even though each term is searched on once or twice per reporting period, the sum of all of them together frequently accounts for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of search referrals.

No marketer can predict all of the terms that their searchers will use during a reporting period, but it is possible to identify the types of words that are most frequently associated with success – the words that are used most frequently in search referrals that lead to conversions.  For example, consider the following illustration.  On the left side is the excerpt of long tail data mentioned above with each keyword phrase now associated with the number of “Referrals” generated and the number of “Conversions” accomplished during the reporting period.  (A referral is counted when a searcher clicks through to your page from the search engine.  A conversion is counted when the visitor subsequently takes the desired action on your site, whether that is a purchase or some other metric.)
The list on the left is aggregated into a similar list on the right by tallying the number of conversions that were associated with each individual word in the search phrases on the left.  For example, the words “nike”, “free”, “trainer”, “7.0”, and “review” each count for one conversion, based on the first row of data in the chart on the left.  Tallying these numbers up for the entire list (including the rest of the search terms that were not included in the list above), we see some interesting trends emerge.  For one thing, the most important words for generating conversions were “review” and “reviews”.  This is not unexpected, since we are dealing with pages that contain review data.  Other words that led to conversions were “top”, “best”, “ratings”, and so on.

Wise marketers use lists like this to help determine which keywords to put into the page templates of their consumer-generated content pages.  (Incidentally, this is one of the basic principles Bazaarvoice uses in building the SearchVoice Pages that come with our Ratings and Reviews product and in building the SyndicateVoice microsite.)

The long tail is a gold mine for search marketers and the variance of the content contributed by consumers helps you tap it.  Read and analyze terms in the long tail of your data to find out what your site visitors are really looking for.  Oh, and if you are the one that was looking for used men’s hunting socks, please drop me a line and let me know what you were thinking.