Goals

• Free SEO efforts from IT dependencies
• Maximize natural search brand visibility
• Increase search traffic and revenue

Solution

GravityStream is an easy-to-implement natural search channel management platform that delivers measurable results without requiring extensive IT resources.

By implementing GravityStream, Cabela’s gained a real-time, crawler-friendly version of their e-commerce site. GravityStream provided Cabela’s with the tools to overcome their content management system constraints on their native site, and the ability to optimize their existing pages, without forcing them to rebuild their entire site.

Results

• GravityStream empowers Cabela’s marketing team with control over the natural search channel.
• GravityStream shattered indexation goals by 45%. This lead to 200% more traffic and 50% more sales.
• Cabela’s brand is well positioned in over 200,000 long-tail search markets, with over 40,000 pages driving traffic.

“We have seen an impressive 50% increase in year over year organic search sales using a powerful new approach to SEO. Best of all, we didn’t have to change our core website. GravityStream gives me the flexibility we need to systematically manage our organic search business.”

- Derek Fortna,
Marketing Programs Manager, Cabela’s, Inc.

“With the earlier system, he says, “If I’m a user searching for boat trailer parts, I can’t buy from that page, I have to make another click to go into the web site to make a purchase. With the GravityStream proxy, if I find what I want I can place the order right there.”

Read the article here.

For more information about Cabela’s success with Netconcepts, read the Cabela’s Case Study.

Read the entry submission and GravityStream product overview published by the NZ Marketing Association and written by Netconcepts’ very own Chief Executive Officer, Nigel Varcoe.

Unbranded keywords are the key to unlocking natural search’s success potential. However, the ability to measure your natural search channel and quantifying your ROI is a new concept for most companies. Quinton does a great job of tying in the research and background that went into Netconcepts’ white paper “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search” to these ground breaking advancement in search.

Read this entire article and learn how to capture your own Long Tail.

As a search marketing retailer, the most important commitment you can make this year is to understand the most powerful concept affecting large dynamic websites today - the long tail of natural search. You could read the research paper we wrote on the subject, or my new article in Multichannel Merchant magazine on the new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of natural search, or listen to this podcast interview with Direct Magazine, to learn more about tapping into the long tail of search.

What does it all mean to you?

I see three important takeaways for you to consider:

1. Re-invent your approach to natural search:

Is search engine optimization (SEO) dead as some claim? No, but the process has evolved. Nimbler competitors are sidelining top merchants. The allure of a pageless-AJAX Web challenges the basic notion of search results. And capturing unbranded keyword traffic is unfamiliar territory. SEO is no longer a list of simple tasks for your content and site management teams to complete. It’s ongoing. And it’s gone social. SEO is fragmented into disjointed new rules: Diminishing return on SEO efforts are real. It takes scalable solutions to move the needle. Iterative testing is required. Yield management is an imperative function of SEO campaign management.

What is your plan to grow your unbranded search engine-referred traffic? What strategies will you use to target your website assets on these untapped opportunities? How will you burn your brand into the market and associate your products and services with millions of keywords? Can Web2.0 technology help you “outsource” the hard work of page-by-page website optimization to your users?

Welcome to this brave new “long tail” world of natural search optimization.

2. Ask what the tail can do for you:

Unfortunately, making a true business case for capturing the value of this long tail requires a PhD in probability theory. (Add all the words on every page of your site. Assume 100% indexation. Calculate the likelihood that each page would be associated with each word in each engine. Calculate keyword demand for each word according to various sources. Multiply each page’s chances of ranking high enough to capture some percentage of this sum search demand. Factor in more popular alternatives not currently on the page. Not to mention backlink text…) It is complicated!

So we have taken the messy keyword extrapolation guesswork out of this process. Using the keyword sampling factor based on real merchant data we developed in the paper (multiplying your page count x 97), you can estimate how many of these unbranded searches are conducted for keywords your pages can compete for (See methodology here). If you have 5,000 unique, crawlable pages on your website, simply multiply this by 97. (In this case, we’d estimate your pages have nearly 500,000 relevant unbranded keyword searches each month to compete for.) What percentage of this estimate is your channel capturing now? How does it compare to your unbranded keyword traffic? Chances are, your untapped potential is quite significant.



Your brand keywords will always be important, but unbranded terms are truly your “long tail” opportunity. For the typical top 100 merchant, the unbranded keyword opportunity is nearly 40 times larger than the amount of searches for the company brand name itself.

3. Attack your “freeloading” pages:

Let this be your motto this year. Chances are good that 80% or more of your web pages are indexed and sending no search-referred traffic. Growing a long tail of unbranded search-referred traffic means making these pages work harder for you, without killing yourself in the process. The best approach is to test different strategies that can scale across your entire website, and measure the results using KPIs that track long tail dynamics (such as those outlined here).

Some strategies to get you started testing:

• Is there value in adding keywords to your URLs?
• Are you better off buying links or adding an RSS feed of your sale items?
• How about user generated content for product pages, or enabling social bookmarking?
• What about tagging pages with keywords that generate popular search result pages?

Whichever strategies you test, you need to measure your results. Concentrating on traffic and sales alone may lead you to wrong conclusions. Instead look beneath the surface:

• Has the crawling depth and frequency increased on your pages?
• What has happened to your indexation and rankings?
• Has the flow of PageRank or “link juice” changed?
• Are more websites organically linking to your pages now?
• Are more of your pages yielding traffic than before?
• How many keywords does each page now yield?
• How many visitors does each of those keywords yield?

Focusing on these KPIs gives you a more holistic view of your channel’s long tail performance.

Your mission is to get as many of pages ranking your brand as highly as possible, in as many relevant keyword markets as possible, to maximize your channel yield in terms of clicks and branding. It is a tall ask. But it is not impossible if you are using a disciplined yield management approach and have the right technology and expertise in place to test and grow.

Talk to Netconcepts about how we can help your company grow your natural search long tail.

In particular, our GravityStream natural search proxy platform can provide you with ready access to KPIs like these, and the expertise to advise you on channel growth strategies. Many scalable solutions are easily included (such as friendly URLs, for maximal flow of link juice), and we can test various strategies quickly and with immediate tracking benefits. Ask your sales person or account manager about these ideas and product features in your next call. Or drop me a line at .

It’s 2007 already. If you are like most merchants, you’ve followed the advice of your NSO firm and completed some basic site optimization projects. You routinely spot check your Google indexation, and your rankings on 100 or so “trophy” keywords to show your executive team. And a look at your web analytics shows your natural search channel sales growing. So what’s wrong with this picture?

The problem is you are staring at the tip of the iceberg, oblivious to the iceberg below. Something gigantic lies beneath. And you need more sophisticated tools and methods to understand and diagnose the opportunity in order to take appropriate action. In fact, chances are high that your natural search channel is seriously underperforming as a result.

As NSO best practices become commonplace amongst your competition, taking this evolutionary step is required for merchants to gain advantage. Fortunately, by approaching the natural search channel with an understanding of long tail dynamics, new key performance indicators (KPIs), and yield management techniques, savvy merchants can move beyond the traditional project-based mentality of NSO, to a more sophisticated, yet DM-friendly approach – one that leverages website size, brand power, and direct-marketing principles to capture the enormous potential that lies beneath the surface.

The Long Tail of Natural Search

To understand the KPIs and management techniques, let’s examine what lies beneath the surface. In a word, it is not an iceberg, but the “long tail” - a colloquial term referring to a common statistical distribution featuring a “tail-shaped” curve. Thanks to Chris Andersen’s book, the long tail concept has received much press recently, and carries many significant Internet business-based implications. But there is also a long tail distribution that contains the promise of natural search for large, dynamic e-commerce merchants.

Source Netconcepts, 2006

In fact, to appreciate the enormity of this potential, contrasting it against a known quantity is helpful. According to research published recently by Netconcepts (“Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search”, 2006) for every search that occurs for the average merchant’s brand name, nearly 40 relevant searches occur for more generic, brand-neutral keywords. For instance, if there are 100,000 searches for “LL Bean” this month, there are an estimated 4,000,000 searches for hundreds of thousands of “unbranded” keyword markets LL Bean pages could compete within, ranging from “furniture slipcovers” to “women’s flannel pajamas” to “men’s reindeer sweater,” and more.

For these coveted and targeted keywords, LL Bean is likely to have matching category or product pages somewhere on the website, that ideally could position the LL Bean brand high enough in the search results to win these millions of click decisions (and sales) on the cheap. And even if these pages do not convert 100% of these searches into clicks, if well ranked, these pages still serve the purpose of building brand by association with these millions of corresponding “unbranded” searches, and by extension, the searchers that used them.

This is the long tail of natural search – the universe of diverse, unbranded keyword markets that, while perhaps not as frequently searched on an individual basis, cumulatively, add up to orders-of-magnitude greater (40x, in our research) search potential than the brand search traffic that most merchants naturally receive. This is the prize every savvy merchant seeks.

Since brand popularity is relative, a more objective way to think of this long tail potential is as a function of your website size. In particular, our research suggests that for every unique page that exists on a merchant’s website, nearly 100 unbranded searches are conducted in an average month. If you have a 20,000 page website, your long tail potential would be calculated as 2,000,000 unbranded searches, and so on. Tracking your unique pages and their yield therefore is a critical measurement to understanding the dynamics of your natural search channel performance.

Capturing the Elusive Tail

The long tail of unbranded keywords is a new entity for most marketers to grapple with. What drives it? How do you quantify it? What is good performance? What is bad? How do you capture it?

We set out to answer these questions in the research alluded to earlier. To this end, we developed a theory we refer to as “Page Yield Theory.” Page Yield Theory aims to breakdown, quantify, and model the components of a merchant’s long tail into manageable units, and was informed via natural search data gathered from a few dozen top online merchant (clients utilizing our GravityStream™ natural search optimization proxy technology). In the process, we developed a set of metrics to understand the dynamics of the long tail. We have since applied these same ratios as key performance indicators (KPIs) explained below, for growing natural search channel programs under management.

KPI #1 – Brand to Non-Brand Mix

What percentage of your natural search comes from brand keywords versus non-brand keywords? What does it mean if your keyword curve is dominated by brand terms? If you discover that most of your traffic is coming from searches for your brand, we view this as symptomatic of a larger problem lying just beneath the surface - that very few of your pages are actually yielding traffic.

Many retailers find 95% of their search traffic comes for brand terms with, not coincidentally, a very small percentage of their site powering that brand traffic. Whereas what you may find, when you have done some search optimization, is a very different distribution curve. You may find that 40% of your pages are yielding traffic, but that 60% of that traffic is unbranded keyword traffic. This in fact, is the core hypothesis of Page Yield Theory – unbranded keyword traffic volume grows as the number of pages yielding natural search traffic grows.

KPI #2 – Unique Pages

Just how big is your website? How many pages are there? This is a critical metric for establishing a yield management foundation. You may be tempted to approximate this number using a product count. This will most likely significantly understate your actual pages. Or you might want to use a search engine’s reported index. This too will return mixed results, as each engine indexes dramatically different amounts of pages for each website.

However, search engines are in the business of discovering pages. So we recommend using the number of pages that bots (such as googlebot) are able to crawl over a 30 – 60 day period as the most useful proxy for how many unique pages are available on your site. (This assumes your URLs are in a condition that permits bots to crawl deeply. If they are not, you may need to resort to an approximation.)

As a comparison, the average merchant in our research had roughly 73,000 uniquely crawled pages.

Note: Most analytical packages do not track page crawl metrics because they rely on Javascript to track user actions. Since search engine bots do not have Javascript enabled, their crawl activity goes unregistered – leaving marketers blind to the dynamics of their “search conversion funnel.

KPI #3 – Pages Yielding Traffic

What percentage of those pages yield search traffic? Is it 10%? 90%? This ratio essentially dictates the length (the X axis) of your unbranded keyword long tail, and suggests remaining potential.

With this KPI in hand, you understand your missed opportunity cost, and monitor your progress throughout your NSO engagement.

If you do not know your amount of unique pages or yielding pages, the above matrix can be consulted for an estimate. It was developed using data from the average merchant in our research and illustrates the inverse relationship between Page Yield and Brand / Non-Brand Traffic. Simply seek your current level of brand and non-brand traffic to estimate how many pages are accounting for that traffic.

The average merchant in our study had 14% of pages yielding traffic.

KPI #4 – Keywords per Page Yield

Now that you have an idea of your Page Yield rate, how many keywords does each of those producing pages yield over the course of a month – 2 keywords? 10? This is the fourth KPI: keyword yield. This KPI is responsible for creating scale. That is, the more keywords each yielding page attracts or targets, the longer your tail.

The average merchant in our study found 2.4 keywords produced per yielding page.

KPI #5 – Visitor per Keyword Yield

This fifth KPI – Visitor per Keyword Yield – is basically determined by how highly a page ranks for a keyword, and tells you how much traffic each keyword drives. This metric determine the height or thickness of your long tail.

The average merchant in our study experienced 1.9 visitors per keyword.

KPI #6 – Index-to-Crawl Ratios

The first step in the search conversion funnel is converting a crawled page to an indexed page. While we do not put significant stock in the reported engine indexes, this KPI can illustrate engine differences or potential trouble-spots.

For instance, the average merchant in our study saw a 3:1 index-to-crawl ratio in Google. That is, for every page that was crawled, there were 3 in the index, as strange as it sounds. If a merchant finds the index shrinking to say, only 50% of the crawled pages, that may be a signal of crawl pattern changes, or perhaps pages are being shifted into the supplemental index.

KPI #7 – Engine Yield

A final KPI to monitor is engine yield. Each engine has different audience sizes. How do you fairly compare the referral traffic you get from each? Simply calculate how much referral traffic each sends for every page it crawls or consumes. Compare engine by engine. What we have found is that MSN and Yahoo! tend to crawl a lot more pages, but the yield per crawled page from Google is typically significantly higher.

Reconstructing the Tail

Once known, these KPIs can be reassembled to create a vivid picture of your performance and empower smarter decisions. For instance, brand and non-brand traffic composition (KPI #1) provide a baseline on the effectiveness of your channel yield. This can be contrasted against your total available pages (KPI #2) and actual yielding pages (KPI #3) to understand the gap between current and potential performance. The rate at which these pages yield keywords (KPI #4), times the visitor driven by each of those keywords (KPI #5) form the length, and height, of your tail, and can each be optimized individually. Meanwhile your index-to-crawl ratio (KPI #6) and engine yield (KPI #7) help quantify your site’s effectiveness at converting web pages into units of “search produce.”

For instance, if the number of pages yielding traffic is low (under 10%), it may be time for some basic, scalable, URL rewriting to maximize the flow of link juice through your internal link text. On the other hand, if 80% of pages are yielding traffic at a rate of one keyword per page and one visitor per keyword, it may be time to conduct some auto-generated title tag tests to scalably lift rankings of thousands of pages, by incorporating more relevant keywords per page. And perhaps a pinch of organic link building via RSS may be in order to power-up the link juice that flows through the inbound link text. Each situation is unique and requires a custom approach to optimization.

The secret to capturing the long tail of natural search is this: Fully maximize the page yield of your website. That is, develop a metrics-driven optimization process that empowers each page to be viewed as the authority on the subject – be it for “furniture slipcovers,” “men’s reindeer sweater,” “18 volt Makita power drill” or other. This is not without challenge; empowering thousands of pages to yield natural search traffic may seem daunting, but it can be achieved by focusing on these new KPIs, managing your NSO channel effort against these yield metrics, and committing to an iterative NSO testing program.

Increasingly, the natural search game revolves around getting your brand associated with unbranded terms. While these new KPIs do not change the basics of NSO, they can provide the context and management discipline that enable marketers to make more informed decisions how to best spend time and budget optimizing your long tail.