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.

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.

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 .

TV shopping network HSN, a global leader of multichannel retail, and the online arm of TV’s 4th largest cable network, offers tens of thousands of compelling and innovative beauty, home, fashion and jewelry products online, including highly respected brands like, Gateway, Paula Dorf, Kodak and Cuisinart, as well as many proprietary brands.

Situation:

Although HSN offers tens of thousands of products online, only a small amount of unique pages were indexed in Google in early 2005. This level of visibility was primarily only generating search traffic for HSN-related brand keywords (such as “HSN,” “Home Shopping Network” etc). Unbranded “long tail” search terms however accounted for a very small percent of HSN’s natural search traffic. Upon investigation, it was discovered that many of the indexed pages consisted mainly of duplicates of similar pages, as well as article-related content, rather than unique product-related pages capable of attracting unbranded search terms and sales.

Challenge:

HSN’s strategy was to take steps to capture more unbranded search traffic by getting more product pages indexed. However the prospect of re-architecting the HSN.com website to accomplish this would require many hours of development time and would impact many website stakeholders. According to Rob Caiello, OVP of Online Marketing, “We knew we needed to take action quickly and that we did not have the internal resources to restructure the HSN.com website at the time. We needed to find a powerful and immediate solution to achieve greater visibility in the major search engines for unbranded keywords.”

Solution:

HSN decided to implement a faster, more robust, proven approach to capturing natural search potential, using a hosted, natural search proxy optimization technology developed by Netconcepts, known as GravityStream™. This patent-pending optimization technology provided HSN with a real-time proxy of the retail website for search engines and search engine users, with very little effort required upfront. Around 40 hours were required by HSN’s internal IT department to set up, test and launch the GravityStream proxy site.

The solution has also been resource-friendly after the initial launch. As a real-time proxy of the website, new pages and links are emulated and made crawlable automatically, requiring only a few hours of ongoing maintenance from the marketing team on a regular basis.

Results:

The results achieved speak for themselves. Within 12 weeks of launching the GravityStream solution, HSN’s indexation in Google had increased 1200% from previous levels, and included all tens of thousands of product-related pages. This newfound level of visibility instantly began delivering on the “long tail” promises with over 25% of unique pages yielding increases in unbranded natural search visitors. In fact, during the critical 2005 holiday season, this visibility led to an increase in nonbranded search sales of 150% over Q4 levels from 2004.

Kristina Stern, Online Marketing Manager of HSN.com stated, “When compared to other options, Netconcepts GravityStream proxy solution is a quick and effective way to get many, deeper level pages indexed on Google that can deliver incremental, unbranded traffic and sales.”

According to a recent study by Netconcepts, and documented in the whitepaper titled “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search,” the average multichannel retail website has only a small percentage (usually under 5%) of its E-Commerce pages yielding traffic. For merchants utilizing Netconcepts’ GravityStream proxy technology, including HSN, over 20% of all unique pages are yielding unbranded natural search traffic. To get a copy of our “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search” white paper, click here or call a Netconcepts at 608-285-6600.

Problem:

Northern Tool recognized that very few of their products could be found via search engines. The company’s website was not compatible with search engine spiders and the site’s dynamic pages weren’t indexed by Google. “This basic inability to reach one of the largest online buckets of customers at Google, had frustrated us for years,” says Nathan Miller, eCommerce Manager at Northern Tool.

Though the website offered over 14,000 products, potential customers could only find a few of them in search engines - a big problem, given consumers’ increasing reliance on search engines to find products they need. The company believed their site’s lack of search engine visibility was costing $100,000 - $250,000 per month in missed sales.

Northern Tool.com’s goal was to increase non-branded keyword sales, brand awareness, and acquire new customers by optimizing their website for Google. They wanted to expose their product catalog to the thousands of people using Google to find tools and equipment every day.

They wanted to act quickly and leverage end-of-year search traffic increases. However, their imminent holiday “code freeze” limited our options. Within a few short weeks we would be unable to affect changes to their website. Furthermore Northern Tool’s IT staff were extremely busy and unable to devote any significant time towards an URL rewriting project or other server-side solutions.

Solution:

Northern Tool.com turned to Netconcepts to optimize the website architecture for natural Google listings.

Given the timing issues of an imminent holiday code lockdown at Northern Tool, Netconcepts’ proxy-serving solution, gravityStream, was selected as the path forward, rather than implementing changes onto Northern Tool’s main web server.

GravityStream’s data-matching scripts enabled Googlebot and other search engine spiders to retrieve the site’s product content without significant changes to the website. Search engine users access the exact same page that they would if they clicked into the page from within the Northern Tool site and the page was generated for them - the pages are dynamic, remember. But gravityStream offers the page in a search-engine-friendly static form. You could call it re-presenting all product pages as landing pages.

So gravityStream turns Northern Tool’s dynamic product pages into search engine friendly landing pages and customer acquisition engines. Millions of search engine users are now exposed to the Northern Tool brand and product range every day.

And gaining this level of visibility was easy. Implementing gravityStream required only a few hours of Northern Tool’s time. “We just set up a sub-domain, added a link to our home page, and then waited for Google,” says Nathan.

Results:

Within eight weeks of launching gravityStream, 100% of NorthernTool.com’s product catalog had been spidered and included in Google’s index - over 14,000 products, many with great rankings. When searching Google for Northern Tool’s 600 category and sub-category pages:

• 32% are ranked at #1.
• 71% are listed on the first page.
• 77% are listed within the first two pages.

More importantly, NorthernTool.com has experienced tremendous gains in traffic and sales. GravityStream is now delivering 15% - 20% of total site-wide traffic. The first month of sales was in the 6 figures. GravityStream accounts for greater than 5% of total online sales. Approximately 80% of these orders generated were “new-to-file” - a critical metric to catalogers, as it is a measure of the degree of cannibalization there was of their other channels, most notably the print catalog.

Nathan Miller and his management team can see the bottom line value of the natural search visibility gravityStream offers: “With Netconcepts’ help we will continue to optimize our site to make the most of this giant opportunity for new customer acquisition in 2005.”