WebmasterWorld of Search Conference, Day 2
Keynote: Noel McMichael

Noel, co-founder and CEO of MarketLeap, provided a very thorough business analysis of the Search industry as a whole. Likening it to an ecosystem, Noel defined different parts of the Search ecosystem, and emphasized, as with any industry’s ecosystem, that it’s vitally important to know your role within.

Five parts of this ecosystem, and corresponding examples, are:

1. Search Engines; Overture, Google, Yahoo!, etc.
   
2. SEMs, Tools, etc; trusted or not trusted
   
3. Advertisers; small or large
   
4. End Users; consumers, procurers
   
5. Distribution Partners; AOL, Infospace, CNN, etc.
   

He went on to discuss how some organizations may be part of different parts of the ecosystem. For example, a search engine marketing company may also be an advertiser. Regardless, he re-emphasized the importance of knowing your role, and also, knowing your role when making key decisions.

In this system, as in any system, Noel also discussed that there would be one role in the ecosystem that would be the context provider, setting the guidelines for the ecosystem. The analogy made, was that in a forest ecosystem, you don’t control the fact that trees produce oxygen – you adapt to that, and make sure that you are able to make use of it in order to survive.

Finally, Noel outlined what he called to be 7 Imperatives for Success:

1. Define ecosystem direction and values
   
2. Foster open relationships
   
3. Focus all participants on the end customers
   
4. Treat employees, partners and vendors as investors in human capital
   
5. Search engines must define the governance and rules of engagements
   
6. Leverage knowledge and information of external entities
   
7. Evolve or become extinct
   

As if to state an unofficial eighth rule, the whitescreen was suddenly displaying two pictures: the first of one of the VPs of MarketLeap in urban dress and sunglasses, as if to appear on the cover of a CD and the other of Mikkel deMib Svensen in his token bright orange suit with red sunglasses. Noel went on to say:

      Hire individuals that contradict the norm.

It definitely got a good laugh out of the crowd, and the point was very well made.

Proactive Linking:

I honestly thought that this session would go much more in depth into specific techniques that are being used today, but, as if to hold their secrets to their bosom, everyone kept the session at a very high level.

One very good point was made, though, that when engaging in a new linking campaign, that it is best to test ad creatives via PPC test campaigns before executing the linking campaign. The point was also made, in conjunction with this sentiment, that linking should not only be done to increase search engine relevance, but also to increase traffic to your site from visitors clicking on those links (in this context, it was generally being spoken of with regards to purchasing links).

Shopping Search Engines

I found this to be a very informative session regarding the use of the Yahoo! Shopping and Froogle shopping search engines. Included in the discussion was, here’s that keyword again, how to increase relevance of your shopping search engine ads, but also how to optimize your listings for those search engines and also for increased clickthrough on your ads.

Andrew Chen of Yahoo! Shopping started the session by describing main visitor behaviors, and also functions of shopping search engines, as browsing and searching for products. It was noted that there didn’t seem to be a preference for users, either towards searching for products or browsing for products, and, in fact, Andrew noted that most users actually used both functions, seemingly equally.

Probably the most important message displayed by both Andrew and Matt Cutts of Google, was that relevancy isn’t just keywords and how you rank for them. This is much more of a fine art than SEO in that a few of the things you must keep in mind are picture quality of your product, freshness, and price. With users being able to browse so many products, or the exact same product, from so many companies at once, it’s imperative that you set your listing apart from the others.

Requirements to get into the Yahoo! Shopping search engine are that you have the title of the listing, the price, the description and an image of your product. Additionally, your products may get in via a Natural Search crawl, Yahoo! Shopping’s Product submit, Overture, and by CPM advertising through Yahoo! Shopping.

Andrew closed out his presentation by outlining four distinct ways to optimize your Yahoo! Shopping listings:

1. High quality product images
   
2. Including as much information as possible in your listing; category, brand, model number, part number, UPC, and age or sex specific information, if applicable.
   
3. Product names and descriptions should be concise, accurate, and follow manufacturer conventions
   
4. Freshness of your listing.
   

Matt Cutts from Google kicked of his presentation with an apology. It was quite apparent that he had a pretty good night before and said, “You know it’s a great WebmasterWorld conference when you’re well on your way to losing your voice after the first night.” I’m sure a few drinks tonight will help that out, Matt. ;) Andrew, I think it would be in Yahoo!’s best interest to keep him double-fisting his drinks and out late tonight at the Yahoo! Party. ;)

Matt outlined that it is possible to get into Froogle via AdWords, sending a product feed, or via a natural crawl. He emphasized, later, that the best way to get into Froogle and maintain a successful listing was to submit your product feed on a daily basis – Froogle will drop your listing if it has not been updated within 30 days. An added benefit of using a feed to send your products to Google lies in that feed results are shown first.

The benefits of Froogle goes to both the end users and to the merchants. For users, not using a paid inclusion model insures both results by relevance, and broad coverage since it is open to all merchants. For the merchants, the value comes in that there is no cost involved, and that it’s more free traffic from Google.

Matt also touched on the fact that Froogle has recently implemented a merchant rating system that factors into relevance of listing as well. Additionally, Matt noted that Froogle now has the ability to automatically convert your Froogle data feed to your AdWords account. This is certainly a feature we’ll be looking further into over the next few weeks.

Matt closed by discussing the internationalization of Froogle, the end goal to be in all countries, but that right now, Froogle is separately available in the US and UK – if you offer service to these two countries you must use that country’s feed area separately.

I usually find that the Q&A sessions reveal questions that are highly targeted toward a specific, and usually rare, case. However, there was one very good issue brought up in this Q&A session with regards to shipping rates in conjunction with localization. Since shipping rates factor into the final cost of a product, there are many stores which have different shipping rates for different regions of the country or in the world. First, the shopping search engines don’t differentiate between different shipping rates. And, second, if/when they do, they must consider that if they were to locally do a reverse DNS lookup in conjunction with a user’s physical location, considerations must be made for those who may be in, say Las Vegas for a conference, when they actually live in Raleigh, North Carolina. I thought this was a great topic that touched on a few different areas of improvement for the shopping search engine industry.

All in all, a pretty good day – I got a touch of a nap in earlier, and got some good sushi in me, so I’m definitely ready for the Yahoo! Party at the Palms. Supposedly, they’re giving chips to play with – I wonder if we get to keep our winnings. Regardless, I definitely keep finding new symbolisms in Internet marketing and Las Vegas.

Time to double down!

Ben Wills | permalink | +marktd |