Retail Performance Marketing - The Mercent Blog: CSE Best Practice: CSEO

This post is the second of an initial nine part series on Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) marketing best practices.

Let's start by stating a pretty obvious point: General Internet search engines index web site content whereas shopping search engines typically index merchant product data feed content. This blog post is focused on best practices for search engine optimization (SEO) for your data feed driven referral or marketplace channels. At Mercent we call this type of optimization 'CSEO' or Comparison Shopping Engine Optimization.

The concepts behind CSEO are pretty simple. If we were describing the concepts as courses in a college catalog, we'd perhaps do something like this…

CSEO 101: Make your feed compliant

Generally each shopping channel or affiliate network has a native data feed specification. In some cases they have more than one. It's essential that you adhere to the specification closely and make sure the data document (whether it's a flat file or XML) is 100% compliant with the specification.

CSEO 201: Transform and map your data thoughtfully

Get creative with your data mapping. Don't be afraid to concatenate, truncate, regex and generally parse and transform the data you have available to work with to match the true intent of the data field. An example of this is using brand and part number fields to beef up a product title.

CSEO 301: Map your categories accurately

Most shopping sites have browse taxonomies that a merchant should (or is required to) map their products too. While mapping your SKUs to CSE categories is important, in practice, it is becoming less so. CSE's such as Google base are abandoning category mapping in favor of Amazon.com like browse nodes dynamically generated based on the item type, product type and product attributes. Other sites like MSN Shopping use their published taxonomy more as an indicator of product type than they do as an actual browse hierarchy. Regardless, do your category mapping and do it right. Be wary of black box category mapping algorithms. Software algorithms are typically poor excuses for real merchandising.

CSEO 401: Make your feed complete (and remember the children)

Just like a product page on an ecommerce site, a product record in a CSE data feed is really all about offer content. Make sure you have relevant data in all the fields, whether they are required or not. If you have parent SKUs that have child variations (size, color, material, etc.) make sure that all parents are complete and all the children have unique titles and descriptions.

CSEO 501: Make your feed search engine relevant

Ok, now for the graduate work. Beyond almost anything else you can do… make sure your content is search engine optimized with the highest converting keywords for a given product. Leverage your experience (and investment) in traditional SEO and paid search campaigns to help understand what keywords really matter in driving the conversion of given product sets. Make sure those keywords and phrases are sufficiently dense in your titles and descriptions. This effort will pay off amazingly well.

CSEO 699: Make it easy

By working with a proven marketing services team such as Mercent Performance, a retailer is able to achieve amazing results to the point where the incremental cost of engaging professional help is a small part of the incremental ROI achieved by putting these best practices in place (and monitoring and maintaining them over time). CSEO on one channel (for one feed ) is hard. Optimiziing 10 to 30 channels is not practical without dedicated headcount and specialized tools. To achieve the benefits of CSEO at scale, it's wise to consider the help of a retail online marketing services provider such as Mercent Performance.

Comments

Fantastic post on an interesting aspect that you rarely hear much about within SEO circles.

Also presents an interesting interactive marketing strategy.

If you are actively monitoring CSE page placements (where your products are an option), and these placements are below the fold on Google SERP's, a web marketer could point outbound links at that page to increase the ranking - and drive incremental traffic to the online store.

Becomes a conversion issue in which the linkbuilding efforts need to be focused at the placements that convert at 3% or higher.

Also could conduct social media and syndication efforts to try and increase the ranking of the CSE listing.

Posted by: Craig Smith | June 19, 2008 at 07:47 PM