Making Trade-offs – Update on Baseball site

Posted on April 22, 2007
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After making good progress on the term ’softball gloves’ I realized my client and I were faced with an interesting question. To proceed with our quest for this one phrase or to expand our efforts to move on other, potentially more lucrative, phrases. We chose the latter.

But before we get into that too deeply, I promised to reveal what is working as well as what doesn’t. When I last posted we had fallen back into #50 for our term softball bats (see my post: The Trials and Tribulations of Google Bounceback). I was expecting to make up ground lost when we had fallen to that position after getting as low as #36. Well to try to spark additional advancements, I went ahead and changed the title tag and placed two text links on the home page to interior pages. And then we fell to #80.

Whoops!

Not sure if it was a larger component of the Google bounceback in positions that we had already seen, I sat for a week. During that period, we slowly climbed back to about #74. Not too impressive. This was clearly a message from Google to me that we had now moved to an over optimized state on our homepage. So I went and removed the text links that I had placed and made a small revision to the title tag and we immediately moved back up to #59. Today we are at #47. I made another small change to the title tag last night and am waiting to see what impact that will make on our progress.

The key here is to keep a low profile on the key phrases you want to rank on. Try too hard, and you are sure to trip a filter with Google and see a set back.

Now back to the initial subject stay the course to rank better on ’softball gloves’ or go after an even bigger money term, ‘baseball bats’. When I had last posted about our #50 position on ’softball gloves’ we were at #118 for the term ‘baseball bats’. A great position for a new site with only 3 months of SEO activity but not close enough to ‘go for it’. Well the site naturally drifted to about #91 and I figured it may be time to give it some attention. Now by so doing, we’d have to sacrafice some forward movement on the ’softball gloves’ term but given a signficiant traffic volume difference, we decided to go for it.

Today we are at #66 on Google for ‘baseball bats’ Not too bad I think. Of course the glory and the monies hit when we get to page one. Which brings me to another point. How does a site make money if it’s out of reach for traffic on any major search term? I mean I’m pretty vocal about how I think doing analysis on long tail keywords is a waste of time so does this site make money?

In a word – yes. Here’s what’s happening. First, we get a fair amount of long tail without trying. As I’ve alway maintained, there is nothing wrong with long tail traffic, just don’t spend time trying to chase it. You will be surprised at what pages will just rank naturally and will find that many long tail phrases that real people visit your site on don’t exist in the databases of any of the keyword tools out there.

Secondly we have already nailed (page one of Google) a number of 2nd tier phrases. By that I mean we rank on page one of Google for the following terms:

Cheap baseball bats #2
Cheap baseball gloves #2
Cheap softball bats #8
Cheap softball gloves #6
Discount softball bats #8
Discount softball gloves #8
Cheap catcher’s gear #1
Cheap baseball gear #1
Cheap baseball equipment #3

And there is just as long a list of Google page 2 positions on 2nd tier phrases like Glovesmith Gloves, Discount Baseball Bats, Discount Baseball Gloves and many more.

But here is the important point, these 2nd tier phrases end up being only about 10% of the total traffic. The other 90% is coming in from naturally dervived long tail phrases, the ones we didn’t work for. Pretty cool huh?

Well that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more progress as we move this new site even further!

“Long Tail” from the guy who coined the term

Posted on April 19, 2007
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Whether Chris Anderson coined the term “long tail” isn’t the point of this post. I don’t care if he did or didn’t and neither should you. But because of my stance that this long tail phenomenon is simply a waste of time, if focused on, for most ecommerce marketers, I get a fair number of folks pointing to Chris’ book “The Long Tail”. They argue that the numbers presented on Amazon’s book sales are proof that long tail is the future and that Internet marketers better be paying attention.

Hmmmn, Did I miss somthing after all?

I don’t think so – and neither does the book’s author.

Look, the long tail as Chris describes it applies only to businesses with a ton of products. By a ‘ton’ I mean a product inventory in the hundreds of thousands, not just the hundreds like most ecommerce retailers I know. Not even in the thousands like a few select Internet retailers I know. Hundreds of Thousands.

That’s a lot.

And Chris apparently agrees. Here’s what he said in a recent post on his blog: “The big money in the Long Tail is in aggregation, as shown by the likes of eBay or iTunes. For the individual producer who’s way down there in the weeds, the forces that created the Long Tail market in the first place–democratized access to market and powerful filters that can drive demand to niches–certainly help, but even doubling a small number still leaves a pretty small number.”

Thanks Chris!

Enough said?

Mike’s Question about Google

Posted on April 13, 2007
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Hi all,

Got this great question from Mike over on the “Ask me a question” section and I thought I’d make my answer a bit more prominent:

Nancy,
There is one thing I constantly wonder about with Google. For a lot of my keywords, the top spots seem to be taken by listings from shopzilla, bizrate, amazon, nextag, pricegrabber, etc.

Why is it that preferential treatment is given to these discount listings rather than the legitimate sites that optimize for those keywords?

Take a look at the keywords “latex pillow” or “floor pillow”, 2 keywords that I try and optimize for and look at the listings on the first page of Google if you want to see what I mean.

I don’t notice this as much in Yahoo! or MSN…

Thanks,

Mike

Here’s what you need to consider. Google has as it’s top priority to bring forth the best web pages for any given keyword or phrase. While we can always argue that they got it wrong, it’s understanding their mindset that’s important. Google, unlike the other two search engines, has this concept of an authority site. So if a site is considered an authority site it’s more likely to have pages rank than would a site that is not considered an authority site.

So when you raised your question and indicated that an unusal number of sites of the Bizrate, Shopzilla, MSN Shopping and the like were getting prominent placement, that made me wonder why. And before I even checked I assumed that the answer was that there really was not much competition on that phrase – particularly from authority sites – so Google would give top placements to interior pages of shopping sites.

Then I took a look and here is what I saw:

So my hunch was correct, there really isn’t much real competition on those terms if you filter on sites that use the term in both their title tag and in anchor text in incoming links. This actually should be good news – right? However, I took a peek at your site’s standings and saw that your Google rankings were not in the top 50. UGH! OK why is your site getting no love from Google?

In a nutshell, you are not doing enough of what Google wants you to do and you are doing too much of what Google doesn’t want you to do. I’ll be happy to take this offline with you to get a bit more specific but my initial look at your site was that while you had a fair amount of backlinks, looked like most of them were obtained via reciprocal link trades which work just fine with MSN and Yahoo but not too well anymore with Google. Also your backlinks and title tag are too heavily laced with the word ‘pillows’ and/or ‘pillow’.

Finally I didn’t see where your site was targeting ‘decorative pillows’ but that phrase would be one I’d definately go after. Much more traffic than some of the other terms.

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Making Trade-offs – Update on Baseball site

“Long Tail” from the guy who coined the term

Mike’s Question about Google

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