BloomReach: SEO Automated at Last?

Read more in my latest article at Practical Ecommerce, BloomReach to Change SEO Technology?.

Can relevance platform BloomReach change the SEO technology landscape? Bet on it.

Making search engine optimization more scalable, effective & efficient is the holy grail of all SEO platforms. Many measure different SEO datapoints and offer recommendations for marketers to implement. Some platforms actually implement SEO automatically. But well funded newcomer BloomReach debuted this week the most interesting solution in years with its Web Relevance Engine and BloomSearch service.

BloomReach’s head of marketing, Joelle Kaufman, was quick to say that it is not an SEO platform. It’s about “creating the most relevant user experience possible on any page,” she told me. The new platform is focused on improving user experience and conversion by exposing content —such as descriptions on a product page and user reviews —and algorithmically improving its relevance to search terms. Essentially, what BloomReach does is suck hoards of data from a merchant’s site, web analytics, product feeds, social media streams, competitors’ sites and more into its Web Relevance engine by means of an API. BloomReach semantically analyzes the data, determines relevance, decides which pages need additional content and links, and deploys the appropriate content algorithmically to the appropriate pages through its three services: “BloomSearch” for SEO, “BloomLift” for PPC, and “BloomSocial” for social media marketing. The infographic below makes the process a bit simpler to understand.

BloomReach Web relevance engine

Read more about this revolutionary relevance platform / SEO technology. »


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

SEO Impact of Ratings, Reviews and Comments

My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

 

Content that consumers leave on an ecommerce site can improve the site’s search engine optimization, if the platforms and underlying code are set up optimally. Ratings, reviews and comments each play a part in SEO, utilizing the words and opinions that real shoppers voice to strengthen optimization.

In aggregate, these types of content fall under the label of user-generated content. I wrote in more detail about reviews and SEO here, in “SEO: Letting Customers Generate Long Tail Search Terms.” The gist of that article still stands. Optimizing a site manually for the millions of phrases that could drive one or two converting customers just isn’t scalable. User generated content such as reviews and question-and-answer sections can solve the problem by outsourcing long tail optimization to your own customers. In addition to reviews, though, ratings and comments have their place in ecommerce SEO as well.

Reviews for SEO

When review content displays on the relevant product page, it boosts the keyword theme for that individual product page. Most reviews vendors — such as Bazaarvoice — offer product variations that display the reviews on the product pages in a crawlable manner, but some don’t. At the same time, Google and Bing are getting better at crawling the JavaScript that has traditionally kept crawlers out of juicy review content. An easy way to check whether reviews content is crawlable is to just Google a random chunk of the review content and see if it appears in the search results.

For example, the Asics Women’s GEL-Blur 33 on Shoes.com has six reviews. But are they crawlable? To find out, copy a unique-looking chunk of a review and Google it in quotes like this:

“Asics have never let me down! I love these shoes because they look good and they provide awesome support for all kinds of workouts and the best part is I can wear them out and get tons of compliments!”

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Google’s Search Plus Your World & SEO for Ecommerce

My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

 

As search and social become ever more entwined in Google’s and Bing’s algorithms and search results, search engine optimizers cannot afford to turn a blind eye to social media. Bing incorporates Facebook data into its search results. Google has taken another big step with the introduction of Search, Plus Your World. Last week Practical eCommerce explored the social media impact of Search, Plus Your World, in “Google Integrates Google+ in Search Results.” In this article, I’ll focus on the search-engine-optimization impact of this new feature.

Visibility in Search Results

The biggest impact SPYW has on SEO is the visual and personal nature of the results it returns. Compare these two search result sets for a very common search phrase: “shoes.”

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.