Stephan Spencer Interview
Stephan Spencer is president and founder of NetConcepts, a company providing SEO services, email, and site design. As a well-respected “white-hat” SEO guru, we were delighted Stephan took the time to share his insights with us on online marketing.
Alan Rimm-Kaufman: What are the biggest challenges & opportunities facing online retailers today in relation to natural search, Stephan?
Stephan Spencer: Because search is evolving so quickly (it seems like a day doesn’t go by when Google doesn’t make an announcement of a new service tool or update) online retailers have to continually look to the horizon, not just where they are today.
Personalization, geotargeting, user intention, etc all play an increasingly more prominent role in search rankings. I believe successful retailers will see over time a majority of search traffic coming in from The Long Tail. In other words the more obscure and less popular search terms, in aggregate, will add up to half of their business.
The strategies for optimizing for the tail are in some cases drastically different than those for optimizing for the head. For example, you couldn’t rely on keyword-rich text link ads in the same way when optimizing for the tail. So it is a challenge to think differently and it is a huge opportunity for those that do.
For retailers doing it right, what fraction of SEO traffic should come in on brand terms?? How much on non-brand terms? (Brand = retailer’s own brand name, not brand names of retailer’s manufacturers) And tell us more about the long tail of natural search.
It depends. For the average medium to large sized online retailer the opportunity is, according to our research, 38 times greater for non-branded terms than for branded terms. Therefore an online retailer who is doing it right should be getting a majority of their traffic from non-branded terms. That is predicated on a very important point: capturing the Long Tail of non-branded traffic is a function of what percentage of your site’s web pages are yielding search traffic.
If you have a majority of your pages yielding search traffic, then it would make sense that a majority of your search traffic would be from non-branded keywords. If, however, you have a “broken” website that is not well optimized for the Long Tail, then one would expect a small percentage of your pages to yield search traffic and therefore a small percentage of search traffic to come from non-branded keywords in the tail.
In other words, you would have a majority of pages that aren’t doing anything for you; these page are, in effect, freeloaders.
Even for a retailer with a huge brand presence, you might think it makes sense that they get a majority of search traffic from brand terms, yet I assert they should still strive to maximize their non-branded search traffic. Remember, there is always room for improvement.
What’s your advice to retailers who need to improve their SEO traffic but face marketing and/or IT resource constraints?
If their IT resources are limited, I would suggest employing a proxy optimization approach, using a service such as our GravityStream, to optimize the content, HTML, internal linking structure, etc. Thus, the optimization work can be done easily through a web-based interface and not involve the IT team to implement.
In fact, if marketing resources are constrained as well, the copyediting etc. can all be outsourced as well. Thus, the retailer will no longer be held back from optimizing title tags, body copy, category names, navigation, anchor text, URL structure, CSS, heading tags, and so on merely because the internal folks are too busy. Furthermore, the learnings from the proxy can be applied to the retailer’s native site over time as resources allow.
If marketing resources are the limitation, I would suggest the retailer delegate the majority of the SEO work to their SEO agency, including copy optimization, keyword research, link building, HTML optimization, metrics analysis and so forth. If the retailer is running GravityStream or similar technology, then the optimized copy, title tags, anchor text, etc. can all be applied to the proxy first to build the business case for the changes, measure and prove the ROI, and further tweak and improve. In other words, the proxy can serve as a testbed for trialing out the optimizations, observing the effects and correlating the causes with the effects, on a page-by-page basis.
Social marketing — myspace, facebook, etc. What is the importance of such sites to online retailers?
I would say MySpace in particular is extremely important.
MySpace has been shown to drive more traffic to online retailers than MSN Search — uh, I mean Microsoft Live Search. It is even more important if you are selling to a younger set and you need to appear trendy and hip. I blogged some examples (here and here) of marketers who have successfully cracked MySpace, including Pugster.com and Apple. Included in those posts are some useful tips for online retailers.
What marketing blogs do you regularly follow?
Oh, gee! That could take a while to answer. I follow over 200. One of my favorites is Matt Cutts’ blog.
Favorite recent movie?
Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. Did you know there’s an iceberg the size of 25 football fields floating off the coast of New Zealand?
Last question: something personal…. do you prefer chocolate or vanilla icecream?
Chocolate, I guess.
Thanks, Stephan, for your insights and your time!