Monthly Archives: November 2011

How to Get Reviews For Your eCommerce Store

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Getting reviews for your eCommerce store is one of the ways merchants and online retailers can add value and create a point of differentiation to their online store. In this article we’ll be taking a look at ways to get those reviews, how to use them to your advantage and what are some of the dangers.

Set Up an Incentive

The first hurdle you need to overcome is getting initial reviews and reaching a critical mass of reviews that create value to consumers. It’s human nature that more people will complain when they have a problem or negative experience than a positive one, so you will need to provide an incentive to get a good cross section of reviews, not just negative ones. You can provide incentives in the form of future discounts, free shipping offers, free samples, gift cards, or even free products. How you choose to incentivize these reviews is going to depend on the price point of your products and your profit margin.

For example, if you sell $15 shirts, giving everyone a free shirt when they submit a review is a shortcut to going out of business. However if you sell $500 digital audio equipment, providing people who submit a review with a free t-shirt is probably not going to impact the bottom line.

What do you do if you have a small profit margin on your products? One suggestion is to hold a contest. Enter everyone who submits a review into a contest and give away one or a few of your products every month. Another option is store credit or a gift card. By giving away a store credit, you can build loyalty and encourage repeat customers.

However if your business doesn’t have repeat customers, like say a moving company, offering a gift card is another good option. Choose a generic gift card such as one from American Express, Mastercard, Amazon or iTunes. You could make the offer even more consumer friendly by giving them three or four options and letting them choose their own prize. For this strategy to work you need to choose a prize that has value to consumer that you want to submit the review.

dog on the phone male hand

How to Get Reviews

Once you have established your incentive, the next step is reaching out to consumers and customers. Start with your existing customers who have purchased products with the past 6-12 months. Send them a polite and short email asking them to review their product purchase, and telling them about whatever incentive method you have chosen. If you have repeat customers, it could be annoying for them to receive 6 emails asking them to review the 6 items they purchased in the past year. Contact them about the last purchase, but let them know they can submit reviews for all of their purchases from you. If you sell generic products that are available from other merchants, allow them to review them as well.

As part of your buying cycle, you should ask all new and future customers to submit a review. Hopefully your inventory control system knows when a product ships, and you have an estimate of how long it takes for the product to arrive. Give the customer 7-10 days after the arrival date before sending them an email asking them to review the product, with your incentive offer.

Another option to consider is advertising you are running a contest for reviews. Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter or forums that are about your topic or products are sources to promote your contest to the right audience. Don’t forget to create a press release and promote your incentive using services like PR Web or PR Leap.

Moderating Reviews

Moderating reviews is tricky issue, for consumers to trust you and your reviews they have to believe they are honest. You don’t want to create a store where everything has 5 out of 5 stars, the customers love all the products and the world is filled with sunshine, rainbows and unicorns prancing in meadows, you need to have some negative reviews. That said, you need to protect yourself from slander, defamation, and questionable fake negative reviews submitted by competitors or ex-employees with a grudge. A suggestion is to develop a review policy or set of review guidelines that allow you a wide editorial latitude to not publish reviews that don’t pass the sniff test. You can see a sample here of Amazon’s Review Guidelines.

Additionally unless you have a trusted customer rating system, you would want to be cautious about publishing any reviews without examining them first. What you want to check for is inappropriate language, potential legal issues, fake reviews or reviews with an agenda. What you don’t want to do is moderate out any negative reviews, you may think it helps sales in the short run, but all it really does is undermine your credibility in the eyes of the consumer. Sometimes fake reviews can have unexpectedly pleasant results.

For example the three wolf moon shirt at Amazon became an Internet sensation because of it’s purported ability to attract women, repair broken bones, increase strength to super human levels, and allow it’s wearer to jump 30 feet or more. As a result, it became an Internet meme selling thousands of shirts.

While Google has said spelling and grammar doesn’t affect search engine results, there is still some evidence and debate that pages with a “low english score” doesn’t rank as well as pages that have few or no english errors. You’d want to construct your review policy and process to give you the ability to correct spelling and grammar mistakes. However, you want to be careful and not edit the review any more than it is necessary. Also, never change the tone of the review or put words in someone’s mouth.

Getting the Most out of Reviews

Once you have reviews, you will want to use them to your advantage and enable rich snippets in the SERPs. For example, whenever you do a search for hotels, you will see things like this:

The best way to do this is to implement the Schema.org markup for reviews. Depending on what type of products you sell the markup may vary slightly, but it’s fairly easy to implement. Once you implement this markup, it’s no guarantee that Google will start showing rich snippets for your listings. Google doesn’t disclose exactly what factors they use to decide if a site qualifies for rich snippets. However most experts agree it’s a combination of site trust, authority, critical mass of reviews and proper XML markup. However, it’s extremely unlikely you will have rich snippets without the proper XML markup.

court gavel on top of a law book

Legal Issues

When you decide to add reviews to your website there is a big temptation to add “fake” or “artificial” reviews, you should avoid this. First, it’s extremely unlikely you will be able to create reviews with a different style and language structure that reads like more than one person wrote them. Nothing says “you are a shady merchant” like fake reviews.

Secondly, in some jurisdictions, writing or publishing fake reviews is illegal and may result in a hefty fine. Another issue to consider is how you incentivize your reviews, again some states or countries have legal issues regarding how you incentivize actions, and contests laws vary considerably, so be sure to do your research.

SEO Concerns

Hopefully you have spent time and effort optimizing your pages content for the proper keywords. Since most consumers don’t write with a keyword focus in mind, adding reviews may throw off the keyword focus of your product pages. One suggestion is to show a few of the most useful or editorially selected reviews on the product page, and to locate all the other reviews on separate page. Another concern is adding dates to your reviews. Consumers like to see current and up to date reviews, however Google recently announced they updated their algorithm to show “fresh” results. Even though reviews from 2 years ago may be helpful, having an old date in the SERPs may negatively affect your click through rates.

Takeaways from this post:

  • Come up with an incentive plan that encourages customers to submit reviews
  • Contact old and new customers for reviews
  • Promote and advertise your review incentives to the right audience
  • Set up a review policy that allows you to moderate as needed
  • Format your reviews using the proper XML markup for rich snippets
  • Review that your review plan doesn’t create any legal problems
  • Be aware of any SEO pitfalls you might introduce by including reviews

Image credit: Shutterstock/Robyn Mackenzie

Intermediate eCommerce SEO Tactics

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Once you have eliminated duplicate content and started started link building for your eCommerce site, it’s time to take the next step with intermediate SEO eCommerce tactics.

Image Optimization

Image optimization is a controversial tactic. Some argue that it leads to image theft, and there is some truth to that argument. (This is a thought worth exploring philosophically. We’ll do that separately.)

However, keywords can lead to conversions. Consider phrases like “Wynn hotel room pictures”, “angry birds halloween costume”, or “navy blue one piece swimsuit”. Users searching for such images are often researching those products, and may be planning to buy them. (Even for those who aren’t – you get the opportunity to imprint your brand upon them.) They will often bookmark your pages and comeback to them later and make a purchase.

Here are some best practices for image optimization:

  • Name your file using the keywords you want to rank for, use the “-” as a word delimiter (“angry-birds-halloween-costume.jpg”)
  • Stay in the 3-5 word range
  • Use keywords in the alt tag. Be descriptive without resorting to keyword stuffing
  • Add relevant words before the image in a heading and/or in a caption right after the image.
  • Keep image size “reasonable” as far as pixel size and file size. (Exceptional cases: When you’re targeting keywords such as icon, wallpaper or keywords with size modifiers)

XML Markup

Using the new Schema.org markup helps search engines understand your data. If your website has enough authority, you will have rich snippets being displayed in search results. Rich snippets are generally speaking more helpful to the users and have a higher click through rate, even in lower ranking positions.

Internal Anchor Text

Using internal anchor text can be a powerful strategy if you don’t overdo it. Use link hubs to distribute page rank where you want it to go. Create high value, highly linkable content on editorial pages. Link these pages to your high value department and product pages.

Utilize breadcrumbs for maximum advantage. Make each of the words a link. Find a balance between usefulness, usability, and keyword value. Be consistent with your breadcrumbs throughout the site.

Make a list of 25-50 of your most important product keywords, and “automatically” link these words to your products. If you use a CMS this is often built in, or available with an add-on or plug-in.

If you have too many auto-linked words your pages will often appear too “linky”, so choose your auto-linked words carefully.

Rapid Indexing

You can speed up the indexing of new products, important products or updated products, by featuring them on the homepage, in the common sidebar navigation, or as a related or featured product in the main content section.

Try to use optimal anchor text for the links, and avoid phrases like “click here” , “see more”, “learn more” or phrases with little or no keyword value.

Department and Category Pages

If you have products that have a short lifespan, you might want to try to rank your department pages for more generic terms.

First you need to ensure that these pages have editorial content. This usually means you will need non-linked text, and an editorial picture. Make sure these pages also have unique titles and meta descriptions.

If there are multiple pages, block those secondary pages from being indexed, or push the spiders to the “view all” version of the page.

Lastly try to build as many external links to the pages as you can, and use your internal anchor wisely.

Image credit: Shutterstock/Diego Cervo

The Evolution of Social Networking [Infographic]

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With 1 in every 6 seconds on the Internet spent on Facebook, it’s clear that social networking is here to stay. But how did we get here? We thought it’d be interesting to look back into the past to get a sense of how social networking has gotten to where it is today. Here’s an infographic that sums up the evolution of social networking over the past few years.

Click on the infographic below to view full sized image.

The Evolution of Social Networking

Embed this Infographic using this tag:

<a href="http://blog.referralcandy.com/2011/11/08/the-evolution-of-social-networking-infographic/"><img src="http://images.referralcandy.com/images/the-evolution-of-social-networking-referralcandy-600.jpg" alt="The Evolution of Social Networking" title="The Evolution of Social Networking - Infographic" width="600" height="1987" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.referralcandy.com">ReferralCandy - Customer Referral Programs for Online Stores</a>

Duplicate Content on eCommerce Websites

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Whether due to negligence or corner-cutting, duplicate content hurts your SEO. Let’s talk about the different ways in which it happens, and how to deal with each of them.

There are three kinds of content that need addressing: Editorial content, Product content and Internal content.

1. Duplicate Editorial Content

Blog posts, articles, FAQ pages, customer service content, and even boilerplate content like privacy policy and TOS pages – anything that’s non-product, non-shopping.

It’s important that this content exists only on your website. It’s okay to occasionally reprint and republish content from websites (with proper permission), but this should be a minimum – only when absolutely necessary – and ideally less 10% of all your content.

Google wants to serve search results that link to original unique content, not 10 versions of the same content.

If you have content that you want on your website but it already exists elsewhere, don’t just copy it. Rewrite it, update it, improve it, give it a new editorial view. Add your own value to the mix.

If you absolutely have to reuse content that exists elsewhere, and you can’t change it, block it from the search engines using robots.txt or the noindex meta tag.

2. Duplicate Product Content

If you are getting a product feed from a distributor, getting product specifications from a vendor, or just selling the same products as everyone else, there is a good chance that you have duplicate product pages.

SIMPLE CHECK: Select six to seven words from some of your products (don’t choose a set of words with punctuation or special characters). Put the words in quotes and perform a search on Google. If you get back any results other than your website, this is probably considered duplicate content by the search engines.

If a significant percentage of your content is duplicate, you’re probably not going to rank for those products.

Start with your most important products first, and rewrite the descriptions to be unique. For products where it isn’t cost effective to rewrite the content, use a noindex meta tag, customers will still be able to purchase the item, it just won’t show up in the search engine index.

3. Duplicate Internal Content

Duplicate internal content can be one of the easiest ways site owners shoot themselves in the foot. Maybe it’s the CMS or shopping platform, but having the same product/information on more than one URL is a recipe for trouble. Another big source for this type of problem is the marketing or advertising departments adding tracking parameters to URLs. For example search engines have problems when they see URLs like this:

example.com/prod-name/?utm_source=twittercamp564
example.com/prod-name/?utm_source=facebookmothersday
example.com/prod-name/?utm_source=rssfeed

If all three of those URLs return the same product page Google will have to guess which one is correct. You can use the canonical tag or webmaster central to tell Google the correct URL and which parameters to ignore, but really this is a workaround and not recommended.

The less you leave up to a search engine to “figure out” or “guess” the more certain you will be of the end result. If you have to use parameters, try using the hashtag implementation

example.com/prod-name/#utm_source=rssfeed

It’s not perfect, but it reduces the “guessing” that the search engine has to do.

In Summary:

  • Make sure your site has little to no duplicate editorial content. Rewrite, revise, update or block any existing duplicate content.
  • Check your product pages and descriptions for duplication, starting with the most important products, rewrite and eliminate duplication.
  • Be on the lookout for duplicate URLs created by your CMS, shopping cart software, or internal business divisions. If the information is mission critical, use hashtags.

Image credit: Shutterstock/Mast3r