Friday, October 29, 2010

Social Commerce SEO Benefits

Lots of buzzwords there in the title - but in a nutshell, putting customer generated content on your product pages helps people find your stuff in search engines.  Bazzarvoice hosted a webinar last week featuring Cabelas.  Cabelas has always had a great online catalog, but hasn?t always had great placement in the search engines.  They?ve started featuring the latest 4 or 5 customer reviews directly on the product page.  Many other sites (Sprint included) tend to keep the reviews hidden behind a tab or a sub-modal somewhere.http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/cs_covario_background1.jpg

By placing the customer reviews right on the product page, the search engines index the product and the words real customers use to describe the product.  Instead of having to manually (and often disingenuously) seed your page with the words you think your customers may use to describe your product, you let the customers do it for you.  By putting real world customer words right on the product page you end up with multiple benefits:

  • Better search driven traffic - north of double the organic traffic
  • Fresher content - the page is updated frequently with customer reviews.  Search engines like fresh content 
  • More transparency - you show you aren?t afraid of customer opinions of your product.
  • And the above should lead to increased sales and more revenue.

Win - win situation.  You get more traffic and sales, your customers feel more trust in your product and brand.

Where are you using your online product reviews in your site?

What tools or tactics do you use to encourage your customers to contribute reviews and user generated content for your social commerce platform?

Originally posted on the Sprint /meta discussion Community

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Adding Value


You can add value in two ways:
  • You can know the answers.
  • You can offer the questions.
Relentlessly asking the right questions is a long term career, mostly because no one ever knows the right answer on a regular basis.
Via Seth Godin