luni, 7 noiembrie 2011

8 Points How to Maximize Profits With Competitive Price Monitoring Software Graywolf's SEO Blog

8 Points How to Maximize Profits With Competitive Price Monitoring Software

Posted: 07 Nov 2011 10:44 AM PST

The following is a sponsored post for Karsa Monitor.

As you probably know, competitive price monitoring is vital for i-retailers nowadays. It is quite hard to be successful in e-commerce without being familiar with your competitors behaviour. I am saying “behaviour” on purpose, because you need to know more than just your competitors product prices, the issues are more complex than that.

So what do you need to be aware of and what should you avoid with making the product prices correct? I consulted with specialists in this field, who designes the competitive price monitoring tool Karsa Monitor.

Web data scraping

When deciding which downloader to use, you should be careful whether the software is capable of capturing the data you need.
There are 3 important points to take heed of:

Paging is important for automated gathering of an overview about newly added products and new categories in the competitor´s product line.
Ajax pages are common and for most downloaders it is an insurmountable obstacle
Execution of "Free actions" such as the changing of sizes, colors or any other product variations. You should be able to capture data even if there is a potentially different pricing between them.

If the downloader can do all of this, you can monitor 20+ of your competitors or capture data from the price comparison websites.

The flexibility of the data capturing

It is one of important factors in successful monitoring. If you decide you want to detect a competitors´special offers or add a new product category to be monitored from another competitive shop, it is very convenient for you if you can do this right away. This change can take 5 minutes from your office and you can start gathering current data immediately. Otherwise you would have to contact your supplier and this change would take significantly more time and it would be of course, more expensive.

Product matching

It is useful to receive pure data, but without product matching it is not worth that much to you. What is important is an accurate product match. Your tool should also be able to match products without Part Numbers, which are not matched successfully even on the Google Shopping site.
There is several tools, which can be used for this purpose.

Thesaurus lists (lists of synonyms)
Stop words or ignored words
Word breakers (separators)
Mutually required expressions
And other helpful algorithms. As a result, you should be able to match perfumes, kitchen appliances without PN, contact lens, clothes etc. with a high accuracy of matching.

Reports

Make sure, your tool includes a Reporting Module. It is very useful if the manager of the i-shop can view overall price differences and can react promptly. You don´t need any notification about price changes. What is important for you is to have a well arranged report, which contains not only your prices and your competitors prices, but also your purchase price and the item´s primary ID uploaded from your system. In this case, you can automatically transfer the data into your Information System.

Regularity

If you carry out price monitoring once a weak, it is better than nothing, but your competitors could change their prices, let´s say, 8 times during this time and launch several other activities upon which you couldn´t react. Therefore the perfect solution is if the data download is for free – included in the price of the tool, so you don´t have to pay any additional charges. Then, you can receive a report with the competitors data at any interval and gain a competitive advantage.

Special offers

It is definitely beneficial for you to have in advance, information about the special offers of your competitors. You would not have to put the same product on sale at the same time as your key competitor and you would understand why the product was really easy to sell one day and no one was buying it the next.

Top products – Reviews

Similarly helpful information such as the special offers could be information about successful products, which are most often demanded by customers. How many positive customer reviews does the product have on Amazon? Shouldn´t we promote it better in our i-shop? These facts can radically help you in your decision making about which products to promote and your tool should be able to do this for you!

Stock levels

A helpful guideline in setting the right price in an i-shop can also be information about the stock levels of your competitors. If your competitive price monitoring tool is able to capture information about storage and you realize your key competitors don´t have a concrete solid product availability (especially at the pre-Christmas period), you have a unique opportunity to increase your product price and your profit margin.

Monitoring competitors is becoming more and more important for direct repricing as well as for gathering further marketing figures, which can be employed for maximising profits in internet shops.

This article was created with the help of the company Karsa Technologies, which develops software for direct competitors price monitoring Karsa Monitor.

The preceding has been a sponsored post. Find out more information about sponsored posts.

photo credit: Shutterstock/Vimos Varga

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8 Points How to Maximize Profits With Competitive Price Monitoring Software

How Search Volume Affects Brand Links

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 01:03 PM PST

Posted by Stephanie Chang

Distilled's Tom Critchlow recently gave a presentation on SEO Ranking Factors at Digital East. One of the key points he made is how brand links could potentially be affected by search volume. The higher the search volume for your brand, the more likely you are to appear in the brand links.

What is a Brand Link?

In May of 2010, Google announced via their blog that they had made brand refinements for product information in Google. Google's intent was to help inform users who are looking for information about a product, but are also unfamiliar with the brands that are associated with that product. The purpose of the brand links is to make it easier for users to find "popular" brands. According to their post, these "popular" brands are determined algorithmically.

For some head terms, these brand links would appear right below the paid search ads. These are especially influential for companies in the e-commerce space because it always helps to be associated as a "popular" brand with any product.

Many of the brand links pertain to articles of clothing, but they can also pertain to accessories (handbags).

It can even include equipment, such as bikes.

Or something as simple as office supplies, like pencils.

It's uncertain which factors are involved in identifying "popular" brands for head terms. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that each brand's corporate website and how optimized they are for keywords is not enough to result in a brand link. This is because many of the websites that do have brand links actually do not employ SEO best practices, such as using targeted keywords on the website.

For instance, I took a look at American Eagle to evaluate how optimized their site is for the head term "jackets", since they appear in Google's brand links for this term. Using SEOmoz's on-page report card tool, it was determined that American Eagle actually has an F grade for "jackets" optimization.

For the head term "jackets", American Eagle isn't even ranked in the first 3 pages of the SERPs. Thus, what are some possible reasons why American Eagle would receive a brand link for "jackets"?

Keyword Search Volume and Its Impact on Brand Links

One possible reason is due to increased search volume for the brand "American Eagle" in conjunction with the keyword "jacket". This was identified using Google's Insights for Search, which provides information about search volume trends. Thus, it is possible that Google is taking notice of which head terms are being associated with which brands, particularly in search queries. The rising searches below appear to be very similar to the type of brands that have brand links for the head term "jackets" (Hollister and Gap along with American Eagle).

This type of scenario also applies for other head terms, such as "sneakers".

Below is a breakdown of the totals for all the brand links + the keyword sneakers using the Google Insights for Search tool. According to Google, the totals numbers represent the number of searches conducted for a relative term compared to the number of searches on Google overtime. There were a significant number of searches for many of the brands as shown below.

Other Potential Factors

Upon further investigation, such as observing the rising search trends, there is evidence indicating that search volume is not the only factor influencing brand links. If that was the case, then "Adidas" sneakers should also have a brand link.

Although, it's not entirely clear why "Adidas" was left out of the brand links, a couple of hypotheses can be construed. For example, perhaps Google is taking into account the number of news mentions for a brand or even the number of social media mentions.

I tested out some examples of news mentions. In this case, Adidas sneakers received 96 Google News mentions.

On the other hand, New Balance sneakers, which has a brand link, received about 202 news mentions.

This one scenario is not definitive by any means and it's evident that more research would need to be conducted.

Similarly to news mentions, it is also possible that there might be some correlation between brand and social mentions (although it definitely does not appear to be a primary factor). To identify and quantify social mentions of handbag brands, Topsy's analytics were used. This chart compares brand mentions of Louis Vuitton handbags, Gucci handbags, and Guess handbags. From the graph, it shows that there has been significantly and consistently more social mentions for Louis Vuitton and Gucci handbags over the past month in comparison to Guess handbags social mentions. Perhaps, this is one of many reasons why Louis Vuitton and Gucci have brand links for handbags, whereas Guess does not.

It'd be interesting to compare current handbag brand links (or any other type of brand link) month by month. Which brands retained their brand link and which ones have lost them? Perhaps, after isolating different scenarios and noticing changes overtime, a better understanding of these links could be developed.

I'm interested to know the SEO community's experience with brand links and any observations that they have made on how these type of links have been acquired. I'm also curious to hear if any SEOs have any stories on how brand links affected brand searches/conversions and whether they are effective in creating brand awareness/increasing the amount of organic traffic or not. Please share your thoughts below; I'd love to hear from you.

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November Linkscape Update is Live; Binary Files Issue Dramatically Reduced

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 01:33 AM PDT

Posted by randfish

On Thursday (November 3rd) of this past week, Linkscape's index updated (in record time - just 3 weeks). New link data's once again available in OpenSiteExplorer, via the SEOmoz API and in the Mozbar. Here are the stats for this latest index update (our 46th index update):

43,077,387,028 (43 billion) URLs
480,597,551 (480 million) Subdomains
105,570,741 (105 million) Root Domains
356,255,241,471 (356 billion) Links
Followed vs. Nofollowed
- 2.18% of all links found were nofollowed
- 58.21% of nofollowed links are internal, 41.79% are external
Rel Canonical - 10.46% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
The average page has 77.28 links on it (down .19 from last index)
- 64.86 internal links on average
- 12.42 external links on average

Since August, we've been struggling with the particularly devious problem of binary files in the index messing up link counts and showing links that Google + Bing probably are not counting. In September's crawl, we put a black list on these files and saw a reduction of ~40% in binary files. This time, we've made even more progress (though it's tough to know exactly how much - we're continuing to evaluate) and you should see a signifcant reduction in these binary files.

Reduction in Binary Files Means More Accurate Link Counts

In part because of the reduction in these files, processing time for the Linkscape index was reduced, enabling us to produce a much faster index update. However, we're planning in December to produce a much larger index and thus anticipate processing time to rise back up. On the plus side, this will mean a lot more link data. In 2012, we're aiming to reach into the 100billion+ URL index size, closer to what we've heard Bing + Google keep in their main indices (~120-140 billion URLs).

As always, feedback on the new index is greatly appreciated - if you're seeing stuff we've missed, files we shouldn't have crawled or metrics that feel wrong, please let us know. Our engineers would love to hear from you.

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No Veteran Should Have to Fight for a Job at Home

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, Nov. 7, 2011

No Veteran Should Have to Fight for a Job at Home

Today President Obama will deliver remarks on tax credits included in the American Jobs Act and announce new executive actions that will help get veterans back to work. You can watch at 12:00 p.m. EST on WhiteHouse.gov/Live.

Learn more about new resources for veterans, including a national job bank and enhanced career services at WhiteHouse.gov/Vets

Seth's Blog : Six questions for analyzing a website

Six questions for analyzing a website

It's tempting to believe that any website can become a perpetual motion machine of profit. But before you start one, invest in one or go to work for one, a few things to ask:

What's the revenue per visit? (RPM). For every thousand visitors, how much money does the site make (in ads or sales)?
What's the cost of getting a visit? Does the site use PR or online ads or affiliate deals to get traffic? If so, what's the yield?
Is there a viral co-efficient? Existing visitors can lead to new visitors as a result of word of mouth or the network effect. How many new visitors does each existing user bring in? (Hint: it's less than 1. If it were more than 1, then every person on the planet would be a user soon.) This number rarely stays steady. For example, at the beginning, Twitter's co-efficient was tiny. Then it scaled to be one of the largest ever (Oprah!) and now has started to come back down to Earth.
What's the cost of a visitor? Does the site need to add customer service or servers or other expenses as it scales?
Are there members/users? There's a big difference between drive-by visits and registered users. Do these members pay a fee, show up more often, have something to lose by switching?
What's the permission base and how is it changing? The only asset that can be reliably built and measured online is still permission. Attention is scarce, and permission is the privilege to deliver anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. Permission is easy to measure and hard to grow.

Do the math on successful companies online and compare it to those that are struggling and these six metrics will help you understand the difference. For example, if the RPM is less than the cost of getting a new visitor, you've got trouble. If the site is relying on fads and occasional PR but isn't building a permission base, that's trouble too.

The good news is that each of them can be changed if you're alert and willing to do surgery on the business model and structure of the site.

The ideal structure is a business that's a platform, not merely a place to stop by. Once people move in and become members, they're hesitant to leave, they share permission over time, they tell their friends, their RPM goes up and the cost of acquiring and hosting members goes down. The real question is: are you on that path?

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luni, 7 noiembrie 2011

8 Points How to Maximize Profits With Competitive Price Monitoring Software Graywolf's SEO Blog

8 Points How to Maximize Profits With Competitive Price Monitoring Software Graywolf's SEO Blog

Web data scraping

The flexibility of the data capturing

Product matching

Reports

Regularity

Special offers

Top products – Reviews