Next time you duck into the corner convenience store or bodega to get a pack of gum and a lottery ticket, take a look around. All that equipment, from the shelves to the security mirrors and from the pricing gun to the “Take a Penny, Leave a Penny” dish, had to be bought somewhere.
Many owners of specialty stores, as the category is known, are opting for some one-stop shopping of their own and choosing to get as many of their supplies as they can from one provider. Des Plaines, IL-based Specialty Stores Services wants to be that sole supplier. And it has retained online marketing firm MoreVisibility to help it win that business over the Internet using paid inclusion.
Paid inclusion has been around search for a few years now and grew up in part so early search engines could speed up their index-building. Basically, it works like a hybrid of two other search marketing modes, algorithmic or natural search and paid search ads. The Web operator hands a Web site and its pages directly to the search engine to be crawled and indexed, just as the engines routinely do. The difference is that when a paid-inclusion client’s pages come up on search results pages and a searcher clicks on that result, the client pays a small fee to the engine.
So paid inclusion relies on both a well-optimized Web site and a pay-per-click keyword strategy. Paid inclusion users get no guarantee that their results will appear in a certain position; that placement decision is up to the engine, which decides on the basis of relevance to the keyword. So it’s in the Web operator’s interest to optimize Web pages to outrank your competitors on the results page. Your program isn’t going to produce many conversions if you ad appears four pages down into a search.
On the other hand, there’s no bidding for keywords as in paid search ads, and no bidding in an auction environment that can change hourly. You pay a flat fee for inclusion. So you’re not going to be outspent by a rival with deeper pockets. And search marketing costs are lower more controllable than in sponsored listings programs, a fact which can produce a strong return on investment (ROI) compared to pad search ads.
That’s the result Specialty Stores Services experienced, says Eric Weinstein, the 20-year-old company’s marketing director. “We started working with MoreVisibility in October 2004 to raise both traffic and conversions at our Web site,” he says. “After recommending some basic changes in our site, they added us to Yahoo!’s paid inclusion program, and that’s made a big difference. Over a four-week period last month, our search marketing ROI improved by just short of 400%. And traffic to our Web site has increased 1,096% in the six months we’ve participated in the program.”
All that paid-inclusion benefit is coming from Yahoo!, for the simple reason that few other search engines—and virtually none of wide reach-- now offer the service. Both Ask Jeeves and MSN Search dropped paid inclusion last year. In doing so, Ask Jeeves said that it proved too difficult to combine “structured” data such as that from XML feeds—one way paid inclusion programs get Web pages to the search engines for crawling—with the unstructured data from Jeeves’ own Teoma search bots, and that difficulty had skewed the relevance of some search results. Google has never offered paid inclusion, although its SiteMaps program does allow Web operators to submit their sites for free crawling.
Paid inclusion is also problematic for some consumer watchdogs. Earlier this year WebWatch, the Internet arm of Consumer Report, nailed Yahoo! for making its paid inclusion disclosures less prominent and user-friendly.
But Danielle Leitch, vice president of marketing and analytics at MoreVisibility, says that paid inclusion can benefit both searchers and advertisers if the program is properly managed both by the search engines and by firms like hers. MoreVisibility is a “certified ambassador” for Yahoo! Search Submit Pro—in other words, a partner Yahoo! trusts to build the UML feeds that send Web pages for inclusion.
Leitch sees paid inclusion as a complementary search tactic to both paid placement and natural search optimization. “It’s a third thing,” she says. “You’re hand-delivering what is in the natural optimized portion of your site to Yahoo!, rather than simply hoping they find you on the Web. You’re offering to pay for that crawling service, like a sponsored listing. But as in any organic search, you have to tie very relevant keywords and highly qualified descriptions and titles to the pages.”
Paid inclusion keyword rates are usually pegged much lower than those for paid ads. That’s partly due to their drawbacks. Not only does paid inclusion offer no positioning promises, but it’s a less flexible marketing vehicle in other ways; for example, advertisers can’t make copy changes on the fly as they can with the text in paid search ads.
But on the plus side, Leitch points out, the traffic that it does deliver is more highly qualified than simple algorithmic search, because a paid inclusion result has been through a strict editorial process to determine its relevance, either by Yahoo! editors or by partner firms such as hers.
In the case of Specialty Store Service, MoreVisibility started out the way it would for most B-to-C clients: by examining how search engines were crawling the company’s Web site before paid inclusion, to see how often they hit the site, how deep they went and what pages they ignored. Specialty Store caters both to general store owners and to video store proprietors (their original market back in 1986), so the company wanted to make sure both customer segments were getting a look at the relevant portions of its site. Specialty also features security equipment and custom printed bags, labels and paper goods—two more categories to put before the searching audience.
MoreVisibility then made some recommendations for optimizing the site, mostly involving better page titles and descriptions to make sure that each of its 80 product categories, from garbage cans to gumballs, got properly crawled and indexed. Weinstein says that while Specialty has had a transactional site on the Web since 2002, optimizing the Web site for search had not been a priority until last year. “With two employees, I also run our catalog marketing division, which puts out a 200-page book and a 100-page book three times a year,” he says. “We could perhaps have optimized our site on our own, but who’s got the time? Not me.”
The paid inclusion tactic is one MoreVisibility often recommends to companies that have revamped their Web sites, rather than waiting for Yahoo! to come crawling. In Specialty’s case, paid inclusion produced the dramatic thousand-fold increase in Web traffic. Inclusion and optimization together have doubled the company’s Internet sales, Weinstein says. Those Web sales are significant—more than 6% of sales revenue in June, he says—but still small compared to sales through Specialty’s other channels, its catalog and a direct sales force for top accounts.
Specialty uses its Web site as much for generating leads as for closing sales, so any visitor registration is a conversion to Weinstein. Visitors can sign up for an e-mail newsletter offering online specials, featured products and other content every two weeks. Specialty also recently launched an online “blue book” pricing service for used video games, an attractive item for its customer base. For a $99 monthly fee, users can find out how much they should charge (or spend to buy back) for the Game Boy version of Super Mario Land. “We hope that will keep people coming back to the site once they’ve found us,” Weinstein says.
That view of the Internet as another tool for generating sales and leads means that the time-pressed Weinstein is not in a hurry to get involved in traditional paid-ad search marketing. He says he’ll rely instead on further optimization, continued paid inclusion, and improvements in both product display and navigation when visitors reach the Specialty home page.
“There are no real trade secrets here,” he says. “If you’re a marketer and you’re not doing what we’re doing on the Web, you’re years behind the times.”