Classic Car Parts Marketing

Recently, I was privileged to have been invited to conduct a Customer Acquisition seminar for the Direct Marketing Association in New York (along with Shari Altman). A topic I wanted to cover in some detail is one of my favorite prospecting techniques: paid search — also known as PPC (pay-per-click).

Now, one of the smartest people I know is my good friend Alan Rimm-Kaufman, who also happens to be a leading expert in search engine marketing (his agency, the Rimm-Kaufman Group, handles paid search for a ‘who’s-who’ of internet retailers). Alan kindly allowed me to ask him some questions with a video camera rolling. My seminar participants were keen to hear what Alan had to say, and I hope you’ll find his comments useful, too. Part 1 of the video is about 8 minutes long; part 2 is about 6 minutes.

Technorati Tags: alan rimm-kaufman, rkg, search engine marketing, ppc, google, adwords, paid search

I’ve been guilty of this in the past. It’s so easy to swipe the product description text from your designer’s Quark or InDesign file and stick it into your website. But consider this: unlike your catalog copy, the text on your site needn’t be constrained by high square-inch costs. You may as well be sure you’re feeding the search engine spiders plenty of relevant keywords.

What you’re doing is a simple but effective bit of search engine optimization. One obvious tactic is to think of all the different names your customers might call a product, and make sure each is sprinkled into the block. For example, a product you call a “clutch release bearing” may be a ”throwout bearing” to some, and they’ll search appropriately. This effort goes hand in hand with buying pay-per-click keywords for that product. Everything else being equal, when your landing page is appropriately rich in the searched keyword(s), your link will show up higher on the search engine’s results page.

Experts in search engine optimization recommend that you figure out (and write down) the best keywords before you start writing copy — and then create the copy around that list.

You don’t need to go overboard; in fact, Google and the other search engines will actually penalize you for “stuffing” or “spamming” keywords into your pages. The worst things you could do would be to try to hide repetitions of certain keywords (using small or background-colored type) or to use keywords that aren’t directly related to the product (e.g. “Paris Hilton wheel bearings”). The search engines definitely won’t reward that kind of behavior. Just make sure each important keyword or phrase is in the copy, and not more than 3 or 4 times. Some have suggested that the optimal “keyword density” is on the order of 5% of the text (in other words, one out of twenty words).

If you’ve done a good job, it won’t be obvious that the copy was keyword-optimized. All copy should remain in your company’s “voice” — and product benefits should shine through.

What if you have thousands of SKUs? Don’t worry about fixing every copy block. Just concentrate on the top 25 sellers or so, and if you have time, do the next 25 and so on.

To dig deeper into search engine optimization, check out Stephan Spencer’s blog. His site appears to be down at this writing, but it’s worth checking out.

Technorati Tags: copy blocks, catalog copy, website copy