Adam Audette's presentation from Pubcon 2010. Trends in ecommerce are covered, including shopping behavior, Google Instant and SEO, case study showing the effectiveness of the rel=canonical SEO meta tag, power of video in ecommerce, why Bing is important, and visual search.

1. Trends in Ecommerce
Adam Audette – President/CEO
AudetteMedia, Inc.

2. 2

3. What Shoppers Want

4. What do consumers want?
• Brand Loyalty is Less Important
• Free Shipping is More Important
• Deals are More Important

7. CSEs Gaining Ground

9. 51% of shoppers are
“somewhat likely” to cancel
their entire order if free
shipping is not offered!

10. Takeaways
• Free shipping is huge
• Offer discounts, rewards, incentives
• Need to differentiate strongly

11. Video Sells

12. Video is Powerful
• 65% of people are visual learners
• People process info 30% quicker with
video + text, opposed to just text

17. Takeaways
• Experiment with product videos
• Ensure SEO is applied
• Visual search and browse are the
future

18. Instant and Ecommerce

19. Google Instant: Impact?

20. Case 1: $1.5bil retailer

21. Case 2: $300mil retailer

22. Sample of 12 Retailers

23. Takeaways
• Instant does not have significant
impact
• MayDay a much bigger impact on SEO
• More time and research needed

24. More Reading
• Conductor: blog.conductor.com
• Seer Interactive:
seerinteractive.com/blog

25. Rel Canonical Works

26. Rel Canonical Case Study
• Large single-channel retailer
• Excessive duplicate product pages
• Controlled changes: rel canonical and
XML sitemaps

29. Increases in Traffic and
Revenue

30. Takeaways
• Number of duplicate product pages indexed by
Google was drastically reduced.
• Traffic to product pages increased due to better
rankings
• A corresponding increase in revenue from visitors
landing on product pages occurred

31. Caveats
• Bing doesn’t support rel canonical
• There still may be better methods
• Use caution: www.audettemedia.com/blog/link-
canonical-is-breaking-sites

32. Speaking of Bing

33. It’s not Google
• Results do not favor ecommerce as much as Google
• Results vulnerable to link spam
• Very focused on user experience

34. Bing Users Shop More
• Bing users are 31% more likely to buy than internet
in general
• Bing users are 11% more likely to buy than Google
users
• It tends towards a ‘shoppy’ demographic
• Can provide incremental traffic and revenue

35. What works at Bing
• XML sitemaps for deep content
• RSS feeds for fresh content
• Normalize URLs, use parameter handling in Bing
tools
• Large brands will have advantage
• Still too vulnerable to links
• Still too slow to crawl 301s

36. Thank you!
Adam Audette
email: adam@audettemedia.com
web: audettemedia.com
twitter: @audette
Adam Audette
email: adam@audettemedia.com
web: audettemedia.com
twitter: @audette