diapers.com: Reviews boost search rankings and drive 33% more sales at Diapers.com

Within two weeks of implementing new technology that makes it easier for search engines to index customer product reviews on its site, natural search drove 33% more sales at Diapers.com. Josh Himwich, director of e-commerce operations and customer experience for the retailer, says a new feature from ratings and reviews vendor PowerReviews spurred the sales. The In-Line SEO feature generated a 49% increase in natural search traffic and a 59% rise in the number of keywords driving traffic to the site’s product pages.

In-Line SEO routes organic search traffic directly to Diapers.com’s product pages that feature customer reviews. PowerReviews says eliminating the interim landing pages and sending consumers directly to ratings and reviews pages helps retailers avoid the drop-off in traffic that typically occurs between a landing page and a product page.

When gathered by a vendor like PowerReviews and fed back to the retail site, customer reviews aren’t actually part of the HTML code of the retailer’s site, according to Himwich, so they aren’t indexed by search engines as part of the e-commerce site. Under that scenario, the only way to use customer reviews for search engine optimization is to create a microsite, transparent to the site visitor, specifically to hold product reviews in a format that can be indexed.

“The problem there is that they’re not on the product detail page – you have to provide a link to get them to the product page,” Himwich says.

By incorporating the top 15 reviews for any product directly into the HTML coding of the product page, the page gets a boost in natural search rankings from the fact that the reviews create a higher keyword density for the page, which search engines read as greater relevance to the keyword being searched, Himwich explains.

He adds that making the customer reviews indexable on product pages also helps traffic and sales by associating many more keywords with the product. For instance, a customer review might describe the product as “easy fit,” language the site’s own product descriptions don’t include. Because the reviews contain content search engines now index, “there are that many more keywords driving customers to the product detail page,” he says.


Source: internetretailer.com