When & how do Seller Rating Extensions appear? The Seller Rating Extension will automatically append a store’s rating from Google Product Search if you meet the minimum requirements of a 4-star rating and 30+ reviews. There is no need to sync your account with Google Product Search, as the ratings are pulled based on the display URL.

If your ad has an extremely high quality score and shows in the top panel (above natural results), the extension will also display the number of qualified reviews next to the rating. Note: New reviews can take up to 10 days to appear in product search.

Currently, the ratings will only show to English speakers in the US. It is our understanding that the ads will NOT show with other extensions (i.e. product extensions or SiteLinks).

Where do the ratings & reviews come from? Google Product Search ratings are compiled from a variety of sources including (but not restricted to) Epinions, Google Checkout, Reseller Ratings, Bizrate & PriceGrabber.

How much do they cost? There is no additional charge if a user clicks on an ad featuring a Seller Rating Extension, and there is no cost if a user clicks through just to read reviews.

How can I take advantage? Assuming you’re already registered for Google Product Search (it’s free!) the most important thing you can do is to keep serving your customers well and encouraging them to rate your store. The ratings will show automatically for all eligible queries unless you explicitly opt out here.

Are seller rating extensions a good thing? That’s for you to decide. There are a number of huge advantages to the new extensions, but you will never know if they are truly helping your business until you test. To help decide if the extensions will help or hurt you, SEER has outlined a few pro’s and con’s/potential pitfalls below.

Pros

• The extensions put a new emphasis on online customer service. We always knew that your reputation can have a huge influence on your store. Seller Rating Extensions only increases the influence by putting the ratings front and center.
• Assuming you have a great customer service rating, you can stand out from competitors who may have had a few issues from time to time.
• Having a 5-star rating show for a challenging non-brand term can enhance your visibility & help you stand out from the competition.

Potential Pitfalls

• While you don’t pay for clicks to the review site (and Google claims the review links receive less clicks), these clicks take the user away from your AdWords landing pages and your planned conversion funnel.
• If you have a new or small business, you may be trumped by a store with more reviews or simply may not be eligible.
• The ratings extensions appear (based on preliminary testing) to be trumped by other extensions. If you have SiteLinks, Location Listings, or Product Listing Extensions, the Seller Ratings Extensions will not be shown.
• The Seller Ratings Extensions could punish those who aren’t registered for Google Product Search (or other Comparison Shopping Engines).
  • While Google Product Search is free, it does require a certain amount of maintenance to make sure your product feed is up to date.
  • Other CSE’s that provide Google with reviews (PriceGrabber, BizRate) aren’t cheap and may not be right for your business.

The Seller Rating Extension is certainly a very compelling new AdWords feature; perhaps even more compelling is that Google rolled it out automatically and with almost no notice. Whether or not you are eligible for ratings extensions they provide an always welcomed reminder as to how important customer service is, especially in the E-Commerce space.

SEER will always recommend that you test, test, test to find out what works for your business; Seller Ratings Extensions are no exception! So what do you think – are Seller Ratings Extensions a 5-star feature??

What was interesting is that for this client they had an automated SEO tool installed after we did regular SEO to the main e-commerce site with tens of thousands of pages. So I got to see just how these tools perform head to head.

For those of you who are going up against a competitor with an automated SEO tool here’s how to kick that things’ ass, we did it, and will share with you too:

1 – INVEST in re-developing your site to be SEO friendly, any good SEO company will be able to help here. Some basic things to consider in the re-programming of your e-commerce site from an SEO perspective:

The SEO company working on your e-commerce site needs to understand how to find the fine line between what terms need REAL day to day love and which ones can be done with the right template. This is done by evaluating the competitiveness of individual terms (short and long tail) to understand which can be hit with template-based, scalable SEO best practices. Developing the right site hierarchy is critical here!

Leave space for copy in your templates.

Give yourself control over page titles, meta descriptions, and section headers, so you can overwrite automated copy here if you need to because of competitiveness.

Create search engine friendly URLs (use Mod re-write or ASAPI).

BEWARE: This is the hardest part, I have seen re-developments run in the low 6 figures for highly customized old carts. If you can NOT do this, then call up an automated SEO company to help, but expect that your competitors will eventually make these investments and will likely beat your tail (and I do mean the long tail).

Do not fall for the “do you want to change you programming to keep up with the algorithms” sales pitch. Any good SEO company, with experience in e-commerce SEO, will help you develop a search engine friendly architecture that should stand the test of time.

If you have the resources to re-develop your site, or if it is already SEO friendly according to the few basic requirements above proceed to step 2.

2 – DEVELOP copy for your category pages (not product pages yet that could be a HUGE task). I know this is NOT ideal or fun, or easy, but guess what, if it was easy everyone would be doing it right? Right! If you want to do something fun, go play with the subservient chicken! Get a bang up company to develop your hundreds of category pages of copy, or if your SEO company can develop the copy, even better, either way get the copy through the eyes of your SEO firm.

I would recommend having the content delivered early, 6 months before your peak season would be ideal. For e-commerce sites, product pages should follow a “template” for where the keywords go in titles, descriptions, alt tags, header tags, etc. Remember, you should have flexibility to overwrite what is in these templates just in case you need to apply specific techniques to hot products quickly and easily.

Sample: Changing a few quick tags and internal linking helped a client sell out of the top searched for item (according to hitwise) in their peak season in about 3-4 days after the changes were picked up (and they went to #2 for the term). Can your automated tool do that? Probably not, that is where you create competitive advantages; get in get out, while the tool is just chugging along.

3 – OPTIMIZE your site in the traditional way, social media, link building, tweaking content over time, working on descriptions that get click throughs and sales.

Now you don’t have to believe me, but this is the process, and it is a process maybe called “Scalable SEO” or e-commerce SEO 4.0 (HA!) it works very well for large e-commerce sites with thousands, or tens of thousands of pages. Category and Product pages should be templatized, and that template should be tweaked and optimized several times leading up to your busy season. As soon as the season is over, get started again! Tweak the copy, add pages, remove pages, but if done right you will not need to change the programming, and each SKU you add will fit the template and be well optimized.

As for how we fared against the automated tool…well here’s the details:

1 – In the same niche industry we found that 4 other sites were pitched and BOUGHT the SAME automated tool from the SAME company, that really didn’t give a competitive advantage to our client as every one of their competitors was using the same tool to target the same terms too.

2 – Since the automated tool kind of mashes up your existing content (to avoid content duplication on you less than optimal pages) the pages weren’t as well themed as a site with handwritten copy developed by copywriters (my opinion).

3 – When pointing to successes the vendor picked out the most long tail (or should I saw WRONG tail terms). Now these did drive traffic and sales, NO DOUBT, but they were for so many very long tail terms that I think the client would have ranked well anyway.

4 – For any non-competitive product terms, we killed the automated results typically with top 10 & 20 results vs. theirs, I would think that automated SEO pages beat custom SEO pages in one out of every 15 to 20 terms targeted. The fewer words and the higher the search volume, the less likely they were to have fared well.

5 – For as long as the site stays on the existing platform (which was re-architected for SEO) they should maintain decent rankings without paying a dime to support the existing terms. Changes in platform only require the SEO company to GRILL the new platform provider to ensure smooth transition.

6 – For the short tail, we did well (I’m never 100% pleased), the automated SEO tools for e-commerce sites NEVER hit the head of the tail or really any 2 words phrases now that I think about it, and I think most of the companies that pitch automated SEO to e-commerce sites do a good job of setting that expectation.

So in closing, a quick synopsis:

If you can re-program your e-commerce platform for SEO according to the steps above, you should do your own SEO. If you can’t go with an automated system, our friends up the road (Commerce360) have launched such a tool. With varying opinions, but I like those guys, and wish them luck.

If you can invest in having real good, engaging copy developed for at least your category pages, you can do your SEO.

If you want a long term competitive advantage that won’t be sold to every one of your competitors, consider avoiding the automated route or seeking industry exclusivity for at least a year (good luck).

Lastly, each position on page 1 and 2 indicates value, there’s only one #1, one #2, one #10, etc. However you create a competitive advantage, is up to you, but anything that can be bought and installed by you that gets bought and installed by your competitor the next day may not be something to hang your long term hat on.

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It is helpful (which is somehow web 2.0 now) in assisting people in narrowing down or honing in on the right grill for their needs. It uses a very nice interface to make the process smooth and easy! It combines product information, videos, and more in a very digestible and tastefully done way. See our thoughts on the Nike golf ball selector, who has a similar tool, that at the time was tough to find. Looks like it was a success, not to mention Home Depot has some serious numbers to show the REAL value of this tool. In the article it states:

Customers who use the grill finder tool are more than 50% more likely to make a purchase than other visitors to HomeDepot.com, reported Tari Huddleston, senior manager of e-business, who spoke with Schueler. She noted that a majority of visitors to the Home Depot site are women who want information about the sometimes complex products the home improvement retailer sells. “Women are doing their homework online,” Huddleston said. “They want to be educated before they go into the store.”
Ok, “50% more likely to make a purchase” sounds like a great stat, resulting from a GREAT tool. With those numbers behind you, wouldn’t you want to get as many interested grillers to use this wonderful tool, since it helps so much in the conversion process?

A brief search on gas grills using Google suggest showed the following data:
Notice some of the other terms that show up with the root term “gas grills”:

• Reviews
• Ratings
• For Sale
• Comparisons

Then there are other terms like grill reviews, charcoal grills, etc…but I think you get the point.

From what I think, this tool would help grillers find the right grill, but they aren’t going to find this tool, why?

1 – There doesn’t seem to be any concerted effort to drive traffic to this great tool. I didn’t see any PPC effort at the time. If the numbers weren’t so compelling on how well this is working I would say maybe there is a reason, and maybe there is, but I don’t see it.

2 – On the SEO front, certain best practices just were not followed. Basic things like title tags and description tags aren’t included. There’s also no copy relating to grills, or selecting a grill on this page, which doesn’t help either. The search engines don’t have much to “see” when coming to this tool, which is flash intensive. Maybe a non-flash alternative that would contain more easily spidered information could help too. If someone over there just read this SEO guide.

There’s been a lot of chatter about web 2.0 and SEO but to me this has less to do with that and more to do with best practices for just trying to drive traffic to a web site. Home Depot obviously invested heavily in the following to create this tool which has a highly seasonal shelf life:

• web analytics
• video
• photography
• voice overs
• excellent flash development
• strategy
• development / QA

If they invested upwards of 100k to build it, why would they not take the 5 minutes to develop a paragraph of readable copy and a title and description tag (oh and maybe promoting it with social search tools, like stumbleupon (food section) or digg). This 5 minute investment could have gone a long way in maximizing the value of this wonderful conversion machine.
There must be something I am overlooking…have any answers?

Oh, and don’t tell me you didn’t receive the reservation form – like I don’t know how to operate a five-field form and press the submit button with my left click button. Let’s just come clean and admit that your form is broken.

But… I guess that’s what I get for submitting an online reservation for a service to a website that doesn’t even rank well for its own brand name. I had to get to the website by clicking on the 4^th result, which was a Citysearch page, and then clicking on the website link. Oy vey!

The site I had issues with today – and other reservation sites out there – can take some notes from my favorite reservation system out there: OpenTable. I can select restaurants by region & neighborhood and then by date, time and party size. I can find out what reservation times are available in 15 minute increments, and I get immediate email confirmations of my reservations. I also receive email reminders before my dining date. Additionally, I get reward points for booking reservations online and dining at the restaurant. My personal favorite – the OpenTable representatives are accessible and helpful. When I had a question about a restaurant’s participation in a special event after I had made the reservation, the OpenTable representative took care of contacting the restaurant (by phone), getting an answer, and emailing me back promptly.

The moral of the story: if you’re going to have an online reservation form, be ready for fulfillment. Potential customers may not follow up with a phone call when they don’t hear from you. In a competitive space, they might just go to the next result down.

After determining my want for goods was greater than my frustration with their marketing, I bought some things. However, while checking out a few more things raised my left eyebrow.

I was near the end of the checkout process when I left to change the color of a product. It was disappointing to find it was my duty to reenter all checkout information again. No one likes doing this. This would be the first thing that I would fix.

Next I noticed the most predominant number labeled total on the next-to-last checkout page was incorrect (as far as I see it)! This total didn’t have the coupon applied. To find out what you’re actually being charged, you’d need to know enough to subtract the grand total from the discounts listed below in a different colored & aligned area. How many support calls does this generate, or even worse, how many customers leave silently at this point?

Performance bike seems to always have a promotion; they offer free shipping or a percentage discount on all items. Personally it’s a little strange. I’m either used to better prices all the time, think Trader Joe’s, or sales on a few select items every week, think Whole Foods. Having discounts at all times that claim to be “limited time” reminds me of the boy who cried wolf. I feel less incentive to buy today knowing their “soon to run out sale” will be back again in two.

I don’t doubt that Performance Bike does tons of business online, they claim to be the #1 retailer of bikes. I only think that they can do much better if they were to straighten some of these issues out.

On a side note, I was going to link “Trader Joe’s” above to a page of theirs that had something about Philadelphia on it, but I defaulted to a home page link. They decided to hide their location listings in a PDF.

Why consumers like it:
They have less chance of getting spam & unwanted newsletters. A consumer’s personal information is spread out less across internet shops, and in that they feel safer. It’s much easier to enter in information one time for numerous checkouts. Besides, Google is name brand they trust.

Why you as a store owner should participate:
If you’re enrolled in Adwords and you spend $1, Google will credit you $10 in transaction fees. It’s a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want to invest money that would otherwise be spent in transaction fees to Visa, AMEX, etc. especially when considering it’s multiplier?

We don’t need many more reasons to participate because consumers like it! This means more sales for you. The only factors in need of consideration are cost and feasibility.
Okay, so let’s offer it.
Hopefully your e-commerce software vendor has implemented it already, or has plans to. Every day that passes where your shop doesn’t have the google checkout option, somewhere else consumers are choosing other stores that do.

You may be unfortunate enough to be stuck with a proprietary vendor that moves very slowly, whereas the only feedback you’ll get is “We’re working on getting it in the next version.” Maybe they’ll charge you for a new version, maybe they won’t. It gets worse for some people though, namely Yahoo Store owners who should never expect to have integration with any tools offered by a Yahoo competitor.

If you have your own developers you’re better off than some shop owners, but your will be on their time when it comes to integrating the code and testing/debugging.

The best scenario
If you’re lucky enough to be using an open source tool like oscommerce, you don’t need to call your vendor to plead for support, the open source community has you covered.

One of the huge benefits to using open source software is the community response to new developments. Someone else usually starts such integrations on their own time and then offers it freely to the community. Their vested interest is obviously their bottom line in addition to credit for developing such software. It’s good developer karma.

It will still take an investment to implement these latest and greatest tools as they show up. But when doing it open source, you can cut down most if not all of the development time, and only pay for debugging and QA. This is why SEER loves using open source tools and uses oscommerce for the guts of our stores. Our time is better spent on marketing and customizing the store’s inner-workings, rather than reinventing the wheel.