BirthdayExpress.com is a destination Web site for children’s party supplies and services. The online store offers more than 100 creative celebration themes to help parents make their children’s parties an easy and enjoyable experience.
To reach its sales goals, Birthday Express needed to ensure all of its products were included in the results from the most popular search engines. However, managing a keyword database for more than 2,000 products within dozens of subcategories in this “virtual party store” was proving to be a challenge. The company knew it needed to do something to make its entire base of site content more “friendly” and accessible to search engines.
But that wasn’t the only challenge Birthday Express and its sister site, Storybook.com, faced in getting into algorithmic (non-paid) search results. The company also needed to ensure that the time-sensitive data in its search listings, such as specific product availability, was as up to date as possible. To ensure accuracy, Birthday Express’ data feeds needed to be updated more frequently than the normal update cycle of the major search engines.
From a scale standpoint, it quickly became clear that most of Birthday Express and Storybook.com’s content – with so many categories and products within their databases – simply would be inaccessible to search engines without the use of additional technology-driven services.
The Solution & Implementation
To address these challenges, Birthday Express partnered with Marchex subsidiary TrafficLeader, a provider of search engine marketing services, to design a custom campaign that prominently featured Yahoo Search Marketing’s Search Submit Pro product.
Search Submit Pro lets advertisers and firms such as TrafficLeader work directly with Yahoo to ensure that the information included in search listings is frequently reviewed and dynamically updated, increasing the relevancy and “freshness” of algorithmic listings.
We have access to a broad suite of search engine marketing solutions and consistently find Search Submit Pro to be among the most effective, results-driven programs in the marketplace. This is especially true for major retail clients that have hundreds of product pages. By providing a solid ROI and easy-to-manage processes, this has become a primary component of our marketing program for Birthday Express.
Search Submit Pro also offers easy data-feed submission and updating of large quantities of Web addresses and descriptions, providing better control over messaging and targeting. This feature set, combined with an efficient feed management processes, lets retailers like Birthday Express get more qualified leads as well as better coverage on search results pages.
Increasing Relevancy, Number of Leads
The program paid dividends shortly after it was initiated for Birthday Express and Storybook.com. Search results on Yahoo (and other sites using Yahoo’s index) that were relevant to the two stores began to feature more complete and current product information, increasing the relevancy and number of qualified leads arriving to the online retailer.
For example, with the program now implemented, searches on Yahoo for relevant phrases such as “Star Wars Birthday Supplies” or “Hot Wheels Birthday Party” produce relevance-based algorithmic search results that link a user directly to specific, product-focused pages of the Birthday Express site.
In short, more relevant results now point searchers to exactly what they seek, delivering to the client prospects that have a specific interest in their products.
Birthday Express tells us that its investment in this search engine marketing program has paid for itself several times over.
For more articles from The Direct Marketer’s Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing, visit www.dmnews.com/search .
A PDF of the guide is available at: http://www.dmnews.com/pdffiles/semguide.pdf
