Optimizing for Google Onebox

How important is one-box?

Ever wondered how much business can really be generated by working on those one-box results on Google? Ever thought about optimizing for anything other than a sku? Or, maybe you’re one of the many I’ve talked to that say Google Base / Froogle really don’t provide any traffic to your site and certainly not any business.

Well, I’m not going to give away all my secrets, but since Todd was nice enough to point out that it’s a serious part of my marketing strategy, I’ll share some numbers that might astonish you, especially if you’ve read our stats in the book.

First, I’d like to tell you I’m a marketing genius. But that’s clearly not the case. I took marketing 101 at a local community college about 8 years ago. I didn’t understand what this had to do with web design at the time, so I largely ignored it. Yes, I’m kicking myself now, but at least I got the concepts since I didn’t care about the terminology.

So what is it that I’ve done? Well, for one, I’ve worked with search frequency tools to find the top phrases for many of our products. What good is a feed if you’re not optimizing each listing for actual searched phrases? This carries over into our organic SEO, but it’s also very, very important for those feeds.

I’ve also automated as much as possible. After all, if the feeds aren’t updated, they’ll have less value than something current.

Finally, I’ve experimented with variations of KWD (keyword density) within the feed elements to maximize our exposure for the search phrases. Just like organic optimization and experimentation, you’ll have to find your own right formula.

So how much business has this generated? Well, looking at last year’s numbers, over 10% of our business came from one-box generated traffic. Is that a lot? In a word: Yes. It’s especially a lot when I hear of online stores that aren’t over that magical 7 figure mark annually. Google one-box results have sent us 6 figures monthly for a while now, so that’s into the 7’s annually by default.

There is so much potential there if you take the time to test. Don’t just give in to the hype that “One-box doesn’t result in sales” - test it, adjust, and then test it some more. The day you quit making refinements is the day your competitors will run you over. Don’t take my word for it. Just look at the large number of sites that submit feeds and you’ll quickly figure out that they can’t all be doing that “Just because”. There’s got to be money in it or they would have all stopped doing it a long time ago. You’re just going to need to figure out how to make the most out of it for yourself because nobody is going to do it for you.

I feel like I’m rambling a bit, but feel free to post questions in the comment below. After all, if I can generate 7 figure sales annually from Google Base, most any of you should be able to do the same.

January 2nd, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | Strategies | 3 comments