MoMA
Driving
traffic to the
Art
Online Store
Overview
▀ The
Challenge
The major search
engines were not finding many products, brands, and designers carried by
the MOMA store. Customers weren't even
aware that the MOMA Store carried the products they were buying
elsewhere.
▀ The
Solution
MOMA utilized Shared
Vision Group's expertise in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and WebSphere
Commerce to give their products the visibility they need to compete in the
highly competitive online world
►
Key
Benefits
100% of the stores
products are now indexed by the search engines.
70% increase in the
number of pages found by Google.
Significantly higher
page rankings on every page of the museum store.
The
importance of SEO
By optimizing your
site for search engines, you are using an effective marketing strategy to reach
millions of online shoppers.
There's no doubt that
search engines are the primary way for consumers to find products online these
days. With a significant percentage of online purchases originating from a
search engine, it's more crucial than
ever to make sure your products show up in the top ten percent of the search
results. Search engine optimization allows you to increase your online
visibility, build brand awareness, and drive more customers to your
website. The MOMA Store, like many
online retailers using IBM WebSphere
Commerce, struggled with their products not being found through the search
engines. The result; lost sales opportunities and revenue. MOMA turned to Shared
Vision Group to get results.
Studies
show that more than 90% of all online users use search engines to find what they
are looking for.
Keyword Research and Analysis
To help MOMA
identify their campaign goals and develop their SEO strategy, Shared Vision
Group worked collaboratively to identify and research the stores important
keywords. Along the way, the team discovered that key brands such as Muji and
Alessi were being searched for online, but consumers weren't aware that the MOMA
Store carried them due to poor inclusion rates on the search engines. Customers
were buying these products elsewhere. The obvious focus of the SEO campaign was
to emphasize the products, brands, and designers carried by the Museum store. To
achieve these goals, each of the stores pages were optimized to place important
keywords in the URL, title, heading, and descriptive text where search engines
give them the highest ratings.
Remapping WebSphere Commerce URLs
A URL is
incredibly important when it comes to search engine optimization. Through it,
search engine spiders are able to traverse the pages of your site and rank your
content. IBM WebSphere Commerce dynamically generates URLs for a store, and
these dynamically generated URLs include what the search engines refer to as
stop characters (? and &), named for their ability to confound search
engine spiders and force them to abandon the store.
/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10451&storeId=10001&
MOMA URL before
SEO
Optimized
page for the Aeron Chair
After removing
stop characters from the URL, search engine spiders see each of your pages as
static, rather than dynamic, allowing your products to be properly indexed. To
further increase each pages relevance at MOMA, a dynamic keyword was added to
each product URL, and the
URL context was
changed from /webapp/wcs/stores/servlet to simply /museum/moma.
The result is an optimized URL that increases the sites search rankings and
ensures that MOMAs products,brands, and designers show up in the search results.
/museum/moma/ProductDisplay_Alessi_10451_10001
MOMA URL after
SEO
Optimizing the WebSphere Commerce
Sitemap
A sitemap
serves as a single point of entry for a search engine spider to find all of your
stores products in as few clicks as possible. Though fairly well constructed,
the MOMA sitemap was only linking to 14 products per category. Shared Vision
Group optimized the MOMA sitemap so search
engines could
easily find all of the stores products in only two clicks. The sitemap was then
submitted to Google to ensure inclusion and high
rankings.
MOMAs
Optimized sitemap finds all products in 2 clicks