Multi-Channel Commerce & Retailing

I am a big bollywood fan so first example is from Bollywood. And before I proceed, let me disclose that I am big fan of Shahrukh khan (He is a bollywood actor). Those who don't know Shahrukh Khan, I strongly recommend reading about Shahukh on Wikipedia and watch few bolloywood movies :-)

Recently I was looking to buy a book which was written on Shahrukh Khan but I couldn't recall the name so I decided to search for the book on Google and searched for "book on shahrukh khan". (http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=book+on+shahrukh+khan&meta=)

Though I got book results from Amazon but that made me think that what other Shahrukh fan might search if they are in similar situation as me. For those who don't know Shahrukh is also known  as SRK (Stands for Shah Rukh Khan) and King Khan. I decided to look at the customer behavior and see there are any trends which exists here. Another google tool to my rescue this time and I looked for trends for terms SRK, Shahrukh Khan and King Khan on google trends. (http://www.google.com/trends?q=SRK%2C+Shahrukh+Khan%2C+King+Khan)

This is very evident from this graph that in recent years term "SRK" is gaining momentum as a search keyword on search engines whereas queries for term "King Khan" are still very limited. This brings a important point if somehow there is a intelligent way to co-relate SRK with Shahrukh Khan or King Khan, you can optimize your web pages for term "SRK". More importantly, you can atleast include these related terms in descriptive URLs for the product detail page.

Anybody who has observed SEO efforts of big e-retailers in recent years can easily figure out that  descriptive URLs for product detail pages are constructed using a algorithm which takes product title as input (Check URLs for Amazon results in google in first screen shot in this post) and if this co-relation can be built into the algorithm, output will definitely will be more fruitful for SEO efforts.

But millon dollar question here is that how IT systems can figure out this co-relation between various terms. Remember the data soruces which I mentioned while defining Next Generation SEO systems? Those numerous data sources will be the key to build system intelligence. Next question is that what those data sources might be...we still need to figure out. I attempted to look for the data source which we can use for building SEO intelligence. Here are some of those data soruces:-

1) Wikipedia can serve as a valuable data source here. Wikipedia entry for Shahrukh Khan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahrukh_Khan) can definitely help in this particular case and to my surprise wikipedia knew that these three terms are co-related (Check Other Names section).

2) In my search for additional data sources, I landed on Amazon.com. It's a hidden treaure for customer insights in my opinion, hence I tried to give it a shot for this research. Amazon "related searches" feature can provide valuable insight here. Though, in case of "Shahrukh Khan" amazon didn't suggest SRK or King Khan to me but I am sure some day Amazon's system will learn this and will be able to provide this insight as well. Or Otherwise, by community  contributions like "Amazon tag for Search" (https://www.amazon.com/gp/associations/wizard.html?ie=UTF8&ref%5F=s9%5Frk%5Fdpcs%5Fwiz&asin=0446578584), I expect Amazon systems to build that intelligence some day...and here you go...we got another data source to feed into our SEO data mart.  

3) Another data source may be insight which you get from your Web Analytics tools like Omniture, Web Trends etc. You can always feed Search term report from analytics tools to SEO data sources and that might result in some useful trends. (You probably want to get a customize search term report like "Common search terms used by various customers who ended up buying same product"). With this additional data point, next generation SEO Data Mart can gain some further insights on consumer behavior when it comes to searching.

4) Further search for data sources takes me back to another google product. This time it was recently launched "Google Insights for Search". Google insights showed me a clear pattern for regional interest in these terms. (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=SRK%2C%20Shahrukh%20Khan%2C%20King%20Khan&geo=&date=&clp=&cmpt=q)

With this it's clear that in Finland and Switzerland, people search for Shahrukh with term "SRK" rather than searching for "Shahrukh". With this comes the concept of GeoMarketing SEO URLs. Now it makes sense to focus your efforts for optimize your pages for term "SRK" in Finland and Switzerland and for "Shahrukh Khan" in rest of the world.

Now to digress from Bollywood here, if you take the example of newly launched Canon 1000D Camera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS_1000D). This particular model is known as EOS Kiss in Japan and EOS Rebel in United States. If you compare the search traffic for these two terms (EOS Kiss Vs EOS Rebel) in google trends (http://www.google.com/trends?q=EOS+Kiss%2C+EOS+Rebel&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2008&sort=0), it clearly shows that traffic for EOS Rebel is significantly higher compare to EOS Kiss. 

But regional data reveals some interesting facts here again.... Search pattern for these two terms is exactly opposite in Asian countries compared to Europe and United States. This data can serve as a very useful insight in coming up with Geo-Optimized SEO URLs.

We will see more and more data sources or services which will provide ecosystem for Next Generation SEO and obviously building a system like this will have it's own challenges. Lot of research is still required in order to come up with a robust system which can consume all these data and provide insights using this data. This may require a significant investment in technology which probably only big players will be able to afford. Small players will have to wait and watch if this works or not.

I will be looking for more and more data sources in future to support this theory. Meanwhile feel free to comment on this post if you have interesting thoughts or ideas..... 

Thanks for reading.