Case Study: How a Single Modification to a Web Site's Functionality Significantly Upped Natural Search Traffic, Sales

Company: Diapers.com
Contact: Josh Himwich, Director of E-commerce Operations & User Experience
Location: Montclair, NJ
Industry: Online Retail
Annual revenue: $89,000,000
Number of employees: 1400

Quick Read

Customer reviews are powerful online content. They are held in high regard among consumers who are looking to minimize the guesswork and risk of trying a new product. And because they are both vendor-neutral and come from people in circumstances similar to, they instill a higher level of confidence. That, in turn, leads to increased conversion and sales.

But consumers aren't the only ones who are partial to reviews; search engines, too, tend to award higher natural rank to sites that regularly add fresh, keyword-rich content to their pages.

The challenge for many sites, however, lies in how their product pages are indexed by the search engines. Reviews typically don't actually reside on those pages but are instead shown to viewers via JavaScript, serving them up onto product pages from where the reviews usually reside, in databases of application service providers. Consequently, search engine crawlers don't "see" the keyword-rich reviews on those pages; they see only the snippet of code that calls up the reviews from the database.