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.

Diapers.com found a way around this issue by using the In-Line SEO solution from PowerReviews, which doesn't use JavaScript. The result was an SEO trifecta: higher product-page rankings, increased natural search traffic, and a nice boost in search-related sales.

Challenge

Diapers.com is the largest online retailer of baby-care products, with a much broader selection than its name implies. The business has steadily grown and earned the trust of consumers through its offering of low-price guarantees; fast, free shipping; and a plethora of customer-generated product reviews that provide a great service to new parents seeking advice on how to best care for their new bundles of joy.

"Reviews, in general, are a great boon for us because of the nature of our customer, whose number one resource is usually the mom, sister, best friend...people who have been in similar situations," said Josh Himwich, Director of E-commerce Operations & User Experience for Diapers.com. "Having reviews has really brought out that voice."

Recently, when the company formed a major marketing partnership with BabyCenter.com, a global interactive parenting network, it inherited BabyCenter products, as well as the related customer reviews.

The number of product reviews on the Diapers.com site quadrupled—reviews that Himwich noted tend to be in-depth, usually three to four sentences long, and chock-full of keywords that could really boost the company's search engine rankings, if only the search engine crawlers could read them.

Unfortunately, the way Diapers.com's pages showed the reviews, using JavaScript, meant that they were invisible to the search engines.

The alternative used by some companies—setting up separate pages consisting solely of reviews so that they could be indexed by search engines—would have meant  that searches who landed on those pages had to navigate through the site in order to make a purchase. As a consequence, the likelihood of drop-off increases, adversely affecting sales.

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

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kimberly Smith is a freelance writer. Reach her via dtkgsmith@gmail.com.

LinkedIn: Kim Smith