BloomReach to Change SEO Technology?

Search engine optimization, boiled down, is the process of making sure a web page ends up highly ranked on search results, for searches relevant to that page. A merchant selling "Columbia Traverse Men's Hiking Shoes," for example, will want to optimize its product page so that searches on Google — or Bing, or Yahoo! — for terms like "men's hiking shoes" return the merchant's "Columbia Traverse Men's Hiking Shoes."

That process is straightforward when a merchant has just a few products. But what about merchants with thousands of products that are relevant to hundreds of thousands of search terms? How can that merchant devise a system to optimize all of those product pages and match them with the hundreds of thousands of relevant, constantly changing, search terms? Such a system would have to be easy to manage, and scalable across thousands of products and search terms.

SEO Platforms

That's the purpose of SEO platforms. They attempt to make search engine optimization more scalable, effective and efficient — across thousands of products and hundreds of thousands of search terms. Many measure different SEO metrics — such as raw traffic, conversions, and time on site — and offer recommendations for marketers to improve them. Some platforms actually implement some SEO tactics automatically. But there's one platform, BloomReach, that debuted this week with a very interesting SEO solution: its "Web Relevance Engine" and "BloomSearch" service.

BloomReach’s head of marketing, Joelle Kaufman, was quick to say that it is not an SEO platform. It's about “creating the most relevant user experience possible on any page,” she told me. The new platform is focused on improving user experience and conversion by exposing content — such as descriptions on a product page and user reviews — and algorithmically improving its relevance to search terms. Essentially, what BloomReach does is suck hoards of data from a merchant's site, web analytics, product feeds, social media streams, competitors’ sites and more into its Web Relevance engine by means of an API. BloomReach semantically analyzes the data, determines relevance, decides which pages need additional content and links, and deploys the appropriate content algorithmically to the appropriate pages through its three services: "BloomSearch" for SEO, "BloomLift" for PPC, and "BloomSocial" for social media marketing. The infographic below makes the process a bit simpler to understand.

source:practicalecommerce.com