E-commerce: How Ice.com Used Blogs to Increase Natural Search Traffic

One of the biggest Web phenomena in the last few years has been the explosion of Web logs, or blogs. While initially nothing more than online diaries, blogs have emerged as opportunities for merchants to spread awareness about brands and products.

Pinny Gniwisch, vice president and co-founder of online jewelry merchant Ice.com, shared how his company has leveraged blogs to increase search traffic to his Web site at an impromptu question-and-answer session at last month’s eTail conference in Palm Desert, Calif.

Q: Did you have any specific objectives or metrics in mind when you started the blogs?

Pinny Gniwisch: When we first were thinking about blogs, I went to our CEO, who happens to be my brother. We were sitting at a table, and I was obsessing about the whole blog phenomenon. He was commenting that it was a fad with no real value. But I decided to push it through and do it anyway. So I did some research -- this was a bit before blogs really became all the rage -- and got the software; within an hour, I had posted my first blog called Sparkle Like the Stars. And in my research I found that natural search rankings based on link popularity will help your site, i.e., your Web site will achieve higher natural search ranking if other sites, like blogs, link to you.

What happened as my blog became very popular was that we were getting thousands of hits a day and getting links from lots of other blogs. We found that our natural search rankings went up about 40 percent for a lot of keywords mentioned in the blog that are linked to Ice.com.

Q: What have the blogs done for sales?

Gniwisch: In the beginning we didn’t focus on sales. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted link popularity, which is what I got. For this past Christmas, just from Sparkle Like the Stars, we did $220,000 in sales. Compared to our overall sales, that’s not a lot, but it’s free money. We didn’t pay a commission to anybody. There’s no affiliate rates. Nothing at all. And all of this came from the blog.

Q: How have you measured the effectiveness of your blogs?

Gniwisch: A/B testing has been very important to our plan. We’ve been watching every single touchpoint that a customer has with the blogs and our site. What is the conversion rate of every piece of the site the customer interacts with? A person comes to the blog, looks at the site, then leaves. That’s one type of conversion. Another looks at the blog and clicks on a link to our site. That’s another type of conversion to measure. If you monitor every step of the way, you can optimize each step to convert at a higher rate.

Q: How do people find the blog?

Gniwisch: Fashion sites often link to the blog. Often, they lift content wholesale. But people find it through search. If you search for “Drew Barrymore” and”earrings,” or something similar, a lot of times we’ll be highly ranked in those search results because we mention those terms in the content of the blog. And it’s important to know that Sparkle Like the Stars is not an Ice.com blog. It’s owned by a separate company, and it’s just content. We don’t sell anything on the blog. And we’ve found that a totally new customer is coming to Ice.com through the blog as well. We wouldn’t have gotten these customers if they hadn’t loved the content featured in that blog.

Q: So that content in the blog is from an external source?

Gniwisch: Yes, we have one person we employ through that company who writes and posts at least three times a week on Sparkle Like the Stars.

Q: You have several different blogs, correct?

Gniwisch: We have four blogs, and each blog represents a different demographic we want to target. Sparkle Like the Stars is a fashion blog. We have another one called Ask Leslie, which is a jewelry buyer’s blog. For instance, a woman may have a daughter going to the prom, and she wants to know what earrings to get for the daughter. Leslie answers those types of questions. It’s a very education-centric blog. We usually get very serious shoppers visiting that blog, so the conversion rate off of links from that site are very high.

Our third blog is the Ice.com blog, and that’s sort of our public relations blog. Any magazines we’re featured in, any TV shows or movies in which we appear, that’s where we display that information.

And our last blog is a coupon site for our site. When I go shopping online, the first thing I do is type the company I’m buying from plus the word coupon. And I’ll always find an affiliate who will offer money off that retailer’s merchandise. We decided to compete with our affiliates. So we created a site, which is not officially affiliated with Ice.com, and we offer only Ice.com coupons. Why should we pay our affiliates for something we can do ourselves?