Shopping Comparison Engines Will Boost Sales

By Derek Gehl of Entrepreneur.com



Customers viewing results on a comparison shopping engine are twice as likely to convert into sales. That means if you haven't already submitted your site and products to the Web's top shopping comparison sites, you're missing out on a ton of high-converting traffic.

Essentially, shopping sites are mini search engines that put shoppers in touch with a wide variety of products. Shoppers can search by product category or keyword to bring up a list of products from a variety of merchants. Many shopping engines allow searchers to compare characteristics such as price, product ratings or customer reviews.

Chances are you've landed on one of these sites before, if only by accident. In fact, a majority of shoppers find shopping engine listings while searching on regular search engines such as Google (GOOG Quote).

The big search engines love these shopping portals because they're:

• loaded with millions of frequently updated product listings;

• chock-full of keywords; and

• valuable to visitors because of their comparison and review features.

Because shopping-engine listings rise to the top of the general search-engine rankings so quickly, a shopping site can be your pipeline to a top ranking for your top keywords and products -- without doing any of the extensive optimization work yourself.

However, it's not enough to submit your products blindly to each site. According to Shopping.com, the top three listed merchants get 50% of all clicks, so the higher in the appropriate listings your Web site appears, the better.

So how do you get your products to the top? Well, each shopping site uses a different set of criteria to list products, so you'll need a unique strategy for each one. The good news is there's only a handful of strategies to learn.