• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 9, 2010

Semantics play a major role when it comes to companies connecting with site visitors. Baynote recently released a suite of online tools aimed at helping ecommerce marketers connect with consumers through adaptive landing pages and search insights that consider semantics. The tools aim to increase the number of visitors to a site based on connecting through these words that searchers might not have actually used. I'll explain.

The content on a company's Web site must match the vocabulary searchers use to find the products and services. But taking this into consideration gets a bit tricky, especially when the company's site supports consumers across the entire United States, North America, or perhaps the world. I realize that's why some companies support consumers through dynamic content, but what if that's not a financial option for one reason or another?

Baynote Founder and CTO Scott Brave points to the underlying technology that fuels the adaptive Web-a notion of collective intelligence-that lets the company adapt in real time to serve up content based on consumer interests. He says the company's technology can see everything happening on the Web site through a tag, including the search terms on Google, Bing or Yahoo that led the searcher to the Web site. The tags records the pages searchers spend time on, scrolled down to view other content below the fold, and clicked on the text in the link.

Watching search patterns can connect words like "stove" to "range" or "oven." It's these types of connections that Baynote continues to focus on in its platform. Some marketers might think it really comes down to semantics and determining the correct lingo for a specific item in a particular region of the world. For example, people in the United States on the west coast might call Pepsi or Coca-Cola "soda," whereas those on the east coast call it "pop."

The tool, Search Insights, released in late October is an optional add-on module to the Baynote Optimization Center. It suggests onsite, organic and original search terms that have been used by searchers. Marketers can use the add-on to augment paid-search and social campaigns, as well as SEO content to improve acquisition of new visitors. Among features included in the toolset, Search Insights provides keyword suggestions that span beyond suggested words based on popular terms. It also offers integration with paid search management campaigns and numerous data export options allowing digital marketers to feed Baynote's keyword suggestions and keyword performance data into existing solutions.

Baynote not only understands the vocabulary of terms for searchers who come to Web sites it supports, but what the searchers engage with. Not just what they clicked on and bought, but what they show interest in. The company relies on a patented technology called UseRank to observe engagement patterns in real time among like-minded searchers on a variety of landing pages, including what Carlos Carvajal calls "adaptive landing pages."

Carvajal describes adaptive landing pages as "dynamic" pages tailored to specific site visitors based on their intent. And I don't have to tell marketers that getting close to the searcher's intent can reduce bounce rates and improve conversions. What have you done differently this year to optimize Web sites and pages as the holidays approach and technology gets more sophisticated.