This article will cover how to make your products more discoverable in the Boom store by helping you understand how the store's search functions work as well as the best practices of listing your products.
1. Best Practices: Quality Over Quantity
Listing your creations in the store is exciting! At Boom, we take pride in providing a quality experience for students and educators. We expect our Publishers to uphold our standards of quality.
2. Only One Copy of Any Deck
To ensure that we only have the best quality in the Store, you may only publish one copy of any deck. If you modify a clone of that deck and choose to publish the clone as a replacement deck and because you have made improvements in the quality and content of the deck, you must un-publish the original. Publishers are not allowed to un-publish decks, clone them, and then re-publish the nearly exact clone. Publishers that are reported for this behavior will receive a strike against their account. If the behavior continues, your account and payouts will be locked and you may be banned.
3. Optimizing for Discoverability
Starting in 2024-2025 school year, we will give preference to accessible decks over those that are not accessible. As we roll out accessibility tools, we will inform you when we expect to turn on preferential ranking for decks that meet accessibility criteria.
In our search engine less is more. We reward most relevant. Carefully consider what to include in titles, keywords, descriptions, subjects and grade levels. For best discoverability, your keywords, titles and descriptions should contain the words or phrases a buyer is most likely to type when looking for a product.
For example, to appear in results for materials teaching one-to-one correspondence you should do the following:
keywords: one-to-one correspondence 1:1 correspondence
title: 1:1 correspondence OR one-to-one correspondence but not both - put both in keywords.
Use titles that are meaningful and concise without excessive repeats. Your titles should be 48-60 characters long max. You will be able to have additional hashtags of 4-20 characters to participate in hashtag sales. Hashtags are NOT titles. If you add a hashtag to a title, you must also have a title.
4. Think about Exact Match Searches
Customers can also use quotation marks in the search bar to search for a specific phrase. For example, a customer entering "Past tense verbs" into the search bar (including the quotation marks) will only see decks with titles that include the whole phrase "Past tense verbs".
5. Keywords
You can add keywords to your deck from the Details box in your deck editor. Keywords have the highest weight in the search so it is very important to determine which keyword(s) that will BEST describe your deck within reason. Too many keywords used will cause your deck to be "bumped" down in search results. Keywords are single words or short phrases that act like "tags" for your product.
Format keywords using natural language and punctuation. You should include words and phrases that a customer is likely to search for so that your product will be more likely to appear in their search results. Examples of good keywords would be the theme of your deck, a specific concept covered in your deck, or the type of activity required to complete your deck.
You can repeat words or phrases in keywords as needed to show alternative spellings such as: one to one correspondence one-to-one correspondence 1:1 correspondence.
Punctuation is not required between keyword phrases. Only use punctuation a buyer would use. If you try to game the system and add any of "one-to one" "one to-one" "one.to.one" "one?to?one" and so on you will not phrase match to a search. Worse - you may not appear in results at all because you will have lower relevance than a product that does not include the artificial punctuation.
6. Product Description
You can enter a product description from the "About" tab in the Details box. The description is seen by potential customers and is a great place to summarize the contents of your deck. Descriptions should be concise and relevant with the most important information for the customers listed first, with no typos. Finding the sweet spot is key, include all relevant information without excess truncation or Superfluous text. Portions of the description are indexed and do affect search relevance. Vague and/or excessive descriptions may harm your ability to appear in search results. Do not include a keyword section in the description. Do not include links to external stores in your product description. Do include information about standards.
7. Subjects
Our search will return products that match the buyer's selected subject first. If you have not selected subjects or have poorly matched subjects you will not return in results where you want to be seen. When publishing a product, be sure to always choose subject and relevant subtopics.
- Religious content goes to Religious Studies. Secular holiday content goes to Holiday.
- Native language is for the language in which instruction is written.
- Instruction language is for the language being taught.
For example, Immersion language content would have the native and instruction language match. Non-immersion content would have one language for native (such as English) and a second language for the language being learned (such as French or Spanish).
Subjects are reserved for authors with the training, skills, ability and knowledge to teach the subject. We reserve the right to demand proof of credentials for your ability to teach a subject. Failure to provide credentials will result in your store being suspended and/or banned. For example,
- "Speech and Language" is for trained speech language pathologists.
- "Occupational Therapy" is for trained occupational therapists, however, certain specialists with adequate training may use certain subcategories, such as handwriting that are under this subject category.
- "Religious Studies" is only for materials that teach theology.
- "Special Education & ABA" is for trained special educators and ABA specialists.
- "Reading" is for people trained in teaching reading.
- "English as a Second Language" is for people trained in teaching English as a second language.
Boom is a place for skilled and trained authors to sell materials to those who need their skills and ability. Authors found misrepresenting their training and skills will be BANNED.
8. Grade Levels
Our results favor products that most closely match to the searcher's selected grade levels. If you have added "extra" grade levels (such as University to a K, 1, 2 product) it will harm your position in the search results.
You can select multiple grades and/or multiple subjects if your content applies to a wider range. To select multiple subjects, you can hold down your Shift key (this will select a range of subjects as you click on them with your mouse) or use your Ctrl/Cmd key (this will let you select individual subjects at the same time).
We have a "Not Grade Specific" option. "University" should be used for non-special education adult education.
9. Google Search Results and Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is an unfair trade practice and can mislead customers. Our keywords are indexed by Google so Boom products can appear in Google search results. Google penalizes keyword stuffing, which harms all Boom Publishers. We will suspend or ban stores that engage in keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is loading your title, keywords, and/or description with repeated words. Stuffed keywords may appear as a list, group, or as unnatural repetition. You should create useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. See Google's guidelines on what content is penalized.
10. See Something, Say Something
To report technical snafus or other search items needing attention to development, use the Help Center to create a ticket and select Group: Technical Support. This will get your request to our test and technical support team fastest.
To report content that looks mistagged in the Store, please go to "Reviews", and select "Report Violation". Please select "Other" from the checklist options and leave a comment about what the mistag is. Our legal team reviews decks that are reported, and follows up with creators.