Supermarket SEO
There is an interesting post in the Grocer today about how Waitrose is struggling with SEO after a £10m website relaunch earlier this year.
“Waitrose.com is so technically hampered it is going to have a problem ranking for anything – it’s terrible,” said Juliette van Rooyen, a consultant from digital consultancy Reform, after analysing SEO measures determining the visibility of Waitrose, Ocado and the big four’s websites to search engines such as Google.
All were found wanting. And they were losing out because they were failing to optimise their webpages for popular search terms, said Simon Hall, retail manager at Google UK, adding that describing content with more relevant terms – such as recipes – would help them win more business online.
Now I’ve had a look at the site and it doesn’t seem to be too bad for a large corporate site. It ranks well for a few of the recipe searches I tried.
What is interesting is to look at the visibility via Searchmetrics recently and how it had a slight drop in July. This is to be expected when a major site gets relaunched because it’s almost impossible during a £10m rebuild to get all the SEO aspects sorted. The bigger the project the harder it is to optimise.
Also interesting to see how Asda & Tesco are surging ahead in the last few months.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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I find this very surprising to be honest. I can understand that with such a large project it can be difficult to ensure all aspects of SEO are sorted, but i would expect with a £10m investment they would have done more to ensure that it was fully optimised. With a new website development the SEO factor can prove crucial in its success, likewise i bet if other aspects of their website development had short comings, such as the photography or recipe idea’s, they would put more of an effort in to ensure they were efficient. In terms of the searchmetrics it will be interesting to see if they see an increase due to this development, as they seem to have a very steady rate before hand.
Why has it taken so long for the terrible state of Waitrose’s website to come to anyone’s notice? Robin Philips only raises his head above the parapet to tell us how wonderful everything is – but it isn’t. I’m just an ordinary shopper: I live a long way from any supermarket, and Waitrose online used to be a lifeline. My Waitrose order was around £100 a week, EVERY week, and completed in about 20 minutes -until the new website was launched. I gave up shopping with them in disgust about 6 weeks after that. It was taking me anything up to two and a half hours to put in orders, as opposed to the two hours it would have taken to get my car out and actually drive to the shop- and at least if I shopped myself, I was certain of getting what I wanted! I’ve been dipping in and out of their online forum since then, to see if things have improved. Complaints are never addressed and questions go unanswered.Finally the other week I tried again(Waitrose is still the best supermarket, despite its new Tesco-matching form): I had to try yet another browser (the site wasn’t written for either Internet Explorer or Safari, apparently) but it still took me 45 minutes and the search facility is as enigmatic as ever. Can someone please explain to me why the shoppers’ real-life experiences of problems, as they appear on the Waitrose forum, aren’t reported in the press?
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WOW, a 10 million pound rebuild! Just when I was thinking $60,000 was a lot. You would think with that kind of cash they could get the SEO spot on. Found your post on Baby SEO very interesting also.. Do you do work on any stateside sites?
Honestly, if people invest 10 million pound in rebuilding a website, I would expect that they give proper attention to SEO, so as to bring in more traffic. because if they do not, what is the return on investment? It looks like the typical big business (management9 screw-up.