What Is Wrong With My Website? – Holiday Edition

No one is Too Big to fail, especially when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Some of the largest companies on earth make simple SEO mistakes that dramatically impact their leads, conversions, and their bottom line – constantly. What you may see as a beacon of eCommerce may be suffering from one of the worst buyer experiences possible on the Internet, or they may have accidentally hidden their most important product pages from search, cutting their traffic in half. In this series of SEO advice articles, we will take a look at some of the biggest and most successful companies on the internet and the mistakes they are making that are leaving money on the table.

Holiday eCommerce Mistakes

The Holidays drive an absolutely absurd amount of traffic to major US retailers each year and with it, eCommerce purchases. But what happens if your retailer website has SEO and User Experience issues? What kinds of mistakes can a large company make that impact it’s ability to grow exponentially each Black Friday? Today, we will take a look at an eCommerce retail giant, Best Buy.

SEO Site Audit – BestBuy.Com

Best Buy is a multinational consumer electronics retailer headquartered in the United States. It offers a wide range of products, including electronics, appliances, and entertainment items, both online and through its brick-and-mortar stores. They also have an incredibly slow website…

Website Speed Issues

When I say slow, I mean like molasses. At least for the Crawler. Currently, they’re getting a 33 out of 100 for performance when using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. This score, unacceptable in the eyes of Google, not only potentially impacts their ability to rank as well as they should but also their ability to get potential users to make purchases on their site. 

According to Google’s own internal testing data, for every second your site takes to load conversions can drop by 20%. Think about how much of an impact that could have on your sales.

But It Looks Like It Is Loading Fast…For Me?

Sometimes the Page Speed Insights tool will see websites load much slower than it seems to your own eyes. In this case, the crawler believes that the website takes ~9.3 seconds to load properly for a user. This is because so many files are loading in the background that piece together the entire site, that it causes the browser to go into overdrive trying to put it all together.

While a user may see it load faster, this slow speed for the crawler means it thinks the site probably gives the user a poor purchasing experience. This contextual understanding could negatively impact the ability for Best Buy to have the best possible rankings it could have, despite how big of an authority they are. 

So, What Causes This Slowdown?

JavaScript is complicated. While scripts help sites look beautiful and appear seamless in their flow, they make crawling and loading pages harder for Google and browsers. It takes a lot of energy to crawl through and properly understand how to put the page together, and often times, large files are used to build a site – while only part of the actual data in the file is needed.

In the above image we can see many warnings and errors that BestBuy.Com is receiving from Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. Much of this clearly shows the problems causing the slowdown on the website and what could be reworked or tooled to increase the speed and give both the user – and the bots – a better experience.

Words Are Important

One of the biggest mistakes we see time and time again among retailers is their inability to create unique, informative content about a product that isn’t just the boilerplate language given to them by the vendors and manufacturers they work with. Much of the time this language is missing valuable SEO that could help drive even more visibility and traffic.

Example: RokuTV

When a user looks for Roku TV on Google, in many cases they do not get Best Buy at the top of the search results because the website uses the same content created by the manufacturer for much of their on-page content. Missing from much of this content is the actual phrase, Roku TV. Because the manufacturer has created the copy, it instead frequently refers to it by the branded name, RokuTV. This is not how users typically search. Additionally, because they are using the same content as other retailers, it is harder for Google to understand which one of these retailers should rank for these searches.

A quick Google search shows that Target and Walmart are both using the exact same copy to describe the television – but they have purposely optimized their sites by splitting RokuTV into Roku TV. A smart SEO move. The closer you can get your site optimized, verbatim, to the keyword you are targeting, the better.

The Difference In Potential Search Volume Between RokuTV vs Roku TV

Ok…Why Does This Matter?

These SEO and User Experience missteps underline how critical it is to focus on the finer details of eCommerce. Overlooking something as basic as page load times or how customers search for products can lead to lost sales and diminished visibility. Even industry giants must pay attention to these aspects because, in the competitive world of online retail, the smallest missteps can have major consequences.

Grow Your eCommerce Sales

If you’re ready to identify and fix SEO mistakes holding your website back, or if you need help driving more traffic, leads, and sales for your business, contact Direct Online Marketing today for help in SEO services and eCommerce website design. Take advantage of a free site audit to uncover opportunities for growth and ensure your website is working as hard as you are to achieve your goals.