Recent research carried out by the digital edition of The Grocer magazine, has shown the website SEO of the leading supermarkets is a long way from where it should be, leaving some of the biggest names in British retail virtually invisible online.
One of the main offenders is Waitrose.com, which, after a £10million initial investment in their ecommerce website, is nowhere to be seen on the search engines for some key terms.
The website SEO on Waitrose’s site is so poor that even Morrisons, which at present doesn’t even operate an ecommerce site, currently ranks higher.
The site is being held back by a number of technical issues you would not expect from a £10million ecommerce website. However, it is not only Waitrose who are falling behind on their website SEO.
Having looked closely at a range of website SEO factors which determine the visibility of websites on search engines such as Google, a leading digital agency found Waitrose, Ocado and the big four supermarkets were all underperforming, leaving other retailers such as Amazon to clear up in certain markets.
Simon Hall, retail manager at Google UK, said: “The supermarkets all need to improve – they’re just not getting the exposure they should. If they were to describe their content with more relevant items – such as recipes – then they would win a lot more business online.”
The proof is in the pudding and for the five most popularly searched recipes online: chocolate cake, cup cakes, Yorkshire pudding, pancakes and sloe gin, no supermarket ranked anywhere near the top ten, leaving other retailers that are more focused on their website SEO to clear up.
In a letter to The Grocer, one customer clearly expressed their discontent at the shortcomings of the Waitrose website SEO: “It’s time the operations director stepped in and sorts out this very expensive mess!”
Here at Designer Websites we put years of technical know-how and experience into our website SEO service, ensuring your site is search engine friendly and highly visible to your customers.
