iskandarX Society SEO - Are British Retailers Still Failing Online?

I have been studying for some years how British retailing brands handle their online footprint in search engines such as Google, how they perform in natural search results and how they offer their products to the searching population. Whilst doing this I have tracked a good number of leading British based companies including Sainsbury’s, Dixons, Currys, as well as brands such as Next for many years as they try to capture some market share on the Internet.





I have also looked at all the major catalogue and home shopping brands to see how they are targeting the millions of people who use Google and other search engines to do their shopping. This market especially has so much to gain from a good natural search profile.

I am still amazed by their lack of knowledge and understanding of the Internet, how to deliver their products to the searching consumer who is looking for a specific manufacturer, category and product. The way information is presented is woeful and many sites are not addressing even rudimentary principles that will let search engines such as Google do their job.

Brands such as Dixons and Sainsbury’s are in a really poor shape considering they have placed so many of their ‘eggs’ in the Internet basket and yet they seem inept at doing anything about it. Frankly, how can they fail to address the prolific sales channel of natural search in engines such as Google where people are actively looking for products and services in their millions every week?

In fact just carry out a search for a ‘Hotpoint Freezer’, which is not a particularly generic search and see who turns up in the natural search results. All the usual suspects will be conspicuous by their absence.

And its not just about visitors and sales these retailers spend millions on branding offline, every word, every colour and every design has to be signed off and yet on the Internet their brand is not controlled in the same way. For example what is the website address that people are supposed to remember when visiting Sainsbury’s?

You can go to Sainsburystoyou.co.uk, Sainsburystoyou.com, Sainsburys.co.uk, J-sainsbury.co.uk, Jsainsburys.co.uk, plus a whole host of other Sainsbury’s domain names aimed at market categories, try going to www.sainsburysentertainyou.co.uk how much did that ‘white elephant’ cost the company?

I only spent a few minutes looking but how many versions of Sainsbury’s can there really be?

Then you have Dixons, for three years the High Street retailer Dixons have struggled with their online platform, they have repeatedly been let down by their marketing directors, their web developers and their Internet experts.

On more than one occasion this painful journey has seen their site suppressed in search engine listings with whole sections of their e-commerce platform dumped out of the active search results thus preventing any measurable sales from natural search enquiries for products both in category and by type.

Many search engine ‘good practice’ guidelines were and are continually breached in an ongoing basis and poor quality pages are spawned to search engines such as Google to further undermine the brands Internet footprint. In fact at one point at a ‘Christmas Past’, the official statement for a drop in Internet sales was along the lines that there was a ‘downturn in consumer confidence and spending’, the real cause was the whole website bar the homepage had been dumped out of Google and so nobody searching for products could buy anything from Dixons website during this period.

Of course this is partly not the fault of Dixons, in the main they have been duped time and again by their suppliers of SEO expertise and the site developers who clearly have no understanding of what makes a site work for search engine spiders, how it should deliver information to both the visitor and the search engine.

However, there is significant blame in my opinion that should be placed at the head of the marketing department, getting it wrong once is perhaps excusable, after all the SEO industry is full of bad practitioners on the bandwagon and many web developers spew jargon with every breath. But getting it wrong time and again is perhaps less excusable, worse though is getting it wrong when the company decides to take itself out of the High Street and wholly online how can you make this decision without addressing the need for natural search positions.

This last point really shows how poorly led the marketing team must be, the management took the business wholly online without any understanding of how to tap into the most lucrative channel for sales, without a facility that could deliver a proper online sales profile and with even more bad expertise delivered from yet another ill informed SEO agency and steered by a marketing team that does not understand the environment of natural search.

Of course they are in great company; the absolute debacle of Sainsburystoyou.co.uk is an ongoing shameful series of blunders that is unforgivable for a company such as Sainsbury’s, especially when they are fighting for market share with Tesco. Where is the accountability I ask? In fact after contacting Sainsbury’s many months ago to try and give them some free advice I was told there was currently no marketing director to talk to.

Anyway it’s a year on since I last looked seriously at Dixons and the rest of the retailing world and I felt that in my summer lull I should again look for improvement and progress. I was hoping for a pleasant surprise and this time I thought I would approach it from a consumer perspective. So I went to Google and typed a search for the term ‘digital camera’ no sign of Dixons anywhere, another big seller was ‘Plasma TV’ again no sign, so I decided to make a far more focussed search. This time I searched for Kodak Digital Camera and again there was no sign of the brand that had taken its business out of the High Street and onto the Internet!

In fact there was little sign of any leading brand and as I cycled through an ever increasing number of searches I failed to find many of the leading names. I then went further a field and tried many searches for products and categories that should turn up the cream of British shopping, most of the High Street names are absent.

In fact unless you start to watch the paid search offerings such as Google Adwords the brands are invisible and a good look at paid search will show you who should be profiled in natural search as well. In fact the best blend is good natural listings dovetailed with a credible paid search strategy; most just rely on paid search.

I once again analysed the Dixons website and nothing has really changed, the site is still a mess for visiting search engine spiders, information and presentation that is vital to let a search engine understand the site and its products is absent!

Now I am not talking about manipulation or ‘playing the optimisation game’, I am talking about good ethical practice and meeting general compliancy standards that ensures a search engine can collect information in the way it is designed to collect it. I have no doubt that the overall cut in staff and High Street premises has enabled some major shift towards profitability but I wonder what an expert analysts prediction for lost sales on the Internet would be, especially factoring in the timeframe the website has been in such a poor state.

Of course there are many internet sales channels not just organic search traffic; there are price comparison sites, affiliates, Amazon, Kelkoo, Ebay, social networks and so on. But surely the Chairman is a brave man if he has decided to ignore the droves of consumers that are looking for his products every week using natural search in Google, MSN, Yahoo and the other leading engines, to me its seems inconceivable he would do this… but then again perhaps he just doesn’t know.