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January 23, 2007
Search Visibility for Electronics Retailers Revisited
by Richard Drawhorn
Last year at this time, I investigated the search visibility of popular online electronics retailers to see which companies were most visible both organically and in paid search results for important keywords like "digital camera", "mp3 player" and others (see A Snapshot of Search Visibility for Online Electronics Retailers). This year, I've decided to revisit this project and see how things have changed over the last 12 months.
The same keywords and electronics retailers used in last year's study were investigated again this year:
| Keywords | Web Site Domains |
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The Results
Search visibility, as defined by WebPosition 4's Keyword Visibility Index (KVI), is shown below. To obtain these numbers, a "Visibility Score" is first calculated by assigning a point value to the highest position achieved on each engine, and then summing the points for all engines queried. Next, a "Visibility Percentage" is calculated by dividing the Visibility Score by the maximum possible score that would be achieved if all of your keywords were ranked number 1 for all engines. In other words, if a site was perfectly ranked at number 1 for all keywords on all engines, your Visibility Percentage would be 100%. In contrast, if a site was not ranked in the top 30 for any keywords on any engines, then the Visibility Percentage would be zero.
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Compare the above data measured in December, 2006 to a similar set of data collected about a year ago:
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Organic Search Visibility
You can see from the above numbers that Amazon.com was again the clear leader in organic visibility, followed by dell.com and bestbuy.com. Compared to last year, many of these retailers have improved their organic search visibility for the search terms measured. For example, walmart.com, bestbuy.com, and circuitcity.com have all made significant advances. The two leaders amazon.com and dell.com also show slight improvements in organic visibility.
Notably, a few major online electronics retailers had no organic visibility at all: radioshack.com, outpost.com, jr.com, and overstock.com did not appear in the top 30 search results on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN for the keywords measured. It would be an interesting exercise for the reader to take a look at these sites and try to determine why. Are these sites well optimized for the keywords researched? Do the leading sites have a significant link popularity advantage? Are any sites affected by duplicate content issues, or violating the search engines' terms of service in some way? Is the HTML coding of the pages correctly formatted, and is the information on the site well organized to help reinforce a common site theme? Any combination of these factors may have an influence on the organic search visibility of a web site.
Out of curiosity, I decided to look at radioshack.com's digital camera category to see if there are any obvious SEO issues with the page. Without spending much time on it, I've come up with several suggestions that might help this page get organically listed for the search term "digital camera":
- The Meta Description tag does not mention digital cameras at all.
- The Meta Keyword tag is a list of terms that pertain to electronics, but do not focus on digital cameras.
- The head of the document contains a long list of javascript functions that effectively lowers the prominence of the relevant keywords. It would be better to save the javascript in an external file and then link to the file in the document head.
- The page does not contain any kind of header tag which could be used to boost the importance of the phrase "digital camera".
- The phrase "digital cameras" is at the end of the title tag, which lowers its prominence in the title.
- There are some hidden sections of the page which can be seen when you view the source code. The "visibility:hidden" attribute is used for certain <div> areas of the page to hide text relating to the availability of a given camera. Hidden text is not a SEO best practice, and at a minimum will lower the density of the phrase "digital camera" on the page.
Paid Search Visibility
The companies investigated increased their paid search visibility over last year. This trend is not surprising considering how successful paid search is as an online marketing strategy. It's likely that the use of paid search will continue to increase in the future because the effectiveness of paid search can be proven with hard data. For example, WebTrends Dynamic Search makes it possible to automate paid search campaigns in order to profitably scale the campaign and maximize return on investment.
It can be a good strategy to use paid search to complement the organic search visibility of a site. Amazon.com appears to be intelligently applying this strategy by making modest use of paid search to complement their excellent organic search visibility. This can significantly reduce the amount spent on paid search while maintaining a presence on search engine results pages for all keywords of interest. However, even in cases where a site has good organic visibility for a search term, companies often still purchase the paid search ad to ensure that their brand is as visible as possible.
Summary
The organic and paid search visibility was measured for major electronics retailers, and compared to a similar set of data taken a year ago. Several retailers showed significant improvement in organic search visibility, but others have suprisingly shown little or no improvement. The retailers investigated showed an increased use of paid search, which supports the fact that paid search is an effective online marketing strategy.
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