ShopYourWay and SEO


The Retailer


ShopYourWay.com is a part of Sears Holdings ("Shop Your Way | Brands | Sears Holdings Corporation", 2018). This website is defined as “a free social shopping destination and rewards program” that offers members “millions of products, personalized services, and advice” from other shoppers, service providers, and retailers ("Shop Your Way | Brands | Sears Holdings Corporation", 2018). Members of the Shop Your Way rewards loyalty program earn points for every purchase and then are able to redeem those points towards future purchases ("Shop Your Way | Brands | Sears Holdings Corporation", 2018). Points can be earned through buying products or using a service offered as part of the program ("ShopYourWay", 2018). ShopYourWay.com allows a user to set up a profile, designate hobbies, likes, dislikes, whether or not they are married or have children, and even where the user prefers to vacation ("ShopYourWay", 2018).

All of this information is to build a shopper profile for their community, creating a social media type of interaction in which users can see what other users are adding to catalogs (shopping lists), what they have purchased, and what they have reviewed ("ShopYourWay", 2018). Beyond just a website, ShopYourWay also exists as an app that is available to download on both Android and iOS ("Shop Your Way | Brands | Sears Holdings Corporation", 2018). 

ShopYourWay and SEO

ShopYourWay.com’s On Page SEO Setup is relatively decent for a site that wants to act as both a retail location and an online community. Sadly, any advantages that the site has is offset by the loading speed of the website. The page’s First Contentful Paint (FCP) is 2.3 seconds and the DOM Content Loaded is 3.6 seconds, which puts the website in the “slow” category for loading ("PageSpeed Insights", 2018). Page load time is about eleven seconds, which means that more than 90% of the rest of the Internet is faster to load than this website (Open SEO Stats, 2018).

ShopYourWay is managing some SEO easily. The website title matches the URL and the page title also mentions the website name (Open SEO Stats, 2018). If someone is searching merely for the site and not the products on offer, this would work very well for results.

The website also uses meta keywords which mention brands associated with Sears, like Craftsman, Kenmore, and brand names associated with the Sears Holding - Kmart and Sears (Open SEO Stats, 2018). Users searching for any of those brands may stumble across the ShopYourWay website in the search results.

Sadly, their meta description does not give a lot of information concerning products:
“Get rewarded for everything you want. Earn points on your favorite brands, get inspired, and discover the best products, deals, and coupons. Start shopping today!”
(Open SEO Stats, 2018)

There are only two external links which lead to locations where users can download the mobile applications for their mobile phones (Open SEO Stats, 2018). Internal links are much more encouraging, with 295 internal links on the website (Open SEO Stats, 2018).

In terms of keywords and headings, there is no heading 1, but heading 2 does exist and there are many keywords, but those keywords do not reflect the full amount of content on the page (Open SEO Stats, 2018). Content in heading 2 appears to be more a repeat of the navigation menu instead of an actual heading.

Alt text does exist, and it covers everything from appliances to subscriptions for TIME magazine (Open SEO Stats, 2018). Other alt text includes “Craftsman Gifts”, “Electronics” and “Gifts for Him” (Open SEO Stats, 2018). This alt text gives a better description of the content on the page than any other information.

Much of the content of ShopYourWay is heavy on the pictures and images, which may limit actual word content for the indexing spiders to find and locate, which may cause ShopYourWay not to appear in searches, even if the information that the website contains is the correct website. 
 

Using ShopYourWay

Using ShopYourWay is a frustrating experience overall in terms of user interface. The page load time is extremely long compared to other websites and it is not entirely clear what the user should do when first greeted with the landing page. The desktop website has little to offer right off the first arrival. The user is greeted with a website that filled with images, icons, and immediate suggestions from the community on the page. The first look is intimidating. After using the website for a few minutes, one thing became clear: this website is a mix of Amazon and Pinterest with a little Twitter thrown in.

Retail is the name of the game here, but users are able to create their own catalogs and fill them with products that they wish to buy, or just like and wish to share with others. Other users can see when a user creates a catalog and can even follow that catalog, just like people follow Pinterest boards on Pinterest. The service offers a newsfeed that displays the latest information from catalogs the users follow or suggestions for particular categories, like fashion and beauty or recipes from other cooking enthusiasts using the service.

There is quite the learning curve for this website, and finding a specific product category may take a few minutes using the browsing feature; it is better to search directly for what is wanted than clicking category after category and hoping to stumble upon what is needed. This may account for some of their bounce rate, which is currently 44.78 percent of their visitors with the average visit duration just over five minutes ("shopyourway.com Traffic Statistics", 2018).


Additional Tools, Data Collection Methods, and/or Metrics to Improve Web Analytics Efforts

One suggestion for the ShopYourWay website to increase their ranking in search results is to increase social media advertising efforts. Currently, only 1.53% of their traffic comes from social media sources ("shopyourway.com Traffic Statistics", 2018). Surprisingly, the majority of their traffic comes through a direct channel, with 45.18% using direct, followed closely by search with 38.71% ("shopyourway.com Traffic Statistics", 2018).

The website does have a small percentage of traffic from mail, with 9.03% of the traffic arriving through that method ("shopyourway.com Traffic Statistics", 2018). Increasing their frequency or email subscription may help increase traffic to the website.

Changing their content on their website to increase the words and cut down on pictures may also raise their rankings in search engine results. With their picture heavy format, ShopYourWay is missing out on opportunities to show the Internet what they have available on their website.

References

About PageSpeed Insights | PageSpeed Insights | Google Developers. (2018). Google Developers. Retrieved 9 April 2018, from https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/about

Open SEO Stats. (2018).

PageSpeed Insights. (2018). Developers.google.com. Retrieved 9 April 2018, from https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.shopyourway.com%2Ftoday&tab=desktop

Shop Your Way | Brands | Sears Holdings Corporation. (2018). Searsholdings.com. Retrieved 9 April 2018, from https://searsholdings.com/brands/shop-your-way

Shop Your Way | Brands | Sears Holdings Corporation. (2018). Searsholdings.com. Retrieved 9 April 2018, from https://searsholdings.com/brands/shop-your-way

ShopYourWay. (2018). ShopYourWay. Retrieved 9 April 2018, from https://www.shopyourway.com/people/amber-hoffer/26702080/catalogs/

shopyourway.com Traffic Statistics. (2018). SimilarWeb. Retrieved 9 April 2018, from https://www.similarweb.com/website/shopyourway.com#overview

Welcome to ShopYourWay - ShopYourWay. (2018). ShopYourWay. Retrieved 9 April 2018, from https://www.shopyourway.com/homepage#/?filter=7220133

Comments

  1. jhonOctober 27, 2018 at 3:09 AM

    , Hummingbird makes it possible for a page to rank for a query even if it doesn’t contain the exact words the searcher entered. This is achieved with the help of natural language processing that relies on latent semantic indexing, co-occurring terms and synonyms.
    degital marketing

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jon SigurdssonNovember 6, 2018 at 11:19 PM

    Thanks for sharing this case study!
    Internet Marketing Company

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reporting Ninja - Analyzing Assassin

Image
Reporting Ninja sneaks in, slices through data, and leaves behind reports and results after disappearing through the mists of the night without a whisper of sound. Well, close, but Reporting Ninja is on 24/7, and offers results in an easy to understand format for analysts and customers alike. Reporting Ninja is one of many solutions that can be added onto Google Analytics that will help analysts deliver more results with less turnaround time ("Apps Google Analytics Partner Services and Technologies", 2018). Reporting Ninja offers the analyst a chance to schedule reports and email them to the clients without the need for the analyst to intervene ("Adwords reporting, PPC & Analytics reporting tool | Reporting Ninja", 2018). Cultural appropriations aside, Reporting Ninja is a solution offered for Google Analytics to enable analysts to create custom reports for customers without needing to build reports themselves ("Apps Google Analytics Partner Services
Read more

Businesses and Social Media

History of Social Media Social media got its agreed upon start with a website called Six Degrees , which allowed people to establish profiles and find friends ("Then and now: a history of social networking sites", 2018).  This social media website started in 1997 before the term "social media" ("Then and now: a history of social networking sites", 2018). While it had millions of users registered to the site, network growth was hindered due to the amount of people connected to the Internet ("Then and now: a history of social networking sites", 2018). Following Six Degrees, blogging as a platform became popular around 1999 and that popularity continues today (Karr, 2016).  LinkedIn started in 2003 and Facebook came after that in 2004 (Karr, 2016). MySpace was also around in the early 2000s and still exists today (Hendricks, 2013).  YouTube came onto the social media scene is 2005 (Hendricks, 2013). Facebook launched its first ad in 2005 (H
Read more