FEATURE Learn from the Best: Impr
Based on a large research project it conducted last year, digital marketing expert Sa successfully online. Here, Lewis Ridley, Content Mark
In 2019, Salience performed a large analysis of the flooring industry to identify the best-performing brands and how they market themselves online. On the final report, one brand stood out from the rest – Carpetright.
https://salience.co.uk/insight/reports/flooring-retailers-market-performance-report/
Carpetright had a total visibility score of 12,485, and we were curious as to what this brand was doing to bring in so much traffic and achieve so much visibility. What was it doing that the other brands weren’t and how can its strategy be replicated so others can achieve similar results?
We found exactly what Carpetright is doing to get their results, laying out the tactics in a concise and practical way that allows anyone to use them in their own business.
A Mega Menu That Gets Mega Results
One thing you have to get right with your ecommerce store is the ‘mega menu’. If it’s confusing or isn’t optimised to the max, you’re missing out on serious rankings.
Carpetright has a comprehensive mega menu which has everything you need from both a search engine optimisation (SEO) and user experience (UX) perspective. It’s organised into clear-cut categories, making things easy whether you’re looking for a specific product or if you’re a Google-esque robot trying to work out which pages are a priority.
The ‘Three-click’ Rule
On Carpetright, each of the most important categories expands out into a range of additional options, which Google loves to see, making things easy to crawl and reducing crawl budget.
Important pages should be, at most, three clicks away from the homepage. Any deeper into your site and Google will see them as unimportant and therefore lower their rank – bad practice if one of these pages is a main subcategory.
If you find your website is in a slump, it might be because you have hundreds of pages that are not linking well from each other or the home page. Bear in mind Google has to crawl every URL of your site and, if you aren’t making it easy, your rankings will suffer.
Simple URL Structures
A common problem we see with ecommerce stores, particularly large ones, is that the URL structures from the main navigation are often… strange.
When you have a series of random URLs for the array of pages on your store, Google has a hard time understanding what relevance they have to other pages and categories on your site. Thus, it’s important to have a clear structure which follows some sort of semantic pattern.
Carpetright has combined a good balance of using clean URL structures and indexed parameters. Its top-level pages, such
10 | Tomorrow’s Retail Floors
as laminate and engineered wood, all have simple, clean URL coding which lets Google know exactly what they’re about; there’s no confusion. It also uses parameters instead of individual pages when suitable. This, in effect, reduces the number of pages, optimising crawl budget.
To summarise, make sure your ecommerce URL and category structure are neat and tidy.
Keywords
Some sites fail to utilise their keywords to the fullest, either missing them out completely or stuffing them erratically into their copy.
Carpetright knows what it’s doing when it comes to keyword implementation and it’s a common occurrence with top brands in other industries.
They use their main keywords within their main categories, particularly in their HTML heading tags.
For example, when you click on the laminate category, the first title you see is ‘laminate flooring’. To the average user, this is nothing special. However, to a search engine, this is exactly what they want to see and now know what keyword to instantly rank that page for.
To put this into perspective, the keyword ‘laminate flooring’ gets over 100K searches a month. With Carpetright using keywords like this within the heading tags and metadata, they’re giving themselves a better chance at achieving those top spots for keywords like the above.
Title Tags
It can be tempting to stuff keywords into your title tags and metadata. Although this can sometimes have positive effects in the short term, it might not benefit you in terms of UX.
Google is paying close attention to click-through rates on the search engine results pages (SERPs), so making sure people are clicking on your result tells Google it’s relevant.
Carpetright makes sure its title tags are as ‘clickable’ as possible by adding ‘20% off’ and other benefit-driven phrases. This gives the searcher more of a reason to click on their search result, telling Google it’s relevant and should be higher up the page.
This small hack can be implemented by any brand. It only takes a few seconds and can have drastic results on your visibility.
Content Strategy
Content is something Google loves to rave on about, but what is actually considered as good content is not so clear.
In our experience, good content is well-written, authoritative, and well-referenced. Of course, there are other factors such as keywords, but we won’t touch on those for now.
www.tomorrowsretailfloors.com
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