SEO News

Who’s ranking for ‘supermarket’? 

Kevin Gibbons wrote on this site back in 2008 about the way that supermarkets were ignoring SEO for many major keywords and thus missing out on branding opportunities. 

In this post he pointed out that none of the top UK supermarkets ranked above number nine in Google. Six years later, not much has changed. 

The only supermarket ranking on page one is Sainsbury’s, though local results ensure that local stores get some coverage. However, there are more local stores not mentioned here. Perhaps they haven’t heard of Google’s local results. 

You might think that they aren’t interested in search visibility for these terms, but the fact that ASDA and Sainsburys are using AdWords suggests otherwise.

The supermarkets rank well for terms such as ‘online grocery shopping’. Sadly, that’s not what most people are searching for: 

More recently, the Guardian Media Network talked about content marketing being a critical driver with major supermarkets having “quite an affinity with food-based content, generating everything from recipes, diets and forums through to events” which seems to be a major truism in today’s post-Hummingbird world of rich content curation and outreach.

Does this mean onsite SEO is irrelevant for supermarkets? Of course not, content curation still requires intensive levels of optimisation, and even the best content in the world won’t magically outreach itself.

Plus there is still no harm at all in having category and product pages nicely optimised to ensure maximum potential traffic capture for brand purposes, something which a struggling supermarket would be well advised to examine.

Morrisons SEO

The news is full of unfortunate stories regarding Morrisons at the moment, with the BBC referencing a 5.6% like for like sales decrease and a generally ‘disappointing’ sales performance at the end of last year.

Morrisons has been late to the online party, and only started offering online deliveries in January this year, in limited areas too. The company’s slow adoption of a proper digital strategy is very telling in the sales figures.

The structure of the website is very strange, with the main homepage at entirely image based, and the design a little old-fashioned.

All the curated content which could be put to work pulling in visitors for the brand (and earning backlinks to boost authority) is pushed into the subdomain your.morrisons.com, while the online grocery shopping section is split again on groceries.morrisons.com, with wine over on morrisonscellar.com and the Kiddicare range over on its own top level domain as well.

Meanwhile, the user experience, though not absolutely disastrous, is less than optimal. I explored it here, with the help of some user tests, and it seems that customers were confused about where to start shopping. 

All of the products and discounts promoted on the homepage lead to the your.morrisons.com sub-domain rather than product pages, while the actual link to start shopping is on the top nav, not in the prominent position it should be. 

Groceries, wine and baby products are lucrative product ranges, but compare the Morrisons approach with rivals like Sainsbury’s and Tesco and we can see that the lack of subdomain unification isn’t a good way to go.  (A mistake also made by Staples). 

Aside from the technical SEO considerations such as splitting authority up, the unified shopping experience and purchase path offered on these two market leaders is an obvious improvement over Morrisons’ more piecemeal approach.

Even in terms of direct content curation Morrisons is behind the times, making some sadly elementary optimisation mistakes like wrapping the H1 around the top logo on all pages, using generic meta descriptions for recipe type listings (example from the Mains page – “Find hundreds of fantastic offers, easy recipes and entertainment products for the family at Morrisons online.”) and no ALT text on the (sometimes lacklustre) recipe images.

This is even more of a shame when looking at the search functionality for recipes, which is actually fairly solid (although some filters for refinement by ingredient would be nice), and the pages themselves which are actually nice and simple in their design with minimal scrolling. 

There’s actually another missed opportunity here. Luke Knight, head of Lifestyle at 4Ps, raises the sometimes-thorny issue of supermarket-brand integration:

It amazes me how few grocers work closely with the brands they sell in order to improve all-round performance with supporting content as well as landing/product page merchandising. A brand like Lindt, for example, could sell a lot more through supermarket stockists if it worked with them to improve optimisation, merchandising and “added value” content like exclusive recipes.

It isn’t just the recipes, either. Morrisons has a mass of brilliant content available like its healthy eating tips section (everything from achieving your 5 a day on a budget to adding more egg into your diet) and their brilliant themed product ranges like NuMe, Just for Kids and Free From.

Charlie Kay, Senior Digital Executive on the 4Ps Food and Drink team, comments that Morrisons seem to be having trouble with its unique selling proposition:

The key to online success for a brand like Morrisons is identifying the USP, what can it offer that other online retailers don’t already make available to their customers? The website seems to heavily focus on price but with supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl dominating the “value for money” niche perhaps Morrisons needs to take a different approach.

It already has a good start on family-orientated content on the site, and with so much power behind the idea of families at supermarkets perhaps making the distinguishing approach the idea of “feeding the family” healthily on a budget would get the brand further than competing purely on price. 

There is so much editorial content here which could help Morrisons to cement its market share, but none of it seems to be integrated properly with a digital strategy that will grow visibility for the brand in order to attract more shoppers, long-term brand advocates and  (the ultimate and obvious goal) boost that bottom line.

I’ll leave it to the head of the 4Ps Food and Drink team, Kia McSween, to wrap up:

Brands like Morrisons have a unique opportunity to change the way customers and businesses alike interact with grocers. By understanding their audience better, grocers can put the customer experience at the forefront of their objectives. This will allow them to create an innovative platform and strategy which includes content that is tailored to suit their customers’ needs and wants.

What do you think? Are supermarkets missing out when it comes to SEO? Or is search somehow less important for these businesses? 

Posted by JamesAgate

There is an awful lot of controversy going around for things like guest posts, with techniques being proclaimed dead and blogs being decreed toxic, but the fact remains that if you handle blogger outreach in the right way, you can get a tremendous amount of value from blogs.

Targeted audiences, run by passionate and receptive bloggers; these types of opportunities shouldn’t be discounted. If you take a step back from your link profile, it is very likely to be heavily weighted towards blogs, whether that be as a result of guest posts, editorial mentions, competitions, or just about anything else.

However, while all of the above add value (broadly speaking), they point to a link profile that looks skewed toward just one type of website. Links from blogs can be overcooked, and the reality of being an SEO in 2014 is that it is always wise to diversify the ways in which you get links—irrespective of which color hat you think you wear. You need to be proactive about what your link profile looks like.

We’ve probably all recently seen instances of overly harsh penalties, websites that looked
whiter than white (especially in relation to competitors) getting spanked. I’ve seen instances of sites getting hit that didn’t even look like they cared all that much about SEO, and yet someone at Google arbitrarily decided they had fallen afoul of guidelines.

Do I think Google is crazy? Sometimes, yes. But I’m not here to complain, because frankly it’s their playground, so I guess we all need to learn to live in it and determine ways to make the most of it—or face the consequences.

My point is we all have to think carefully about the things we do (even if they don’t at first appear to impact SEO) and what knock-on effect that is likely to have.

This especially applies when it comes to content generation and building links. It is easier to get bogged down in the day-to-day and think you are diversifying your link profile because you have a variety of blogs or because you are using different means to connect with bloggers, but from a bot’s point of view those links probably all look quite similar.

Here are just some of the wealth of link opportunities that are out there in almost every market:

• Resource pages
• Forums
• Directories
• Professional organizations
• Events
• Submission-based
• Press

The sad thing is that at least one person reading this can probably find one instance of each of the above links being mentioned by someone at Google as “unnatural.” That being said, all of the above, if done right, are highly defensible and would pass the litmus test of “would I still want this if Google didn’t exist?”

Targeted acquisition

The problem (actually, the opportunity, because it means fewer people will bother) is that there isn’t usually a surefire step-by-step to finding these types of opportunities; the process can be quite serendipitous. I know that sounds like fluffy nonsense but there is no substitute for really getting to know a client and their market. This is why we often save this kind of activity for several months into an engagement: That is when some of the really golden opportunities seem to appear—after a few conversations with your contact, some research for a content piece, etc.

It is also likely that opportunities are limited in certain markets. There’s nearly always another link opportunity out there, but to be brutally truthful this process isn’t going to be easy, and it isn’t going to be one of those things where you can suddenly
make it rain links.

In most cases we have found markets to be a series of rabbit holes with niches, sub-niches, sub-sub-niches,etc.—the internet is HUGE, and if you are just focusing on “Keyword” + “Write for us” in your link prospecting, then you are leaving a world of opportunities on the table.

Resource pages

This type of opportunity is likely to form the foundation of any proactive “blogless” link building campaign because there are so many resource page opportunities out there.

You can really shoot for the stars with this technique, though and we’ve secured placements on government, academic, and top-tier websites like About.com. I must stress that this isn’t always an easy sell, because these types of websites don’t link to just anyone so you’ll need to adjust your expectations accordingly particularly if your business or client has only a small amount of value to offer outside of its usual commercial enterprise. It probably doesn’t surprise you that these types of websites care very little for link-baity stuff. :-)

A common mistake is to adopt the mindset of “I have made this guide on {keyword}, it is really {useful | interesting | identical to everything else on your resource list} and so should be included on your page because it will be good for {your audience | me}”. You either need something completely new that brings diversity to that resource page, or you need to sell the webmaster on the asset you are asking them to link to.

A common approach we adopt is to utilize an existing client asset and then look for multiple angles depending on the type of resource page you are targeting. If you think about, a governmental website, they want to help local citizens, so content about things like public safety is of interest to them. However, there is no incentive for them to link if they’ve already got three guides to the issue you are talking about. If you can find one governmental site that has a section on a specific public issue, though, you can use that in your pitch to another website, offering them a reason to link (because it rounds out their offering to their local citizens).

In terms of finding these kinds of opportunities, there are two main ways we do this:

• Digging through an existing link profile (the client’s or a competitor’s) and extrapolating the tactic from there
• Surfacing (often) hundreds of opportunities using a combination of prospecting phrases that include a variation of resource, help, further reading, and the keyword

Forums

Who would have thought a type of link usually reserved for the spammer could be valuable?

Well, a number of our clients enjoy mountains of traffic from targeted forums; in fact, in some cases they are the biggest referrers.

Naturally I am talking about the client adding value to the forum, or in most cases (this is easier if you don’t have the client industry expertise and the client doesn’t have the inclination) encouraging conversations about the client within the forum. Tread carefully, as most forums don’t take all that kindly to marketers poking their noses in, but with a modicum of client participation you may be able to join a conversation and highlight a piece of content on the client’s site. By doing so, you might just “turn on” the forum to the wealth of useful content you probably already have there.

Our participation in forums is often content-led, and it is a very low-volume tactic, as there are often only a handful of worthwhile forums in the industry you are looking at.

Directories

A recent study found most
web directories are dead, and I wouldn’t disagree that most are simply live so they can charge for removal of links. Leaving this type of directory aside, there are a wealth of industry directories and localized business directories that real people actually use. These are the types of listings where you can get phone calls. Regardless of what you think of directories as a link type, that to me is a defensible link that is worthwhile irrespective of whether it is going to have an impact on your rankings.

The US is a gold mine of link opportunities like this, with directories for cities that are relatively easy to get listed on and can actually generate calls and new business. If you are in the travel industry, for example, where people who don’t know the area need to book a car service from the airport, they might use a site like
SantaMonica.com to find a provider. There is that perceived credibility of being listed in what is an authoritative site in the area.

How do we go about finding them? The
Link Prospector tool from Citation Labs is very useful in surfacing these types of opportunities if you use a combination of local and niche-specific phrases. If you don’t want to subscribe to the Link Prospector tool, then it is easy enough (albeit less automated) to do generic searches that include a combination of keywords or geographical locations and the directories themselves often show up. I actually prefer the manual method, as it allows for more serendipitous opportunities to present themselves.

Professional organizations

There won’t be all that many, but as with directories you want to be thinking in terms of niche and location as well as a combination of the two. Especially in the US, there are a wealth of opportunities with local chapters of organizations that you or your client could join.

There is often a cost involved with joining these professional organizations (at least the worthwhile ones), but the credibility associated with it and often the other business benefits for the client hugely outweigh the cost.

We’ve been frequently surprised at how often a client is already paying a subscription fee for a membership that entitles them to a listing but they’ve simply never claimed it! These are very quick and easy wins, granted the impact isn’t necessarily going to be life-changing.

To find these kinds of organizations, again the
Link Prospector tool is very useful if you need a quick and easy way to find these opportunities. You might find this list useful (albeit a little user unfriendly to navigate) as many trade publications have a corresponding association. Not always, but hey, it is still a useful resource if you want to find out about trade press.

Events

I strongly suggest you read this blog post on
Link Building with Local Events by Kane Jamison from 2012. There is very little I can add to this specific topic that Kane hasn’t already covered, but a few specific points are worth repeating:

First, why would we want these links? Well, you are likely to be getting links on domains that are otherwise hard to get even a citation from, let alone a link, websites like well-respected news outlets. Similarly the links are geographically specific, there is nothing more difficult than obtaining links from blogs within a certain geographical area, because the pool is often really small. So when it comes to “blogless” link building, it is nice to add that local element to your profile, and event-based link building can really help with that.

Secondly, think about the whole process when it comes to event-based link building, because there is more to it than just the “submission to the event section.” You need to consider how you structure the event pages on your website as well as selecting the right ticketing provider (e.g.
Eventbrite) for maximum SEO-related benefits (and frankly to ensure a seamless experience for any attendees).

Finally, consider all the angles for leveraging your event for link building goodness, from typical search queries that uncover submission opportunities to looking for footprints within event widgets.

Submission-based

This is an excellent way to maximize the reach of content either through finding or repurposing for a new audience.
This guide, whilst painfully cringe-worthy in its analogy to food, is a mostly useful guide to repurposing your content.

I am talking about worthwhile submission-based link opportunities here, though, whether that be making a presentation from a guide to go onto Slideshare or just submitting a podcast to the relevant directory. This is less about the resulting link (Google knows these aren’t exactly tightly editorially controlled), but you can effectively plug into an audience that you didn’t already have access to.

I still get milestone notifications of a guide I wrote for eHow nearly five years ago. I’m actually a little embarrassed about the content so really must get around to updating it but that has had over 10,000 pageviews since it launched. I accept that’s not viral traffic, but it was an extract of a longer piece on my site, and I linked my guide in the section beneath. My guide has subsequently had just over 4,000 visits since the eHow extract was published, which is almost certainly a lot more eyeballs than it would have gotten just sitting on one of my websites.

Eric Ward is a big proponent of submitting content to different places; many of the Link Opportunity Alerts that you find in his
LinkMoses newsletter service are submission-based, but often niche-specific and have a large audience or carry some real credibility.

Press coverage

Is doing PR a challenge as an SEO? Absolutely. It isn’t always an option, because if your client has a PR department or existing agency you might just end up crunching toes. On the flipside, however, we as SEOs are often far better at actually getting the link than a PR exec might be. We’ve achieved coverage for clients on TV networks, offline magazines, radio interviews—lots of great things that any PR agency would be proud of, and that started as a way for us to build some links!

The thing we have found is that most press opportunities present themselves and you have to be a bit reactive (or real-time) rather than proactively seeking coverage. We have also found some success in looking at how and why clients (and their competitors) have been covered in the past. Go into this with an open mind—I couldn’t believe when we found one of our clients had received coverage for the release of a product brochure; my initial thought would have been “who actually cares besides the owner of the business that our client has released a new product brochure??!”… turns out the trade press cared, and would happily cover it. In situations like that you find an asset which even the best of us would have dismissed as little more than sales fodder that can actually be used effectively to garner links.

Incidentally, I would be interested to hear your experience gaining press coverage with services like
HARO. We’ve probably had 4 successful pieces of coverage from HARO pitches, and while you could argue our targeting was off, our pitch was poor, or the client wasn’t a good fit, we’ve got coverage for those exact same clients through all sorts of other means so it truly baffles me when I see other people cite HARO as though it’s a push-button way of getting publicity. Maybe we’re doing it wrong, or maybe it’s just inundated since all SEOs on planet Earth started using it. Who knows?

A walkthrough

It is often easy to illustrate a point with an example, so I wanted to do a quick runthrough of what we might do if we were to handle link building for
Ontraport, a small business CRM provider. These guys aren’t a client, and were selected at random after going through a list of a few of our providers (we use them for email auto-responders among many other things) I thoroughly recommend their software, but I digress.

Let’s look at the assets they already have that we might be able to work with…

• http://ontraport.com/ The software itself is likely to appeal to small business owners, seeing as it has been designed with them in mind. From a link building point of view, we might struggle given that there isn’t a free version of the tool, but as a “suggested tool” on a small business website we might have an angle. The better angle here is that the company is itself a “small business” success story (or at least sort of small; they’ve featured on the INC500 list and Forbes Most Promising Companies).
• http://ontraport.com/women/ This one is buried in their footer, I actually found it digging through their link profile, but it is a sign-up page to join an online community for women in business. Ontraport’s COO is a woman named Lena Requist and she wanted to create “The Professionistas” to be a community within the wider Ontraport community. It is such a great idea, and is likely to be a valuable asset for any link building campaign.
• http://ontraport.com/community-meetups/ This provides details on all their forthcoming in-person meetups. Loads of potential link building angles here.
• http://ontrapalooza.com Their annual event which seems to work a bit like MozCon. I saw details of the event last year but didn’t actually attend, and there are opportunities aplenty with a large-scale event like this.

Here are just some of the opportunities I came up with after little more than 10 minutes of research:

• The founder of Ontraport did an interview on Mixergy a while back, how about reaching out to BusinessInterviews.com?
• SBA.gov helped me find an office that supports female business owners that is local to Ontraport and that office has a resource page.
• The National Association for Female Executives has setup a page to help guide female executives in their career here. Perhaps Ontraport’s Professionista community for women would be a good addition for any women looking to strike out on their own as a means of furthering their career?
• Their forthcoming in-person meetup in Santa Monica is likely to be of interest to the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce in their business event listings: http://members.smchamber.com/events/
• The Annual Ontrapalooza event I mentioned was held in Santa Barbara last year, so how about telling local residents about it and getting a link in the process? You can submit event details to the Santa Barbara Independent events section (granted most listings are aimed at general public but there are some specialist events in the calendar).

Conclusion

Ultimately you need diversity in the link building that you do. Many of the tactics described above are low-volume, high-value so are worth investing a bit more time in. Can you build a process around them? Yes, but it is likely to be more of a framework or alternatively very industry-specific because there are so many nuances hence why I haven’t provided a step-by-step.

I don’t think that you should consider blogger outreach or links from blogs to be dead, but as with anything in SEO, there is such a thing as too much of something good. Hammering away at one tactic because that’s what’s cheap or in your comfort zone is only going to get you so far.

I’d love to hear thoughts in the comments below, particularly success stories with “less common” types of links.

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