Many retailers still need a proper online strategy

17 December 2009

Cyber Monday, on 30 November, delivered the biggest spike in internet retailing to date, with more than £350m spent. The day broke the previous year’s record of £320m.

While this is a great recession-busting figure, it’s not enough for internet retailers to pin their hopes on a general move online in retailing behaviour. Rather, they must develop a full-blown strategy combining paid and natural search to maximise the online opportunity.

Our audit of 30 of the top retailers’ websites shows many major retailers have fundamental natural search issues, such as duplicate content, canonicalisation problems, page titles and headers that aren’t optimised and content that’s not keyword driven. Many of these could be fixed quickly to improve rankings at category or product level.

All this indicates there are still huge gains to be made for those who invest in this key area.

Furthermore, many paid search campaigns aren’t fully aligned with a retailer’s product range or inventory levels, usually because of poor pay-per-click campaign structure.

Retailers therefore need to take a long, hard look at whether their internal or agency teams are taking enough advantage of the shift to online purchasing.