‘Terrible’ SEO: how do people find Waitrose online?
Waitrose’s £10m website isn’t just infuriating existing shoppers - it’s also virtually invisible to new ones, according to analysis carried out exclusively for The Grocer.
The retailer’s website is so poorly optimised for internet search engines that even Morrisons, which doesn’t currently operate an e-commerce site, ranks more highly.
“Waitrose.com is so technically hampered it is going to have a problem ranking for anything - it’s terrible,” said Juliette van Rooyen, a consultant from digital consultancy Reform, after analysing SEO measures determining the visibility of Waitrose, Ocado and the big four’s websites to search engines such as Google.
All were found wanting. And they were losing out because they were failing to optimise their webpages for popular search terms, said Simon Hall, retail manager at Google UK, adding that describing content with more relevant terms - such as recipes - would help them win more business online.
“The supermarkets all need to improve - they’re just not getting the exposure they should,” he said. Analysis for the Grocer by Experian Hitwise revealed no supermarket ranked in the top 10 for the five most popular recipe searches [12w/e 1 October 2011]: chocolate cake, cup cakes, Yorkshire pudding, pancakes and sloe gin.
“The supermarket websites receive very little traffic compared with content-based websites - Tesco Real Food is perhaps the best of the bunch,” said James Murray, an analyst at Experian Hitwise.
“The supermarkets seem so fixated on their own agendas that they don’t seem to realise people like Amazon are stealing market share in categories such as recipe books and dried goods,” added van Rooyen. The particular criticism of search engine optimisation for Waitrose.com comes amid continuing anger from Waitrose’s customers following the site’s March relaunch.
“It’s a very expensive disaster,” one customer wrote in a letter to The Grocer, citing Waitrose’s failure to address problems such as the need for users to repeatedly re-enter details before making a purchase. “It’s time Mark Price steps in and sorts out this very expensive mess,” continued the customer. “Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. It isn’t working.”
Robin Phillips, e-commerce director at Waitrose, last week used the retailer’s online forum to tell customers “it’s now quicker and easier to register to use Waitrose.com”. Shoppers could now view branch locations on Google Maps, collect party orders from branches other than those where they had placed orders, and order Christmas items online, he added.
However, further improvements to the site’s ‘remember me’ and search functions had not yet been made, he added, stating that these would be finished in “coming months”.
Read more
Waitrose dark store opens in the capital (3 October 2011)
Waitrose targeting Tesco rather than Ocado inside M25 (17 September 2011)
Readers' comments (6)
Littys | 02 Nov 2011 21:32
Thank you for reading my letter and writing the article. It seems all the supermarkets could do with improving their websites, but Waitrose is particularly awful, as can be seen in their forum, where they ask for feedback!
https://www.waitrose.com/home/forum/our_website.html
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Laura1 | 06 Nov 2011 14:11
Why has it taken so long for the terrible state of Waitrose's website to come to anyone's notice? Robin Philips only raises his head above the parapet to tell us how wonderful everything is - but it isn't. I'm just an ordinary shopper: I live a long way from any supermarket, and Waitrose online used to be a lifeline. My Waitrose order was around £100 a week, EVERY week, and completed in about 20 minutes -until the new website was launched. I gave up shopping with them in disgust about 6 weeks after that. It was taking me anything up to two and a half hours to put in orders, as opposed to the two hours it would have taken to get my car out and actually drive to the shop- and at least if I shopped myself, I was certain of getting what I wanted!
I've been dipping in and out of their online forum since then, to see if things have improved. Complaints are never addressed and questions go unanswered.Finally the other week I tried again(Waitrose is still the best supermarket, despite its new Tesco-matching form): I had to try yet another browser (the site wasn't written for either Internet Explorer or Safari, apparently) but it still took me 45 minutes and the search facility is as enigmatic as ever.
Can someone please explain to me why the shoppers' real-life experiences of problems, as they appear on the Waitrose forum, aren't reported in the press?
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paulme | 06 Nov 2011 17:13
I think SEO is the least of Waitrose on-line problems. It is impossible to understand how such a poorly designed, un-finished and bug-ridden web site was ever allowed to go live. It is a disgrace to the John Lewis partnership.
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JESouch | 08 Nov 2011 9:24
Another long-standing and appalled Waitrose Online customer here. There seems to have been no understanding of or investigation into how shoppers actually used the previous website before the redesign was undertaken and nothing approaching rigorous testing before the new site was actually launched.
The new site has lost many of the useful features of the previous one. The 'List' feature is now organised alphabetically in wholly unwieldy blocks like 'cupboard' rather than product groups so that, for instance, soya milk from two different manufacturers can end up on different pages. It is also impossible to delete 'no longer available items' from lists - always assuming that information is correct. It is not unusual to be told a product is not available in your branch only to go in and find it on the shelves. The site has ongoing speed and compatibility problems with different software and hardware configurations. The data entry hasn't been managed with any regard to consistency or accuracy and the search results are frequently so inaccurate to be useless. I could go on but that's enough to begin with.
Waitrose Forum asks for feedback. A good number of other customers with between us, decades of experience specifying, programming and implementing computer systems, have highlighted such crucial problems as urgent priorities to be addressed. Eight months on and nothing substantive has been done. Except we read press releases breezily saying how some customers have made rather 'a lot of noise' but overall everything's fine!
Adding insult to injury.
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GRO55670 | 03 Jan 2012 15:49
Try looking at the Forum now. Some might think it just coincidence that it was shut down shortly after Mr Phillips claimed the new website was finally working ok - thus totally ignoring the detailed information many customers and would-be customers were giving him via the Forum about how the new website is much less usable (and completely unusable for many functions) than the old website.
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Allan Shelley | 11 Nov 2012 22:16
It's November 2012 and if the Waitrose online wine store is anything to go by things are still chaotic. Website still has basic content errors, staff are often ignorant of the problems and hopelessly overwhelmed by the number of customer calls. Cheryl Mackenzie, Customer Services Manager, does not respond.
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