Waitrose found to be 'almost invisible' in search engine results pages 

Monday, November 7th 2011 by Kate Billinghurst

Supermarket giant Waitrose's website would have search engine optimisation (SEO) providers tearing their hair out, according to recent analysis carried out by the Grocer.

The website, which cost around £10 million, is not only infuriating those who currently shop there but it is also proving almost invisible for potential new shoppers. The site is believed to still need work on items such as the 'remember me' and 'search' features.

To prove just how poorly the site is performing, Morrisons' website enjoys a high website ranking which eclipses that of Waitrose's despite not even having an e-commerce site.

According to the analysis, which was carried out by Experian Hitwise, it wasn't just Waitrose who ranked poorly with all supermarkets needing to up their SEO games.

The analysis showed that no supermarket ranked in the top ten for the five most popular recipe searches which were chocolate cake, cup cakes, Yorkshire pudding, pancakes and sloe gin.

"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," said Juliette van Rooyen, a consultant from digital consultancy Reform, speaking to the Grocer.

Simon Hall, retail manager at Google UK, told the website: "All were found wanting. And they were losing out because they were failing to optimise their webpages for popular search terms.

"The supermarkets all need to improve - they're just not getting the exposure they should."

The report from the Grocer even led one customer to write in and urge John Lewis bosses to smarten up their act and to "stop trying to reinvent the wheel".

Waitrose's website was only recently launched back in March although Robin Phillips, e-commerce director at Waitrose stated that improvements would be made to the site's performance and visibility online.

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