Introduction
SEO is important for
marketers because it makes sure that customers find us before they find the
competition. In this report I will be looking at the dog food industry,
specifically Purina and Nature’s Variety. Purina is one of the largest pet food
companies on the planet. I expect them to have outstanding SEO, site design,
and online presence. Nature’s Variety up until very recently was a private
company that mainly specializes in raw dog food. I don’t expect too much from
them but I’m prepared to be surprised. Keep a look out for keywords such as
“best dog food” and “healthy dog food”. The objective of this report is to
compare both sites’ SEO and see who’s is stronger.
Screen Captures of both home pages:
SEO Considerations
|
Purina
|
Nature’s Variety
|
1.
URL:
|
www.purina.com
|
www.naturesvariety.com
|
2.
Page Title
|
Pushing
Pet Nutrition Forward - Purina® Pet Food & Products
|
Nature’s
Variety
|
3.
Meta Description
|
Nourishing pet food and pet products. Find the right dog food, cat food, and treats for the pets that enrich your life. |
N/A
|
4.
Meta Keywords and Monthly search volume:
|
Purina US, purina pet food,
purina dog food, purina cat food
|
N/A
|
5. Structural
elements:
H1, H2, H3
|
H1:
N/A
H2:
Dog Product Selector • Dog Breed Selector • Cat Product Selector
H3:
N/A
|
H1:
N/A
H2:
N/A
H3:
N/A
|
6.
Strong tags
|
N/A
|
Wondering if Instinct is right for you? • Wondering if Prairie is right for you? • Give your pet a Nature's Variety Treat today! |
7.
Alt Text
|
Purina
• Purina • Tidy Cats<sup>®</sup> • Purina
ONE<sup>®</sup> • Purina<sup>®</sup> Pro
Plan<sup>®</sup> • Purina<sup>®</sup> Dog
Chow<sup>®</sup> • Beyond<sup>®</sup> •
Beneful<sup>®</sup> • ALPO<sup>®</sup> •
Friskies<sup>®</sup> • Fancy Feast<sup>®</sup> •
Beggin′<sup>®</sup> • Click to Chat With an Online Representative
|
Click to Expand • Click to Expand • Click to Expand |
8.
Page Load Time
|
15.317 seconds |
6.887 seconds |
9.
Observations Regarding Page layout:
|
This
page’s layout is easy to navigate. Every important link is available without
scrolling. This may be a personal preference but I don’t like the amount of
content on their landing page (too much). Overall it has a good layout.
|
Very
simple but gets the job done. Everything fits on one page without scrolling.
|
10. Observations
Regarding Visual Content:
|
Good
mix of pictures and words. Every link is easily understandable (you know
where you’re going next). Good use of brand colors (red, black, white)
|
Just
the right amount of pictures. Links stand out. Good use of brand colors
(green, brown, orange, yellow). These earthy tones symbolize the brand’s
commitment to all natural dog food.
|
11. Call-to-action:
|
Not
impressed with the amount of call-to-actions. Only a couple “share”s and one
“Shop our store”
|
“Try
It!”, “Subscribe to our news and promotions”, “Find A Store”, “Find A Vet”,
“You can transform your pet’s life with Instinct Raw. Learn more…”
|
12. Anchored
Text: (list 3)
|
“Dogs”,
“Cats”, “Meet Purina”
|
“Product
Choices”, “Learning Center”, “Who We Are”
|
13. Moz
Established Links: # to Root Domain
|
1171
|
610
|
14. Moz
Established Links: # Total Links
|
145K
|
7016
|
15. Top 3
inbound links.
|
|
|
16. Mobile
Friendly:
Yes/No
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
17. Content
is “shareable”
(Like, Tweet, Pin, Blog, etc.) |
Yes
|
Yes
|
18. Social
Media: (List all SM icons on the home page.
|
Facebook,
Twitter, Google+, Pintrest
|
Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube
|
19. SERP
ranking results when using keywords from this table: (placing or page number)
|
1st
on page 1
|
N/A
|
Google Trends Insights:
There is a massive
spike in search popularity across the entire industry in March of 2007. At that
time there was a big dog food recall and many brands were affected. Other than
that, search popularity across the board has had a small but consistent
increase since 2008 (except Nature’s Variety, the have close to 0 presence).
The dog food industry has been more popular than it has ever been (if you
exclude the spike in 2007) the last 12 months while Purina flatlined around
it’s average.
Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords:
Purina: purina pro
plan, purina veterinary diets, purina points reward program
Nature’s Variety:
nature’s instinct raw dog food, nature’s variety prairie, best raw dog food
Summary:
Purina’s SEO was
pretty strong but the website itself was mediocre, which really surprised me.
Purina’s website took top spot when searching their product brands and was on
the second page when searching the generic keyword, “dog food” (first page was
all retailer like Wal-Mart). I was shocked by lack of call-to-action on
Purina’s site. They had many opportunities to use call-to-action, such as their
“Dog Breed Selector” tool, but dropped the ball in favor of a boring link.
Purina’s website also had a whopping 15+ seconds loading time and had
practically no keywords related to dog food on LSIGraph. Nature’s Variety was
the complete opposite; great site, awful SEO. Their website was straight
forward, easy to use, and modern. Their links were intriguing which shows
evidence of a great marketing team. That’s where the positives stop. If you
look at my analysis I put “N/A” for 4 extremely important categories. When I
looked them up on Google Trends they were almost non-existent. And when
generating keywords on LSIGraph all I got were variations of the same two
keywords along with names of competitors. Both of these sites could benefit
from a dedicated digital marketing team coming in and sprucing up the place.
Conclusion:
If this report is any
indication of the industry as a whole then everyone needs to work hard at
improving their digital footprint. There were no common keywords used across
both sites and SERP ranking was relatively low industry wide. If I have to
winner of this analysis it would have to be Purina. They shouldn’t celebrate
though, they have a lot of work ahead of them.
APA Citations:
LSIGraph. (May 2016). LSIGraph
keyword generator [purina.com]. Retrieved from http://lsigraph.com/
LSIGraph. (May 2016). LSIGraph
keyword generator [naturesvariety.com]. Retrieved from http://lsigraph.com/
Nestle. (May 2016). Purina. Retrieved from http://purina.com/
Nature’s Variety. (May 2016). Nature’s Variety. Retrieved from
http://naturesvariety.com/
SEOmoz Inc. (May 2016). MozBar.
Retrieved from https://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar
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