Iams and Blue Buffalo SEO Comparison

Brief Overview of Iams and Blue Buffalo Search Engine Optimization
Mark Faber

Search Engine Optimization is a relatively new concept for marketers but a vital one. So many consumers turn to the internet, specifically search engines (such as Google) as a first step in the information and purchasing process. In the Dog Food industry Iams and Blue Buffalo are two top brands promoting healthy dog food and high quality ingredients. Using keyword sentences like “Grain free Formula”, “Natural Ingredients” and “Senior/Puppy Dog Food” these companies are trying to attract the right consumer to their website. Hopefully this table will help break down the two brands and show the power of SEO and its importance in today's marketplace.

SEO Considerations	Iams (Mars, 2016)	Blue Buffalo (Blue Buffalo Co. Ltd, 2016)
1.     Page Title	Pet Food from Iams- Only the Highest Quality Ingredients	Natural, Healthy Dog & Cat Food for Your Pet | Blue Buffalo
2.     Meta Description	Find the complete Iams pet food line, learn about our nutritional philosophy and more at Iams.com.	Blue Buffalo - Natural, Healthy Dog Food and Cat Food. Discover Why Blue Buffalo is the Best Choice for Your Pet.
Meta Keywords and Monthly search volume:	Pet food, iams, iams pet food	Not Found
3.     Structural elements:  H1, H2, H3	Not Found	H1:Blue Buffalo® H2:Dog Food, Cat Food, Pet CancerAwareness, The BLUE™ Story, Slice. Serve. Top.  (plus 10 more) No H3
4.     Strong tags 5.	Not Found	12 strong tags in total, including: About Us, Why Feed BLUE? Events, Pet Cancer Awareness
Alt Text	Yes, 12 Alt Texts including; IAMS BREED SELECTOR, INGREDIENTS GUIDE, THE IAMS DIFFERENCE	Yes: BlueBuffalo, Blue Buffalo TV Commercials, Compare Your Brand, Compare Your Brand
6.     Page Load Time	8.362 seconds	6.655 Seconds
7.     Observations Regarding Page layout: 8.	Simple Layout, only 3 ‘areas’ top scrolling images links to articles and different products. Next is Dog and Cat articles. Goes on to list the Iams Story, Ingredients etc.	Engaging content, not just a list of products, but including articles on pet cancer awareness and comparisons of different pet foods. Products and store availability are featured as call to actions at the bottom of the page as well.
9.     Observations Regarding Visual Content:	The top menu boxes are overloaded with text and options, the menus are overwhelming. The rest of the homepage is visually appealing, spacing out different sections nicely and making it all easily readable.	Visually appealing, a good mix of pictures and text with a consistent theme of corporate colours being used. Blue is featured heavily throughout the home page.
10.  Call-to-action:	Go, Join, Learn, and Buy Now	Make an online Donation, Join our Newsletter, Follow, Share
11.  Anchored Text: (list 3)	Iams Breed Selector, The Iams Difference, and Ingredients Guide	Explore Dog Food, Explore Cat Food, Ingredients
12.  Moz Established Links:  # to Root Domain	54	714
13.  Moz Established Links:  # Total Links	1295	5475
14.  Top 3 inbound links.	Japanese Iams website: http://www.iams.jp/ Newswire: http://www.newswire.ca/fr/news-releases/iams-les-fetes-en-famille-aide-plus-de-7-millions-danimaux-a-trouver-un-foyer-permanent-509486261.html Iams Japanese Website index: http://iams.jp/index.html	Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls BestFriends.org: http://bestfriends.org/about/our-partners/kind-partners GoPro Mountain Games: http://www.mountaingames.com/summer
15.  Mobile Friendly: Yes/No	Yes	Yes
16.  Content is “shareable” (Like, Tweet, Pin, Blog, etc.)	All the Articles are easily shareable through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and E-mail	Yes, it can be shared instantly through Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest
17.  Social Media: (List all SM icons on the home page.	Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and YouTube	Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram
18.  SERP ranking results when using keywords from this table: (placing or page number)	Page 3, 4th organic result when searching for High Quality Dog Food	Page 1, 3rd organic result when searching for healthy dog food

Google Trends: 
Dog food is a pretty broad search term and is used often. When comparing the 2 brands, Blue Buffalo and Iams, they score equally at 5. I think this is because there are so many different types of dog food brands out there without a clear market leader that the market share becomes widely distributed. Surprisingly Newfoundland and Labrador generate the most regional interest even though it has smaller population than the other regions.

Google Trends, retrieved May 19 2016

Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords:

Healthy dog food, Senior Dog Food, and Puppy dog food all appeared in the LSI generator and are listed on both the IAMS and Blue Buffalo websites. (LSI Graph, 2016)

IAMS has Healthy dog food listed several times within images, but not as alt text. It does however mention grain-free which came up in the LSI generator. IAMS only contains 5 of the keywords generated.

Blue Buffalo has healthy dog food listed in the title of the page, with the word healthy mentioned 6 times on the home page as well. Grain-free is also mentioned along with organic dog food. Blue Buffalo has 7 of the LSI generated keywords mentioned on their homepage.  

Blue Buffalo’s strengths are its use of healthy and natural dog food. By repeating these words throughout their home page, Blue Buffalo shows up quickly in the organic search for dog food. IAM’s strengths are its use of specific formulas, i.e. puppy food and senior care. The keyword sentence of Healthy dog food are found throughout both sites, but used better in the Blue Buffalo site in their headings and strong words html.

Both IAMS and Blue Buffalo are household names when it comes to the dog food market. However in my humble opinion Blue Buffalo has done a better job utilizing SEO and making their website findable and relatable. Their site showed up earlier than IAMS and made better use of specific keywords in their page titles. It also had more reliable and positive links, rather than sister companies like IAM’s. 

References

Blue Buffalo Co. Ltd. (2016, May 19). Natural, Healthy Dog and Cat Food. Retrieved from Blue Buffalo: http://bluebuffalo.com/

Google. (2016, May 19). Dog Food, IAMS, Blue Buffalo Co. Ltd. Retrieved from Google Trends: https://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=Dog%20Food%2C%20%2Fm%2F02pkvr%2C%20%2Fm%2F02vlv0r&geo=CA&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4

LSI Graph. (2016, May 19). LSI Keyword Generator. Retrieved from LSI Graph: http://lsigraph.com/

Mars. (2016, May 19). Pet Food from IAMS. Retrieved from IAMS: https://www.iams.com/

SEOmoz Inc. (May 2016). MozBar. Retrieved from https://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar