Any idea which Australian retailer has topped the list of the most site visits in the first quarter of 2019? Turns out its Bunnings with 4l.2 million visits in January - March. This is ahead of Woolworths, Coles, JB Hi-Fi, Kmart, Kogan and Officeworks. Particularly interesting is that Bunnings only announced its decision to become an ‘online retailer’ on 21st March 2019.
So what has given Bunnings the edge? In the company’s own words, the decision to wait, based on practical concerns regarding the delivery of heavy and bulk products, has enabled it to watch and gain experience from the industry as a whole. According to Bunnings’ managing director: “We have jumped on the escalator half way up, which allows us to move at some pace.”
What does this actually mean? A quick check of a couple of SEO markers shows Bunnings does indeed understand what needs to be done:
- Mobile-first indexing is now standard for Google and rightly so as the bulk of search requests now happen from mobile devices. Google’s mobile-friendly test tool shows that this has been a focus on the Bunnings site, receiving a big thumbs up for mobile compatibility.
- Secondly, Bunnings has made good use of structured data markup. This is important for all sites, but critical for retailing. This code markup helps search engines interpret the data in an accurate manner. On a retailing site, products can be marked up to label parts of a page as ‘product’, ‘price’, ‘brand’ etc to ensure indexing of the page happens correctly. Google doesn’t guarantee to follow the markup, but highly recommends its use.
Viewing the code shows Bunnings has prepared the data for search engine indexing
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool shows the load speed of the Bunnings website leaves a bit to be desired … but I’m sure their IT crew are working on this. After all, good website SEO is an ongoing project. Websites are not set-and-forget business tools!
If you're selling online run your website through these simple tests. If you’d like support improving your website, take a look at IT Basecamp’s SEO packages and contact us here.
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