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Anyway, this five minute video clip targets Grange Insurance, and it shows immediately that they either have never heard of SEO or just have never put even the basic ounce of effort into SEO.  The page title for their homepage is “Welcome”.  Seriously.  That is it.  There are junior high kids with blog sites that do a better job of optimizing their web site. Grange is saying right off the bat that hey… we want to rank right at the top anytime someone goes to Google and searches for the word “welcome”.  That will help us dominate the insurance field.  Obviously, that is sarcasm.  But this might possibly go down as the single worst homepage title for a major corporation ever. 

So we’ll move on, despite this blunder that is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted advertising dollars by not taking advantage of proper SEO elements.  The content on the home page is very, very weak – as in, there really is none.  The image they use has no alt tags, the text is not descriptive…  I didn’t even see at quick glance the word insurance used on the site at all, in a manner that is indexable by a search spider. THe only time it is used is in an image with no alt text, which spiders can’t see, so it literally doesn’t even exist in their “eyes”.

The information architecture is very weak, and they use words such as Auto, Homeowners, and Life.  Sure, we can guess that this is in regards to insurance, but a search engine may think they are selling cars, houses and board games for all we know.  Again, the word insurance is not even used.

In those lower level pages, the page titles are no better (ie. the title of the Car Insurance section is literally one word again – ‘Auto’.)  Again, there is no sitemap xml anywhere to be found, not that the pages Google should index would ever rank anyway, but still.  The site is very poorly laid out and is not built to ever be found by anyone on the internet – and when you do that, why bother even having a web site.

The frustrating thing is that the site has a PageRank of 5.  Not that this should necessarily matter to you anymore, but it show just how valuable the site is.  And it is being completely wasted by poor, actually non-existant, SEO practices. 

Taken from Compete.com, you can see in this graphic that almost 55% of all of their organic search engine traffic comes from people searching for Grange Insurance. Another 9% for ‘Grange’, and another 9% searching for some variation of thier URL.  75% of all of their traffic is coming from people that are looking specifically for them!  Virtually nobody is finding them when doing comparison shopping or at the single most critical juncture in capturing new business.  As someone that is so very passionate about good SEO, it is literally heartbreaking to see how much they are wasting such a great opportunity.  And it wouldn’t even be a significant investment.  A basic site cleanup and overall SEO training package costing them under $20,000 total, would help them earn millions of dollars in recurring and free marketing.  It is absolutley heartbreaking to see a company not take advantage of that kind of return on investment.  

If you don’t realize the importance of SEO, take a look at this graph below.  The green line is State Farm’s monthly web traffic, the number one ranked company on Google for the word Insurance.  The blue line is Grange’s web traffic.  Last month, it was 2.2 million visitors for State Farm, and 48,000 visitors for Grange. By looking at the SEO for the site, it is pretty obvious why. These numbers aren’t 100% accurate as they are pulled from Compete.com, but they are a good representation of the importance of SEO. 

 Just imagine if they were using a good, Columbus SEO provider.  If those numbers were even 10% fo what State Farm is pulling in, it would triple their traffic and I’m guessing would have a pretty good impact on their sales.  To be honest, it would be very easy to do.  This is the kind of site that is easy to make a big impact – when the on-page optimization is a train wreck, there is nowhere to go but up.  Tripling their web site traffic would be something a good SEO firm could do in their sleep. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to increase traffic by 1000% or better within 6 months – if only the effort were made.  

Did I mention how heartbreaking this is to see?

Until next time… have a great day and get ranked.

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The five minute video clip shows right off the bat some javascript issues that appear to be preventing images from displaying on the homepage, which isn’t an SEO issue but definitely a user experience issue. I examine the missed opportunity of the poorly written title tags, the lack of textual content on the site in general, the use of images for top level category definition, and the lack of URL re-writing which is literally costing them tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars in wasted advertising dollars by not taking advantage of proper SEO elements.

Not in the video, but I also noticed major mistakes on their sitemap.xml file (priority is .5 or less for every page except their home page – ugh!)  They have multiple (and I mean like 7 or more) instances of H1 tags on a product page.  The <H2> tag is the same on all the pages, and it is this: <h2>Product Details: </h2>  Oops. Yea, that isn’t really doing anyone any good at all. Same with the <h3> tags capturing price and only price. If anyone Google’s the price “$64.99″, DSW just might come up at the top of the list for it! 

All in all, this is the kind of audit I’ll be displaying on this site.  It will usually be the most atrocious examples of poor SEO that I can find. And usually by big companies that should know better and can afford to know better. DSW is probably wasting half a million dollars a year in advertising just by not being smart in terms of search marketing. 

Also, with such inadequate SEO, they have no chance of catching competitors such as Zappos.com.  You can see from the graph below, they are not cutting into the leaders market share whatsoever, so whatever the current strategy is, it isn’t working.

Until companies such as DSW realize that they need real SEO expertise and web marketing folks making the important decisions, they are going to leave significant dollars and market share on the table.