We are going to be featuring regular SEO site audits of various sites from businesses across Central Ohio and across the country, and the first of which is DSW.com.  I helped launch the DSW.com site about a year and a half ago, and probably haven't visited it since.  I was not involved in the SEO aspect of the site as that fell to the marketing department, and it seems that either SEO is not a very high priority for them or they lack the personnel and experience to really be successful in terms of SEO.  It is not unusual for large companies to fail in terms of SEO, and this is no exception.

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 hundred's, 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 marketshare on the table.