Wayfair is one of the top online retailers and is a data-centric company. The use of proprietary web analytics combined with data across every channel gives insight for data-informed decisions. Even with the use of proprietary software for data collection, Wayfair’s SEO team free shares their knowledge and experience publicly. They share knowledge through guest blogs, and resources for other SEOs to check search engine ranking factors on their sites. Wayfair analysis and optimizes every part of their websites to ensure that they not only appear in relevant organic search, but their paid search ads are related to the search as well.
Proprietary Web Analytics
Web analytics is a big deal for Wayfair, as they built their propriety systems for data collection and analytics to inform every decision on either the web or offline. Wayfair uses their search marketing platform, Athena, to improve the reach of their customer search keywords and is the reason for their search marketing success (Wayfair Inc., 2016). Much of the analysis that Wayfair gains insight from is from the on-site search engine where data is captured to inform search optimization along with the incoming search traffic.
Data Informed Decisions
Every choice and decision that Wayfair makes across their multiple websites is from the consideration of the data collected from the web analytics and other data source from their omnichannel data collection. A-B testing is a part of the decision-making process of the company when changing wording, styles, and even implementing new technology (Stambor, 2014). Testing on Wayfair websites allows for improvement of user experiences along with SEO fixes across sites.
Some of the new technology Wayfair has introduced as a part of their mobile app and website is the use for augmented reality (AR) and visual search. The introduction of visual search has given a customer the ability to take a photo of an item in a store or someone’s home and find all products that are visually similar with the Wayfair catalog (Rayome, 2017). Even with the introduction of new technology, Wayfair continues to collect data on how the user interacts and time spent on pages with the use of new features like AR and visual search
Shared SEO Insight
With a dedicated team of SEO experts at Wayfair, they have honed their skills and learned valuable lessons that they freely share. Wayfair operates a tech blog where they share many of the new technology and insights for optimizing their websites. Wayfair’s SEO experts publish findings, such as surprising ones that go against what is accepted practice in SEO. One instance, Brian Wood of Wayfair shares insight he found through a mishap that switched title tags across multiple sites. He was able to determine that a webpage can reach an SEO saturation point and further optimization may not increase the page’s rank (Wood, Accidental SEO Tests: When On-Page Optimization Ceases to Matter, 2015). SEO experts at Wayfair have also free contributed their knowledge through the development and open sharing of SEO tools they have found to help their SEO efforts (Wood, SEO Engineering Public Projects, 2017).
Current Website SEO
When evaluating the Wayfair website, it is easy to find consistencies through the site and how the pages are optimized. Also, keywords for storage and kids occur multiple times on the page. The internal link on the homepage also mirror the keywords by directing traffic to link specific sections relevant to the keywords.
Following the link to furniture from the homepage, it is easy to see that the internal link goes to a page that is optimized solely for furniture. This same optimization occurs across the site with linked keywords directing to pages with a high word density of the linked keyword. The internal linking to these categories from the homepage passes rank and authority to the pages (Fleischner, 2016). Header tags within the page also show that the page is predominantly about furniture and further validates that the keyword link is appropriate for the content on the page.
Wayfair using primarily an internal link strategy to build the rank of categories and subcategories of products and limits their use of external links to the other brands that are part of the Wayfair family of brands as well as relevant to each other because of the similar products they sell. The other sites key in on niches within the home goods niche.
Improvements
It is hard to pinpoint places for improvement of the overall Wayfair SEO goal. If you were to find points of friction or missed opportunity, it is likely Wayfair is already a step ahead fixing and testing variations of the data-informed solution. One issue I found when first navigating the website was that a box appeared, to sign up for their mailing list, over the page on every page I navigated. This box was annoying as someone just browsing their site, but after closing it enough times, it stopped appearing. It would be interesting to know if there is the number of closes they decided would determine that a customer wouldn’t sign up and that would be enough before sending a customer away from a site. Using bounce rates could be informative of when the box becomes a problem and send a customer off of the site.
Another issue that users may have when first navigating to a webpage on Wayfair is that much of the content is below the fold. It is possible that most popular content has been placed above the fold to ensure that customers can see it first. I would suggest the elimination or the reduction of the size of the top banners across the website to bring content more visible when first navigating to a webpage. Data may show that the banner converts customers more than the content below the fold since it features the current deal of sale.
Wayfair has positioned itself as a home furnishings leader using data and analytics gathered across all channels. With dedicated teams of data analysts and SEO experts, they have optimized and continue to optimize their websites along with other business decisions. They share the knowledge they gain through analytics for other SEOs can replicate and be better informed in their optimization of web pages. As a web developer, there are things about the Wayfair website I do not like, but it is likely things I don't like has been validated and scrutinized according to the data and analytics that the site collects.
References
Fleischner, M. H. (2016). SEO Made Simple: Insider Secrets for Driving More Traffic to Your Website (5th ed.).
Rayome, A. D. (2017, September 1). How Wayfair used big data and omnichannel retail to transform shopping. Retrieved from ZDNet: https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-wayfair-used-big-data-and-omnichannel-retail-to-transform-shopping/
Stambor, Z. (2014, May 20). Extensive web site testing helps Wayfair grow online sales. Retrieved from Digital Commerce 360: https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2014/05/20/extensive-web-site-testing-helps-wayfair-grow-online-sales/
Wayfair Inc. (2016, January 26). Wayfair Rolls Out Proprietary Big Data Search Engine Marketing Platform in Europe. Retrieved from Business Wire: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160126005319/en/Wayfair-Rolls-Proprietary-Big-Data-Search-Engine
Wood, B. (2015, November 12). Accidental SEO Tests: When On-Page Optimization Ceases to Matter. Retrieved from MOZ: https://moz.com/ugc/accidental-seo-tests-when-on-page-optimization-ceases-to-matter
Wood, B. (2017, February 24). SEO Engineering Public Projects. Retrieved from Wayfair Technology Blog: https://tech.wayfair.com/2017/02/seo-engineering-public-projects/
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