Schwan’s reconciles the customer experience and search engine optimization
What a marketer wants to put on a web site to attract customers can conflict with what’s needed to satisfy search engine spiders. It’s a disconnect that can cause friction between retailers and search engine marketing agencies, says James Siderits, marketing manager for Schwan’s Home Service Inc., Marshall, MN.
Siderits says he and the people at his agency, OneUpWeb of Suttons Bay, MI, share a laugh now when they look back on their differences over whether to put a site map on the home page of the retailer’s site. It wasn’t funny two years ago, however, when Schwan’s was redesigning the site and the agency was offering suggestions to optimize it for natural search.
“We never had a site map before and we didn’t really see what a site map would do for the customer experience,” says Siderits. Gradually, the agency won over the skeptical crew at Schwan’s. “They were diligent about educating us and convincing us as to why for optimization a site map could be beneficial.” The map, they learned, would encourage search engine spiders to explore multiple pages and thus find more relevancy to the keyword. More relevancy would result in a listing higher in the natural search results.
“I remember it as an initial pain point, but now there is a site map up on the Schwan’s site,” says Siderits. “It is used primarily for optimization but it still has some value for customers who look for site maps and want to navigate a site that way. We were a little bit stubborn. There has to be a little bit of give and take between building that customer experience you want and the search engine optimization.”
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