Q.13 For your selected e-commerce site, assess the ease (or not) with which you can find the site using a search engine. Type some of the company’s branded products or key themes into a search engine. Discuss what is returned. Pay particular attention to ‘paid for’ results. Check where competitors appear. Interpret the results. Provide recommendations. Deadline is 6 pm Friday.
I am going to look at the result from the following three major search engines, Google, Msn and Yahoo. Firstly Google search engine. When I typed the keywords ‘Northern Bank’ into the search engine, the company was listed as the first search. The picture below shows the Google results for ‘Northern Bank’. When ‘eBanking’ was typed into Google, Northern Bank came second of normal links. Abbey National a rival bank came top. When I typed ‘savings accounts’ into Google, Northern Bank didn’t even show up as a result.
Now looking at the Msn search engine for the same as searched on Google. When the keywords ‘Northern Bank’ were typed into Msn, the website was top of the normal link, but was never a sponsored link. Again the image below shows the results for ‘Northern Bank’ but from Msn. When ‘eBanking‘ was typed into Msn, Northern Bank came top of the normal search listings, but again didn’t appear as a sponsored link. When I typed ‘savings accounts’ into Msn, the website yet again didn’t show up as either type of link.
Finally looking at the Yahoo search engine. After typing ‘Northern Bank’ into the Yahoo search engine, Northern Bank came top yet again but didn’t show as a sponsored link. Image below shows results from Yahoo for ‘Northern Bank’. When searching for ‘eBanking’, Northern Bank came top again of the normal links. After searching again for ‘savings accounts’, Northern Bank for the third time didn’t show as a result.
After analysing the top three major browsers with the same search keywords, it is fair to say that they are all displaying the Northern Bank website in the same place. For Northern Bank to make sure they become top of the search engine results normally, I would advise them that they spent time with their meta data for the website to try and tweak it to enable search engines to find Northern Bank with keywords like “savings accounts” etc. Tweaking the meta data will hopefully solve the problem with Google placing, Abbey National top when searching for ‘eBanking’.
For Northern Bank to become a sponsored link on all the major search engines, they need to spend more money with their marketing of products, and the company name itself. If they paid the money for a sponsored link spot on all the major search engines, anytime a bank would be mentioned they would appear as a sponsored link on all the pages of results.
