This article was originally published under Practice Ecommerce.
For this monthโs โSEO Report Card,โ I thought I would do something different and review a site that didnโt request it. The site I chose, Woot.com, is near and dear to my heart. Iโm an avid Wooter, and have been for the last few years.

Whatโs Woot.com?
Woot.com is a very special ecommerce site: It sells only one product per day. Granted it has several spin-off sites now, such as Wine.woot.com and Shirt.woot.com, but still the premise across the main site and the spin-offs remains the same: Only one product is for sale on a given day, and when that product sells out, there is nothing else to sellโat least not until midnight Central Time (U.S.), when the next dayโs product is unveiled. (There are exceptions, as any Wooter will tell you, like when there is a Woot-off.) Itโs brilliant marketing that uses scarcity to drive impulse purchases. Speaking from experience as a Woot customer, Iโve been way too impulsive way too often.
Wootโs been in the news lately. It was just acquired by Amazon, if you hadnโt already heard. This was really the impetus for me to feature it in this monthโs โSEO Report Card.โ Amazon.com is arguably one of the best-optimized ecommerce sites on the planet. And yet Woot.com sits on the other end of the spectrum. Dare we call it anti-SEO?
Home Page, Secondary Pages
Wootโs unique business model poses a significant challenge for search engine optimization. There is no online catalog full of SKUs to present to the search engines. Nor is there an array of categories and sub-categories with keyword themes to target. Even the home page is lacking a stable keyword theme. The home page is where the dayโs deal is presented, so the entire page copy changes out every night at midnight. So whatโs there to optimize? Plenty. Specifically, thousands of blog posts and tens of thousands of discussion forum posts, the latter being user-generated content that Woot didnโt even have to pay for. Each of these pages is sitting in Googleโs index, ready and waiting to deliver searchers to Wootโs door. Unfortunately, most of these pages arenโt currently targeting any keyword themes. At least thereโs nothing worth targeting. (What do you reckon โWoot: The Community: Woots: Random Crapโ is targeting?)
Whatโs the point of attracting a Google searcher to the site from a months-old blog post that talks about a product that is no longer available for sale? The point is to get this prospect onto Wootโs list. Once the prospect is on their list, Woot has permission to start and maintain a dialogue with that prospect, and to turn him or her into a rabid fan. Every blog post, indeed every page of the site, should be treated like itโs a โsqueeze page.โ
Keyword Choices
What would be โheadโ terms for Woot? โDealsโ and related keywords like โlast minute deals.โ I donโt think โbargainsโ is as good as โdeals,โ but itโs a decent candidate. Perhaps even โelectronicsโ and/or โgear.โ The home page should be retooled so that it targets one or more of these head terms as its keyword focus. (โLast minute deals and bargains in electronics and gear,โ for instance.) Right now, the primary keyword focus for the home page is its brand name and its tag. Itโs unnecessary to target the โWootโ brand as a keyword focus because itโs impossible for Woot.com to not rank number 1 for that keyword, due to the strength of its domain authority and the โWootโ containing anchor text of the inbound links. And, of course, no one searches for a companyโs tagline, except perhaps for the companyโs CEO.
Title Tags
Incidentally, the first word of every title tag is โWootโ across the entire site. This I would definitely change; itโs prime wasted real estate that should be occupied by the pageโs primary keyword theme.
How about โLong Tailโ terms? There are plenty of those to target. Any product that they had sold in the past and blogged about, like โMotorola hs820 bluetooth headsetโ would be a good candidate. Wootโs already is doing a reasonable job targeting names of past-featured products in title tags. Too bad these pages are dead-ends that donโt compel the searcher to do anything but hit the back button.
โTorsoโ terms are in between the head and the Long Tailโnot quite popular enough to be considered a head term, but not esoteric and rarely searched for, either. A great example of this would be โroomba,โ an oft-returning product to Woot.com that no self-respecting geek should be without. (Itโs a robot vacuum cleaner.)
Now that Amazon owns Woot, it makes even more sense that it ranks for terms such as โroombaโ because it can direct incoming search traffic to the Roomba category on Amazon (as well as any related deals listed on the Deals.woot.com aggregator site).
Summary
In all, the Woot.com site is a diamond in the roughโwith a ton of textual content (the prose is some of the funniest youโll ever see on an ecommerce site). In my view, that content could easily be tweaked to drive much more search traffic and many more conversions, such as opt-ins, if not actual purchases.
SEO Report Card
WOOT.COM
Home Page Content D
Inbound Links and PageRank A-
Indexation A
Internal Hierarchical Linking Structure C-
HTML Templates and CSS A-
Secondary Page Content C-
Keyword Choices C
Title Tags C+
URLs C+
OVERALL GPA C+



