This article was originally published under Practice Ecommerce.

For this monthโ€™s โ€œSEO Report Card,โ€ I thought I would do something different and review a site that didnโ€™t request it. The site I chose, Woot.com, is near and dear to my heart. Iโ€™m an avid Wooter, and have been for the last few years.

Woot.com, partial home page screen capture.

Whatโ€™s 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 sellโ€“at least not until midnight Central Time (U.S.), when the next dayโ€™s product is unveiled. (There are exceptions, as any Wooter will tell you, like when there is a Woot-off.) Itโ€™s brilliant marketing that uses scarcity to drive impulse purchases. Speaking from experience as a Woot customer, Iโ€™ve been way too impulsive way too often.

Wootโ€™s been in the news lately. It was just acquired by Amazon, if you hadnโ€™t already heard. This was really the impetus for me to feature it in this monthโ€™s โ€œSEO 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

Wootโ€™s 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 dayโ€™s deal is presented, so the entire page copy changes out every night at midnight. So whatโ€™s 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 didnโ€™t even have to pay for. Each of these pages is sitting in Googleโ€™s index, ready and waiting to deliver searchers to Wootโ€™s door. Unfortunately, most of these pages arenโ€™t currently targeting any keyword themes. At least thereโ€™s nothing worth targeting. (What do you reckon โ€œWoot: The Community: Woots: Random Crapโ€ is targeting?)

Whatโ€™s 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 Wootโ€™s 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 itโ€™s a โ€œsqueeze page.โ€

Keyword Choices

What would be โ€œheadโ€ terms for Woot? โ€œDealsโ€ and related keywords like โ€œlast minute deals.โ€ I donโ€™t think โ€œbargainsโ€ is as good as โ€œdeals,โ€ but itโ€™s a decent candidate. Perhaps even โ€œelectronicsโ€ and/or โ€œgear.โ€ The home page should be retooled so that it targets one or more of these head terms as its keyword focus. (โ€œLast 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. Itโ€™s unnecessary to target the โ€œWootโ€ brand as a keyword focus because itโ€™s impossible for Woot.com to not rank number 1 for that keyword, due to the strength of its domain authority and the โ€œWootโ€ containing anchor text of the inbound links. And, of course, no one searches for a companyโ€™s tagline, except perhaps for the companyโ€™s CEO.

Title Tags

Incidentally, the first word of every title tag is โ€œWootโ€ across the entire site. This I would definitely change; itโ€™s prime wasted real estate that should be occupied by the pageโ€™s primary keyword theme.

How about โ€œLong Tailโ€ terms? There are plenty of those to target. Any product that they had sold in the past and blogged about, like โ€œMotorola hs820 bluetooth headsetโ€ would be a good candidate. Wootโ€™s already is doing a reasonable job targeting names of past-featured products in title tags. Too bad these pages are dead-ends that donโ€™t compel the searcher to do anything but hit the back button.

โ€œTorsoโ€ terms are in between the head and the Long Tailโ€“not quite popular enough to be considered a head term, but not esoteric and rarely searched for, either. A great example of this would be โ€œroomba,โ€ an oft-returning product to Woot.com that no self-respecting geek should be without. (Itโ€™s a robot vacuum cleaner.)

Now that Amazon owns Woot, it makes even more sense that it ranks for terms such as โ€œroombaโ€ 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 roughโ€“with a ton of textual content (the prose is some of the funniest youโ€™ll 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+