Search Marketing Sage

Changes in site architecture and Search Engine Algorithms had a decimating effect on our client’s rankings for its over 600 store locations.

The Problems

Search Engines can’t fill out a store locator box.  Google-bot can’t type a zip code.  So even though users can easily use these kind of interfaces to find their nearest store location, a search engine can not do that.

As a result, a directory of store locations had to be developed as a path that Search Engines can use to find the store pages.  This was effective until one day in May.  The directory structure could only be accessed from one link on the site, deep in the site map page.  When the Google May Day update hit, the directory structure had all of the store locations 4 clicks away from the home page.  Ever since the May Day update you really need to try to have your content within 2 clicks of your Home Page.

The client also used JavaScript to dynamically pull the addresses, phone numbers and store names from a database and then put that content in JavaScript on the store location pages.  Search Engines can’t really read JavaScript content.  So if a Search Engine somehow did bother to index all the way down to the store location page level (which they didn’t) their wasn’t any readable content with regard to the location of the stores.