How Wayfair Makes the Most of SEO

“A zillion things home” is the tagline for the Boston-based online retailer Wayfair.  Co-owners Steve Conine and Niraj Shah started the fast growing private company in 2002 by selling furniture and audio video products from their online store RacksAndStands.com.  

During their first year in business, Conine and Shah, whose company was known as CSN, made $450,000 in revenue with 1,667 customers.  As they added more product categories to their offerings, the company sprouted, and by 2012, revenue had grown to $600 million with more than 6.4 million customers (Wayfair History, 2014).

Today the company sells more than 4.5 million items in 25 categories with products ranging from birdhouses and beanbag chairs to porch swings and gun safes (Wehrum, 2012). In 2013, Wayfair reported revenue at $915 million making it “one of the few online-only retailers, other than Amazon, [...] to reach annual sales in the range of $1 billion” (Alspach, 2014, para. 2).

Promoting the Website

“Being really good at search is a critical piece of Wayfair's success” (Frick, 2013, para. 6). For many years, instead of selling items on one central website, Conine and Shah purchased multiple domain names with individual product names and sold niche products through those websites.  

By using website names that matched up with keywords used in internet product searches, CSN was easily able to appear in first page on Google.  If someone searched for hot plates, for example, it was likely that CSN’s HotPlates.com would appear in the top 10 search results.  However, as CSN’s niche websites grew to nearly 300 and Google diminished the importance of keywords in URLs, CSN decided to combine their niche websites into one e-commerce marketplace: Wayfair. (Haden, 2012).

Since Wayfair has an unusually large selection of most of the products they offer, it has made their website [search engine optimization, or SEO] friendly (Lynley, 2012).  There are now large teams of staff who focus on writing search friendly content for the website.  

The company also aggressively participates in paid search advertising on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other online retail venues, but Google still controls a lot of their inbound traffic (Lynley, 2012).  

In 2012, to help grow the Wayfair brand, the company started ramping up the development of custom products under the Castleton Homes name and launched their first television advertising campaign (Giammona, 2013).

Website Data and Analytics

According to the Wayfair’s website privacy policy (2014), the company uses the IP addresses of their visitors to identify users and their shopping carts, gather general demographics, and diagnose problems with their server.  By collecting cookies from visitors, Wayfair can enhance their online display advertising and personalize the shopping experience.

In addition to capturing the typical visitor metrics, Wayfair uses BloomReach software to deliver automatic thematic product pages for onsite searches.  Therefore, if someone searches for baby blankets, BloomReach software will create a Baby Blankets themed search results page.  There is always a chance that customers will search for keyword terms that a company has not anticipated, but “Bloomreach notices those unpredictable searches and responds to them with content” (Haden, 2012, para. 9).

Wayfair also uses voice of customer (VoC) software to capture additional visitor information.  Feedback collected through ForeSee’s customer experience analytics program allows Wayfair to “[measure] several key drivers, or elements, of the customer experience” in order to drive shopping satisfaction (Freed & Feinberg, 2013, p. 41).  Wayfair is able to combine their website analytics with the VoC analytics to make the adjustments to their forms, presentation, customer service, and other website elements that may negatively affect a shopper’s onsite experience.

The data collected is also used to promote advertising opportunities for businesses interested in reaching the types of customers that shop Wayfair.com. According to Wayfair Media Solutions (2014), Wayfair’s shoppers skew female by 40 percent, are in their mid-thirties, make more than $100,000 per year, and are well-educated.  Wayfair offers advertising opportunities to national and global audiences, and even allows bricks-and-mortar retailers to target customers living near their stores with Wayfair’s Get It Near Me software.

Data Collection Recommendation

Wayfair’s competitors, such as Amazon and Williams and Sonoma, have a recognizable brand and top the charts when it comes to online retail sales. Since Wayfair changed their name and their business model less than three years ago, they have put forth their best effort to brand their online retail business as the best place for people to shop for home goods.  

Aside from organic search, paid search, television advertising, and repeat customers, Wayfair is heavily involved in social engagement on multiple platforms. The company’s Facebook fan page has more than 1 million likes and the content they post is quite visual with photos of home spaces inspired by products from Wayfair’s website.  Each post also includes a link to a landing page where products can be purchased.  The Wayfair Pinterest board has multiple boards for home decorating, do-it-yourself projects, and recipes.  Many of the pinned items in the inspiration boards are from Wayfair’s website or from the boards of the brands they carry.  

Twitter is used to post simple design ideas and tips with links to product pages.  Their YouTube channel contains their television commercials and a special video blog section with a host who talks about projects that can be done around the home. The Wayfair blog incorporates posts by guest bloggers who are known for their home decorating advice and do-it-yourself projects. Finally, Wayfair’s Google+ page is updated to reflect many of the posts seen on Facebook and the company blog.

With such a robust and active social media effort, Wayfair should consider tracking their social media analytics.  By integrating a competitive analytics tool such as Moz, Wayfair can isolate search engine crawl issues, pinpoint keyword targeting, see how their social media efforts rank with their biggest competitors, as well as compare social media trends to their competitors’ and monitor the quality and quantity of Wayfair’s brand mentions online.

The analysis will help Wayfair determine which inbound marketing efforts may be falling short, and they will be able to focus their efforts on the social media content and activities that are working best for them.  They will also be able to test other activities that their competitors are successful at implementing to see if it could also work for Wayfair.

References

References

Alspach, K. (2014, January 31). Wayfair sales surged to $913 million in 2013. Boston Business Journal. Retrieved from http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/techflash/2014/01/wayfair-sales-reached-915m-in-2013.html 

Freid, L., and Feinberg, E. (2013). The ForeSee experience index (EXI): 2013 U.S. retail edition [White paper]. Retrieved from http://www.foresee.com/research-white-papers/downloads/foresee-experience-index-2013-us-retail-edition.pdf 

Frick, W. (2013, February 4). Why Wayfair works when most e-commerce fails. BostInno. Retrieved from http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2013/02/04/why-wayfair-works-when-most-e-commerce-fails/

Giammona, C. (2013, July 18). Wayfair.com wants you to say its name. CNN.com. Retrieved from http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/07/18/wayfair-com-wants-you-to-say-its-name/ 

Haden, R. (2012, April 11). Lessons from Wayfair.com. Haden Interactive. Retrieved from 

http://www.hadeninteractive.com/lessons-from-wayfair-com/ 

Lynley, M. (2012, January 10). This guy’s under-the-radar-startup brought in $500 million last year, and now it’s breaking free from Google. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/this-guys-company-brought-in-500-million-last-year- and-now-its-breaking-free-from-google-2012-1 

Media solutions from wayfair.com. (2014). Wayfair.com. Accessed February 23, 2014 from http://advertising.wayfair.com/index.php 

Privacy policy. (2014). Wayfair.com. Accessed February 22, 2014 from http://www.wayfair.com/customerservice/general_info.php#privacy  

Wayfair history. (2014). Wayfair.com. Accessed February 22, 2014 from http://www.wayfair.com/about/history.php

Wehrum, K. (2012, April 3). Special report: Wayfair’s road to $1 billion. Inc. Retrieved from  

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201204/kasey-wehrum/the-road-to-1-billion-growth- special-report.html