Nordstrom SEO Case Study

These days SEO is especially important for e-commerce sites. The more traffic that is directed to your site, the more chances you have to influence prospective customers, which gives you more opportunities to convert. Today's post is a case study for the posh fashion retailer Nordstrom, in which we will explore how they use web analytics and SEO to monitor and optimize traffic and customer behavior.

Company Background:

Nordstrom is a luxury retail store chain, which originated as a shoe store in Seattle, Washington (Nordstrom, 2021). By 1960, the company had expanded to 8 locations across Washington and Oregon and was the largest independent shoe chain in the country (Nordstrom, 2021). “Looking for new ways to spread its wings, Nordstrom ventured into the women's clothing market with the purchase of Seattle-based Best's Apparel in 1963,” added men’s and children’s clothing lines in 1966, and the company went public in 1971 (Nordstrom, 2021). 

Upon entering the new millennium, Nordstrom entered into several strategic partnerships both in the U.S. and Europe in which they acquired several luxury boutiques to solidify their stake in the market. “In 2012, Nordstrom became the only major U.S. retailer to sell a broad assortment from the renowned British fashion brands Topshop and Topman,” and later acquired the personalized clothing service Trunk Club in 2014 as traditional retail began to dissipate (Nordstrom, 2021). 

“Nordstrom describes itself as ‘Customer Obsessed and Digitally Enabled’” with a connective system that enables all salespeople to access inventory from all stores, distribution centers, and Nordstrom.com (Spector, 2017). 

As shown in the Statista (2021) table below, Nordstrom customers mostly shop in-store, likely due to the experiential nature of Nordstrom's business model. However, just as most retailers were, Nordstrom's business was greatly disrupted by COVID-19, and digital sales accounted for 55% of their sales worldwide. 

With the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, as well as the continuing shift of consumer preference to online shopping, Nordstrom has begun accelerating its focus to online selling, making it an especially important time to optimize their SEO. 

Strategy:

Using SEMrush(2021), we will explore Nordstrom's digital strategy through their efforts to drive traffic to their site. 

For the month of March 2021,  Nordstrom.com received 40.5 Million (M) visitors to their site. This total can be broken further down by each source: 

• Direct: 46.9%
• Referral: 26.8%
• Organic Search: 20.3%
• Paid Search: 4.0%
• Social: 2.0%

For the purposes of this project, we will focus on Organic and Paid traffic and how Nordstrom compares to top competitors such as Macy's, Bloomingdales, Dillard's, and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Organic:

With over 3.5 Billion searches on Google alone each day, keywords are especially important to direct these searches to Nordstrom's site (Wordstream, n.d)

Nordstrom has over 3M organic keywords, 2M of which are unique to their site, 82.5K that position them as the #1 result on the SERP, and 891.2K that position them in the Top 10 (SEMrush, 2021). Most of the organic keywords for which Nordstrom is shown in the number 1 position are specific longtail keywords that are based on current fashion trends or commonly searched questions.

Using SEMrush's Keyword Gap tool, we were able to see that there is a significant amount of overlap in keyword usage for each of the aforementioned competitors:

162.2K keywords are shared amongst all above brands listed, but Nordstrom shares 1.6M keywords with Macy's, which is by and large their biggest competition for SEO. 

In total, Nordtrom's focus on continuously adding relevant keywords to their site have so far resulted in Organic Search Traffic of 35.7M visitors to Nordstrom.com for the month of April.

Paid

Conversely, Nordstrom does not prioritize paid search efforts in their digital strategy. The least of all competitors, Nordstrom uses less than 400 paid keywords which account for 455.7K visitors to their site--a fraction of organic search traffic. 

There is also little overlap with paid keywords and there are no shared keywords for which each of the domains have rankings (SEMrush, 2021):

However, they also participate in Display Advertising in which they have a broad reach to the audience based on their interests using publishers in such industries, including (SEMrush, 2021):

• Media & Entertainment (46%)
• Shopping (43%)
• Technology (28%)
• Lifestyle & Hobbies (21%)
• Beauty & Wellness (19%)

Interestingly enough, of the audience targeted through these ads, 55% reached are Male, and 47% are between the ages of 25 to 44 year-olds.

Data Collection & Usage

As a company that has been thriving for more than a century, Nordstrom surely has collected an immense amount of data. In recent years, Nordstrom has invested heavily into technology enabled data collection to better understand their core base of customers as well as attract new customers, and provide personalized experiences to all. "One way Nordstrom does this is by acquiring volumes of Big Data coming from their website and in-store sales, as well as through their social networks like Facebook (over 2 million likes), Pinterest (over 4.5 million followers) and Twitter (about 360,490 followers)" (Yahoo Business, 2020).

In March of 2018, Nordstrom purchased two messaging platforms, BevyUp and MessageYes, to enable personal messaging to customers; BevyUp is used to help give customers style advice while MessageYes sends personalized messages from which the customers can directly purchase items (Townsend, 2018). 

Further, the retailer uses Machine Learning (ML) to learn from historical data and collect data through the various touch-points in the customer journey (HBR, 2018). "After integrating data collected across various channels, Nordstrom leveraged ML to develop an “inferred scoring” system that allowed it to improve its marketing campaign efficiency and increase its email-to-dollar conversion by around 25%" (HBR, 2018). 

Nordstrom also uses consumer data collection tools. Using Facebook Pixel Helper extension through Chrome, we were able to identify that Nordstrom does in fact use Facebook Pixel on their site. Also, Nordstrom uses UTMs to track traffic sources which was determined through examining the URL after following a shopping link through their Instagram page.

Recommendations:

Overall, Nordstrom is clearly winning in a number of areas with their SEO strategy. However, the site itself has some issues. While I only enabled SEMrush to audit 20,000 pages, the site health results were shockingly low, with a score of only 58% performance. For reference, Top 10% of websites average 92% performance, and shopping (e-commerce) websites average 77%. 

Some issues SEMrush reported are:

• 100,000 internal links are broken
• 23,675 hreflang conlicts
• 339 pages returned 4XX errors
  

As shown in the image below, the On Page SEO Checker details different areas of improvement that could increase Nordstrom's organic traffic potential by over 1000%.

While that number should be taken with a grain of salt, I am confident that addressing even just the three aforementioned site issues would further provide Nordstrom advantage in their SEO strategy.

References:

HBR. (2018, November 14). Nordstrom: How to leverage the deluge of data as a competitive advantage. Retrieved April 18, 2021, from https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/nordstrom-how-to-leverage-the-deluge-of-data-as-a-competitive-advantage/

Nordstrom. (2021). Company History. Retrieved February 15, 2021, from https://www.nordstrom.com/browse/about/company-history

SEMrush (2021). Nordstrom Project. https://www.semrush.com/siteaudit/campaign/5180041/review/#overview

SEMrush (2021). Nordstrom Project. https://www.semrush.com/analytics/overview/?searchType=domain&q=nordstrom.com

Statista Sabanoglu, T. (24 March 2021). In-store and digital sales share of Nordstrom worldwide from 2015 to 2020. Retrieved April 17, 2021 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1035249/nordstrom-retail-sales-share-by-sales-channel-worldwide/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20the%20in%2Dstore,channel%20accounted%20for%2055%20percent.

Spector, R. (2017, October 20). How Nordstrom adapted to the e-commerce challenge. Retrieved February 14, 2021, from https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2017/10/15/nordstrom-adapted-e-commerce-challenge/

Townsend, T. (21 August 2018). How Nordstrom tapped into a century’s worth of customer data. Retrieved April 18, 2021 from https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/21/how-nordstrom-tapped-into-a-centurys-worth-of-customer-data/

Yahoo Business. (2020, May 28). Retailers using Big data: The secret Behind Amazon And Nordstrom's success - Business Resource Center. Retrieved April 18, 2021, from https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/resource-center/retailers-using-big-data-secret-behind-amazon-nordstrom-145852413/