Target Stores – An SEO Challenge

Dear Target,
You are currently spending, the pundits say, over $250,000 per day on pay per click marketing.
That may well generate a decent return. I dunno. Given past ppc issues you’ve had (cough negative keywords cough), I’m willing to bet you can improve. But that’s beside the point.
If you took 1% of that spend and put it into search engine optimization, you could increase sales another 20%, minimum.
Wait! Don’t go away. I’ve done real math-type stuff here. Bear with me:

What you’re missing

Let’s take one term: Nintendo DS.
You’re on page 2 of Google’s search results.
Christmas time there are 4 million searches a month on ‘Nintendo DS’.
Four million
Get a top-5 position and you can grab, what, 10% of those clicks? That gets you a paltry 400,000 additional clicks to your site.
Convert 2% of them to either game or DS unit sales, and I figure you earn at least $200,000-250,000 more a month.
And that’s just one term.

What you need to do

Let’s not worry about fancy stuff like code optimization and link structures just yet.
I’ll give you 3 changes to make. Make these and see what happens:

1. Change all links to your home page to link to ‘www.target.com’. That’s it. Not ‘www.target.com?ref=nav_2_logo’ or whatever. You want to track clicks on the logo? Use event tracking in Google Analytics, or set cookies. Just fix this canonicalization problem, OK? It’ll take even the most overtasked developer about 15 minutes.
2. Change the graphical heading on the Nintendo DS pages to a text heading. That’s another, what, 15 minutes?
3. In your navigation, change ‘DS Lite’ to ‘Nintendo DS Lite’.

Don’t stall. Don’t say it hurts your brand. Don’t tell me it’s not that simple.
It is that simple: Make these changes. Get on page 1. Sell 8,000 more Nintendo DS products per month.

My challenge

That’s my challenge. Make those 3 simple changes. Or, go to your board of directors and let them know you didn’t think 8,000 additional orders was worth an hour of development time.
Oh, and you’ll want to tell them why it’s not worth under $100,000 a month to do that for every product you sell.
K? Thanks!
With affection,
Ian Lurie
PS: If you want to, think about a little content marketing, fixing some duplicate content issues, maybe some code cleanup and content rewriting and stuff. Then things will really get going. E-mail me. Any time.

Related bitterness

• Canonicalization defined
• The social media marketing list