Woolworths – Company Focus. Woolworths has obviously had a bad time of things lately.
With the company going into administration and the 1000s of employees facing unemployment just weeks before Christmas, it’s not been happy reading. Woolworths Decline.

However, one shining light for the Woolworths brand over the last 12 months has been their online presence. Whether or not they have been selling products through their website is another discussion, but their positioning in the search engines has been good –

and for certain keywords, it has been excellent.

But then this happened:

The Reason: Woolworths Website holding page throughout the site

This appears on every page linked to. So all the readable content has gone, all meta and all internal links. This blank page is all Google sees. Furthermore bounce rate is therefore 100% and we all know what that means.

Woolworths' keywords fell off a cliff in mid November in Google UK

Previously Woolies was in the top five SERPS for “Toys” “Outdoor Toys” “camp Rock” and many other children’s related purchases. At Christmas, these would be searched millions of times and the purchase rate is for many retailers better in December than for the rest of the year put together. So why did they take the site down?

As you will see above from our Keyword line tracker Woolworths.co.uk the effect of the maintenance page is stark. Woollies online has now taken the same hit as its fellow High Street Stores have – and fallen off a cliff.

Is there a way back?

The Woolies site was getting some very good positons, and closing it down like this, before the business has properly shut-up shop, seems premature. Furthermore, the site itself had a PageRank of 5, certainly a sellable asset to anyone in retail.

But what we can conlude from this is that links, by themselves, will not get you good results.

In a recent news release John Lewis stated it has achieved record figures for online sales:

“Internet sales were driven by demand for gifts, Christmas decorations, furnishing accessories, home electronics and toys.” The Release stated, But how do they get on in the SERPS?.


The John Lewis website is of a high standard, in both design, content and for many keyword related searches. It ranks highly for a wide variety of keyword searches, reflecting its diverse product range.

Using our tools we can see how John Lewis has done for those sectors stated, within Search. John Lewis does well for “electrical appliances” – one of their stated successful terms, but do not perform well in the other areas offering no real consistency. In fact for some, they have even taken a drop over the last few months.

The first chart shows Johnlewis.com performance in Google UK, for the selected keywords over a period of 6 months, from position one to positon 100.

Competitors such as Tesco Direct, perform much better across these diverse product areas showing consistency and generally keeping on page one and two.

Chart 2 shows direct.tesco’s progress in the Google UK.

John Lewis obviously achieves results on the back of its brand equity and from online shoppers who have already experienced the high quality of service. Traffic and repeat custom would rise if they performed better in the SERPS. Having a successful SEO service would undoubtedly help.

For more information please do not hesitate to get in touch.