Best Buy CEO = No SEOBest Buy’s CEO recently resigned.  It wasn’t his tacky suit, his larger than life mustache or even his horrible selection in ties, but these “style” choices might parallel his understanding of Internet marketing as a force in ecommerce these days.

Web retailers like Amazon, New Egg and even Apple which has a strong brick and mortar presence know how to market online.  They all show up as well for searches meaning to me that they understand SEO.  I’m not saying that Best Buy and their now x-CEO didn’t apply SEO to their business, but I am saying that maybe they didn’t realize how important it was and that focusing on the brick & mortar like past companies Borders and Circuit City did nudges it closer to the financial grave of companies.

I just did a quick search within Google Product Search (i.e., Google Shopping) and typed in “pcs” which is a larger category of products.  While “Best Buy” did show up #2 on the list of retailers, they had less than 1/2 the reviews of Amazon who was #1 and not even 1/10th of New Egg’s reviews which averaged the top rating of 5 stars.  At the bottom of the list was Buy.com, but they had almost 100X’s the reviews of Best Buy and even with that ginormous number of reviews, they averaged a 1/2 star higher than Best Buy.  (by the way, this was for the “HP TouchSmart – 320-1030 – 4 GB RAM – 2.7 GHz” which was the first PC that showed up & a product that I thought more than just Apple could sell).  

Like I mentioned in the post this past September, but if you don’t carry out SEO, you have a smaller chance of surviving as a business entity.  While it’s a huge leap in terms of generalizing, I think it’s becoming more apparent that you really do need to have a strong online marketing presence which incorporates SEO and whatever it will be called in the future: inbound marketing, online marketing, whatever.  However, when I see companies struggle like Best Buy which has built up a very strong brand — considered the 5th best retailer brand according to this website — it goes to show that a brand can only do so much.

 

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