As I make my way through my SEO and Web Metrics class, I’m finding myself noticing all these SEO tricks (and lack of them) across all kinds of websites. Just the other day, I was exploring Menards' website looking for pavers for a patio I am building. As I explored their website, I noticed a lot about how they are using web analytics and SEO to monitor their visitor traffic and optimize their SEO. I also noticed some things they could be doing better.
If you’ve never been to a Menards, it’s a home improvement chain located in the Midwest. With over 300 locations, Menards is the third-largest home improvement chain in the U.S. behind Lowe’s and Home Depot (Forbes, n.d.). If you’re used to going to Lowes and Home Depot, you’ll find Menards to be different and interesting. Most big box home improvement stores have a similar feel with tall rows of products lined in horizontal rows. Menards is different in that they forgo the tall rows for a more open concept, making the store feel expansive. Besides home improvement items such as tools, appliances, lumber, building materials and paint, Menards also offers non-conventional home improvement items like groceries, furniture, clothing, and discount toys and other household items, making it this weird and wonderful hodgepodge of items at lower prices than their competitors.
Figure 1 Screenshot of Menards' Homepage
On-Page SEO
In looking at Menards’ website, I am seeing a few deficiencies in their site SEO. This includes long meta descriptions, a lack of header tags, few keywords both on the page and in their code, inconsistent image alt tags and overuse of images and little actual text. While they are doing some things right, Menards could be optimizing their site better for SEO.
Meta Tags
Menards; meta description is packed with keywords and phrases you’d expect from a home improvement store:
"Save BIG Money on your home improvement needs at over 300 stores in categories like tools, lumber, appliances, pet supplies, lawn and gardening and much more."
At 158 characters, this description barely fits under Moz’s recommendation of 50-160 characters (Moz, 2021), and is being truncated by Google.
With that said, only the word “more” is cut off, so they didn’t lose much. They also used words like “home improvement,” “tools,” “lumber,” “appliances,” “pet supplies,”etc., all words one would use when searching online for home improvement shopping.
Page Content
One very strange thing about Menards homepage is that there is very little actual text on the page. Yes, you will see text, but nearly all of it is images. Without actual text, there is very little content beyond the images for search engines to index, and this lack of quality content can be detrimental to Menards’ SEO efforts. According to Shane Barker, quality content directly affects your search engine rankings and increases credibility with your audience (2021). While Barker states there is a strategy of using Short-Form content (less than 1200 words per page) for businesses who are established and looking to convey to concise information to ready-to-purchase consumers, Menards is using a bad web design practice of relying on nearly all images and no actual text. This includes the logo and tagline which are an image, all header font and other text. The only real text is in the navigation, footer links, and text that accompanies the product images. In fact, there isn’t a single H1 tag on the page- any actual text that appears to be a header is actually styled that way, so no header tags are used. This also means that there are almost no keywords on the page since there is such little text- even the word “Menards” is only used 5 times on the page, and most of them are in the navigation and footer. I would suggest a website redesign that uses more actual text, utilizes header tags and includes more keywords on the actual homepage. By the way, this styling occurs on other landing pages such as their Appliances landing page, but when you get to actual products, those pages have actual text and header tags (although the highest header tag they use is the product title which is an H3 tag).
Speaking of images, Menards is using alt tags and aria tags (aria tags are similar to alt tags in that they help with accessibility when no other text is provided). For instance, an image of a table and two chairs has the label: “Stylish and sturdy coordinating wooden patio furniture - 11% off. Shop now.” However, this level of tag detail is not consistent across all images- an image of a leaf blower just has “leaf blower” as it’s alt tag. This inconsistency could become problematic for someone utilizing the alt tags for accessibility, as well as being detrimental to SEO efforts since alt tags are used by web crawlers to find and identify images. I would suggest they streamline their alt tags and aria labels to be more consistent so that web crawlers can mine this data easier, as well as improving accessibility.
There are a few things Menards are doing right with page content. At the top of every page is a robust navigation with a hierarchal structure. There’s actually two navigation bars, with the first one having links for customers (Order Tacker, Rebate Center, Credit Center, etc.), and a second for their products. The products navigation accordions out as you search for departments or products, making it easy to find most things. Also included in the navigation is a Search bar that includes a history of previous searches and offers suggestions as you type, which is very useful. Menards also is using keywords in their URLs (for instance, the Appliances landing page URL is https://www.menards.com/main/appliances/c-5570.htm), and they use the keywords in their page titles (the Appliances landing page is “Appliances at Menards,” or a specific product page is titled the full product name ). However, they are not using keywords in most of their image URL’s (like this URL for a wooden bench- https://hw.menardc.com/main/items/media/SOUTH018/ProductMedium/273-0836_P_RF.jpg), so I would recommend looking at restructuring their image URL naming convention to include more keywords.
More Website Design Thoughts
An important part of web analytics is whether your site is designed well for a good customer experience. This is crucial because if the user experience is bad, visitors won’t stick around or come back. As stated earlier, Menards has a good navigation and search bar, their site has a clean design with bright colors and detailed images, and despite the overuse of images to convey texts actually has a lot of good information. Their site is also responsive, meaning it’s designed in such a way as to scale for any device, making it look good on a large desktop or a mobile phone. While some of the design looks a bit outdated (like font choices), this is part of Menards’ folksy theme and thus fits their branding. In all, I would say the look and feel of Menards’ site is good (not great), but it is easy to navigate and is responsive.
Gathering Consumer Insights and Behavior
Google Tools
In looking at their source code, I see a that Menards has their site verified through Google, a crucial step in controlling how Google crawls and indexes their site. They also have a Site Map, making it easier for search indexes to crawl and index their site. I also see Google Tag Manager code, which is useful for creating and managing tagging snippets for traffic analysis, tracking events on page, and other visitors analytics. Finally, while I am not seeing the specific Google Analytics tracking code I am used to seeing, I do see something called “analyticsDataLayer.” Data Layer is a JavaScript variable that allows for custom Google Analytics integration, as well as a connection to GTM (Srivastava, 2017). This tool offers improved analytics for things like event tracking, form submissions, and persistent ID tracking. Menards appears to be using a more sophisticated approach to using Google tools, so I think they are good there.
Qubit
I also noticed during my search of Menard’s code that they have something called Qubit Analytics installed. According to their website, Qubit is an AI commerce tool for advanced customer insights and personalization. Their tools include journey customization, personalized content, product recommendations, product insights, consumer questionnaires and more. I think this level of personalization is interesting and is probably powering what products I’m seeing when on their site.
Facebook Pixel
According to the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome extension, Menards is not using Facebook Pixel. Facebook Pixel is a chunk of code embedded into a website that tracks what the user is doing on that site and then syncs that activity to the user’s Facebook account (Vranicar, 2020). This is beneficial to the website owner because now they can target ads on Facebook properties to these users, and Facebook gets valuable targeting data for future advertising. Thus, Menards is missing out on this opportunity by not including a Facebook Pixel, and I would recommend including this valuable piece of code to close the advertising loop between their site visitors and Facebook users.
Newsletter Signup
Menards is using a newsletter to reach out to consumers via email. They have a sign-up button on every page in their footer, and I triggered a pop-up on my second page in- sadly, I did not get a screenshot of the pop-up since my years of closing pop-ups kicked in and I closed it, never to trigger it again even in incognito, but I saw it and it does exist. While the pop-up had an input box to add your email from the pop-up, I found the link that takes you to their newsletter lacking. The form on this page looks like it was made on 2001- I would suggest redesigning this page to feel cleaner and more modern for a better user experience.
Mobile Pop-up Questionnaire
I noticed that when viewing Menards’ website on my phone that I got an interesting questionnaire box at the top of the homepage.
See the little gray box at the very top? I didn’t get this in all my bouncing around on desktop. It asked me a series of questions, like if I was shopping as a business or if I had a specific project I was working on. After the third question, I got a “Welcome to Menards- Thanks!” box. Unfortunately, I could not inspect this element to see what was powering it, but I’m sure it is designed to gather insights about shoppers. As a consumer, however, I was disappointed in the payoff- all I got was “Thanks!” I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t a thanks, but I guess the box achieved its goal of getting information from me (it could use a better design).
UTMs
Surprisingly, I could not find a single example of a UTM being used in a link on Menards’ website. UTM code, or Urchin Tracking Module, is a bit of code added to the end of a URL that enables you to track visitor data to that link (Stanis, 2019). This helps you fine-tune your analytics to discover more about the campaign, source, medium, etc. that led someone to that link. Menards should consider adding UTM codes to their links so they can better understand how people get to their content and create more effective campaigns in the future.
Conclusion
Menards is an interesting mix of good and bad web and SEO practices. It seems like they are trying to be ultra-forward thinking (like AI-powered personalization and advanced analytic tools), but they are lacking keyword optimization and their lack of text on page is odd. I also think the user experience is muddled with a mix of good and bad design practices (font choices, outdated form design). Menards seems to be tracking consumers well, but they could work on how they are getting people to the site.
References
Barker, S. (2021, March 18). Short form vs. long form content: The best comparison ever (Updated March 2021). Shane Barker Blog. Retrieved from https://shanebarker.com/blog/short-form-vs-long-form-content/#Short-Form_vs_Long-Form_Content_Understanding_the_Buyers_Journey
Forbes. (n.d.). Menard on the Forbes America's Largest Private Companies list. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/companies/menard/?sh=725fdc335c30
Moz. (2021). Meta description. Retrieved from https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description#:~:text=Meta%20descriptions%20can%20be%20any,descriptions%20between%2050%E2%80%93160%20characters
Srivastava, K. (2017, September 15). How to leverage Data Layer with Google Analytics. Grazitti Interactive. Retrieved from https://www.grazitti.com/blog/how-to-leverage-data-layer-with-google-analytics/#:~:text=By%20%7C%20Analytics,portability%20and%20ease%20of%20implementation
Stanis, J. (2019, October 19). What is UTM code and how to use it for traffic analysis. Weidert Group. Retrieved from https://www.weidert.com/blog/what-is-utm-code
Vranicar, D. (2020, March 29). The Facebook Pixel explained. Oberlo. Retrieved from https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-pixel
Hi Nick,
ReplyDeleteI love Menards so I had to read what your analysis showed.
I’m impressed at what you were able to uncover with your analysis and yet wonder how a chain of over 300 stores a digital marketing department would not have addressed these issues. It surprises me yet makes me think what awesome career opportunities there are out there.
Menards seems to have addressed their meta description, but I agree that it’s surprising their use of images over text when the search engines are looking for text and this has to affect their results in customer searches according to Barker. Would love to hear their digital marketing staff explain it.
Aria tags is a new term for me, but you explain the difference between that and alt tags well. I can’t image Menard’s digital marketing department would not streamline their tags for the web crawlers because so much of SEO optimization revolves around it. Any guess as to why? I image that their digital marketing department analyses Lowes and Home Depot daily and I wonder what they feel they need to match (and not match). When Menard’s staff does keyword searches do they come up on the top page of Google, or does one of their competitors and how do they address it?
I was not very familiar with Data Layer and that it allows for custom Google Analytics integration and connects to Google Tag Manager. Qubit Analytics was a new term to me also. Thanks for including that as it sparked my interest and got me to search and read up more about it. The number of tools available to a digital marketing is so massive and each can provide unique information, but could it also cause information overload. What and how does Menards choose to boil it down to and do they leave off some of the things you reviewed? Do they feel diminishing marginal utility from all the data? Why would they not use UTM? They must be aware of it.
Thanks for a great analysis of Menards!
So the answer your question about images, my guess is they have a badly organized content management system. I've dealt with several different CMS', and if you aren't diligent about naming conventions, it's really easy to mess up things like consistent image tags. One person might be typing them in this way, another that way. The other option is their CMS is automatically filling in the alt tags from image titles or some other info. Again, if you aren't consistently entering the same naming convention, this is the result. These are guesses, but I have had these same issues n the past, and when you are dealing with thousands of pieces of media, it can be very easy to make mistakes like this if you don't have standards.
DeleteI too find it strange how Menards can be so advanced on some things and so out of date on others. Perhaps it's a conscious effort to put energy into certain things and not others. However, building websites out of images is just bad design all around.