seo paper

Sarah Fuson and Brandon Travis SEO Analysis & Recommendations for SportsAuthority.com Intro to Web Publishing November 19, 2015

Keyword Research (CR)

The three keywords/phrases I think will drive the most traffic:

1. Tennis Racquets

2. Head Tennis Racquets

3. Tennis Racquet Swing Styles

Current rankings of my 3 keywords:

Rankings for SportsAuthority.com

Keywords Google Bing Yahoo

Tennis Racquets 54 No No

Head Tennis

Racquets

24 No No

Tennis Racquet

Swing Styles

18 No No

Rankings for DicksSportingGoods.com

Keywords Google Bing Yahoo

Tennis Racquets No No No

Head Tennis

Racquets

No No No

Tennis Racquet

Swing Styles

No No No

Explanation of our choice:

Tennis Racquets is the keyword focus given to us by the client. It is generic and with give

us something to start with when researching both websites.

We decided to go with Head Tennis Racquets because when researching popular tennis

racquet brands, we found that head is one of the top racquets that professionals and tennis

players here at Northwest prefer to use. With that being said, we thought that Head tennis

racquets would be a good keyword/phrase for this project.

When thinking about a third keyword we decided to go with tennis racquet swing style.

We thought about doing different brands but we decided that more than one brand keyword

would be too much. From there we talked to a Northwest Missouri State tennis player and asked

what he looks for when searching for new tennis racquets and one thing that he mentioned was

the swing style. From there we looked into that as a keyword in Mikes Marketing Tools and

come to find out that it is a good keyword to use. .

Below is two charts to show the range of popularity between our three keywords. The

first graph is from Google Trends and shows the difference between the three different

keywords. The second screenshot is a table from the Google Keyword Planner which shows

popularity of the three keywords.

Google Trends

Google Keyword Planner

Current Traffic

SportsAuthority.com Monthly Unique Visitors: 2,717,651

DicksSportingGoods.com Monthly Unique Visitors: 6,412,676

Analysis:

Sports Authority

Quantcast

According to Quantcast’s website, Sports Authority does not have Quantcast tools built

in to track their traffic. However, Quantcast still provided data about the traffic at Sports

Authority. Quantcast estimated that SportsAuthority.com receives approximately 915,200 unique

visitors each month. This ranks SportsAuthority.com at 2,168 in the United States when it comes

to visitors. As you can see by the graph below, Sports Authority has a flat line for the most part

when it comes to visitors in a given month between October 31st, 2014 and September 29th,

2015.

As with most traffic, there are also some outliers. For example in December 2014,

SportsAuthority’s visitor number jumped to 2.1 million. My guess is this can be related to the

Christmas shopping season in full swing as more and more people were looking online to find

athletic gifts. For the rest of the data shown on the graph, monthly traffic ranged between 1.2

million visitors per month and 838,000 visitors per month.

Compete

Compete lists the number of visitors for SportsAuthority.com as being much higher than

Quantcast indicated. The unique monthly visitors for the month of September of 2015 are listed

at 2.24 million (a 40 percent increase over Quantcast’s numbers). We also see the same trends

with Compete’s results as we did on Quantcast’s report with a very sizable increase in traffic

during the month of December 2015. The monthly visitors for SportsAuthority ranges between

two million and three million visitors per month with the three million being more popular

during the summer months.

DicksSportingGoods.com

Quantcast

As with Sports Authority, Dick’s Sporting Goods also did not have Quantcast tracking

for traffic built into their website but there was still some data available. Quantcast listed Dick’s

Sporting Goods monthly visitors at approximately 1.6 million (a roughly 57% increase over

Sports Authority). The time frame of data provided for Dick’s Sporting Goods is the exact same

as Sports Authority (October 31st, 2014 to September 29th, 2015). The 1.6 million monthly

viewers that Quantcast recorded placed Dick’s Sporting Goods at a rank of 1,141 in the United

States.

In addition, I saw the same outliers on their site visitors. For December of 2014, Dick’s

Sporting Goods jumped up to 3.6 million visitors which I think also is represented by the holiday

shopping season. Outside of December 2014, there was a range of 1.5 million monthly visitors

up to 2.1 million monthly visitors. A graph of all this information is included below.

Compete.com

Compete had the traffic for Dick’s Sporting Goods listed at a much higher level than

Quantcast. Compete lists Dick’s Sporting Goods unique visitors for the month of September

2015 at 5.77 million and according to Compete, that is a 16 percent drop over August of 2015.

Compete also has a wide range of numbers across the last 12 month spectrum (September 2014 –

September 2015). There is are slightly more visitors during the May to August time frame and I

think that can be attributed to the summer months and more people getting outside and playing

sports. In addition, the visitors during the month of December 2014 skyrocketed to almost 10

million in just that month. Overall, Compete lists the visitor number as much higher than

Quantcast did.

Both Compete and Quantcast listed Dick’s Sporting Goods as having more traffic than

Sports Authority (almost double the traffic when comparing Compete’s listings). The higher

traffic exhibited during December and November can most likely be attributed to the Christmas

shopping season. There was a large difference between the numbers reported by Quantcast and

Compete but I think this can be attributed to Quantcast not having direct access to traffic data

associated with Dick's Sporting Goods and Sports Authority.

Content Analysis

Overall Quality (Cq, Vt, Va)

SportsAuthority.com Score: 9

DicksSportingGoods.com Score: 8

Analysis:

SportsAuthority.com

When you first look at SportsAuthority.com you have to click on “Team Sports” in the

navigation tab to get closer to looking at tennis racquets. As you hover above “Team Sports” you

don’t see Tennis anywhere which leads youto click another button that says “More Team

Sports.” Once that page loads a full list of all team sports appears on the left had side of the page

which Tennis is apart of. Right there I think that it is more clicking than is necessary. One thing

that we did decided we liked was the different categories that the website offers in regards to

everything tennis. Below is a screenshot of the different categories that SportsAuthroity.com

offers.

Once

you click on “Racquets” it will take you to a page that has

rows and columns of racquets to choose from. One thing

that they offer if you don’t feel like scrolling and clicking

through the different pages is a filter system option on the

right hand side of the page. Below is a screenshot of what that

filter system looks like.

This tool is useful because like DicksSportingGoods.com, it gives you the option to

customize your search to make it easier on the customer. One thing that you can see above in the

screenshot also is the option to get the extra help finding the perfect racquet by clicking on “Help

Me Choose Gear.” Below is another screenshot of what the extra help looks like.

We thought this was a very nice tool, especially for the beginner tennis players out there

looking to get their first tennis racquet. Along with the extra help that comes with the “Help Me

Choose Gear” feature, they also offer a “Buyers Guide” and “Size Chart.” This is something that

makes SportsAuthority.com stand out and in our opinion, it makes the site even better.

Once you have used all the tools that they offer you and have found your perfect racquet,

you then have the option to see a larger photo of the racquet and also a video of someone

actually displaying, talking about, and using the racquet. This is an awesome feature because

sometimes you cannot get most accurate representation of a tennis racquet with just looking at a

couple photos.

Another thing that they do really well is sharing all the necessary information that a

customer needs to know. One thing that we thought was nice was the “Availability” that they

offer on the particular product. Below is a screenshot of what that specific feature looks like.

As you

continue to scroll down you will find their description box that has all the extra information that

you need to know about the product. Another nice feature that they offer to help the customer

decide on a tennis racquet is a link called “Racquets that fit your game.” Once you open that link

up it leads you to a page where it has a list of different types of players like aggressive

baseliners, counterpunches, serve and volleyers, and all court players. Then depending on what

type of player you are, they give you a recommended racquet or style of racquet.

When looking through the site to see if they had any of our keywords, I noticed that our

first keyword “Tennis Racquets” only showed up when you are land on the category page where

the title is “Tennis Racquets.” Below is a screenshot that shows where the keyword shows up.

Our second keyword/phrase was “Head Tennis Racquets.” Once again like our first

keyword, only parts of our phrase showed up when looking through SportsAuthority.com. For

example, when you looked at the filter system that they provide, “Head” is one of the brands that

show up to select from. Then when you got to all the Head tennis racquets the racquets were

labeled something like “Head TiS6 Tennis Racquet.” Even then it wasn’t the same as our

keyword/phrase. Our final keyword was “Tennis Racquet Swing Styles.” Once again like the

previous keywords or phrases only parts of our phrase showed up. In the filter system located on

the left had side of the category page a category to help customize your search called “Swing

Style.” It is only one part of our phrase.

When looking again at the content to see if it went into detail to help the customer best

decide on a racquet, the site offered a lot of extra help. As I mentioned above they have the

“Racquets that fit your game,” and the “racquet sizing chart.” These are two things that are extra

than just you’re normal, here is the product, how much it costs, etc. SportsAuthority.com went

above that and added extra tools to help make your process a little bit easier.

The site doesn’t suggest anything that would make someone want to spend more than a

few seconds on the page unless you are thoroughly reading through all the reviews and extra

tools they offer. Like we mentioned, they do offer a lot of extra tools, so that might be another

reason why someone would stay on the site longer than a few seconds.

When checking for uniqueness of SportsAuthority.com, I first entered a description a

writer made on one of their racquets. Shown below is an example of what the sire plagium said

about SportsAuthority.com.

Another site I used to check how unique the content was for SportsAuthority.com was

plagspotter.com. I used a different racquet to see if that would change up the results. The same

results came up when SportsAuthority.com was assessed. Below is a screenshot of what the site

had to say.

SportsAuthority.com had a lot to offer other than just the basic content you would find.

They had the “racquet sizing chart,” “Racquets that fit your game,” “availability,” “product

reviews,” and also “product recommendations.” All the extra tools they put into their site can

only better them. We could see how it could be helpful for beginners and also experienced tennis

players.

Moving on to check to see if they had any typos, I used the website tools.seochat.com to

determine if they had any typos. Below is a screenshot of what the site had to say.

At first glance it was a little hard to understand, from the looks of it they only checked 7 words?

Either way, the site SportsAuthority.com has 0 spelling errors. Looking through the different

descriptions in the descripton box, they used unique descriptions that displayed the racquet is a

positive light. They used fun words that made it sound fun and encouraged you to buy that

racquet and get to working on your tennis game. Overall, the content on the website was well

written and organized very well.

As far as the content that is up to date, when you look at the prodcut level pages you can

see when they reduce the price and that to us showed that they are up to date by promoting their

sales. In the screenshot below is an example of the reduced prices that they offer.

When you are at the category page, you will notice three ads that stand out. Below is a

screenshot of what they look like when you are at the category page. These three ads stay

consistent when you look through the different racquets at both category and product level page.

Overall, they have a good amount of ads, any more ads might be a little too much for a single

page.

Recommendations:

There a a couple of recommendations that we would recommend for

SportsAuthority.com. One thing that might hinder their success is the initial homepage when you

have to click on “Team Sports” and then click again on “More Team Sports.” People could get

annoyed with the extra and maybe uneccessary button to get to where they need to go.

One thing that Google’s SEO Starter Guide stated in their best practices is the ability to keep the

content organized around the topic.

One thing that we would also recommend is maybe taking away a few ads. It could be a

little much for some of the visitors, at least on the product page. It is different if they have more

ads on the homepage, that is where they grab your attention and initially keep you on the site but

further than that, ads might be a little too much.


When looking at DicksSportingGoods.com I first clicked on “Team Sports” which lead

me to a list titles “Teamed Sports” to choose from as seen below in the screenshot.

As you can see above, there is a list of different teamed sports and you will come across

“Tennis & Racquets.” Once you click on “Tennis Racquets,” it will lead you to a category page

where you can choose from a variety of different tennis racquets ranging from adults racquets,

unstrung racquets, by swing type, 3-6 years old, 7-8 years old, 9-10 years old, 11 + years old, and

shop all juniors racquets as shown below.

From

there, as you can see, you can pick form a variety of different racquets.

From there once you click on the category you want, it takes you to the

racquets where you can actually look at the different variety of

racquets. Once again, they offer a filter on the right hand side of the

page where you can pick and choose as shown below in the screenshot.

THROW AWAY THIS PAGE

As you can see in the previous screenshot, there are

different categories you can choose from when searching for a

tennis racquet. There are different brands, racquet stringing, swing

style, racquet balance, racquet head size, price, availability, and

ratings. This is a nice feature to use because it allows the customer

to customize their search to their liking and find a racquet that will

best fit them. Looking through all the different categories this feature

stays consistent through the different pages. Once you click on

a racquet that you like, it gives you a description box where you

can see deeper into what the product has to offer as shown

below in the screenshot.

I think that all these tools make the website content very

useful when searching for a tennis racquet, they give you the option

to customize your search to cater to your preference of tennis racquets. The description box is

useful as well because it gives you the more information about the racquet that just looking at the

photo won’t give you. Below are two screenshots of another feature that is helpful for the

website. It is a buying guide that DicksSportingGoods.com offers that goes into even deeper

detail for someone who is buying a tennis racquet for maybe the first time or just someone who

needs a little help.

When

browsing through the different tennis racquets, not all three of our keywords came across the

category page. One of our keywords is “Tennis Racquets.” This keyword comes across the

category page because that is

what we are specifically

looking at. Below there is a screenshot of the keyword “tennis racquets” appearing on the

DicksSportingGoods.com.

Our next keyword is “Head Tennis Racquets.” This full keyword does not show up in the

category page but in the filter system on the right hand side of the page the word “Head” shows

up under the brand category. Although the whole phrase does not show up on the category page,

the main word of the phrase does show up which is “Head.” Once again if you click on the

product and look at the product level page, you will see the word Head (if it is a Head tennis

racquet) but not the full phrase. They tend to have the brand name and then they type of racquet

followed with tennis racquet. For example: Head MX Cyber Tour Tennis Racquet.

Our final keyword/phrase is “Tennis Racquet Swing Styles.” This keyword is similar to

the previous keyword in regards to only parts of the phrase appearing on the category page. In

the filter system, the phrase “Swing Style” shows up when customizing your search but other

than in the filter system, the phrase does not show up anywhere else.

When first glancing at the product level page of a tennis racquet, I looked for any

information that would help the customer get a better understanding of what type of racquet they

would be purchasing. They have the basic information that any commerce website would have

about their product. They have different colors to choose from, quantity, size, and a variety of

pictures of the racquet to get a better look at the racquet. If you were to scroll down they offer a

little more information on the racquet in their product information as well with customer

reviews. This is pretty normal for a website to have this content on their site and other than the

basic information, DicksSportingGoods.com does not offer any more content than necessary on

the product level pages.

Kind of relating to the previous statement about the product level page having the

necessary information for their customers to look through, it doesn’t give any reason for the user

to spend a long time on the product level page unless they were just reading everything or having

a hard time with decided on which racquet to purchase.

When I started to look at the uniqueness of DicksSportingGoods.com’s content to decide

if it was unique or not, I used the website called plagium.com to start off with. I first started off

with a simple term to see if any other site was using the same titles. Below is a screenshot of my

first search. I typed in “Babolat Drive Max 110 Tennis Racquet” to see if other sites were

offering the same

tennis racquet

and sure enough 8

other websites

were offering

the same product.

I next decided to go a little deeper with my search and decided to look into how unique

they worded their Product Information. This is where the content was “unique” and did not

appear on any other website besides DicksSportingGoods.com. When describing the product

information, the writer used attractive words and worded the content in a nice way to get your

attention and make the product sound like something I would want to purchase.

I also used the website plagspotter.com to research the uniqueness of the content on

DicksSportingGoods.com’s website and the results showed that they were 100% unique in their

content. Below is a screenshot of what they website said about DicksSportingGoods.com

One thing that DicksSportingGoods.com offers to the user is a easy way to find the

perfect racquet. As we menttioned before, they offer a main page that ahs different categories of

different age groups, and unstrung or strung racquets. Their site is organized and well thought

out with the filter system that they offer to customize your search. You can get to what you are

looking for faster and easier than clicking through page by page to find what you are looking for.

When checking for misspelled words on the site, I used tools.seochat.com to double

check any typos the writer might have missed when creating the content for the website. Through

this site, they found zero typos but had only a number of 7 words. Below is a screenshot of what

tools.seochat.com concluded about DiksSportingGoods.com.

Looking through the initial “Tennis Racquet” category page and the different product

level pages the overall content gets right to the point. In the category page they offer different

filters and once you click on a product and read the product information, they are all unique and

well written. For example in the two screenshots below, there are two different product

information descriptions.

You could say the content on the site is up-to-date, when you click on a product and the

product page loads, you can see if you are getting a deal on the racquet. As shown below in the

screenshot, you can see how the racquet was an initial price and then was updated and the price

was reduced. That shows that they keep their products fresh with the latest sales and it also

shows the buyer how much they are saving by purchasing a product.

One thing that we notied was the lack of ads that DicksSportingGoods.com offered.

When you look just at the homepage many different ads ranging form holiday seasonal ads to

noraml discoutn ads. Below is an ad for their Black Friday ad that can be found on the

homepage.

Once you get to the category page

you only see one ad as shown below in the screenshot. When looking at the category and prodcut

level pages, the ad shown below is the only ad that you will find. I don’t think that they have too

many, if anything they don’t have enough. We did like how clean the category and prodcut level

pages looked. They were not overwhelmed with a whole bunch of different ads and it made the

site look not as busy as it might look if they had ads all up and down the sides of the page.

Engaging Content (Ce)

SportsAuthority.com Score:

DicksSportingGoods.com Score:

Site Bounce rate

Page Views/Visitor

Daily Time on Site

Product-level Share Tools

Product-level ratings

Product-level reviews

Sports Authority

26.30% 5.97 4:30 yes yes yes

Dicks Sporting Goods

28% 5.92 4:27 no yes yes

Analysis:

According to the chart above, DicksSportingGoods.com has a higher bounce rate which

means more people spend more time on SportsAuthroity.com. SportsAuthority.com also has

higher page views per visitor which also means the visitor is browsing through

SprotsAuthority.com more than the visitors at DicksSportingGoods.com. Just making an

assessment from looking at the results from Alexa.com in the chart above and the findings from

looking at DicksSportingGoods.com, you could conclude that because their site is very well

organized, the customer doesn’t have to click through a whole bunch of tabs and different pages

to get what they want which results in their bounce rate to be lower and also the page views per

visitor to be lower. DicksSportingGoods.com makes it easy for their customer to browse through

their page and find what they are looking for.

DicksSportingGoods.com also allows the customer to comment, rate, and review their

products. As you can see below in the screenshot, you can see the ratings for that particular

product and can also write your own review if needed and is consistent throughout each product

level

page.

Another place where you can put in your opinion is right below the customer reviews you

can check a yes or no box to answer the question if any of the information given was helpful or

not. In the screenshot below is an example of that feature.

Recommendation for improvements:

One thing that could be beneficial for DicksSportingGoods.com to add to their content is

a

new category in the filter system they have for use on the left hand side of the category page.

When talking to a Northwest Missouri State University tennis player, one thing that he said he

always looks for when searching for a new tennis racquet is grip size. DicksSportingGoods.com

could benefit from adding a “Grip Size” category to the filter system to make the search a little

easier and customizable for the customer.

Another recommendation for DicksSportingGoods.com could be to add a video of a

tennis player using that tennis racquet. A viewer might like to see someone using the racquet

they are about to purchase in use before actually buying the product. Google’s SEO Starter

Guide states that the “Best Practices” are to write easy to read content, stay organized around the

topic, create fresh and unique content, and create content primarily for your users, not search

engines. We feel like DicksSportingGoods.com does a good job at executing all of the “Best

Practices.”

One thing that they might take into consideration is making the description in the

“product information” tab a little easier to understand. For a beginner, the lingo they use to

describe some of the products might be a little confusing. Below is a screenshot of a description

that might make some customer a little confused. Below is a screenshot of a description that

might make some customer a little confused.

Social Analysis:

Social Signals Reputation (Sr):



Analysis:

SportsAuthority.com

Instagram

Instagram is the first social media account we looked at. SportsAuthority.com has a total

of 410 photos, 11.5k followers, and following 612. When looking through their Instagram

profile, one thing that stood out was the amount of photos that were based around kids or kid’s

sports. Out of the 410 photos, 84 of them were based on kids, kid’s sports, or kids being active.

When they first started out posting photos, they had photos that had ads or “self-promoting,” or

the #ProTip photos as shown below.

As you start looking through their photos, they soon stopped with the photos like shown

above and started posting normal photos of athletes, sporting wear, sporting gear, and the

occasional repost or user posts.

Followers/Following 11.5k/612

Number of posts 410

Favorites (range, average) Most favorites on a photo was

391.

Comments (range, average, positive or negative)

They didn’t have very mane comments, it ranged from 1 to 20. They were positive for the most part.

Facebook

Facebook had some of the same trends as Instagram had

when it came to their posts. The majority of their posts were based

on kids and kid’s sports and if not kids, they are posting about

family. They don’t have a lot of comments on their posts but when they do have comments, they

tend to be long comments and some add a photo of their son, brother, or kids they know.

To the right is an example of one of the comments that their viewers posted on a post of a

kids football game. In the comment you can see that the viewer added her own photos of

possibly her son at his own football game.

One thing that I saw on SportsAuthroity.com’s Facebook page that they did well was

commenting or replying back to their customers posts. As you can see in the same example to the

right. They are positive posts and the comments that SportsAuthority.com reply’s with are also

positive.

Likes 1,197,828

Talking about 2,918

Year joined 2009

Most recent posts 7hrs ago form 10:40 p.m. 11/16/15

Comments and likes on posts Usually more than 100 + likes, usually less than 10 comments

Twitter

One their twitter page, they had a little different content vs what they have on their

Facebook page. They have the variety of photos from kid’s photos/kids sports, to adult’s sports,

motivational posts to get active, and just everything about being active. You will rarely see a

tweet that does not have a photo unlike their Facebook page, where you had posts with and also

without photos.

Tweets 14.1k

Followers/following 56.4k/1,625

most recent tweets 7hrs ago from 10:50 p.m. 11/16/15

Comments, favorites, retweets on tweets No comments on posts, had as much as 5 retweets to 22 likes

Google Plus

Just like their Facebook and Twitter pages, they have a lot of photos on their page and

you once again will rarely see a post where there is not a photo attached to it. There is not a lot of

interaction on their Google + page as compared to their Twitter and Facebook accounts but

Google + is still a fairly new social media platform and has a lot of room to grow and become

more popular.

Followers 2,737

Number of posts that have been +1’d All have more than 1 +1’d

Most recent posts November 13, 2015

Comments on posts posts has as much as 3 comments

YouTube

Their YouTube Channel is a channel that we believed to be really useful. One thing that

we thought was really nice was their playlist of workout videos. Since sportsauthority.com is a

sporting goods website/company it would be fitting for them to have workout videos to help

motivate their customers to get in shape and possibly buy their products.

SportsAuthority.com’s YouTube channel also offers “How To” videos to help out their

young audience learn the proper way to throw a football or throw a baseball. They have a wide

range of content that is useful for their customers that also speak Spanish. We noticed they have

duplicate videos that are spoken in English and also in Spanish, which we thought was a really

nice feature.

Number of videos 108

Number of subscribers 1,996

Number of views on videos (range, average) 848,305/23,389.30

Comments on videos (range, average, positive

or negative)

Hardly any comments and if there was a comment it was positive

Thumbs up and down on videos Thumbs up got as high as 27 and didn’t see any thumbs down

Pinterest

SportsAuthority.com does a god job at utilizing their Pinterest account. They have a wide

range of boards to look through which includes almost every sport, the different seasons, and

also healthy food recipes. The amount of pins they have in each board ranges from as low as 14

to some as high as 478.

Number of boards 34

Number of pins 3k

Number of likes 242

Followers/Following 6.6k/151


Instagram

This is one account that DicksSportingGoods.com does not use.

Followers/Following none

Number of posts none

Favorites (range, average) none

Comments (range, average, positive or

negative)

none

Facebook

When looking at DicksSportingGoods.com’s Facebook profile we saw that they were not

as active and didn’t have as much interaction with their customers as SportsAuthority.com had.

They had the occasional comments of customers who were not happy with their service with the

company but sure enough, DicksSportingGoods.com replied right back with helpful information

for those unhappy customers. Below is an example of one of those unhappy customers and how

DicksSportingGoods.com handled the situation.

Likes 4,095,686

Year joined March 10, 2010 is first post

Most recent posts 17hs ago form 11/17/15 at 12:28 p.m.

Comments and likes on posts Some post had up to 9 comments and some had none

Twitter

For their Twitter profile, DicksSportingGoods.com has basically the same content as they

share on their Facebook account. They have a few tweets that are just found on their twitter

profile but a lot of their content transfers over to the different platforms. For example below is a

screenshot of both Facebook and Twitter posts that share the same content.

Facebook Twitter

Tweets 26.4k

Followers/Following 380k/4,355

Most Recent tweets 11 min ago form 12:30 p.m. 11/117/15

Comments, favorites, retweets on tweets Didn’t have very many comments, have up to 99 favorites and 27 retweets.

Google Plus

Just like their Twitter and Facebook posts, their Google + page is pretty much the same.

They share the same content and just like SportsAuthority.com, their account is not very active

but with time it can grow and become more useful.

Followers 6,804

Number of posts that have ben 1’d All of them have 1’d but no more than 5

Most recent posts 12:24 p.m. 11/17/15

Comments on posts Had comments on some posts but they were irrelevant to the content shared

YouTube

DicksSportingGoods.com website offers more playlist to choose from. One that I noticed

that they have a lot of is what they call #HELLWEEK. That seems to be their main focus when

making their videos that they organize into playlists. Along with those videos they also have

their variety as well. Their videos range from inspirational videos to videos that help you choose

the right cleat to purchase.

Number of videos 186

Number of subscribers 13,403

Number of views on videos (range, average) 708,852/103,348.30

Comments on videos (range, average, positive, or negative)

Some videos had a good amount of comments while majority of them didn’t have any. Comments are positive that I saw

Thumbs up and down on videos Saw as many as 50 thumbs up and as much as 5 thumbs down

Pinterest

DicksSportingGoods.com is not using their Pinterest account to its full ability like

SportsAuthority.com is. They have only the 18 boards to showcase their products.

Number of boards 18

Number of pins 925

Number of likes 9

Followers/following 12.1k/51


We feel like SportsAuthority.com does a good job with their social media accounts. One

thing that they could start working on is catering their content a little different when using the

different platforms. Social Media is a growing industry and is becoming more and more

important for a company to use. Different types of people use the different accounts. For

example, Facebook is moving more toward the older generation and Twitter is more generated

for the younger generation so you have to keep that in mind when posting content that will best

suit your audience. SportsAuthority.com is pretty active when it comes to their social media

accounts. Although some of their accounts are not as interactive with their users as other

platforms like Google + vs. their Facebook or Twitter page. They could just keep on replying on

their customer’s comments regardless if they are positive or negative, a response is better than no

response.

Social Signals: Sharing (Ss):




For their social sharing tools, both website were slacking. For SportsAuthority.com they

only had the option to share the cool product you found on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and

Pinterest. The social media sharing tools that they are lacking are Instagram and YouTube. We

can understand how it would be difficult to post it to YouTube, but as for Instagram that is just

foolish. Instagram is all about photos and you are looking at a photo of a tennis racquet. It just

makes sense to have Instagram as a social sharing tool.

As for DicksSportingGoods.com, they don’t have any social sharing tools to offer their

customers to share with their friends and family the new hot product they just purchased. One

thing that we recommend is that they add those social sharing tools for all their social media

platforms except YouTube.

HTML: Current Keyword Location Analysis (Ht, Hd, Hh)

Title Tags

SportsAuthority.com Product Category Page:

<title>Tennis Racquets | Sports Authority</title>

DicksSportingGoods.com Product Category Page:

<title>Tennis Racquets | DICK'S Sporting Goods</title>

Analysis:

We decided to go right to the tennis racquet page on SportsAuthority.com to take a look

at the title tag. We decided to look at that page because it is the main focus of our project. We are

here to analyze the tennis racquets and the keywords that would best generate traffic for that

specific page. The title tag is really short and sweet, it gets right to the point as you can see

below in the screenshot from the page source. This is an important tag because it states what you

are looking at and what website you are on and this is what appears in the SERP and if a website

has a bad title tag, Google won’t recognize that which leads to bad traffic.

Recommendations for improvements:

We would keep the title tag the same. As we looked at SportsAuthority.com and

DicksSportingGoods.com they shared similar title tags. We came to the conclusion that the title

tag might not be our main focus and is not the problem when generating more traffic to

SportsAuthority.com’s site.

According to Google’s SEO Starter Guide, a title tag needs to have an accurate

description of the pages content, needs to be unique, and brief but still descriptive. This could be

a little taking to do but we believe that they do a good job with their current title tag.

Description Meta Tag

SportsAuthroity.com Product Category Page:

<meta name="description" content="Buy Racquets at Sports Authority - the nation's

preeminent full-line sporting goods chain. Shop online or in-store for your favorite brands -

Nike, Under Armour, The North Face, Bowflex, Schwinn, Lifetime and more." />

DicksSportingGoods.com Product Page:

<meta name="description" content="Get in the game with a new tennis racquet from

DICK'S Sporting Goods. Shop a variety of tennis racquets for juniors & adults from

top-rated brands. " />

Explanation:

The description meta tag gives search engines like Google a short summary of the

product according to Google’s SEO Starter Guidelines. Below is a screenshot of what the SERP

looks like when you search Tennis Racquets Sports Authority in Google. The description meta

tag is important because they appear in the SERP and it is what drives the traffic from Google. It

is also important because Google takes little parts of a description meta tag and uses that in the

SERP which is what the readers use to get an idea of the product they will be clicking on.


For SportsAuthority.com, the description meta tag is nice and has a clear description

about the tennis racquets. It gets to the point and is worded nicely. In Google’s SEO Starter

Guide, it states to write a description that will inform and also interest the user. We feel like they

did a good job at achieving that.

IMG names and ALT text

Explanation:

Most of the important images on Sports Authority are the actual products that they are

selling. In this case, we are investigating tennis racquets. After doing some digging on their site,

we found that most of the images on Sports Authority were named with a random string of letters

and numbers. Below is a picture of a Head TiS6 tennis racquet. A Head tennis racquet is

important because “Head Tennis Racquet” is one of our keywords we found to be useful in

Search Engine Optimization.

<img

src="http://www.sportsauthority.com/graphics/product_images/pTSA-

9752619p275w.jpg"

data-src="http://www.sportsauthority.com/graphics/product_images/pTSA-9752619enh-z6.jpg

title="A HEAD S6 Tennis Racquet lets you dominate your tennis competition with an advanced

design and detailed construction."

alt="A HEAD S6 Tennis Racquet lets you dominate your tennis competition with an advanced

design and detailed construction."/>

<img class="lazy smallImage"

data-original="http://www.sportsauthority.com/graphics/product_images/

pTSA-9833254nm.jpg" WIDTH="176" HEIGHT="176" alt="WILSON K

Zero 118 Tennis Racquet - SportsAuthority.com " title="WILSON K Zero

118

Tennis Racquet - SportsAuthority.com " /></a><div class="item-details"><h3><a

href="/WILSON-K-Zero-118-Tennis-Racquet/product.jsp?

productId=11337532&cp=3052500.66276696.22702526&parentPage=family">WILS

ON K Zero 118 Tennis Racquet</a>


Sports Authority uses the same text for their title tag as they do for their ALT text as

shown above. I think the title and ALT tags are well written and contain information that relates

directly to the product. The one thing I think they should change to help with the images portion

of their website is to give their pictures usable names. For example, instead of using pTSA-

9752619enh-z6.jpg as the file name for the picture they should call it

Head_TiS6_Tennis_Racquet. This will make it easier for their web masters to find the pictures

and easier for Google to identify what the picture is.

Architecture (As, Au, Am)

Speed (As)



Explanation:

For our speed analysis, we used webpagetest.org to determine how fast Sports Authority

and Dick’s Sporting Goods would load on the first visit as well as repeat visits. The information

is laid out below

According to Jakob Nielson’s Heuristics, this website does not load fast enough. The

heuristics say that a website should load within 10 seconds or the visitor’s attention span will

move on to something else. On the first visit the site took over 17 seconds to load but on the

second visit that dropped to just shy of 8 seconds. There is nothing on the waterfall chart that

stands out as a major slowdown on the site load. Most of the load time appears to come from

pictures and JavaScript files that take about a third of a second each. The report from

webpagetest.org also included information about how much of the site was images, JavaScript,

etc. According to the report, Sports Authority’s home page was 52% images and almost 20%

JavaScript. As discussed in class, both of these things slow down web pages. Looking at the site,

I didn’t see how these items could be eliminated but if some of the images were saved as .png

files, it could reduce their file size and then speeding up the loads.


Dick’s Sporting Goods did better when it came to speed and fast load times. The first

time the computer loaded the page it took almost six and a half seconds. This beats Sports

Authority’s load time by almost 2.5x. Dick’s did have some items that took a while to load but

the website was able to load six of the items at the same time which reduced the overall load

time of the web site. Dick’s web site consisted of 55% images and 33% javascript. When the site

was visited for a second and subsequent times, the load times were cut in half from 6.4 seconds

down to just 3.8 seconds which is in the wheel house of Jakob Nielson’s Heuristics.

When it comes to speed, Dick’s Sporting Goods is much faster than Sports Authority’s.

Dick’s home page loads an entire 10.5 seconds faster on the first view than Sports Authority’s

page. The two sites have almost identical content loads when it comes images. The one big

differentiator between the two sites is Dick’s home screen is 33% JavaScript while Sport

Authority’s site is split up between HTML (17%) and JavaScript (19%). This could be a result of

Sports Authority beginning to code more in HTML 5 which reduces the amount of JavaScript

you have to run on your site but that would require further investigation into the architecture of

their website. My other thought process on this could be that Sports Authority just uses less

JavaScript on their web page to begin with. Both explanations do have value to them because

HTML 5 was aimed to do more of the fancy things without requiring those things to be coded in

Flash or JavaScript.


One thing that I think could really help Sports Authority is to save their images as a more

web-friendly format like a .png that will cut down on load times because the image is less of a

strain on the system. I also think Sports Authority could benefit from “lazy loading” on their site

because if a visitor is not going to visit the bottom of the home screen, you don’t need to waste

time loading it and rendering it out. If they just go to the home screen to click on a tab on the

navigation pane, you only need to load the content above the fold.

URL’s (Au)



URL:

SportsAuthority.com: http://www.sportsauthority.com/home/index.jsp

DicksSportingGoods.com: http://www.dickssportinggoods.com/home/index.jsp

Explanation:

When it comes to the home page URLs for both websites they are pretty much identical

as seen above but that is where it stops. When you navigate to the Tennis Racquet product

category pages, the URLs get super long for both websites. The URLs start off with a normal

URL structure but then after about the third directory, the entire URL just becomes a random

string of letters and numbers.

The Sports Authority links are super long the further you dive into their product pages

and the IDs on those pages are irrelevant. I definitely think that the URLs should be shortened to

make it easier to type in the exact web page you want using just the URL and not having to

navigate to it. The directories for Sports Authority are also not very intuitive. There are a lot of

sub directories that don’t make much sense in navigation and I think some of them could be

reduced. Also on Search Results Pages, the URLs for Sports Authority get truncated because of

how long they are.

http://www.dickssportinggoods.com/home/index.jsp

http://www.sportsauthority.com/home/index.jsp

Dick’s Sporting Goods also has issues when it comes to really long URLs. Most of their

pages have long strings of numbers after the sub directories in the URL. Because of this, their

URLs get truncated on Google. On the URLs I saw, Google truncated even the middle sub

directories and left the string of numbers as the end of the URL for the visitor to see.


If Sports Authority would take the string of letters and numbers off the end of their

URLs, it would make it much easier to simply type in the URL to the specific page you want to

go to. For example, when you want to go to a specific channel on YouTube, you just have to type

YouTube.com/channelname and it takes you directly to the page.

Mobile (Am)



Explanation:

Both Dick’s Sporting Goods and Sports Authority have mobile versions of their websites.

Both companies also distinguish their mobile site by using the “m.___” standard. Both sites also

seemed to have truncated content on their homepage compared to the content they display on

their desktop home page. In addition, both Sports Authority and Dick’s Sporting Goods are not

responsive but they employ a mobile specific site.

Sports Authority eliminates their entire navigation bar on the mobile version of their

website. They move it so that it sits under a hamburger button at the top left corner of their home

screen. The top third of the home screen on Sports Authority is an in-house promotion for saving

25 percent on Nike products. Then they have three quick links to Gift Cards and to shop brands.

Then below the fold they have a “Recommended for You” tab and then their footer has all the

standard “Contact Us” features.

The menu system on Sports Authority mirrors the navigation on their desktop site so

users familiar with their desktop site will feel right at home on the mobile site. For product

category pages, the site gives you the option to view products either in a 3 by x grid or in a list

view. This is very handy for looking at more than one product at a time. Sports Authority also

gives you a handy button at the bottom of the screen that jumps you back to the top of the screen.

Dick’s Sporting Goods takes two approaches to their navigation on mobile. They put all

of their navigation under a hamburger icon on the top left of the page and they also have larger

categories listed down the home screen as you scroll. Just like Sports Authority, Dick’s has the

top half of the screen dedicated to the title bar and a “Take $10 of when you spend $50” in house

promotion. They also include a “Recommended for You” section towards the bottom of their

home screen as well as links to their mobile app and their contact information.

The menu system under the hamburger icon is pretty much the same as on the desktop.

They have all the main categories listed on their navigation bar listed under the icon plus

additions for Black Friday sales.


When it comes to mobile, I think both Sports Authority and Dick’s Sporting Goods are

spot on with what they are doing. The one thing that I would say could be improved on for

Sports Authority is a mobile application in the Apple App Store. Dick’s has one and I think it

could increase Sports Authority’s visitors on the mobile side if they had a mobile app.

Links (Ln, Lq)

Link Number (Ln)

SportsAuthority.com No. of Referring Domains: 9,863

DicksSportingGoods.com No. of Referring Domains: 19,571

Link Quality (Lq)

SportsAuthority.com No. of Referring Domains: 5

DicksSportingGoods.com No. of Referring Domains: 9

Explanation:

DicksSportingGoods.com had a lot more activity when it came to looking at the referring

domains, external backlinks, etc. This is one place where DicksSportingGoods.com excelled in

and did better than SportsAuthority.com. Below is a chart that is comparing the two side by side

and you can see just how much of a difference the two sites did.

When looking at all the links that were connected to each site, DicksSportingGoods.com

had way more in regards to government and educational referring backlinks and domains. Below

is a screenshot that will show the comparison between the two.

Dicks Sporting Goods Sports Authority

Overall,

DicksSportingGoods.com had a lot more traffic when it came to the numbers and this could be

because it is a well-known store.

Conclusions and Priority Recommendations:

I think Sports Authority is doing a pretty good job when it comes to organizing their

content in relationship to how Dick’s Sporting Goods organizes their content. The main things

that differentiate the two is the extra page that Dick’s uses to organize their content further by

separating racquets based on size, strings, and who they are intended for.

Where DicksSportingGoods.com excels in they also lack and that is where

SportsAuthority.com has stepped up and took over in some parts. For example,

SportsAuthority.com has a lot of extra tools that help the customer decide on a tennis racquet

that DicksSportingGoods.com lacks. SportsAuthority.com offers a lot of content that we think

benefits them and makes their site better in those areas.

The main thing I think Sports Authority could improve on is their speed. Their initial load

comes in at a whopping 17 seconds which is about 10 seconds above where it should be. It is

only a +1 on the Periodic table of SEO Success Factors. From what I saw in the waterfall charts,

they had a lot of files that took a while to load that most likely could be reduced or moved to a

later load time.

Another thing that could help SportsAuthority.com out is when you are trying to get to

the tennis racquets. You have to go to “Team Sports” and then click on “More Team Sports.”

Even though it is just one more click, it might benefit them if they list all the team sports in the

initial drop down instead of having the user click on another button to get to the full list of team

sports.

Overall, we thought SportsAuthortiy.com did a pretty good job with their site. One thing

we brought up was that Dicks Sporting Goods as a company is just really well know. It is a

popular sports store and a lot of people know it vs Sports Authority. Before starting the project, I

didn’t even know Sports Authority was a store. We think that has a lot to do with it plus all the

other factors combined that was covered in this paper.