Coca-Cola: a SEO analysis

Posted bySelene CasalePosted inUncategorizedTags:, , , , , , , ,

A brief introduction


Images from an ad launched in 2018 and posted on YouTube


Coca Cola is one of the most beloved world top brands that boasts more than 106 millions fans on Facebook. Despite being a big company, it invests billions of dollars in marketing and advertising every year in order to maintain a strong organic online presence and the experience provided to site users (McKoy, 2017).

Starting from the reports generated by Hubspot Grader, SEO Site Check-up, SEOptimer, Think with Google and Varvy reviewing the website https://www.coca-cola.co.uk/, I am going to conduct a SEO analysis to highlight the company’s marketing strategy.


SEO


“SEO stands for “search engine optimisation.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid search engine results. […] It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer” (Muller).

Looking at the reports generated by the SEO tools chosen we can see that the Coca Cola website is widely optimised for SEO performance. The meta title Coca-Cola GB has the optimal length of 12 characters and the meta description (that describes the content of the page) has a length of 152 characters out of 160: Welcome to the home of Coca-Cola GB. Discover our latest news and find nutritional information and ingredients about Coca-Cola’s full range of drinks.

SEO Site Check-up highlights that the page makes a good use of HTML header tags from H1 to H5. Their presence is of paramount importance since they signal to the search engine the topic of the page.

The website lacks keywords consistency and search engines could detect only the topic of the website with difficulty. The keywords used are not well distributed and they are not present in the title, header and meta description tags. The website also has a sitemap that provides important information about the content of the page (Google Search Help) and there aren’t broken or paid for links; many of which are SEO friendly.


Performance


Optimising the website’s performance is paramount to increasing traffic and revenue, improving conversion rates and generating more leads.

According to the SEO tools above mentioned, the performance of https://www.coca-cola.co.uk/ should be improved in order to enhance the user’s experience. Hubspot Grader shows that the page size is almost optimal since it’s 3.6MB instead of 3MB. This is a plus because websites that are faster to load are more attractive and have higher chances of conversions. However, the number of HTTP requests is too high and it can ruin the user’s experience. In fact, a slower loading time of the content could push the visitors to leave the page increasing the bounce rate (Kolowich, 2019).

The website has a caching mechanism for images and all JavaScript resources so that the server is not overloaded and the page speed is ideal. Although its URL doesn’t have any redirects and the website is HTML compressed, the speed might be undermined by image size not being optimized, JavaScripts not minified that are render-blocking and CSS not minified or optimized.


Links

SEOptimer informs us that https://www.coca-cola.co.uk/ has an On-Page link structure that includes 540 total links. Among them, the 27% is made of external links and they are sending authority to other websites. Not all the links are SEO friendly because of length, special characters or code strings that make difficult to search engine to crawl them. In addition, the website doesn’t have nofollow links nor broken or paid ones.


Mobile


Nowadays an increasing number of people prefer to access web content using mobile devices, such as mobile phones and tablet. Optimizing a website for mobile is crucial in gaining valuable traffic, leads and revenue.

The Coca-Cola website displays well on mobile devices and its high usability minimizes the bounce rate. According to the reports generated on Varvy and SEOptimer, the text is perfectly legible, tap targets are large enough and adequately sized for users to easily tap on a touchscreen, content fits inside the viewports (allowing a good rendering), plugins, iFrames and Flash content are absent and the design seems to be perfect for all device types. The webpage does not use the noindex meta tag so it will be read and indexed by search engines and it does not have a custom 404 error page which could lead to a bad user experience in case there are broken links or bugs.


Security


Cybersecurity is something that must not be neglected in order to avoid the loss of users’ data and cyberattacks. The team of Sucuri.net states that “if a website is hacked and blacklisted, it loses up to 98% of its traffic […] and client data breach can result in lawsuits, heavy fines, and ruined reputation”. The most common threats are spam, viruses and malware, DDoS attacks and so on. To prevent them it is possible to adopt some measures like the use of HTTPS protocol, updating the software used on the website, choose a safe web hosting plan and use tools to monitor the security (Lofgren, 2020).

The Coca-Cola website is HTTPS secured and the SSL (issued by Amazon) is enabled. This means that the page is authentic and trustworthy and the communication between client and server are encrypted. The Safe Browsing Test performed by SEO Site Check-up shows highlights that the page is not suspicious since no malware or phishing activity has been found. The URL Canonicalization Test shows that https://www.coca-cola.co.uk and https://coca-cola.co.uk resolve to the same URL. However, the JavaScript libraries seem to be outdated and vulnerable and presents a huge risk to the security of the website.


Speed


Moz.com describes the page speed as the page load time that is “the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page”. The ideal speed is 5.3 seconds: the Coca-Cola website seems to be a bit slow since it takes 18,7 seconds to load its content but according to SEOptimer the server response is reasonably low. The webpage is perfectly compressed but its 20 HTTP requests could slow it down. As previously said, there is not any flash content, images, CSS and JavaScripts are cached but not entirely minified and the URL does not have redirects. The page size is too large (8.14MB) and it needs to be optimised to 5MB and the few inline styles should be replaced by CSS style sheets.


Conclusion

The results emerging from the previous analysis show that the Coca-Cola website has been nicely optimised for search engines and mobile devices, its performance is good, its loading speed is appropriate, but there is still room for improvement.

The following points highlight the top 3 improvements required for the website to make the difference. In my opinion, keyword usage, page file size and CSS delivery are important elements that could meaningfully enhance the users’ experience.


1. Keywords usage

The website lacks of keywords consistency and density. This means that it could be difficult for search engines to detect the topic of the website. The keywords used are not well distributed and the most common ones are not present in title, header and meta description tags.

To fix this issue marketers should update their strategy with some little changes, such as avoiding doorway pages, adjusting tags content, choosing personalized main keywords they would like to rank for (and making them more relevant to specific web researches) and better distributing them not only in the body of the text but across HTML tags too.


2. Reduce total page
file size

Heavy pages compromise the loading speed and might push users to leave it before taking any kind of action. In order to avoid that, best practices would be resizing images, compressing them with compression tools and choosing images that respect the width of the container it’s going to be in.


3. CSS Delivery

Coca-Cola marketers shouldn’t use old inline CSS styles because they slow the page loading speed. The idea is to keep the HTML code as simple as possible. Marketers could also enter CSS sprites “reducing the number of server requests” (Stec, 2020), minify the resources and remove render blocking CSS.


Reference list

Published by Selene Casale

I'm a Hospitality Professional and a Digital Marketing student

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