Recreational Equipment, Inc (REI) is in-person as as well as an online e-commerce retailer that focuses on outdoor sustainable and high quality outdoor gear and apparel. Established in 1938 by a group of climbing friends, REI was based on the premise of quality and affordable gear for any outdoor enthusiasts adventures. (REI, 2021) Since their founding, REI has taken advantage of the opportunity that comes with e-commerce.
With REI being a company that specializes in a certain area of goods unlike Wal-mart or Target, there is potential for a mass of keywords at their disposal. Considering 75 percent of people shop online at least once a month (Sabanoglu, 2020) , it would be wise for REI, along with many other e-commerce sites, to place emphasis on optimizing their SEO and website to generate more sales. REI realized and has done just that, especially when it comes to their SEO tactics.
One of the first things that REI does to improve SEO is create a variety of quality content on their website. While people don't always associate this with SEO, spiders crawl through websites and analyze the quality of a website in order to determine if they are worthy of being ranked higher on SERPs. It is a critical component of technical SEO that not all e-commerce sites take into consideration. REI produces dozens of quality long-form video marketing content every year. (Nifong, n.d.) These videos answer questions for their different type of consumers and keeps them coming back to the website. So their organic traffic continues to rise, which helps out their SEO quite a bit.
The fact that REI multi-purposes themselves as not only an e-commerce organization, but a place where users can go to learn outdoor skills and other information also helps them in the SERPs. On their website is an "Expert Advice" blog.
Housed here is a wealth of articles detailing best practices in camping, hiking, cycling climbing and more. This is important and puts REI at a huge advantage. Foundational content is highly valuable and many people go to Google asking questions. REI realizes this and provides answers to these questions using keyword rich blogs.
The users searching these questions have a higher intent to find particular content and are more likely to engage with REI's website. This in turn not only drives purchases, but it drives priority in SERPs. (Guberow, 2018)
REI also uses a third-party visual analytics platform called Tableau to gather and organize their web analytics. This is used to drive decisions digitally. A primary objective of theirs is to provide a more personalized customer experience from the data that they gather through their web analytics, and as they have grown in popularity and sales, the wealth of the data that they have about their consumers is enough to drive the decisions that they make. (Tableau, 2021) Due to REI being a co-op and co-op members accounting for more than 90 percent of purchases with the retailer gives REI access to very important customer data. (Tableau, 2021) This gives REI an opportunity to create a more personalized experience online.
REI has customer data equivalent to more than 90 terabytes. (Tableau, 2021) From this data, the REI team monitors:
- attribution
- customer lifetime value
- customer vs member counts
- churn and retention rates
- customer order behaviors
- even the frequency of trips between online and brick-and-mortar stores
By analyzing this wealth of data, REI is able to make decisions not only for their e-commerce sites, but for their brick-and-mortar stores as well. This creates a consistent experience for customers all around.
In addition, Director of Customer and Advanced Analytics, Clinton Fowler, claimed that REI saw a "complete turnaround" in 2017 with new member acquisition. (Tableau, 2021) Based on the metrics listed earlier, the REI teams developed enhanced member lifecycle programs to increase their customer loyalty and increase sales.
Between SEO and REI's website analytics, they have done a good job of predicting what questions and searches their customers might have through data they have collected, and they have created content surrounding those curiosities. REI has provided solutions and in turn improved their brand and website quality.
While navigating through REI's website there are a few things I noticed that definitely lended a hand towards their SERP rankings. The landing page of their website is keyword rich in most aspects of the site. Their navigation menu links to every category of the items they sell, allowing them to pack a variety of keywords that a user could potentially be searching for.
Keywords are also included in copy throughout the website from drop-down menus to short descriptions of shop categories to blogs. A search bar is also included at the top of the website to streamline the consumer experience.
The content on their website is top-notch in terms of quality. This is especially evident on their landing page. Nearly all of the content on their landing page is clickable and links to a different part of the website. This reduces bounce rate and shows search spiders that users are actually interacting with REI's website. And while we're on the topic of content, there are a variety of forms of content throughout their website. REI features everything from picture galleries to blogs to classes to forums. The REI website is an abundance of wealth and data sprawling across outdoor topics. Any user could get lost in the many features that the e-commerce site houses.
REI already seems to have data collection in check, but I have a few suggestions in terms of ways that they could improve their SEO and what additional metrics could come in handy with a large e-commerce site. While REI has an abundance of copy and keywords throughout their site, it isn't in all parts of the hierarchy of the site. REI describes what they sell using phrases like "outdoor sustainable" or "high quality outdoor" and the word outdoor isn't found except for the footer on their landing page.
If that change was made, then that would lend itself useful in measuring the effectiveness of that change would be traffic and more specifically search traffic. There are tools like Semrush that allow companies to track what keywords are most beneficial and generating the most traffic to a site.
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