For your selected e-commerce site, assess the ease (or not) with which you can find the site using a search engine. Type some of the company’s branded products or key themes into a search engine. Discuss what is returned. Pay particular attention to ‘paid for’ results. Also, check where competitors appear, interpret the results. Provide recommendations.

For this question I am going to use two different search engines to search for brands within my company. I have decided to use google.com and yahoo.com.  I decided to use the two different websites to see if there was much of a difference in the results from the different search engines.

I chose to search google first. When searched for on google.com was ‘Irregular Choice’. My results showed the Schuh were the fifth result, although the top three websites are irregular choice’s own site. This is not a surprise as you would expect the Irregular Choice websites to come up at the top of the search. I would of expected Schuh to appear on the first page as it is a big company that is well established within the UK.

Below is a link to the google results page:

 http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=irregular+choice+shoes&meta=

When using Yahoo’s search engine I typed in the same as I typed into google to ensure that the results where fair. When I searched Schuh did not appear on the firse page of results, it did appear on the second page, it was the eigth result on the second page. I thought that it would have been higher up on the results as in google, I thought this as Schuh is well known and not many high street shops sell the brand of shoes.

 Below is a link to the results page of Yahoo:

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=Irregular+choice&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1&fr=yfp-t-501&pstart=1&b=11

When searchingyahoofor irregular choice it appeared on yahoo page two. Within Yahoo it brought up some of the leading competitors including Office and pretty shoes.com. A number of the results where from ebay and amazon.

I was not surprised with my results form google but I thought that Schuh wuld have been higher up on the results in Yahoo.