Competitive Analysis With SEMRush and Summit Community Bank

  Summit Community Bank is a nearly $4 billion regional community bank. It provides banking, lending, and trust and wealth management services at 44 banking locations across three states. While primarily focused on maintaining its strong footprint in legacy locations, Summit Community Bank has used a successful merger and acquisition strategy to encourage steady growth over the last six years. As it continues to grow in new markets, new opportunities bring new, diverse challenges, including exploring new peers and competitors, expanding brand awareness, and capturing market share. In the digital landscape, competitive analysis is especially important when it comes to optimizing one of an organization’s most valuable online resources, its website.  Competitive analysis, as SEMrush notes, can help benchmark a business’ current SEO performance, identify areas of improvement in SEO strategy, reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses, and discover competitors' winning strategies (Sl...
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Case Study: Nearly Natural SEO and Web Analytics

 















Nearly Natural is e-commerce company that primarily sells silk and artificial flowers, plants, and home decor, located at nearlynatural.com. The artificial and silk plant industry is a steadily growing global market, estimated to reach $780MM by 2028. Nearly Natural is one of the top four United States-based artificial and silk plant companies (GlobeNewsWire, 2021). One way to learn about how certain sites are built and will help deduce if they are utilizing analytics, is by inspecting the website’s code. This is something I’ve used many times when I am looking at websites and I want more information about how they run, and how they might be collecting data. The website’s code can tell us much about the tools that company is using to collect data and measure metrics. On the Nearly Natural site, we can tell right away from our web inspection that there are tags for Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, both web analytics tools. We can also see that Nearly Natural is using Shopify to manage their e-commerce platform and storefront. While Shopify does include basic analytics with their shopping platform, including sales, financials, behavior, acquisition, product-specific metrics, they also recommend adding Google Analytics to the platform for more in-depth analysis (Shopify, n.d). 

Immediately, I can tell that the data that the site is collecting about me is already at work with retargeting ads already showing up as I am researching more information about the company. The Nearly Natural site also presents coupons and specials offers to users the first time that they visit the site, meaning that they are collecting information about prospective customers’ buying habits. Like many e-commerce sites, Nearly Natural also encourages users to create an account to shop with them, therefore gathering data about them personally (name, email address, etc.) site / product browsing, purchases, plus any personal information that’s given in checkout (address or other contact info).  This is essential for the metrics that Nearly Natural will want to track, especially when it comes to specific products that are offered. Web analytics can help pinpoint which products are performing better than others, which sources brought them to the website, and if they are contributing to business goals, (typically sales for e-commerce). 

From an SEO perspective, Shopify says their platform has “built in and features to help you optimize your content. Some SEO is taken care of automatically: auto-generated canonical tags are added to pages to prevent duplicate content from appearing in search results, your website’s sitemap.xml and robots.txt files are automatically generated, and themes automatically generate title tags that include your store name” (Shopify, n.d.). To check and confirm the technical SEO on Nearly Natural’s website, I put it into a site audit on SEMRush and compared that to their actual web content. 

One thing that is noticeable on each of the website’s pages for product pages and product categories is that each page title includes the products that the page contains, for example, on the website, if I selected the faux trees category, and then I chose the “olive tree” as the type of product I wanted to see, the title of the olive tree product page is “Artificial Olive Tree | Fake Olive Trees”, plus there is a paragraph of copy underneath the page title that has even more description of the product with keyword and similar words included. Every product presented on the page has either “artificial”, “olive”, “tree”, or “plant” as a keyword in its title. A quick inspection shows that an H1 tag is also set to “Artificial Olive Tree | Fake Olive Trees”. The page URL and the image alt tags also have the “artificial”, “olive”, and “tree” keywords in them. And while this might shy very slightly of keyword stuffing, it uses enough variation to not be excessive. SEMrush tells us that not only does Nearly Natural have a site performance of 92/100, it also has strong internal link distribution, and a 100/100 in markup, revealing that Nearly Natural has implemented the J-SON Schema.org mark-up for e-commerce on this site (SEMrush, 2022).

To analyze off-page SEO, a backlink audit was performed on SEMrush to gauge how well Nearly Natural has been building authority from other websites, and we also analyzed its brand building efforts through social media.  According to both SEMRush and SEOptimer, Nearly Natural’s off-page SEO could be better, while it does capture some brand authority through social media, and while it has many backlinks, the majority of them aren’t trusted sources, and some are even “toxic” by SEMRush standards (SEMRush, n.d.). Nearly Natural does have a decent amount of followers on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, it is encouraging audiences to buy from their social media sites directly, using the shopping functionality of both Facebook and Instagram to encourage sales natively (SimiliarWeb, n.d). According to SimliarWeb, over 97% of Nearly Natural’s social traffic comes from Facebook, and nearly none of the social channels get enough referrals to show up in the referrals or the backlinks reporting on SEMRush or SimilarWeb (n.d). 

One recommendation I would make for Nearly Natural to help with its backlinks and SEO, it make sure that it is referring traffic back to its own website from social media channels. While I would make some items available for sale on social media, like popular or seasonal items, I would try to encourage traffic to visit the website to explore other products. Also if Nearly Natural would build partnerships with other and popular home decor brands like Wayfair, Hobby Lobby, IKEA, Walmart, and so many more, they could see an increase in trusted backlinks. Nearly Natural also has its own Amazon store, so it already has another channel that could be used to help build potential backlinks. 

Another thing that needs to be considered how the company plans on integrating its overall web strategy in the future. With its analytics, it may find that it obtains its most valuable traffic and most sales at Amazon or directly through social media, meaning that its own website might become less revelant if its not generating the same revenue In fact, it could cannabilize other, better performing channels. If that is the case, it may be more beneficial to update their site to focus more on customer service, enhancing their blog, or showcase more of what the company is doing at the corporate level (behind the scenes, thought leadership, etc.), maybe offer customized plants or flower arrangements on their website,  and then actual link to all their product distributors. 

So while its on-page and technical SEO are highly rated, Nearly Natural’s off-page SEO could use some improvement, but that would also have to align with its business goals. Many times we will see with websites where the product is sold in other places either provide customization options, or focus more on branding and content to help increase valuable traffic to its website. Since SimiliarWeb reports that search is the dominant traffic source for Nearly Natural, I wonder if it is the most highly converting traffic source (n.d). 

Finding out which source from web analytics, either the website, Amazon, social media, or another contributes to the greatest number of orders or largest order value are important metrics that can be looked at from web analytics. Maybe it is two channels simultaneously that funnel into each other, maybe lesser value shopper will find the brand on Amazon, but go to the website to find a 25% off coupon and make a purchase that way, but maybe it costs 40% of what the sale price is to even have an item for sale on Amazon. Maybe another shopper sees the look they want on Instagram and purchases instantly at full price. So not only does Nearly Natural have to look its analytics to see what is contributing to sales, but which channel is the most cost effective as well.

 



References


Market Research Future. (2021, July 28). Artificial plants market size worth USD 780.3 million by 2028 at 4.15% CAGR - report by Market Research Future (MRFR). GlobeNewswire News Room. Retrieved November 13, 2022, from https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2021/07/28/2269945/0/en/Artificial-Plants-Market-Size-Worth-USD-780-3-Million-by-2028-at-4-15-CAGR-Report-by-Market-Research-Future-MRFR.html 

Nearly Natural. (n.d.). Silk and artificial flowers, fake plants, and trees. Nearly Natural. Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https://www.nearlynatural.com/ 

SEMRush. (n.d.). Fastest Backlink Checker - Backlink Analytics by Semrush. Semrush. Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https://www.semrush.com/analytics/backlinks/ 

SEO audit for nearlynatural.com. SEOptimer. (n.d.). Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https://www.seoptimer.com/nearlynatural.com 

Shopify. (n.d.). Seo overview. Shopify Help Center. Retrieved November 13, 2022, from https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/seo/seo-overview 

Shopify. (n.d.). Shopify analytics. Shopify Help Center. Retrieved November 13, 2022, from https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics/shopify-reports 

SimilarWeb. (n.d.). Website traffic - check and analyze any website | Similarweb. SimilarWeb. Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https://www.similarweb.com/ 

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