Back in November I asked a friend of mine, Gabriella Cook, to review some sites to see a non-search-marketer’s take on some of the sites that I love or hate. Following is her take on Zappos.com:

For the weathered shoe shopper, Zappos.com is a godsend. With their endless inventory and countless categories, a shoe connoisseur can find a variety of leather-free, 2 1/8”, oxford wedges from $39.99 to $69.99. In white. The wide range of choices might entice a shoe connoisseur so much that she can ignore the crowded layout, swarm of ads, and more typefaces than the eye can register. For everyone else, these problems have a negative impact on the online retail experience. For all its success, zappos offers unclear categories (after hours, vulcanized, work & duty) and confusing navigation.

Color

The color scheme for the website is simple and consistent. Lavender and blue are a good contrast against yellow highlights. The pastel color palette allows designers to bring emphasis through the use of red (as seen with some type, and the “sale ” button along the top of the page). Most importantly, the use of white space allows viewers to focus on the product of interest. The only place in which color is a problem is in their side advertisements. They detract from the color continuity of the website, and bring undue visual attention. If the website’s goal is to sell a product, the product should carry some if not all the visual weight on the page. Customer testimonials and the return policy should stand secondary to this goal, and bear visual weight accordingly.

Type

On any given page, the viewer can expect between five to ten typefaces, all sans serif. This is a poor design choice because it prevents a steady visual flow through the page and confuses the hierarchy of information. The type treatment for major categories, and product descriptions is legible – but not necessarily attractive. The type treatment for almost everything else feels flashy and over designed.

Layout

While browsing through the website, most of the information is crammed into two columns in the center of the browsing window. This organization is straight forward, but could improve with more white space and less text. When we look down the page, we find many rows of buttons and links. So much of this content could go into a third column, or better yet replace some of the useless clutter on the page. (The viewer does not need to click the “why shop at Zappos.com” button because they are already shopping at zappos.com). Overall, zappos layout suffers from too much content and inefficient organization.

Now for my take on Zappos.

Search Optimization

Overall Zappos is employing a reasonable amount of optimization including alt tags on almost all the images, they have also made an attempt at programmatic construction of titles, descriptions and keywords. They certainly are overlooking some aspects of on-page optimization, and at least one of the omissions is intentional.

Header Section

URL: http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/716773.html

The first thing that stands out is that Zappos could be doing better is using more informative URL Structure — “/n/p/dp/716773.html” doesn’t tell us, or search engines, very much about the content of the page. The internal structure has left this page deep in the site and unfathomable, at least it doesn’t call a large number parameters.

Someone has obviously told them that words are better than numbers because you can find occasional searches that produce URLs like http://www.zappos.com/gs/pony-lodo-white-white-mens.shtml. So far I have found them in #1 for searches where they used word naming conventions.

Sites like Zappos don’t use best practices in URLs because they have highly transitory content. They intentionally avoid URL word naming because they often have multiple products that all would fit the same description that will be gone back and gone in a short period of time. Tracking and renaming content is more complicated when there are a finite number of names. An alphanumeric structure allows them to have an unlimited number of possibilities that can quickly come in an out of existence based on their inventory system. To their benefit they do redirect to “www” when it is left off. So Zappos is doing about as well as is possible.

Title: adidas Samba® Classic (Running White/Black) – Classic

As a title this is descriptive but mediocre. The registered trademark is wasted space, most users are not actually going to search for Sambas with any variation of “running,” and classic is not important enough to warrant double use. A more useful title on all fronts would be:

Adidas Samba Classic Soccer Shoe (White/Black) – Running Shoe

This can capitalize on a number of real queries and still be descriptive. Also it is best to choose a standard capitalization pattern.

Meta Description: adidas Samba® Classic (Running White/Black) – Classic; Read adidas Samba® Classic product reviews, or select the adidas Samba® Classic size, width, and color of the adidas Samba® Classic of your choice.

So you can see here that the same variable is used to make the title and description. Again ® is very unnecessary and Zappos has far better things to say than “choose your width.” There are at least six different seals and three calls to action on the page so Zappos should take advantage of at least one of them with a description more like this:

Adidas Samba Classic Soccer Shoe, 365-day return policy, overnight shipping and customer reviews. Zappos Powered by Service, authorized e-retailer since 1999.

Zappos has honed their messaging for the sale but they are leaving it out of their current description of the shoe. They also have left out their brand which is a major part of their value.

Keywords: adidas Samba® Classic (Running White/Black) – Classic

If you are a believer in keywords you should be doing something other than your title. Because Zappos is a hierarchical site they easily could have done:

shoe, mens, soccer, adidas samba classic

Body Content

Images

Almost all the images contain alt attributes the one that stands out is this one:

I have a special prize for the first person who knows the secret trick to giving this image 13 alt attributes. Zappos has 6 seal including BBB, BizRate, and an official Adidas e-tailer badge. Kudos on the image front.

Copy

The non-testimonial copy is this:

The legendary indoor shoe. Soft leather and a low-profile gum rubber outsole give the elite player ultimate control.
Full grain leather with brushed nylon quarter lining and half-molded tongue.
Full rubber shell sole with indoor sole tread.
Not sure what some of the above words mean, or want to see how this product was measured? Look it up in our online glossary!

They are missing an opportunity to use Samba, Adidas, and Soccer in this text. The site produced copy is the best place to use a bold or italic to put special emphasis on the product words, especially since there is so much unrelated content on the page and the URL naming has been omitted. Zappos is more aggressive with the testimonials, every one of them starts with the product name. Also every review has shoe width, shoe size, and shoe arch — so there is ample shoe repetition, just not directly paired with product specific phrases.

Internal Linking

If you like architectural possibilities Zappos is a fun game — most pages have around 80-100 links roughly 10% go out to a sub-domain or external site and another 10% are javascript to pop-ups. Most of the link flow goes into category pages that go out to dozens of sub-categories sometimes 4-5 levels deep. This is likely where the low hanging fruit is for a site like Zappos, controlling the way they link could very quickly boost their results a few ranks across the board. I would recommend pairing down the number of links leaving from any given page.

I echo Gabriella’s comments about presentation; Zappos does the job well in spite of, not because of, their site. I am not going to cover usability changes in this post, maybe at a later time.