Dixons The Electrical Retailer Still Not Getting Internet Profile

Dixons took their brand wholly onto the Internet and out of the High St a while back and all this time onwards as a brand it is still absent on the Internet, how can this state of affairs be allowed to continue?

For three years the High Street retailer Dixons have struggled with their online platform, they have repeatedly been let down by their web developers and their Internet experts.

On more than one occasion this painful journey has seen their site suppressed in search engine listings with whole sections of their ecommerce platform dumped out of the active search results.

Many search engine guidelines were breached and Spammy pages were sent into search engines such as Google to further undermine the brands Internet footprint. In fact at one point at a Christmas past the official statement for a drop in Internet sales was on the lines that there was a downturn in consumer confidence and spending, the real cause was the whole website bar the homepage had been dumped out of Google and so nobody searching for products could buy anything.

Of course this is largely not the fault of Dixons, in the main they have been duped time and again by their suppliers of SEO expertise and the site developers who clearly have no understanding of what makes a site work for search engine spiders.

However, there is significant blame in my opinion that should be placed at the head of the marketing department, getting it wrong once is perhaps excusable, after all the SEO industry is full of bad practitioners on the bandwagon. But getting it wrong time and again is perhaps less excusable, worse though is getting it wrong when the company decides to take itself out of the High Street and wholly online.

This last point really shows how poorly led the marketing team must be, the management took the business wholly online without any understanding of how to tap into the most lucrative channel for sales, without a facility that could deliver a proper online sales profile and with even more bad expertise delivered from yet another ill informed SEO agency.

Of course they are in great company, the absolute debacle of Sainsburystoyou is an ongoing shameful series of blunders that is unforgivable for a company such as Sainsburys, especially when they are losing market share to Tesco. Where is the accountability I ask, after contacting Sainsburys many months ago to try and give them some free advice I was told there was currently no marketing director?

Anyway its a year on since I last looked seriously at Dixons and was hoping for a pleasant surprise, this time I thought I would approach it from a consumer perspective. So I went to Google and typed a search for digital camera no sign of Dixons anywhere, another big seller was Plasma TV again no sign, so I decided to make a far more focussed search.

This time I searched for Kodak Digital Camera and again there was no sign of the brand that had taken its business out of the High Street and onto the Internet.

I once again analysed the website and nothing has really changed, the site is a mess and so is the way the code is presented to search engine spiders, no doubt that the overall cut in staff and premises has enabled some shift towards profitability after the demise of the High Street stores.

Of course there are many internet sales channels not just organic search traffic but surely the Chairman is a brave man if he has decided to ignore this lucrative driver of traffic and sales, or maybe he just doesn't know?

About the author: Shaun Parker has followed the debacle of many of Britains best known retailers as they continue to blunder around online he asks why do they not talk to a Search Engine Optimisation company of repute such as High Position Ltd