IKEA Website – “Assembly Required”

Introduction

It is hard to believe that the iconic and beloved Swedish brand, IKEA, burst onto the U.S. market back in 1985. Incredibly, for all the success that IKEA has experienced worldwide, there are only 40 stores in the U.S. If you have the opportunity to visit an IKEA store, it is quite an experience. The store consists of a maze of departments and floors that are interconnected on color coded paths that seems endless when steering the peculiar shopping carts that have a mind of their own. 

In 2015, IKEA enjoyed a 11.5 percent increase in business with worldwide sales of an astounding 31.5 billion euros. IKEA was built on a brick and mortar model that caters to the up and coming millennial target market, but it’s mission is to strive for great design, quality and affordability for all. The prices are so affordable, that regardless if you need it or not, it is almost guaranteed that when visiting the store, you will most likely leave the store with something.

Opportunities

For a brand that was founded in 1943 and has become a trailblazer in the affordable home furniture and furnishings sector, they appear to have been asleep at the wheel when it came to online shopping.  "We weren’t one of the early adapters. But we’ve matured in our thinking about it," Peter Agnefjall, IKEA’s chief executive, said in an interview with Fast Company. "We realized this is not a trend, it’s a mega shift." Incongruously, they are proud to boast in the end of year report of 2015, that there were 1.9 billion visits to the IKEA.com website, but does not specify the online channel sales, only to say there was a 21 percent increase over 2014. 

The loss of potential revenue over this missed opportunity is staggering.  For example, if a mere half of one percent of the 1.9 billion visitors converted into a sale of $30, this would equal $285 million in revenue.  IKEA has about 70 percent of the products available online and the goal is to list about 90 percent. One might think, especially if you have visited the brick and mortar store that it is understandable, when developing an online strategy for more than 9,500 products, for this to be viewed as challenging. However, when compared to Amazon, the king of ecommerce sites, which has 488 million product offerings, and a direct competitor to IKEA, Overstock.com, which also solely lives in the online space has more than 1 million products listed. Being slow on the uptake, IKEA began placing an emphasis with online sales in the U.S. only about 5 years ago and saw an increase of 35 percent from the previous year.

 The company culture is one of being minimalistic and frugal, this being clearly mirrored in the product design and pricing. Mikal Ohlsson, former CEO said, “The tiny rocky wooded town where the company was founded breeds people who are very stubborn and incredibly cost-conscious.” He adds “One might say they are even stingy and they strive to make do with less.” This could clearly reflect the insights into the slow embrace of the Internet and leadership’s decision to make change. When an online strategy is developed, there are different nuances that brick and mortar stores do not contend with such as free delivery, white glove assembly or returns. This may have been one reason why the tightfisted hand of the CEO was reticent toward the Internet and as a result became a laggard during the stage of online innovation. The managing director for Anderson Bauman Tourtellot, Peter L. Tourtellot, said, “IKEA squandered big opportunities online and could face difficulties catching up.” Furthermore, according to IBISWorld, the home furniture sales are on track to increase to $14.2 billion in 2019 from $10 billion in 2014.  Furthermore, he said, “They should have been on the Internet years ago. They could have built up a sizable business by now and it was shortsightedness when they got wrapped up in their own success,” 

Pros and Cons of the Website

Visiting the IKEA website is a brutal undertaking and not for the faint of heart because of the awkwardness of the user experience. The so-called “Swedish Theme Park” has not successfully transferred online into an enjoyable visit. The photos are beautiful and visually appealing, but products are represented as a virtual pdf catalog. Speaking of the catalog, although IKEA has developed an admirable sustainability plan, it continues to kill trees by printing 200 million copies of the catalog in 27 languages for 38 countries. It is a beautiful tactile look book with a long shelf life, which has proven highly effective as a low tech tool. However, instead of transferring the book to an online interactive experience the products online are one dimensional, difficult to navigate and very confusing with core design and information hierarchy. Some basic considerations are for IKEA to provide better search results based on the users’ query construction.  In fact, the catalog, that continues as a marketing centerpiece, was mocked by the IKEA marketing team in a video poking fun at shoppers who flock to look and browse online by calling it a catalog “bookbook.” It’s clever but obviously out of touch.

Clearly, IKEA made a huge miscalculation by recognizing how shoppers’ behaviors have changed and consumers use the web to research and compare prices, but more importantly to buy. Furthermore, IKEA ignored that time is a precious commodity and shoppers who may love the IKEA products, but lack time were willing to pay for add-ons such as delivery and assembly of furniture. Which gives one pause that the online challenges may be a combination of a cultural disconnect and a lack of dedicated resources. One bright light is the development of an online catalog app with 54 million visits and an interactive kitchen design tool, albeit clumsy, but certainly a move in the right direction of embracing technology. Both of these are indications that the brand is slowly shifting. For IKEA this is groundbreaking!

Examining the Website

The IKEA brand is a well-known name where a large segment of customers includes the iconic name in the search bar. This was confirmed when using the SemRush analytic tool, that at a minimum 30 percent of the website traffic organically comes from the iconic brand keyword. What this means is that if a shopper is looking for a dining chair, more popular search results will appear with brands such as Pottery Barn, West Elm, Wayfair and Overstock.com, who lead online furniture sales and dominate with 42percent online. Let’s look at a website SEO audit and examine the pitfalls.

Using the analytical tool WebRanks, the IKEA website landed a grade of “D” for search engine optimization, which is pretty poor for a well-known brand. Let’s look at individual elements that contribute to this low grade in the SEO report and for this case study it is useful to use a comparison tool for IKEA and its competition. Using the side-by-side comparison tool by Internet Marketing Ninjas the finding was as follows:

Head Tag Elements:

IKEA missed the boat completely by having this element void of information.  According to Moz, the title head tag element is used to provide an accurate and concise description of the page’s content, which is crucial to the user experience and SEO. The title tag creates value in relevancy, browsing and the search engine results page. The optimal format is primary keyword, secondary keyword and brand name. If we use this rule, it looks like West Elm is the only one who followed the suggestion. The rule of thumb is that the title tag should be no more than 7 words and less than 62 characters. 

Meta Description:

The suggested character length of the meta description is between 150-160 characters. Clearly, IKEA hasn’t taken advantage of this prime opportunity to advertise content by using unique relevancy of keywords. Fleishner suggests using the keyword twice in the meta description, which will have a direct impact on the SERP and improves click-through rates.

Meta Keywords:

In 2009, Google decided to quit using keyword meta tags in the search engine results and this is a result of black hat tactics of keyword overstuffing.  Although meta keywords have no relevance they can expose keyword strategy to competitors. Therefore, it is best to use the Google guidelines when selecting these words.

Headings:

The rules are to include key words in the heading tags and the content with 1 to 3 being adequate. As we can see by the analysis below, IKEA does the bare minimum. These tags are important to emphasize text on the web page. IKEA has zero H1 tags and 1 H2 tags.

Brand	Internal Links	Page Text	Page Speed
IKEA	148	598	1950 ms
Overstock	649	1825	1899 ms
Wayfair	517	1188	9391 ms
West Elm	453	1544	23860 ms

Internal Links:

IKEA falls short on the internal links as demonstrated in the chart above. Internal links are useful as they allow users to navigate a website, help establish hierarchy and help spread the ranking power around the website. By creating internal links, it gives direct access to different pages by order of importance. Obviously, IKEA needs help in this area because when searching on the website for a simple product item the results are overwhelming. What this means is the hierarchy has not been properly established. Another missed opportunity for IKEA.

Page Text:

Not sure what IKEA is thinking with regard to page text and is clearly outnumbered when compared to its competitors. Page text general rules are to use the keywords more in the front end and avoid keyword stuffing, if done properly this will avoid being penalized during the search results…another missed opportunity for IKEA.

Page Speed:

The load speed of a web page directly affects the search engine page results. Google places a high importance on the user experience and if the web page takes too long to load, it is understandable that the user will most likely move on. “According to surveys, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online."

Alt Image:

Alt images, otherwise known as image tags is what is displayed when the image cannot be displayed or is present while the page is loading. Google cannot read an image and therefore all images should have text that matches the relevance of the image and contain 150 characters or less. The text, which often includes keywords, sends a signal to the search engine that the page is relevant and consequently ranks higher. Tagging the images can only help during the search engine process. When conducting the evaluation of the IKEA website, there were 170 images and surprisingly none had alt image tags. This is another missed opportunity. 

Take Away

In conclusion, this evaluation has demonstrated many areas of improvement where the IKEA website still needs work. The U.S. consumer is patiently waiting, with high hopes, that it will turn things around quickly because the downside is obvious lost revenue. There are other opportunities that were not discussed that pertains to social buttons for sharing and creating and linking relevant content all of which increase search results. There are insights into a new Live Catalog webpage that appear to have some promising results, but the real question is can they catch up in time?