Walmart SEO Strategy Brief
Strategy briefs are bite-sized examples of how to apply my organic growth strategy approach to large enterprises. While they are inherently limited by being developed only with external insights, there are still great learnings to derive from the exercise. In this post, we’ll be focusing on Walmart.
Walmart is the largest company in the world by revenue, driving $572.8 billion in revenue in fiscal 2022. $73 billion comes from eCommerce, which is growing but still under 13% of total revenue.
As the world continues to shift more towards shopping online, Walmart’s eCommerce business faces stiff competition from companies like Amazon, eBay, and Target. According to SEMrush, their organic traffic has been flat over the past 2 years.
This strategy brief will outline a potential organic growth strategy for Walmart.
Defining Walmart's SEO Strategy
Walmarts’s Business Strategy
Walmart’s core business strategy is to be a price and convenience leader – their motto is ‘Every Day Low Price’, after all. Their overall flywheel, taken from their 2022 annual report, gives a great overview of the scope of their strategy.
Beyond price, a huge part of their strategy is to grow their eCommerce business, offering convenience to those shoppers who prefer to shop from home or on the go.
Their wholesale club brand, Sam’s Club, is another key element of their business strategy. They believe that the Club format is “one of retail’s fastest growing formats“, and the growth seen by the industry leader, Costco, certainly backs that up (+8% YoY in Q1 ’23).
Lastly, Walmart created their competitor to Amazon Prime back in September 2020 with the rollout of Walmart+. However, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, Plus membership only represents about 25% of Walmart’s customers, and growth has plateaued at about 11.5 million members. While not entirely an apples to apples comparison, Amazon Prime is reportedly north of 200 million members.
International efforts represent about ~18% of total revenue, but interestingly, gross profit rate is less than the US business segment and they recently divested of Walmart Argentina, Asda in the UK, and Seiyu in Japan (per their annual report). This suggests to me that Walmart leadership is still figuring out the best approach for international growth, and therefore, making it a core part of the organic growth strategy may be premature.
There are, of course, other elements of Walmart’s business strategy, such as financial and B2B services, but from the outside looking in, those appear to be longer-term, distant priorities to focus on when it comes to their organic growth strategy.
Current state of Walmart’s SEO
Walmart, as you might expect, is an SEO powerhouse. While their organic traffic may be flat, they still bring in almost 240 million organic site visits each month, and rank for nearly 12 million keywords on Page 1 of Google (per SEMrush).
What I’m seeing from a high-level audit is that the major growth opportunity is with samsclub.com, not walmart.com. I performed a quick keyword gap analysis between Walmart, Sam’s Club, and Costco, and we can see that while Walmart is obviously the more trafficked site of that group, Costco has double Sam’s Clubs visibility.
I also took a look at Google Trends to see how search interest in Walmart+ has trended over time, and saw that search interest spikes in November, and did see modest, if unspectacular, growth throughout 2022.
Bringing it together
Based on a brief look at Walmart’s business strategy and the current state of their SEO, I would likely recommend the following strategy summary:
Goal – Grow organic-driven Walmart+ signups by X%; increase samsclub.com’s organic visibility and revenue by Y%.
Core Insights – Walmart+ is a big strategic bet for the company, with high margins, the potential to make customers even stickier, and competitors have proven it’s a successful business model. Additionally, Sam’s Club is lagging behind competitors like Costco and needs to improve to seize the growing opportunity from the club retail format.
Specific Deployment of Actions – Conduct a full SEO, Content, and CRO audit of samsclub.com; determine specific keyword gaps between Sam’s Club and Costco; develop a testing roadmap to more prominently display Walmart Plus on the main website; fix the meta title on the Walmart Plus landing page (it’s currently the URL, as of Jan 2, 2023); add FAQ structured data to FAQ pages to increase SERP presence (no markup detected on the main landing page or the deeper FAQ pages as of Jan 2, 2023).
In a single sentence, Walmart’s SEO strategy should be:
Our strategy is to drive more Walmart+ subscriptions and increase Sam's Clubs organic traffic and revenue by X% by thorough promotion of Walmart+ and an overhaul of samsclub.com's category & product pages.
Making Walmart’s SEO Strategy Better
How could we make this first draft of a strategy stronger? Beyond the obvious answer (getting information from various experts within the company), the strategy should be
- Aligned with the broader business strategy
- Compelling to key decision-makers
- Credible and well-supported
- Easily understood and memorable
I’ve made some reasonable guesses of what Walmart’s strategic focuses are, but this would definitely need to be validated; for example, Walmart International is the second biggest business segment and therefore supporting international efforts might actually be the biggest focus versus a much smaller revenue-driver like Walmart+. There’s also little focus on walmart.com itself, which may make the strategy less compelling to key stakeholders even if there’s less growth potential there then with samsclub.com.
The strategy does have some data supporting it, which adds to its credibility, but more is certainly needed. For example, I might find in a keyword analysis of Costco and Sam’s Club that Sam’s Club actually outperforms Costco on crossover products, but Costco simply has different inventory than Sam’s Club.
To make the strategy more credible, I would do more research into the specific keyword and traffic opportunity being missed out on currently, to quantify why some of the proposed tactics, like driving more traffic to the Walmart+ landing page, would drive meaningful results.
I also don’t have a sense as an outsider of how to make the ultimate strategy presentation compelling to key decision-makers, so I would need to first figure out who the key decision-makers are that I need to convince to execute my strategy, and then determine what they respond best to. For example, Product leaders in charge of the Sam’s Club website might be motivated by competition, so I could highlight Costco’s organic dominance as a compelling reason why we need to update our own category page layout.
Conclusion
While this is a very high-level approach to determining a potential strategy for Walmart, using a clear framework helps to focus and speed up progress, and get you to a first draft of your strategy sooner.
For a deeper dive into my organic growth strategy framework, I recommend reviewing my guide for more details. If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to contact me here.