Home Aroma

By admin on 1 December 2010 @ 5:34 PM.

Tags: reviews, ecommerce reviews, aromatherapy, ecommerce, fragrance oils, home aroma, oil burners, scented candles, website review.

Home-Aroma.co.uk

Home-Aroma specialise in home fragrances, their products include candles, oil burners, air fresheners and anything else you could remotely connect with fragrances in the home. First impressions of the website are positive, the site is clean and neat and consists of neutral pastel colours that are very easy on the eye.

Homepage

Upon landing on the homepage, you are instantly presented with the parent product categories, these are clear, mostly above the fold and use excellent imagery. The search bar is clearly visible at the top of the page, also providing visitors with the option of searching within each category. The customer account, shopping cart/checkout links are also clearly visible at the top of the page as they should be with any ecommerce website. As far as the homepage goes, very impressive; The recent design change has cleared up the only potential noticable issue with the amount of unused white space towards the bottom of the pages. Ideally with the banners at the bottom, certainly with the free UK delivery on orders over £20 banner and the eco awareness banners, these should really be more prominent without having to scroll to the bottom of the page.

Search Functionality & Navigation

The website search function is simple and works with no issues,  I experienced no problems trying to locate what I was searching for and the product results are returned neatly. The usual filters for search results as you would expect to see on any ecommerce site are available (name a-z, price low-high and rating high-low).

Category Pages

The category pages are consistent throughout the website, as is everything else onsite. it is clear, easy to navigate, well labelled and categorised sensibly. The only recommendation we would make here is to include a description or more of a description on the parent categories and sub categories, understandably however, there is probably only so much you can say about scented candles and the such but including a decent paragraph of text on each will aid with the page ranking in the search engines for the categories product/product range.

Products

The product range isn't huge and certainly isn't as large as some of it's competitors, however there is something for everyone it would appear with a range of product types and a range of scents, albeit, limited with each. The product images themselves are fantastic, clear, detailed and when you enlarge the images, they do actually display a larger product photo (it is surprising the amount of websites that don't). Prices appear to be competitive in direct comparison with other stores for the same style of products which will only work in this sites favour.

Search Engine Optimisation

There is room for substantial onsite optimisation throughout the website which will improve the general performance of the website in search engines. The page title has been optimised for the homepage although there is additional characters left that are being wasted currently. We would normally recommend trying to use between 65 and 70 characters in page titles as this is used as a ranking factor in search engines, is your one chance to stand out and grab a searchers attention amongst your competitors - Anything over 70 characters will not be visible in the snippets in the search engines. Currently the homepage title makes use of 56 characters.

As for the remaining categories throughout the site, many of these have not had their page title optimised, this will make ranking in search engines incredibly difficult and is minising visibility on the web in general. On every page possible, it is worth optimising the page title to cater for search engines (ranking) and visitors/shoppers (usability) as best you can. The products themselves have more descriptive page titles although they could still be improved further.

The same applies with the metadata (meta description and meta keywords), whilst these may not be a ranking factor (on Google anyway), the description should still be unique to each page and be used to describe the pages content as accurately as possible to give shoppers the best insight into the content they will land on as this too, is sometimes used as the snippet in the search engines. Throughout the website, the metadata is extremely limited and this can be perceived as a wasted opportunity.

Upon initial findings, it doesn't appear home-aroma.co.uk ranks particularly well for any of it's desired search terms, the link profile pointing into the site is also of low quality links and pass no authority, 'link juice' or weight. A combination of onsite optimisation and offsite SEOAn acronym for 'search engine optimisation', the series of processes used to improve your ranking in search engines and drive more web traffic to your website organically.

Learn more about SEO would increase the overall performance of this website and the quality of traffic.

Conclusion

All in all, very pleasant ecommerce website to browse and shop on. Very easy on the eye, almost visually therapeutic which should capture the target market perfectly; Simple to navigate, easy to find what you're searching for, good value for money, free delivery available on orders over £20. Christmas banner is also up nicely in time to catch plenty of Christmas shoppers attention. Have definately got the right ideas when it comes to ecommerce, main recommended points would include fully optimise the website sitewide and broaden product range if this is possible.

If you would like a professional ecommerce website review to be featured on Clubnet Search Marketing, then please let us know.

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