Australia Post, Tarazz and online marketing: Just a storm in a teacup?

Recently Australia Post caused a bit of a ruckus when it struck a new partnership deal with eCommerce retailer Tarazz.

Grant Arnott from Online Retailer described the deal as a, “…major kick in the guts for a retail industry already under significant pressure from overseas retailers”.

The executive director of the Australian Retailers Association, Russell Zimmerman, was reported by SmartCompany as saying: “Obviously, we do have some concerns that a body like Australia Post is a type of preferred supplier, if I could put it that way.”

Personally, I reckon it’s all a storm in a tea cup, for now anyway.

I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard of Tarazz before this announcement. Maybe they’re big somewhere else?

Anyway, being curious, I checked out their website for interest’s sake and really found it wanting. They have virtually no on page search engine optimisation to speak of, so unless you know who they are, the stuff they sell will be hard to find through the search engines.

There are basic issues around the placement of the Google Analytics Script sitting in the footer of the code. The new Google Analytics Async code is best placed within the head section of the code.

Then there’s the way they’re handling their domains.

They use what’s known as a 302 redirect to take you from www.tarazz.com to www.tarazz.com.au. A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect; so, generally, search engines like Google won’t pass any of the 170 SEOMoz reported inbound links pointing at www.tarazz.com through to www.tarazz.com.au because you’re telling the search engine you might point the domain somewhere else in the not too distant future. Not good.

There is a small benefit in setting up 302 URL forwards on your domains, and that can be in the search engine result pages (or SERP’s for short). We sometimes use them for reputation management in the search engine results because Google (at the moment) is showing them as separate websites, even though they redirect. This can help you ‘own’ your brand results.

Here’s what’s happening for Tarazz; probably more by accident than design.

I note too that there are no Google Ads showing for them and there are no remarketing scripts on the site either: Not a good way to take advantage of all the publicity the announcement received.

But back to domains for a second. What they need to do in my humble opinion is use a permanent URL redirect (or a 301 redirect) from one domain to the other. This will pass all the authority and anchor text from the 170 links through to the www.tarazz.com.au domain and consolidate their back link profile under a single domain.

Going even further, I’d do what Apple, Crumpler (disclaimer, Reseo customer), Cochlear and hundreds, if not thousands, of other website owners do and that is to use country specific subfolders to improve their SEO rankings.

If I was Tarazz, I’d forward the www.tarazz.com.au into www.tarazz.com/au then use Google Webmaster Tools to assign the /au subfolder to Australia (and so on) as you grow globally (if that’s your intention). You consolidate all inbound links under a single domain. The results can be dramatic.

Anyway, it’s clear to me that Tarazz is an online start-up and has a lot of work to do to get themselves noticed online. That’s not a bad thing, but when you look at the work other start-ups are doing to build their brand and their traffic, like www.theiconic.com.au, they’ve got some work to do.

Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.