Canadian Tire

The Background

Canadian Tire Corporation offers goods and services that meet life’s everyday needs. A proud Canadian company employing 58,000 people under one of the nation’s most-trusted brands, Canadian Tire’s competitive advantage is leveraged through their brands, core capabilities, assets and extraordinary people. They are focused on delivering excellence in value, customer service and innovation.

With a diverse product mix of retail, automotive repair & supply, clothing and financial services, Canadian Tire wanted to use their online presence to better communicate, educate and remain top of mind for their customers across all of their product lines, increasing the opportunity to remind clients of their expertise in a widening portfolio of merchandise and services and capitalizing on trust in the brand.

The challenge was that their web site was not optimized for search and consistently ranked low for organic search results. Fragmented and lacking in a cohesive structure, it was not reflective of the overall corporate mission of the organization.

The Solution

Canadian Tire approached NLC to help increase their ranking for their organic search problem. While at first this appeared to be the problem, it quickly became apparent to the experts at NLC that a low organic search ranking was simply a symptom of a larger issue and suggested that Canadian Tire take advantage of the NLC Site Analysis and Design, a structured approach, honed over years of successful engagements, which ensures that the web presence of a company mirror the business, culture, and revenue objectives of the organization.

NLC began with a complete site analysis, establishing if it was even properly structured to support organic search. This included understanding impediments (for Canadian Tire, postal code blockers), content duplication, how the site was being indexed and whether content creation was following best practices for search engine optimization.

Organizational size and wide range of disparate product offerings added to the complexity of designing the site, developing policy guidelines, implementing publishing protocols and educating internal Canadian Tire stakeholders . In addition, Canadian Tire is equally active in French Canada and required strong bilingual capabilities. This meant more than translation (the approach that most organizations follow), it meant truly understanding search terms, keywords and cultural differences that signficantly impact the ability for the right content on the site to be found consistently by consumers.

The Outcome

Canadian Tire has transformed their online presence into a web site that is a true reflection of the various products and services they represent. In addition, they have utilized this to become an information destination for consumers who are in varying stages of understanding more about appropriate merchandise or offerings. They have realized:
• A 50% increase in organic traffic;
• Movement to the first page of most search engines across all product porfolios (retail, financial services, automative, clothing);
• Improved content posted by educated stakeholders who are able to optimize for search;
• Increase in educational content (how to guides, merchanidse reports, etc.), providing consumers with knowledge needed supplied by a reliable source, and thereby increasing return trafflc;
• Bilingual organic search – Canadian Tire did not do a simple translation but engaged in the same research and approach for French as well as English providing a true multi-lingual site that satisfies consumer needs in both languages and increases site and return traffic.