Wal-Mart My First Impression of Essay

Total Length: 941 words ( 3 double-spaced pages)

Total Sources: 0

Page 1 of 3

A search for "buy vacuum" yielded Yahoo! Shopping, Best Buy and a store in Australia, but Wal-Mart did not make the front page. A search for "vacuum cleaner" again failed to turn up Wal-Mart. Adding a geographic search also failed to turn up Wal-Mart, instead yielding specialty stores focused on this product. Thus, competitors do turn up on the front page, but Wal-Mart does not. However it is worth knowing that aside from Best Buy, the competitors tend to be specialty stores. Other general goods retailers that form the main competition for Wal-Mart, such as Target, Sears or Amazon, also do not turn up on the first page of Google hits. I believe that for specific products, Wal-Mart does not have good search optimization. It is conceivable that Wal-Mart relies on its substantial brand recognition to bring customers directly to its website, rather than via a search engine. Alternately, the breadth of Wal-Mart's product line makes it unlikely that it will receive pagination by search engines for any given item that will bring up Wal-Mart on the first page of a search.

When "Wal-Mart" is googled, most of the hits are from Wal-Mart. The company's main retail site is the first three hits. This is followed by news stories about Wal-Mart, some of which are based on Wal-Mart press releases. Wikipedia is represented, as is WalMartStores.com, the company's corporate website. At the bottom of the first page of Google hits are sites that are not created by the company.
These include critical sites such as WalMartWatch.org and the satirical PeopleofWalMart.com. Lastly, the New York Times is included on the first page of Google results. Bing results are less critical, but do feature a union website that discusses Wal-Mart related labor issues.

The sites that are critical of Wal-Mart are buried underneath of the corporate news and the company's retail site. They are most likely to be found by those looking for them. That said, the presence of negative and satirical websites on the front page of the Google hits is likely to be a negative for Wal-Mart, as these sites contribute to a negative image of the company. The company's ethical practices come into question, and the satirical site effectively ridicules those who shop at Wal-Mart. Such websites could have a negative impact on public impressions of the company, although to be fair neither complaint is new or obscure, and neither has had a negative impact on the company's revenues, growth or profits in the past. These sites largely appear to appeal to those who already share those sentiments about Wal-Mart and they are not framed in a manner that will be especially convincing to the tens of millions of people who are already regular Wal-Mart customers......

Need Help Writing Your Essay?