Coors Light VS Guinness: Two Great Beers With Terrible SEO

Coors Light VS Guinness: Two Great Beers With Terrible SEO

Introduction

SEO is an important consideration for marketers because in order for Google and other search engines to be able to find your site, and rank highest when people are searching for things online, you need to have keywords that will flag Google’s attention and direct them toward your site. In the Beer industry, Coors and Guinness rarely use keyword sentences throughout their sites like Cold Certified and Beer Made of More. In the quest of the Cold refreshing beer, both www.coorslight.ca and www.guinness.com were searched. The objective is to determine which of the two sites when compared has a stronger SEO.

Screen Captures of both home pages:

Coors Light Homepage

Guinness Homepage

Coors Light Upload Speed

Guinness Upload Speed

SEO Considerations	Coors Light	Guinness
URL:	http://www.coorslight.ca/en/home	http://www.coorslight.ca/en/home
Keywords used on each site:	Beer, Coors Light, Coors, Light Beer. Mystery Mansion does not appear in the “keywords” but does appear 6 times throughout the site.	Nothing comes up under “Keywords” but the word beer is in strong text. The word Guinness when searched on its own appears 103 times. Words such as “ale”, “black”, “dark”, “stout”, and things that would make good key words appear infrequently in the text sections, but not as keywords or given any special associate.
Frequency of Keywords:	Beer: 5, Coors Light: 25, Coors: 454, Light beer: 1	Guinness: 103, Ale: 3, Black beer: 3, Creamy: 1, Stout:6
Locations of keywords:	In small phrases	In paragraphs
Keywords in URL:	Coors light	Guinness
<title>	Coors Light - Born in the Rockies	Guinness&reg; – Beer Made of More&trade; | Guinness&reg
<meta name="description" content=“”/>	Coors Light is an easy drinking lager brewed in Golden, Colorado, from refreshing Rocky Mountain water – making it the only beer in the world that's Cold Certified	It takes bold brewers to brew bold beers. Brewers prepared to go to lengths that others wouldn’t to perfect their craft. Discover Guinness
<meta name="keywords" content=""/>	Beer, Coors Light, Coors, Light Beer	Guinness
Quality of written content:	Minimal written content on the actual webpage. Mostly links to social media. Many short posts. Twitter is constantly updated.	Excellent written content. Lots of information about the beer, it history, and even recipes.
Quality of Visual Content:	Excellent. A very visually based site. Many photos and links to social media sites such as twitter and YouTube.	Excellent visuals. Old pictures of founders etc. Many in site videos. Many links to YouTube.
Alt Text used:	355mL Can, Mountain Wisdom, 350mL Can, 341mL Bottle, 355mL Bottle, 473mL King Can, NO KEY, NO SEE, Sneak Peek?, Coors Light Logo,	Search, Guinness logo
Captions used:		Made Of More
Quality of Layout:	Great	Great
Call-to-action:	Enter age to grant page access. Social media links to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. “Find your way in” to the Mystery Mansion. “Get your gear on” shop now. View details.	Enter age to grant page access. Link to Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, Ireland, where you can find social media links.(Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)  Buy tickets for tours ex. Gravity bar. Event planning etc.
Anchor Text:	NA	“Guinness and Draught” takes you to https://www.guinness.com/en-ca/our-beers/guinness-draught/
Mobile Friendly:	Yes. About as good as the desktop site.	Yes. It is huge site on either platform. But it is well done for a mobile site. Not as confusing as I had imagined.
Content is “shareable”:	Yes.	Yes but first you have to go to the link for Storehouse, which actually directs you to a separate page. Then you will find links to share on social media.
Links to Social Media:	Facebook, Twitter, Instagram	Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
SERP ranking results when using keywords from this table:	When searching “beer”, Coors light did not show up within the first 20 pages. Light beer appears on the 6th page.	When searching “beer”, Guinness did not show up within the first 20 pages. Dark beer does not show up within the first 10 pages. Stout appears on the 4th page.

 

Summary:

Coors Light’s strengths are its use of social media and visuals. Guinness’s strengths are its use of well written content, and that it has a huge site that gives a lot of historical information about the brand. The keyword sentences for beer are terrible. For example, when I typed the tagline “cold certified” into google, Coors Light related pages came up but the actual website didn’t appear until the second page.  Other observations are that Coors light is not overly concerned with SEO.

When searching for content using the keywords:  Dark beer, Guinness did not appear within the first 10 pages. I’m not sure when or if it would have. It did not appear in the first 20 pages when searching “beer”. When searching the word “stout”, Guinness appeared on the 4th page.,   The two sites have this in common, the both have terrible SEO but they are different in that Coors light site is very short, to the point, social media based and has a younger target market. Guinness is targeted to an older demographic and has a much larger, more in-depth site focusing on culture and heritage. They also use social media but their site is much more content based.

Conclusion:

In the beer industry, Coors Light and Guinness do not rely on using keyword sentences throughout their sites like Cold Certified or Dark Beer. They rely more on their consumers searching specifically for their brand name when they want to find their websites. In my opinion the overall winner of this SEO Search analysis is Coors Light, by a hair.

APA Citations:

See what’s beyond the peak. (n.d.). Retrieved February 13, 2016, from http://www.coorslight.ca/en/home

Site navigation. (n.d.). Retrieved February 13, 2016, from https://www.guinness.com/en-ca/