Red Bull vs. Gatorade - An SEO Analysis

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In the world of web design and promoting products, you want visitors and people looking for your website to visit and locate your site. When competing for results, you want to be the first link people find. With that in mind, we have investigated the two websites, RedBull.com, and Gatorade.com, to see who has better optimized their website in the field of 'search engine optimization'; the process of making your website 'web ready' and making sure your website is readable to users as well as web crawlers looking for metadata to rank your site depending on its overall quality and usability.

Introduction

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an important aspect of web searching and website optimization as it improves your visibility in relation to a search engine. The more visible or accessible your website is to a web crawler agent, the more likely people are going to find your website when searching for a particular product or item that relates to your company and/or product.

Screen Captures of both home pages:

SEO Considerations	Red Bull	Gatorade
URL:	http://www.redbull.com/ca/en	http://www.gatorade.com/
Keywords used on each site:	Music, Energy, Sports, Events, Motorsports, eSports, Games, Bike	Sports, , Energy, , Athletes, Promotions, , Events
Frequency of Keywords:	10+	5+
Locations of keywords:	Title	Title
Keywords in URL:	Red Bull	Gatorade
<title>	Red Bull Gives You Wings – RedBull.com	Gatorade | G Series Sports Drinks for Energy, Hydration and Recovery
<meta name="description" content=“”/>	Produces a variety of energy drinks in the USA. Offers information on each product along with apparel and information on their sponsored teams.	Official Gatorade home page – the source for everything Gatorade including the G Series, sports science innovation, nutritional information to help you win from within.
<meta name="keywords" content=""/>	Nothing.	Nothing
Site upload speed:	Fast	Fast
Quality of written content:	Excellent	Excellent
Quality of Visual Content:	Excellent	Excellent
Alt Text used:	“Local skater Marco Kada Hardlfips a stair set in Vienna, Austria” “Red Bull Cold Rush Freeski Event”	“Energy Chews” “Thirst Quencher” “Protein Shake”
Captions used:	“Pick your Cold Rush People’s Choice Award”	“The Science of G, featuring Cam Newton”
Quality of Layout:	Articles are laid out nicely, displaying which are more popular, depending on the size of box they’re advertised in.	The page easily allows customers to view their product selection and can quickly find the most popular products and quickly view their page and information.
Call-to-action:	Red Bull’s site makes it very difficult to find their actual products page, and instead, focuses entirely on news articles and sponsorship, making their product selection difficult to find.	Gatorade shows right away what they sell, and what it can do for you. Their drinks selection is right on the home page. It makes it much easier to see that they actually sell products and promote them, which is very different from Red Bull.
Anchor Text:	Yes	Yes
Mobile Friendly:	Yes	Yes
Content is “shareable”:	Yes	No
Links to Social Media:	Yes	Yes
SERP ranking results when using keywords from this table:	“Red Bull” - #1 “Energy Drinks” – 14, 2nd Page	“Gatorade” - #1 “Energy Drinks” – N/A Gatorade does not show up

Google Trends:

Include your topic, and your two brands.  Include the search terms with your screen capture.

 

Google Trends Insights:

From the last 12 months, I can see that Red Bull is much more often searched than its competitor, Gatorade. Red Bull provides an assortment of articles and events that it sponsors as a company, and writes many articles and new stories on everything from sports to motorsports to even eSports. Gatorade however, promotes a few athletes they sponsor and offers links to their product pages.

Summary:

Red Bull definitely gains its strengths from doing editorial style articles and sponsoring events that are really unique and interesting to people, including those who don’t like or watch sports. They do a variety of coverage and have even included video game coverage now, not something that usually requires Red Bull to do.

Gatorade focuses its attention much more to its own products and offers some unique, interactive videos of the various athletes they sponsor. They seem to be much more open to the fact they sell a product, whereas Red Bull actually makes it difficult to find their drink page.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, I would say Red Bull makes use of their site better, in terms of who they are as a company. Red Bull over the years has moved away from focusing its brand on their actual drink products, and has moved more to sponsorship and awareness campaigns of unique sporting events. Gatorade promotes their own product a lot more and you can see it in their site. As mentioned above, Red Bull makes it difficult to find their products page, and Gatorade offers their products right on their home page. But considering Red Bull has moved more into sponsorship, Red Bull certainly has a better site and usually comes up first when you search for any sporting event, especially if it’s a Red Bull sponsored event. Red Bull also does a much better job putting their name out there, and commonly teams up with companies like GoPro to film and promote their sporting events; since the two companies usually go hand-in-hand now.

APA Citations:

Google. (February 2016). Google Trends. [Energy Drinks, Red Bull, Gatorade]. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Energy%20Drinks%2C%20%2Fm%2F0gl8r%2C%20%2Fm%2F01ghgx&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B5

Red Bull. (2016). Red Bull Gives You Wings – RedBull.com. Retrieved from http://www.redbull.com/ca/en

Gatorade. (2016). Gatorade | G Series Sports Drinks for Energy, Hydration and Recovery Retrieved from http://www.gatorade.com/