BuzzStarter Website Review – Zanotto’s of San Jose

I love shopping! Be it clothes, accessories or shoes, one of the things that give me a challenge is getting the best deal, discount, whatever that can give me more bang for my buck. With the rising cost in labor and logisitics that gets that product from the shelves to our doorstep comes increased prices and this motivates me, and other consumers out there to find a good bargain.

So it is no wonder I also look for good values when it comes to grocery shopping. By the way I love shopping for food because I like to pick what I get to sustain this body of mine and around my area I do have a lot of choices. One particular grocery I like is Zanotto’s, its this small family chain of groceries in San Jose, stands out to me because they carry good products I would never find anywhere else. Now, I do not get the chance to shop there quite often as I get off work a little later than their operating hours but when I do, I normally go to the deli and grab me an Original Sandwich! Also, their prices maybe a little more than your average grocery but the service is good and you never get the feeling that you are bothering clerks when you have a question to ask.

However just like any local business, even if it has grown, their website definitely needed an improvement… and fast. Towards the end of 2014 up until around March of 2015, this is what their site looked like:

Doing a deep dive at their interior pages told the same story. A lot of Adobe Flash going on, with not a lot of focus on what they were about but mostly where and how you can find them, lacking guidance on understanding what it really means to run a brand, a product and acquire customers through an online channel.

Come April 2015 though, a much needed re-design came around and now, the site looks like this:

Definitely a huge step in the right direction as the new site is mobile friendly, although there are some sizing issues on mobile which needs to be addressed an fixed. For example these two images and on the home page:

When you view this on mobile, this looks like this:

And then towards the footer where the addresses are wrapping extremely to the left, when viewed from mobile:

One can see that there definitely are a couple of things that still needs to be corrected and ironed out from this new re-design. The one thing that my screenshot does not show is the Contact Us form gets all broken when viewed on mobile as well.

What about their taxonomy? You know, their evergreen keywords? It is hard to make a comment about those because that really depends on what the current brand/marketing strategy is, something that I am not currently privileged to know. One thing is for sure though, just the basic on-page keyword optimization once more is lacking even on the new Zanotto’s site.

The site also runs on WordPress, which is the best CMS in my opinion, that is out there in the market. All BuzzStarter developed sites, from ClearScale.net to Plated’s The Dish runs on on this platform. Nonetheless, it is not configured to its’ full potential as I do not see any of the more important plugins that most in the industry use.

These are tactical elements that are fairly straightforward to fix. However how about the strategic elements? Especially on how I think they can improve their current efforts?

There are a couple of things I can make comments on, however I again hold back a bit as I am not privy to what they are currently planning on the marketing side.

On what I would review on is that I do see a number of call to actions on the site such as:

• View Weekly Ad
• Contact Us (which is horribly placed at the footer)
• Various deli forms and menus in PDF format
• Catering
• Follow them on either Facebook and Instagram
• etc.

Now there are these CTAs and possibly a few more and one huge thing that is missing is that I see no tracking on the site that can measure these various key performance indicators. Without that, it is impossible to even measure if this new site is performing as expected. It is also a missed opportunity in trying to understand what your current and possibly new consumers are interested in.

Gauging how they do their Social and their share of voice, I think that they can still do a lot more, tie in a couple of really good promotions and measure these conversions back to their website. The retail vertical is ideal to every graphic Social platform out there as the products they carry are very visual in nature. Food in itself has reached a revolution in the past 5 years with the various TV shows as well as do- it-yourself foodkits that has hit the market and these platforms are great in pushing your brand out there.

So the final verdict? I give this site a 3.5 out of 5 buzz points. The pros:

• Great effort on the site redesign.
• Good choice in moving the site into a content management system, especially using WordPress.
• Finally surfacing their Social media channels more when compared to the old site.
• A step in the right direction.

The cons:

• Still needs clarity and direction regarding the numerous call-to-actions on the site.
• Zero use of tracking behavior or the more defined conversion points .
• Missed opportunities, especially with regards to utilizing the site for community management and engagement.
• Could still improve on defining their brand and related products.

That said, for every review I do I will do my best to send this out to the business owners. What they do with this review, they can work and fix it themselves or I also offer my own services to resolve this any improve any other existing or new issues that I may find.

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