Pros
- Easy to navigate
- Main navigation menu is sticky (remains at-top while scrolling)
- Large buttons to emphasize free trial or sign-up
- Good image slide-show portraying a variety of devices
- Movie categories are browse-able without a membership
- Separate mobile site
- Nice Media Center for PR and related company information
- Simple layout with navigation, header and movie list
- Informative and intuitive help-center
- Member reviews are available on each movie page
Cons
- Little social media integration
- Very little written content
- Not a very good responsive design
- Mobile website lacks content
- No sample streams or bandwidth tester
- No testimonials
- No mention of original content
- Layout is busy with all the movie cover tiles
- Difficult to access the page-footer from a movie category because it continually feeds additional movie titles.
- Trailers are not available on non-member movie pages
- No mention of their mail-delivery service
Recommendations:
- Stream trailers of Netflix Original content on the home/member signup home page.
- There should be more written content on the benefits of subscribing to Netflix.
- Movie list on home page should be more of a top-10 review of new releases.
- Add a user/subscriber testimonial section.
- Move “Ways to Watch” to the main-menu; it should not be a sub-category.
- Add a bandwidth testing tool and provide recommendations if bandwidth is substandard.
- Integrate Social Media with provided API’s from Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.
- A search function could be included for potential members to find favorite movie titles, actors or directors.
- Instead of listing most categories on the main home page; create a compact and easier to read section that can be dynamically selected by genre or popularity. This would free up some real-estate for more written content.
- For specific movie category pages, use a sticky footer if dynamic content is to be continuously added as a user scrolls down.
According to SEO Performance analysis on seositecheckup.com, Netflix received a 63% overall and a grade B score. Some of the suggested problems are simple fixes but others may require a more involved approach.
Some of the simple fixes are related to Meta-keywords , keyword density, and written content related issues. Keyword density for “Netflix” appears 3 times at 4.69% and the target range, according to the site, recommends 2-4% density. This problem is likely related to a notable problem where the code-to-text ratio of content text represents 3.48% of the webpage source code. There are few problems with the HTML tags but adding more content and include a few instances of an <h2> Heading would fix most of the content related issues and enhance search engine results.
Also, to make the website Search Engine Friendlier, applying a mod-rewrite module to the server to change the dynamic content URL’s that are essentially serving static content into friendlier url address. Although, the pages listed are not essential to the overall user experience; re-writing those page url’s may increase the sites overall page-ranking. It was also mentioned in the analysis that those links contain underscores rather than hyphens. If the site is already ranked highly, this is no need to change.
There also seems to another problem with some broken links which may be from the same set of links as mention above. The SEO Performance analysis reported that 6 out 15 distinct anchor links appear to be broken links. It may be appropriate to throw an exception rule if these links are dynamic and to be excluded from search engine’s index by blocking search engine spiders.
To optimize Netflix.com and to strategically enhance the website, I would suggest installing the Google Analytics API or similar tool. Gathering that data will aide in the effort to increase search engine results. Other optimization suggestions can be applied during regular site maintenance: Minified JS Files, Minify CSS, Remove Inline CSS and add a Media Print CSS rule to help, legal or other static content.
The Netflix Report 