Blog 1/3: My first weeks as an SEO-Intern at the German company Tchibo

Who would have thought that this year will be year to accept the need of change, declare change, work for change and become the change? Who would have thought that the Pandemic would affect us? It seemed to be so far away, away from everything. But it affected us all in different kind of ways. 

But I hope that everyone is safe.

From the business perspective, Covid-19 had a huge impact on the fashion industry especially retail. Due to this, my first internship got cancelled last minute, just a day before I actually would have started. But in the moment, I remined myself that everything happens for a reason. I ended up applying for other internships last minute and finally got the acceptance from the German company Tchibo in the beautiful city Hamburg. The History of the company started with selling coffee but today Tchibo’s product range runs from fashion to furniture and even insurances. The company follows a multichannel approach and has a unique business concept of presenting “Themenwelten” every week. 

It has been almost four weeks already that I have started the internship at the SEO department at Tchibo. I have never experienced the first weeks at a company like this. Everyone is working from home and I was kind of nervous, not meeting my fellow colleagues, not having interactions with other people and being by myself. But everything went pretty well in the first weeks. My lovely superior Annika allowed me an easy start and she is always available for questions and answers. The SEO-Team is located in the “Business Development Department” at Tchibo and works hand in hand with “SEA”, “Onsite Marketing”, “Affiliate Marketing” and “Online Sales”. My department is responsible to generate higher traffic on the website itself and getting higher rated at Google.com, while working with Google Analytics and optimizing keyword analyses. After the first weeks I really felt that the support was very much needed and that my team is treating me as a full team member and not really like an intern. Due to that I really enjoy learning new things and taking responsibility for some important upcoming tasks. The company is very much aware of change and is constantly trying to take this into consideration. Every week the whole business development department is having a virtual coffee chat to talk about important tasks and updates to inform all team members. Every team member takes action in the meeting to present their current tasks and processes they are working on. 

Before the internship I already finalized the topic of my field study. I will conduct a benchmark analysis with the focus on the “User-Interface-Flow” of Tchibo and compare this with the fashion industry, while using pure online players like About You and Zalando. During get-to-know-meetings with the most of my team members my first impression was that the user interface flow and especially the optimization of the check-out process is a huge discussed topic and has relevance to my department. I see a lot of potential to combine the user interface flow with focussing on the check-out process for the upcoming field study. I am really looking forward to work on it and to get more insights about the changes the company is about to make in regard to optimize the website. I will keep you updated in the next blog entry about the process of my field study. 

#staysafe