Find a Way to Get Your Site on the First Free Search Page Now

You think you’re having a tough time this year? It isn’t easy being the editor of a business publication that’s all about sharing thought-provocative success stories as positive learning experiences, either.

As a professionally trained journalist of 26 years, I’d certainly be having a feast this year if I were hunting for “good” dirt on struggling companies to do investigative stories on. How did Lillian Vernon and The Sharper Image both come crashing down? Where did RedEnvelope go wrong? Plenty of carnage out there.

But that’s not what we’re all about here at Catalog Success. We strive to help you through good times and bad. So I chose to focus this edition of The Corner View on free/organic search since it’s, well, free, and at least one low-cost way to help bring in some new customers in these difficult times.

Where the Leaders Rank
Specifically, I conducted a little experiment. I went on the Web sites of the five leading catalogers in this year’s Catalog Success 200 — X-treme Geek, Brookstone, Kevin’s Fine Outdoor Gear & Apparel, Golfsmith and CB2 (from Crate and Barrel) — to see which of these show up on the first page of Google organic/free searches.

Here’s how I conducted my test: On the bar atop the Web browser, virtually every site shows its title and, most often, a brief description of what’s on the site. For instance, if you go to the CatalogSuccess.com homepage — not the page you’re reading right now, because with all our articles, the headline shows up there — you’ll see it says “Your Partner in Multichannel Commerce: Catalog Success.” The “partner” part, of course, is our publication’s tagline, which neatly sums up what we’re all about.

So first I went to each of the five catalog sites from our chart. Then in my Google search box, I keyed in several of those words. For our own site, I grabbed the words, “partner multichannel commerce.” Thankfully, the Catalog Success site was the first site to appear among those displayed in organic/free search.

But when I tried this with the top five from the Catalog Success 200, I had mixed results.

1. X-treme Geek’s (X-tremegeek.com) top line says “Geek Toys, Geek Gadgets, Geek Games, Geek Gizmos, Geek Gifts at x-tremegeek.com.” I then keyed in “gadgets toys gizmos” in my Google search box, and this one did well, coming up as the second site listed.

2. Brookstone’s (Brookstone.com) top line says “Brookstone: Brookstone —The Perfect Innovative Gift Idea — An Assortment of Specialty Consumer Products.” (The company name appearing twice is no typo.) This was a little tricky to work with, so I went to the Brookstone site first and gazed at all the product categories Brookstone offers, then keyed into my Google search, “gifts bed & bath electronics.” By the sixth page of the search results, I gave up. No Brookstone to be found anywhere. Come again? Certainly gifts, bed/bath and electronics are what Brookstone’s all about, no? I found Target. I found Bed Bath & Beyond. I found Costco and Sam’s Club. But no Brookstone. You kidding me?

3. For Kevin’s Fine Outdoor Gear & Apparel (KevinsCatalog.com), the top bar simply states the cataloger’s title, “Kevin’s Fine Outdoor Gear & Apparel.” So I keyed into my Google box “outdoor gear apparel.” Kevin’s did fairly well, coming up as the 10th site on the bottom of the first search page.

4. Golfsmith (Golfsmith.com) lists a ton of things atop its site: “Golfsmith: Golf clubs, golf balls, golf accessories, golf shoes and golf … TaylorMade, Titleist, Cleveland Golf, Cobra, and Nike Golf.” Whoa! That sure covers the gamut. So I keyed in my search box “golf clubs balls accessories.” And bingo, Golfsmith came up No. 1.

Oddly enough, two of Golfsmith’s leading multichannel rivals, TGW (The Golf Warehouse) and Dick’s Sporting Goods, were nowhere to be found in the free search listings, even though their paid listings were toward the top. Another rival, Edwin Watts Golf, which we profiled in our October 2007 cover story, did appear 10th on the first search page.

5. CB2 (CB2.com), the 8-year-old Crate and Barrel offshoot targeted at college-age and 20-something-age consumers for inexpensive, trendy furniture, says, “CB2 — a new destination from Crate and Barrel for modern furniture, home accessories, and gift registry.” So I keyed in “modern furniture home accessories gift registry” in my Google box, and lo and behold, CB2 came up No. 1 in the free search.

As a further little test, I keyed in just “modern furniture home accessories” in the search box, and CB2 dropped to No. 9 on the first search page; not bad, but far from the top.

No Brookstone? What About Woodworker’s Supply?
In sum, for the catalogers with the fastest housefile growth rates between 2006 and 2007, I was only partly impressed. Kudos to Golfsmith, CB2 and X-treme Geek. Not bad for Kevin’s. But Brookstone? Where are you?

Still shaking my head over the absence of Brookstone in my search, I thought back to three and a half years ago, a year and a half before I joined Catalog Success. In January 2005, I gave a keynote presentation at an annual management meeting held by the Woodworker’s Supply catalog in Albuquerque, N.M. My speech was a mixture of industry trends and my own assessment of Woodworker’s’ business.

In conducting my research to prepare for this, I conducted a similar experiment and searched for “woodworking tools” on Google. I found plenty of Woodworker’s’ competitors, but not Woodworker’s Supply. After the speech, several Woodworker’s Supply executives thanked me for pointing this and other flaws in their business out (no tomatoes!), and they talked of taking action on these matters.

So now here it is, three and a half years later, and I did the same search. SAME RESULT! No Woodworker’s Supply found anywhere in the first six natural search pages. I couldn’t believe it.

What to Do
To Brookstone, Woodworker’s Supply and other multichannel marketers whose sites fail to make first pages of searches, Larry Becker, vice president and principal, Web site effectiveness for The Rimm-Kaufman Group, brings out a couple of useful points.

1. Links from other relevant sites: “Each link is a vote of confidence that your site is an authority,” he says.

2. Your site should have abundant relevant content that’s properly formatted. “The more pages you have focused on a given category,” Becker says, “the better.” So breadth and depth of selection help. What’s more, each of those pages needs to link to one another, contain content useful for humans (no SEO spam!) and be “readable” by the search spider, he says. You should also have clean HTML and CSS, more content than code, descriptive titles and headline tag, among others.

Finally, Becker notes that catalogers should be aware that Google favors editorial rather than commercial pages for its natural search listings, despite its stake in paid search. “So we’ve seen retailers do very well at cutting above the competition with strong ‘how-to’ editorial,” he notes.

Finally, if you don’t already, get blogging, because blogs have the added power of RSS distribution.