It doesn’t matter what people might be telling you, the reality is that online, your brand doesn’t stand a chance against grey market competitors.
With an 80% market share [link] Google, is the singular point of reference for the majority online searches. The impact of this for brands is that grey market websites positioned highly in Google, will reap massive rewards in terms of visitor traffic, and return on investment.
High rankings doesn’t mean beautiful.
You might have commissioned a specialist photographer, paid a premium for a fantastic designer, or contracted a copy-editor that turns out award winning product descriptions. But the truth of the matter is, that this of little significance to search engine rankings.
Search engines like cleanly coded and spiderable content and that can be easily read and stored. Once that data has been collected it is subsequently analyzed and then outputted in the form of a ranking in the relevant index.
Your beautiful looking website and content is analyzed along different, non user, lines for this ranking. All that money spent on presentation and style is rather inconsequential at a search engine level, if your not listed, no-one will see your website.
The actual ranking factors for search engines are: keywords, website structure, inbound links and freshness. The last element of “freshness” has become a much more significant ranking factor since the explosion in social media over the past 4 years.
5 reasons why your brand cannot compete with grey market optimization strategies
1. To use the same tools as the grey marketers would be too damaging for the brand because grey market optimization involves a varying degree of spamming, depending on the sector.
2. Your brand website has a single point of access for users. This limits the number of different listings under which it can rank in a search engine (literally, the number of times the same domain can be shown in a single page of results). In the grey market, five different domains for a specific product could translate as five out of the ten listings in the search results.
3. You cannot optimize a single page on your brand website for all the search terms against which your product can be found. While you can rank for the top 10 search terms (with recognized and strong brands), there may be over 200 potential search terms. That means that 190 search terms can be optimized by the grey market (using a domain strategy as described in point 3).
4. In cases where grey market websites have their own affiliate scheme, whereby other web publishers send their visitors through to the grey market publisher in return for %commission on sale, it’s not clear who should be pursued, the affiliate or the grey market website?
5. Entry costs are virtually zero. For less than €300 you can build a website, using a free open-source platform, and buy the tools necessary to start making the website appear at the top of the search engines. You don’t even have to register a domain to do so.
“We don’t need to worry, it will get better!”
This is simply not true anymore, brand owners should be very worried. In Google Labs, Squared [see an example here], sets to dissect online content and present this to users in a grid or tabular format. It’s not clear exactly how this will be developed but what is clear is that it is being linked to Google’s own advertising platform. It could mean that the beautiful product photos commissioned for your brand website, could be shown alongside a grey market advertiser that’s bidding on a related brand search term.
If you needed further proof
We published a small 10 page website and put it on the front page of Google, and Yahoo in four weeks. There were a total of 580 million other website pages competing for the top 10 placements we achieved.
If you’re a brand manager that’s worried about the impact that grey market goods websites are having on your business, contact us, for discreet and professional advice on tackling this problem.
