Jens Ode

Today I stumbled upon an interesting situation when I used Google Image Search. I searched for the term ”Norrgavel stol”, where ”Norrgavel” is a swedish furniture brand and ”stol” is swedish for chair. The result unfortunately confirmed someting I discovered a while back – furniture stores are horribly bad at search engine optimization. Take a look at the screen capture from the search result screen and specifically look at two things:

1. What’s there.
2. What’s not there.

What’s There

Well, I can give myself some credit. At place 1, 4, 8 and 14 we see results from designfavoriter.se, which is a web site I run. It actually shows all the posts about Norrgavel I have on the site, which means that I managed to dominate the search results. Good for me, especially when designfavoriter.se is only a couple of months old. What else do we see? Mainly all sources displayed are from blogs or larger interior design sites such as Sköna Hem and StyleRoom.

What’s Not There

Moving on to the more important question – what’s not there? Norrgavel is a swedish brand specialized in high quality and environment-friendly furniture. They only sell their products through their own set of stores and they have a web site which has been up and running for a long time, http://www.norrgavel.se. Where are the images from norrgavel.se?

Norrgavel should be very interested in driving traffic to their own site, especially since they don’t rely on resellers, in which case it would make sence to let the resellers get the traffic. Page after page is filled with images from blogs (even the logo image from designfavoriter.se appears), but there’s no sign of any images from norrgavel.se.

Does It Matter?

Yes, it really does. Traffic from the image search engines are actually quite large.  To quote SavvyAuntie.com (large community site) ”I have more traffic referrals from images.google.com than Facebook and Twitter. [..]”. It is even more important for a design brand to have a strong presence in the image search results, since it is a very visual product.

What To Do?

Remember that every piece of content on your web site is a valuable asset. Make sure to give your images correct names and to use the Alt and Title tags correctly. If in doubt, read this article about using Alt and Title tags.

Note To Norrgavel

Somehow I don’t believe that Norrgavel has any alerts on when the brand name is used online, but if you do and find this, feel free to contact me and I’ll be glad to give you some hints on what you should do with your web site. Love your products, but your web site really does not live up to your standards.

A screen shot of the search result screen is displayed below.

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4. Fetch as a Google-bot
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