According to the Retail Gazette High street retailers are being outperformed by their digital counterparts. It’s an interesting article and one I though would be interesting to explore a little further.
High Street retailer H&M who spend significant resources on maintaining its 3300 stores across 54 countries could not match the likes of shopstyle.co.uk who dominate organic visibility.
Take a look at these stats supplied by SEMRush:
By organic keywords, Shopstyle.co.uk is dominating with H&M ranking for only a fraction of keywords that shop style is ranking for. In fact, according to SEMRush H&M rank for 3,187 keywords in their database whilst shopstyle.co.uk rank for nearly 130,000.
Established retailers are starting to wake up
I’m not just talking about the big boys here, but smaller retailers too. I regularly hear of small retailers claiming the Internet is destroying their business yet I rarely see them taking steps to do much about it.
It has taken far too long for retailers and brands to accept internet advertising / marketing and now they’re slowly realising they’ve missed the boat and are aggressively trying to catch up to the likes of shopstyle.co.uk.
Take Lenovo for example: The PC / Tablet maker is working hard to position itself as a consumer brand, how? They’re spending “a lions share of its advertising dollars on digital platforms”.
House of Fraser has recently poached Asos’s head of SEO as it looks to expand it’s share of search visibility
The problem is, many of them are waking up too late. Online Marketing is not a life ring: If you wait until your situation is dire then you’re probably too late: Just look at the likes of HMV and Woolworth’s.
It’s about time.
Everyone loves a good statistic so here’ s a few retail based stats:
[Tweet “Despite 82% of luxury purchases occurring in-store, 78% of shoppers research online before buying”]
[Tweet “79% of smartphone owners are smartphone shoppers”]
[Tweet “85% will shop for a gift by starting on one device and finishing on another”]
It’s hard to believe that in light of these facts there are retailers that don’t have an effective online strategy. We’re regularly seeing large established brands being caught napping as young and energetic digital competitors have embraced digital and then having to play catch up as a result.
Local businesses need to embrace digital
Local firms are equally as lethargic and often see the Internet as confusing, untrustworthy and not essential for the prosperity of their business. And they’d be wrong of course:
[Tweet “85% of people look for local information on their smartphone. 13% look for local information daily 81% take action as a result”]
[Tweet “37% use smartphones to look at local restaurants, pubs and bars.”]
[Tweet “Google expects mobile searches to overtake desktop searches by the end of 2014”]
The fact is, it doesn’t matter if you sell flowers, run a bar or you’re a plumber: People are searching online for your products and services. To quote an old advert from Google (ironically it was a newspaper advertisement)
Do you know who needs a haircut?
People searching for a haircut – Maybe that’s why ads on Google work.
