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.