Where Are Your Visitors?
The “Where Are Your Visitors” series examines common problems with apparel websites that limit their traffic.
A fundamental part of Clarinova is market research, so I’ve seen hundreds of website for apparel vendors. Almost universally, they are beautiful, such as the site ( to pick one at random ) for Claire Pettibone:
The site’s splash page has an animated image that immediately establishes the theme and feel of the website, but it has a serious problem: the site is nearly invisible to Google and other search engines. A web search for the terms on the splash page, “couture bridal luxury lingerie” does not return the Claire Pettibone website in the first five pages. If the site were properly constructed and marketed, it should return in the first page at least.
This site has two major marketing problems on the splash page.
First, it is entirely constructed in Flash, so the text is not indexed by search engine. ( although this will change, slightly ) There is no HTML content on the web page, so Google has nothing to put into its search engine. Google does not know that this site carries high-end lingerie. SearcheingineWatch.com has an article on this problem.
Second, the site does not include any of the important keywords in its header. The HTML for the website should have a description meta tag and a title that includes the site’s keywords. Gareth Davies has an excellent video that describes using title tags.
These two problems afflict nearly every apparel vendor’s website, not only clairepettibone.com. Fixing these two problems would help Claire Pettibone and other vendors improve search rankings and increase traffic to retailers without compromising the site’s design.
