Chris Lake goes on a tirade:
After almost three years of weak sales Gap CEO Paul Pressler has stepped down to enjoy more than £7m worth of severance pay. Why is the 3,100-store company suffering? One look at Gap’s website tells you all you need to know. With just 107 words of readable text on its homepage, the Gap site is far too fond of pretty pictures for its own good. The main consequence for Gap is rubbish search engine visibility. Is it any wonder that the firm sales are in freefall?Look at the cached version of the homepage in Google and you’ll see that Gap is preventing Googlebot from doing its work, with its warning about ‘requiring cookies to be enabled’. Make sense of that, Googlebot!The result here is that Google is only indexing around 85 pages from the Gap website, which explains why the company is totally invisible for relevant search terms. And you can forget about finding deep links straight into product pages.If it wants to increase sales by attracting new customers then it is time for Gap to take another look at implementing a search strategy. Because I can’t see any search engine marketing in action whatsoever, and that includes paid search. How bad is it? Well just try finding Gap for anything non-brand name related:‘Men’s clothes’ – not in the top 100 on Google.com, despite Gap presumably generating a healthy percentage of its $14bn-a-year sales from men.‘Wool motorcycle jacket’ – not in the top 100 on Google.com, despite it selling and labelling a product in this exact way. ‘Women’s styles’ – not in the top 100 on Google.com, despite it ‘optimising’ its title tag for this term.
After almost three years of weak sales Gap CEO Paul Pressler has stepped down to enjoy more than £7m worth of severance pay. Why is the 3,100-store company suffering? One look at Gap’s website tells you all you need to know.
With just 107 words of readable text on its homepage, the Gap site is far too fond of pretty pictures for its own good. The main consequence for Gap is rubbish search engine visibility. Is it any wonder that the firm sales are in freefall?
Look at the cached version of the homepage in Google and you’ll see that Gap is preventing Googlebot from doing its work, with its warning about ‘requiring cookies to be enabled’. Make sense of that, Googlebot!
The result here is that Google is only indexing around 85 pages from the Gap website, which explains why the company is totally invisible for relevant search terms. And you can forget about finding deep links straight into product pages.
If it wants to increase sales by attracting new customers then it is time for Gap to take another look at implementing a search strategy. Because I can’t see any search engine marketing in action whatsoever, and that includes paid search.
How bad is it? Well just try finding Gap for anything non-brand name related:
‘Men’s clothes’ – not in the top 100 on Google.com, despite Gap presumably generating a healthy percentage of its $14bn-a-year sales from men.
‘Wool motorcycle jacket’ – not in the top 100 on Google.com, despite it selling and labelling a product in this exact way.
‘Women’s styles’ – not in the top 100 on Google.com, despite it ‘optimising’ its title tag for this term.
Gap relaunched its website in late-2005 and all sister brands, including OldNavy and newcomers like Piperlime, use the same template. Which would be fine if it didn’t suck so badly.See, it isn’t just offsite search that is the problem. Try searching for something once you visit Gap.com and you’ll soon realise that you can’t. Gap’s executives felt that the new website didn’t need an onsite search tool.Which begs the question: “Are Gap’s executives all smoking crack?”That said, we know that consumers think of brands as a single entity, with web and high street amounting to much the same thing. So it follows that a bad experience online or offline will affect the consumer’s perception of the brand as a whole. [It] might be one of the reasons why some people have stopped visiting its stores. About one in twenty of Gap’s (declining) sales dollars are processed online, so while the company has generated significant traction you’ve got to wonder about the opportunity cost of it being blinkered to best practice.
Gap relaunched its website in late-2005 and all sister brands, including OldNavy and newcomers like Piperlime, use the same template. Which would be fine if it didn’t suck so badly.
See, it isn’t just offsite search that is the problem. Try searching for something once you visit Gap.com and you’ll soon realise that you can’t. Gap’s executives felt that the new website didn’t need an onsite search tool.
Which begs the question: “Are Gap’s executives all smoking crack?”
That said, we know that consumers think of brands as a single entity, with web and high street amounting to much the same thing. So it follows that a bad experience online or offline will affect the consumer’s perception of the brand as a whole. [It] might be one of the reasons why some people have stopped visiting its stores.
About one in twenty of Gap’s (declining) sales dollars are processed online, so while the company has generated significant traction you’ve got to wonder about the opportunity cost of it being blinkered to best practice.
Robin Grant
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