Why Gearbest no longer has the right gear

Doing well online is part and parcel of a business nowadays. It’s well known that people browse and shop online, and the gift industry is no exception. It’s no longer good enough to have a solid presence in the high street. Customers, old and new, want to find businesses and gifts online, they like to see other customer’s experiences and check out your reputation.

Each year at Salience we look at how various industries are doing online and recently we have unwrapped the gift market to see who has their online marketing wrapped up well.

What’s happened to the gift industry online?

Overall, the gift market has had a good year online, its visibility has increased overall by 5%. There have been some really good gains by some brands, but others need to sort out that SEO bow.

To find out visibility, we compare each brand over a number of keywords. As each brand is in the same industry, we can assume that they will want to rank for the same keywords. This allows us to rank each brand and compare to where they ranked in the previous year.

The top five have mainly stayed steady, with three brands staying in the top five this year. Not On The High Street has kept its place at position one, despite losing -9% of its visibility. But they are in the lead by far, so unless something majorly changes they are unlikely to be unwrapped easily.

However, there have been some new contenders in the top ten. Buy A Gift has jumped to position six from position 13th, thanks to a 55% rise in its visibility. Zavvi has also joined the top ten, a visibility increase of 59% has helped them to jump from position 14 to eight.

These two are ones to watch out for in the next year, if they continue to keep on top of their SEO strategy next year, they could climb the rankings further.

On the other hand, the biggest negative move in the top ten is seen with Getting Personal. This brand has seen a -30% drop in their visibility, which has caused them to drop four places, from position five to position 10. They need to tighten that SEO bow if they don’t want to drop off the top ten next year.

However, it is Gearbest that have seriously let their SEO unravel this year. They have had a massive visibility decrease of -97%, in a market that has seen overall growth, this is quite something! This drop has caused them to lose their second place spot in the rankings and seen them plummet all the way down to 24th position. They certainly don’t have the best SEO gear!

How can gift brands Improve?

Despite the market doing so well, there is still plenty of room for improvement that brands wanting to climb up the rankings can work on. When looking for some of the higher competition keywords, brands in our report don’t have the top spot or featured snippets.

The same can be said for opportunity keywords (high search volume but low competition). These quick wins are up for grabs for brands in the gift market.

Looking at what pages are ranking for opportunity words, it tends to be those presenting products in a list format. As many of the opportunities are based around gift ideas such as “best X”, this makes perfect sense.

Therefore many magazines rank for these opportunity keywords, as they often do articles based around these questions. Therefore, if gift brands start writing high quality list-based blog posts, they could take these top spots and greatly improve their visibility.

Natalie Took outreach and PR executive at Salience