Brands and Retailers Vying for Top Spots in European SERPs

On observing the sector of search intelligence closely you must have noticed a few patterns that attract our attention while analyzing the market. The importance of retailers over brands in the SERPs is one among them. Strangely, the search market of one European country stands out as an exception.

It has been spotted that 6 out of the 10 of search results for Italian sunglasses are brands and not retailers. When search was on for the bouquet of designer sunglasses that this fashion-sensible nation has to offer, the search result astonished us with the big names like, Gucci, Ray-ban, Armani, Oakley, Carerra and Persol.

Many of them also manage to get their way through to the organic search. If the fact seems to be quite interesting to you please read on to know what brought this paradigm shift in the search industry of the European market. A closer look into the matter will help us sensing the pattern of European market and design the online marketing strategy accordingly.

Here is a note on my observations,

Impact of Brand Origin (Yes/No): Brands like, Armani, Persol and Gucci had their base in Italy. The current headquarter of Carrera is also in this country. The initial observation shows that local brands receive brand-loyalty from the searchers as an obvious result of their brand origin. However, brands like, Ray-ban, Oakley managed to occupy the top positions in the search page despite being based in a completely different continent (based in USA).

Keyword Competition (Yes/No): The research involving some of the generic keywords from the fashion and lifestyle industry has shown that the competition is quite low in Italy.

Maturity of Searchers (Yes/No): A comparison with different other countries in Europe has pointed out some major difference of its e-commerce scenario with the other parts of the continent. The difference lies in the speed of broadband, usage of Adwords, keyword-competitiveness, etc. These factors control the SERPs to a large extent. Moreover, the nature of search can get changed in future as the search market in the country is maturing fast.