Media pundit Dan Abram’s latest website, Styleite (the latest vertical in his Mediaite empire) launched Monday of this week, generating buzz among sartorial and media tastemakers alike. The fashion news site is purportedly going to try and capture an arguably oversaturated online fashion market, going up against heavies like style.com and wwd, as well as a host of blogs.
So what’s their angle? Well a big part of it is search.
The Power Grid is a digital yearbook of “who’s who” in the Fashion industry — a statistics powered feature that ranks people as “top” of their field based on search metrics like “Blog Searches on Name” and “TV Mention” and “Twitter Followers.”
Sound familiar? To SEO Strategists, it should. Change “Blog” to “Keyword Searches on Name” and “TV Mentions” to “Backlinks” and “Twitter Followers” to well you get it. It’s basically:
Page Rank meets Prada!
It’s not a digital revolution breakthrough, true. Other fashion editorial sites have been implementing smaller scale versions of ranking features for awhile now – “Top 5 Shows” and “Hottest Designers” that respond to search queries. But, where else is a whole content section of a fashion journalism site devoted almost solely to search rankings? Are you quibbling backstage over who America’s real Top Model is? Sorry Giselle, Naomi Campbell’s 38 TV mentions trump your 10. Also interesting is that prominent display of the search statistics – in fact, the only content on these Power Grid “profiles” are those rankings and a photo. Did search ranking importance just get a very haute vote of confidence?
And it’s the same logic Search Engine Optimization campaigns look at.
Displaying search ranking information is a genius move on Abrams part. It plays upon that all too human impulse to size up the competition and it shows leading power players of fashion exactly where they need to be to move up the industry ladder whatever their business objectives are (more bookings, a better masthead title, a new design house.) But while Dan Abrams has no problem splaying his fashionista findings, search engines can be a little more coy about their own “Power Grid” metrics. This is where a trained SEO strategist comes in handy – someone who knows how to find and interpret the data companies need to get traffic for their websites.
A good SEO campaign will look at your current website rankings against your competitors (Who is the Marc Jacobs of your field?). It will increase links to your website with a combination of content creation and skilled marketing outreach (Your own red carpet media blitz!) And it will tell you what keywords are the most desirable to grow your audience, and how you can be associated with them so that your business can ultimately become in the top 10 results displayed and not, like Simon Doonan, relegated to the last page of “Fashion Titans” where no one is looking for him.
In related news, SES New York starts next Monday and expect some great information about search engine strategies to come out of there. We also wonder if the the timing of Styleite’s launch will mean an uptick in the amount of Louboutins walking around.
Lauren Salazar is a Social Media & SEO Strategist at Amsive Digital, a NYC-based Search Engine & Social Media marketing firm.
