Redcats follows trend of moving from paid to natural search
Like many retailers, Redcats USA, the New York-based apparel and home-furnishings catalog and web retailer formerly called Brylane, began concentrating on paid search a couple of years ago and has recently turned its attention to optimizing natural search, says Peter Dammann, director of online marketing.
“Paid search is relatively painless from a technical standpoint and it pays out – the ROI is significant,” says Dammann. Using Performics, a Chicago-based search-engine marketing agency, Redcats doubled its paid-search business in a year. Paid search now accounts for a significant portion of the company’s web business, says Dammann. “You have to remember that we’re an established multi-channel retailer,” he says, “so for us to get to that 5% figure, that’s a significant chunk of change.”
Why go from there into natural search, also known as organic search? “When you see what you can do on the paid side, it makes the pain of doing natural search – which does take some implementation and some technical resources – seem much more attractive. We had really good results on the paid side and realized it was missed opportunity within organic search.” Redcats elected to use Performics for natural search as well as paid. “We had this existing relationship with Performics, and they came to us with a tool that was not going to require a lot of labor on our side. The labor is on their side in setting up these proxy sites.”
The agency will present accessible versions of the Redcats sites to the search engine companies. Without the service, the spiders used by the search engines to find relevant sites for search results would have difficulty exploring the Redcats web pages, Dammann says.
Redcats’ brands include Chadwick’s, La Redoute, Lerner Catalog and Jessica London.
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