I don’t buy the whole “Gourmet was a luxury brand in a recession” economy argument. How’d they get through the 70s? The 80s? The early 90s?
They’re dying, in part, because the publisher refused to accept the Internet as a business channel. Here’s a quote from CBC News:
“The magazine industry in the U.S. has been hit by a slumping ad market, with Gourmet’s ad pages down 50 per cent. The food magazine also lost out to internet recipes and food writing.”
Well, duh.
How easily could Gourmet have avoided the chopping block? Oh, maybe change a title tag or two:
The hottest term out there? ‘Recipes’. Percentage of title tags on Gourmet that include the word ‘recipes’? Less than 1%. Most common first word in a title tag? ‘Archive’.
Then there’s the long list of ‘302’ redirects:
The fact that there’s one instance of duplication for every 10 pages:
And, of course, the endless PageRank leaks (most notably from the home page, which has 108 outgoing links):
Don’t even get me started on the forums, where the first word in every title tag is? You guessed it: Forums.
The real death knell is their keyword count:
According to Compete.com, Gourmet.com gets traffic from 355 organic search terms.
Epicurious gets traffic from 8,040.
That has nothing to do with brand, and everything to do with SEO. Gourmet has thousands of pages, and thousands of great incoming links. They could have doubled or tripled their traffic with a concerted, ongoing SEO campaign.
For Gourmet, just a little effort might have made all the difference. Their only number 1 ranking for a really choice term is ‘gourmet’. That’s great, but it’s also branded and doesn’t bring the kind of researchers the magazine needed to survive.
Fix a few inconsistent linking issues, get the editorial team going on real SEO copywriting, change a couple of 302s to 301s, and who knows? They might still be around.
Gourmet’s SEO failures certainly didn’t help. But there are other ways they could have generated more online traffic, more pageviews, and therefore more ad sales:
I’ll bet the tipping point for Gourmet came about a year ago, in a meeting. It went like this:
Person 1: We need to edit the title tags…
Person 2: Oh, don’t be silly. We need titles that will intrigue the user.
Person 1: But we need visitors, too.
Person 2: We can’t change the title tags. We can add a field to the database but it’ll take 4 months.
Person 1: Can we remove some links from the home page?
Person 2: No. Everyone wants placement on the home page. We have to make them all happy.
Person 1: Can we add an e-mail subscription form?
Person 2: People have to register to receive e-mails. We need that.
Person 1 gave up. Person 2 won.
Well, you sure showed them, didn’t ya?
Instead, we have a great publication, with top-notch creative and copy, passion for their industry and a strong following that’s DOA.
It’s criminal. It’s a waste. And it pisses me off.