Your footwear brand’s site is ready. The brand is not in the conversation.

Nineteen of the twenty positions are not yours

We measured the page-one positions for this niche’s real buying questions. A single position belonged to a footwear brand. Everything else was a multi-brand retailer, an outlet or a recommendation list, including on the two questions that asked for brands explicitly.

Two of the measured themes ask for brands by name. What answered were multi-brand retailers and a review site, pages whose business is selling several brands, not yours. The answer your customer reads about your category was written by whoever profits from the comparison.

What this means in practice

Questions from people who sell footwear

If my site already passes the tests, what is still missing?

Content that answers a question. Passing means the machine can read your site; it does not mean the site says anything usable as an answer. The measurement shows both at once: readable sites and absent brands. Closing the distance between the two is the work.

I manufacture; retailers sell. Is this their problem?

The retailer sells today; the brand is remembered tomorrow. In the measurement, the retailer is on page one under its own name with your product inside. If the customer leaves the conversation with the shop’s name and not yours, every sale builds somebody else’s brand.

Footwear is about trying it on. Nobody buys without fitting.

The fitting happens at the end; the shortlist forms before it. Someone asking for a women’s shoe brand recommendation is building that shortlist, and walks into the store with two or three names. Being one of those names is what is at stake.

We are a regional brand, not competing with the big names.

All the better: the big names already fixed their sites and still did not take the content space. A regional brand that answers one specific question well, a type of shoe, an audience, a use, competes on that question on equal footing.