Visibility of pipe organs on the internet

[Colin Pykett]

One of the things I get involved in is search engine optimisation (SEO) related to internet searches.  It's to do with making a website as visible as possible to a search engine such as Google, and it means that you have to make the site appear as a result of as many user search terms as possible, and to appear as near to the top of the list of search results as possible.  For instance, if you are selling apples, you would need to work hard to ensure that Apple computer products did not dominate the search results for your market garden website!

For all their oft-lauded sophistication, search engines are actually pretty dim, particularly when you ask them to look for minority-interest subjects such as pipe organs.  This has come home to me during some recent internet searches, so I was led to wondering whether pipe organ builders might be missing a trick here.  As an example, I looked for the term 'pipe organ' (omitting the quote marks) on Google.  Out of the ten results which came up on the first page, not a single one was for an organ builder, which rather surprised me.  (I was doing this on the UK version of Google.  You can log into the US version, but it didn't make any difference because Google knows the country from which you are searching from your IP address and therefore it no longer allows you to assess how the results might vary with search location).  Yet when I looked for 'digital organ' (again, no quotes), nine out of the ten results on the first page were for digital organ firms.  This surprised me even more.  If this matters to pipe organ builders, perhaps one conclusion might be that they look at SEO when they next ask their web designers to update their websites.  However, there is no single SEO solution which lasts very long because the web is continually evolving, as are the search engines themselves.  Therefore what worked yesterday might well not work today, which means that the SEO fixes on a particular website have to be tweaked on a frequent basis.  It also means that the results you will get if you try these searches might be different to those which I obtained just now.

Of course, one way to get to the top of the search results is nothing to do with interesting academic subjects like SEO.  Instead, it's to do with hard cash.  If you pay the search firms enough money, they will promote you to the top of their search lists.  So perhaps the digital organ firms are merely doing that whereas the pipe organ firms aren't - just a thought.

Finally, a disclaimer.  I'm not advertising my services here.  I just wanted to bring a situation that strikes me as interesting to the notice of a wider audience which is well-disposed towards pipe organs.

CEP

[David Coram]

This surely must be to do with the sales-driven nature of the digital organ market. Most pipe organ builders I know can see several (in some cases, ten) years ahead and know what work they will be doing. A web presence is a useful way of showing your work, but nobody’s going to be filling their shopping cart or booking a home demonstration as they would with a digital provider. 

[Barry Oakley]

I think there is also a conservative element amongst the pipe organ builder fraternity who are not sales orientated. They rather adopt the attitude that if owners of a pipe organ have a publicised problem then they must seek out a suitable organ builder to rectify the problem. It does no harm to knock on a door and express a genuine interest. 

[Dafydd y Garreg Wen]

3 hours ago, Colin Pykett said:

You can log into the US version, but it didn't make any difference because Google knows the country from which you are searching from your IP address and therefore it no longer allows you to assess how the results might vary with search location

You could use a US-based VPN to achieve this (vel sim).

[John Robinson]

I thought I'd try this out and typed in 'pipe organ instrument' (without the quotes), bearing in mind that if you should mention the word 'organ' to the man in the street you are likely to end up discussing something completely unrelated to musical instruments!  Every one of the links on the first page was, in fairness, pertinent to the pipe organ.

Predictably, I suppose, all three adverts at the top of the page were for digital organs or keyboards.

[Colin Pykett]

Thank you for these responses.  Replying to John Robinson, perhaps I should have made the point more clearly that I was surprised that none of the page-one search results in my simple examples picked up pipe organ builders rather than pipe organs in general, whereas this was not so for digital organ firms which appeared in droves comparatively speaking.  By and large, pipe organ builders do seem to want to attract business in much the same way as digital organ makers do, because of the way they both advertise at obvious expense in the major organ magazines.  Therefore it would seem logical that organ builders presumably want web surfers to land on their websites as well.  It's in this aspect that there seems to be a difference.

CEP

[Steve Goodwin]

'Pipe organ building firms' (without the quotes) does bring up a lot of pointers to suppliers including via Wikpedia and IBOB.

I don't think this is peculiar to organ builders. I suspect suppliers of very high value bespoke items are less likely to sell over the internet.
Yes, they need a presence but their sales are probably less related to general web advertising.