Is Search Becoming Less Useful? The “Christmas Bath Toys” Example

One of the themes which is recurring a little for me in work life is the idea that organic search is changing a lot – and not necessarily for the better.

Its a strange thing for me to be saying, as personally, professionally, and as a director of Silicon Dales, recent months have been very, very good in terms of organic search engine performance – particularly as the focus has shifted towards expertise and authority.

But this can have unintended consequences when it comes to finding what you actually want.

If you’re a bit of a pro-level Googler, you probably mastered searching using the “long tail” which is to say, you made your search queries really, really specific.

So you’d probably, like me, have been a bit baffled when a search for “Christmas bath toys” resulted in this entirely empty page at John Lewis as one of the top three results in the Google organic rankings.

Is Search Becoming Less Useful? The "Christmas Bath Toys" Example image 2

That’s not exactly a helpful page to land on when you’re looking for that!

In any case, it has allowed me to unveil a sneak peak at one of my projects, which I’m going to be using to demonstrate just how darned fast we can get WooCommerce even with a limited budget… a Christmas toy finding store.

Fresh full of products from all the best toy retailers in the UK, this Woo store has around 40,000 products in it, and runs on hosting any store owner could afford.

It also took me fewer than 2 hours to build*, start to finish, and was setup using a range of high quality GPL plugins the licences for which which cost under $150 – in total.

Don’t panic, I’ll be tutorialling how this was made in complete detail over at Silicon Dales in the coming weeks and months, as well as using this “store” to example the good, bad and downright dirty among the WordPress hosts when I throw this mid-high level database at them. No more “this is bad hosting” comments without objective data.

Garbage hosters: be prepared to run for cover 🙂

So, in the spirit of better searches, here’s a Christmas Bath Toys page which has got some products in it.

Yay for Christmas too… but first we must traverse Black Friday and Cyber Monday. No mean feat for eCommerce developers.

*Note – importing 40,000+ products does take longer than 2 hours… it was an overnight c. 6 hour import.

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