I wonder how much additional traffic, links, seo benefit and general brand awareness this site has generated simply off doing things to this standard.
A fly wheel of benefits.
A fly wheel of benefits.
Those numbers could be anywhere, on completely unrelated things. They are not a good search query.
For my McMaster example, google gives 9 results, none of which are the McMaster site. That not specific enough? To be fair, I believe McMaster to be fairly protective of their catalog.
At least their part numbers are fairly recognizable - they are usually about 10 characters long, all numbers, with an "A" near the end. That's usually enough to get me to check the McMaster site first.
On the other hand, if you train people that if you want to use McMaster part numbers, you have to use the McMaster site... once you have a customer, as long as your site and inventory don't frustrate them, you have a customer for life.
You're sacrificing inbound for retention, in a highly measurable and testable way, for your unique audience and/or subsets of that audience. I have no doubt this is by design.
Hypothetically, if you make $1 in profit on your product, theory says that some competitor will bid up to $0.99 to secure that sale and if you don’t bid this amount also, your sales will suffer.
The end result is that Google and Facebook end up consuming all the profits for a large number of businesses online that have to survive by advertising, which explains Google’s immense profit margins.
Assuming what you say is true, this is truly a ballsy move by McMaster. Betting that their website is unassailable by their competition and thus such a value-add that they can forgo playing the losing game that Google and Facebook has setup is brilliant. I have such respect for that.
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