We recently had a customer request to have the brand Phillip Gabriel put on their website. We did so, and they said we misspelled the vendor's name. We realized that Phillip Gabriel uses the name Phillip Gavriel in their logo, but seem to switch back and forth between Gavriel and Gabriel on official documentation, such as their footers on the phillipgabriel.com website.
This brand, from Royal Chain, has made a curious choice for their jeweler customers--do they market their brand as Phillip Gabriel or Phillip Gavriel?
Our jeweler, for example, saw it as an error that we used the spelling "Gavriel" instead of "Gabriel," and we wanted to dig a little deeper into this. Could Royal Chain be hurting themselves, and the retail jewelers trying to sell this brand?
Not unlike BVLGARI/Bulgari, which you'll see uses both, too (V being the Roman for U and a totally pretentious slant on a pretentious name already), this is a typeface issue that makes SEO people think twice.
What are people Searching For? That should indicate what they should be calling it.
The Phillip Gavriel/Gabriel brand has a dedicated website at http://phillipgabriel.com, but at the time of this Nugget writing it is not really something you want to send your customers to.
Royal Chain's website has a much larger section dedicated to Phillip Gavriel, and they only use the "v" variation of the name. Although functional, the Royal Chain website is also not very pretty: http://royalchain.com/index.php/shop/PHILLIP-GAVRIEL.1030
There's a definite SEO problem brewing here. As a retail jeweler, it is very important for you to align your own website with the keywords that are also important for each individual brand name.
Normally a large manufacturer will spend a lot of money promoting their name, and keywords related to their style of jewelry. But that's not at all what's happening here because Royal Chain has a dual set of advertising using the "b" and the "v". They've even gone so far as to create 2 Facebook pages with the 2 different names.
When looking at it from the consumer's point of view, if they search for "Phillip Gabriel," they find minimal information. In fact, Google even suggests that you might be searching for "Philip Gabriel" the wedding photographer.
If the consumer searches for "Phillip Gavriel" they find a lot more information and all the right websites relating to the product line.
The name Gavriel is so unique that the first 23 pages in the Google SERP show only Phillip Gavriel jewelry. From an SEO point of view, this seems like the correct name to choose. But let's dig a little deeper.
We're researched the two variations of the name in Google's Keyword Tool (inside an active AdWords account to get the best data) and we found the following:
91 average monthly searches for "phillip gabriel jewelry"
91 average monthly searches for "philip gabriel jewelry"
1900 average monthly searches for "philip gabriel"
110 average monthly searches for "phillip gavriel"
390 average monthly searches for "philip gavriel"
0 monthly searches for "phillip gavriel jewelry"
The average monthly searches are very low and we had to ask Google to show us the worldwide searches to see that search volume. In other words, there's not much happening here.
Google understands that "philip gavriel" should be "phillip gavriel" and they are showing the correct results for that misspelled search. Although historical data shows that November 2010 had the highest volume of searches for "philip gavriel".
Royal Chain must be trying to push the brand because monthly search volume has steadily increased for the phrase "phillip gavriel" from September 2010 through August 2011.
As you can see the highest search volume is for "phillip gabriel" but that's related to all other non-jewelry searches as well.
So what does this data tell us?
We feel you should always list your designer lines on your website because it helps to set you apart from the jeweler down the street. Some brand names will attract customers and some will not. You should only spend a lot of time crafting dedicated brand pages when there is a potential for good SEO and ultimate sales.
In the case of Phillip/Philip Gavriel/Gabriel there isn't enough search volume to warrant the work. Remember those numbers above are "worldwide," meaning you have a very slim chance to attract local attention.
In this case we recommend simply putting the Phillip Gavriel jewelry into the product catalog and not paying much attention to it initially. After other more important SEO work is completed on your site, you could go back and dedicate some free time to a specific designer line page or landing page.
Hopefully this little explanation helps you to realize that customers might not be as interested in brand names as you are; and without the specific SEO support from the vendor you might also be wasting your own time.
