Brand Building White Moose Cafe Style
After a blogger had the audacity to ask the infamous owners of the White Moose Cafe in Dublin for a little quid pro quo in the marketing department, she soon discovered herself on a blanket ban of all bloggers and “influencers”. A textbook example of branding if I ever saw one.
What I learned
- Don’t get into a verbal stoush with the White Moose Cafe (no, seriously)
- There’s no such thing as bad publicity Google Trends has exploded for both brands
- It’s important to fix basic site errors and have great site speed and UX
Transcript
Hey welcome back Rankers! Today I want to talk a little bit about brand building, quickly or globally. So case in point is a social media story about Elle Darby.
This is Elle Darby, a YouTuber, and thank you for Melissa, from Pubcon group for publishing this and bringing it to my attention and others.
White Moose Blogger Ban
So Elle wanted free accommodation. She’s a YouTuber, she’s got 87,000 subscribers and she approached the White Moose Cafe for free accommodation and they weren’t very impressed with that request and basically have banned all bloggers and social media influencers from their hotel and premises.
The letter was published online and people found out who the YouTuber was and then all the bloggers starting, well not all the bloggers obviously but a whole bunch of bloggers started attacking this guy on social media and he lapped it up.
It looked like it’s exactly what he hoped would happen because when you go and look at Google Trends, this is both their brands, so we’ve got White Moose Cafe, and Elle Darby the YouTuber there, over the last seven days worldwide and you can see the coverage has been huge. Now interestingly White Moose Cafe is more popular across Russia, the former Soviet Union and parts of Europe, whereas, Elle is featuring quite heavily down in Australia, South America, and North America as well.
Now, look at that spike and a lot of people have been saying if you take it on 30 days it’s even more pronounced.
A couple of things I’ve learned from this, one of them is what’s possible in Google Trends because when we have a look at the difference between rising and top phrases associated with White Moose Cafe, and you can see here we’ve only got four and our time frame is 30 days.
If we go back to seven days, we have more phrases and we have some now for Elle as well and that’s because it’s the time frame of the explosion around the publicity between these two entities.
So, then I went ahead and look at the White Moose Cafe, I thought wow, what’s that going to be doing for the brand? That’s got people talking about you, okay? This has got citations if you like, we’ve got all these people talking about you on Facebook, we’ve got all these people talking about you on Twitter, and all these other things, that is citations.
Filming Porn
So, I thought, “I wonder what they rank for?” So I went into SEMrush and had a look at what they ranked for and really the only phrase that seemed to come up was “filming porn” and I went what?
Then I went and had a look at the search results and for this particular exercise we are coming to you from Ireland. So, probably should change the background. So filming porn, even though I’m coming in via google.com.au that I knew it’s going to switch to .ie because I’m in Ireland with the VPN.
Then we can see here at number nine, number eight, the White Moose Cafe is there for “filming porn” and the only reason that they are there for “filming porn” is because they have a “Do not disturb” sign that says, “Do not disturb, filming porn,” on one of their hotel doors and that’s what it’s for.
Now that’s odd, obviously that they were ranked for that, it’s funny but that’s the sort of brand that this cafe has. It’s a very much in your face disruptive brand.
So look at the load time on that, I know I’m coming in through a VPN, but this site’s got heaps of problems. Now they’ve done the right thing with the brand, they’re getting people talking about them and according to Barry Adams who’s a very smart SEO bloke over in Dublin, he said, “The manager here has been a provocateur on social media for quite sometime.” So he does a lot of this stuff. So when I talk about building brands this is one of the things you can do. I’m not saying come out and embarrass bloggers but, you know if it suits your brand to be in your face and you can do these sorts of things then why not do them?
He did try to mask who the blogger was and other people unmasked. But the problems with the site, let’s have a look at this, if he went and fixed all these things up he’d have a much better hope of ranking. So, when I go and have a look at the, look at this, site:whitemoosecafe.ie, uh-huh, I’ve done this uppercase, what I’m seeing, I’ve seen this a couple of times now where we don’t get, we do site: then the domain, and we get someone else’s domain in the results. Which is not how the tool is meant to work, but it could just because I’m uppercase, let’s have a look. Yeah it was because it was uppercase. Okay so just remember that when using site:, but look at this we’ve got a duplicate homepage.
So this is an old homepage and it’s a duplicate, so the whole homepage is duplicated. Now once again, well this, that’s a low quality signal, all right? Which homepage is the user meant to go to? Then over down here we’ve got a hello world post and we’ve got you know categories and other sources of duplication.
A whole range of known issues have happened with WordPress installs, we’ve got, we’re running, yes, so you can see, I’ll just quickly go through some of those results but you can see the sort of brand that they have and they’re using word comments on WordPress but it doesn’t seem to be a lot of content. Doesn’t seem to be a lot of, but there is shops and he’s doing things on social media.
So I would say if you want more traffic from Google, certainly build your brand like you’re doing and participate in social media but you’ve got to fix a few of these things up and you won’t have to worry a lot about, you know, how many backlinks. SEMrush also tells us they’ve only got 29 backlinks but this is only happened over the last few days so it will take a while for that count to grow but a very interesting exercise in brand building.
I’m not saying you should go and do that but I’m saying think of things that you could be doing that are going to get people talking about you, because all of this is citations and the way to measure it and what you’re measuring is go into Google Trends, you know, drill in and if you’re not going globally just drill down to your local region and see how it’s changing over time. If you make a big enough impact like Paul Stenson did of White Moose Cafe you’ll get to see some of these global numbers and then providing that your site has a great user experience, it’s working well, it doesn’t load slowly like White Moose Cafe did and all those other things, you’ll rank really well.
Hopefully that’s helpful and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
