E-commerce: Getting the Hang of Moving on up in Google Searches for Colonial Lighting

Essex Lanterns handcrafts outdoor lanterns from designs of colonial lanterns that dotted the New England countryside on the houses and barns during the early American period.  We are an offshoot of The Essex Forge and we are continuing the tradition of fine craftsmanship in producing these historic lanterns.  Our lanterns are made from solid copper and there is an element of custom lighting within the realm of colonial lantern design.  We have a long list of stores we have sold our lanterns to, restoration sites that have chosen our lanterns, and catalogues that have offered our reproduction lighting to customers worldwide.

That is certainly a mouthful and contains more adjectives than in a Jane Austen novel.  But, this is how we have to get noticed on the web, strings of words.  They can even be meaningless.  Of course, in this case they’re not meaningless words.  We read one website’s description and couldn’t make any sense out of their “About Us” section.  They literally took a five word, run-on description and repeated it over and over again.  At the bottom of the page, they blatantly had a section named, “tag words”.  There they listed every category that someone would use to look them up.  It’s funny because the user is already at their site when they read this mumbo jumbo.    They managed to get Google’s attention however and they have good placement on all the desired categories.   Their site isn’t very informative or inviting though.

It took a lot of advertising and advertising dollars to get us noticed back in the days of The Essex Forge.  We were in most every issue of Yankee Magazine, Country Living Magazine, Early American Life, American Heritage, and the list goes on.  Today, we have the worldwide web.  That sounds simple but, it is anything but.  I have spent a long time in the marketing/advertising field and have some web experience but nothing that prepared us for this.  Essex Lanterns, makers of colonial lanterns, is a small site on the web:  http://www.essexlanterns.com/.  We concentrate on those reproduction lighting lantern designs that are true to the early American period and do it better than any company out there.  The solid copper lanterns with their handcrafted details are simple in design so can be used on homes or institutions trying to echo the colonial lanterns, the early American lanterns, traditional lanterns, cottage lanterns, barn lanterns to enhance their overall appeal.  Most of our competitors either sell or manufacture cast piece lighting made overseas somewhere and because they are not handcrafted or hand manufactured, stamp out many designs that mimic but do not remain true, to the colonial lanterns we still make in the colonial tradition.  Our lanterns are all handmade in America.  Because they have big catalogues, with repetitive pages, they take up a lot of space and they get to monopolize the top of many categories of lighting you might be looking for.  How do we do it?  We are involving ourselves on many local websites and utilizing as many free listing sites as we can.  We've been told that the more sites that we can get our link attached to, the better chance we can break into at least one of the first four pages of a category.  

We wish we could invite people to come watch us make our lanterns or come to our showroom to see us but right now, until we grow, that isn't possible.  All of our reproduction lanterns can be seen on The Griswold Inn.  Or, if you contact us at http://www.essexlanterns.com/, we will be happy to give you a name of a store where you can see and purchase our Essex Lanterns.

Watch for our next post.  We will share some of our other stumbles on marketing through Google.  We've learned a lot but have a long way to go.