The Dragons Den Dragons are some of the most famous business people in Britain and invest regularly in Internet companies. Let’s take a look at how their own websites feature on Google.
First up is Peter Jones who doesn’t rank first for his own name. Not only does the top result have site links but they also have the words “Dragons Den” in the snippet whereas Peter just has a list of items from the menu, I’m guessing the top result gets the lions share of the traffic.
This could be fixed easily by creating a more targeted meta description and altering the title tag to “Peter Jones Official Website as seen on Dragons Den”.
Next on the list and somebody who really needs some SEO advice is James Caan. His website is being indexed twice and the top listing is a sub domain of the CMS he uses. The real site is indexed as well giving him some duplicate content issues. James would also be wise to alter the 5th listing from his company site to include his name in the title tag, this would push it up to second place and move the actor James Caan’s IMDB listing down a bit.
Deborah Meaden leaves searchers in no doubt which result to click on by including the words “Official” and “Dragon’s Den Millionairess” in the title, unfortunately she also has the same title on all her other pages as well. The only other issue is with this page which offers the same content as the homepage.
Duncan Bannatyne also has title tag issues with most of his pages having the same title, including this one which would probably rank first otherwise. Including a decent title and meta description on his profile page would give Duncan a lot more clicks.
Since Duncan is the only Dragon to have his profile on his company site it should be a priority to sort out the title tags on his gym pages.
Finally we come to Theo Paphitis who totally rules the search results with 8 site links and a second listing to his Tips page. He even has positive results for the third and fourth listings so no reputation management needed here at all unless he wants to take issue with Kieron in 5th place.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Great round up Patrick – interesting to see them investing in internet companies when their own websites perform poorly in the search engines.
I love dragons den, it’s one of my favourite programs. I can’t wait to be one of the entrepreneurs pitching
Interesting – Peter and Jones have to be two of the most common names that exist. Also – as “Peter Jones” is a brand name of the John Lewis group it is unlikely to be trying to get some of Peter’s traffic. SEO is great when comparing like for like sites but note: Theo and Paphitis do not appear elsewhere in anything like the same quantities. John Lewis have also probably engaged in ppc campaigns in the past that will make them more popular. SEO is also ‘optimised’ for a return on investment (good site development, copywriter, etc.) I cannot see the benefit he would have in trying to go from no.2 to 1 when the whole world is trying to get onto the first page. Otherwise, I wonder how much the budget is for getting “George” and “Bush” up to number 1 and – is it worth it?
I’m guessing most people searching for Peter Jones want the businessman rather than the store. Maybe I’m wrong though but it has to be no worse than 50/50.
Whoever you are it is always best to rank for your own name, especially when your name is what you are trying to brand a TV show on like Peter is.
They could all improve on their internal linking & directory structure. Poor James Caan, thats just embarrasing. Good write up, Stumbled by me
Probably worth re-evaluating again now, especially since James Caan has now made a substantial investment in an SEO and Web Dev company. Of course, Caan’s investment in Freshegg.com may be just that, an investment. Caan didn’t start out with his recruitment business so he could get job offers, so there’s no necessity to assume that he invested in an SEO company just to get better vanity search either.
I think he just sees the obvious synergy, as an investor in businesses, in having a company well equipped to launch, relaunch, or simply reinvigorate the online business of anyone he cares to put in touch.
an easy method to gather data about the seo and/or smo is by using http://ministatus.com. one could also download the gathered results in pdf form for later usage.
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