MandolinPicker
sharke
Or are you talking about it being at the top of results when people Google "DAW"? Well if you Google "DAW" right now, no particular DAW is anywhere near the top of the results. In fact no DAW even makes the first five pages of results - not even Pro Tools. What you do have on the first page (the only page that matters) is mostly articles about DAW's. So for whatever reason, no DAW manufacturer has ever managed to achieve SEO for that search term.
Given that most folks today turn to Google (or other search engines) when they are first looking into a new topic, it appears that all of the DAW companies have dropped the ball in this area. I started thinking about how someone who is new to this would start their search. They probably have no idea what a "DAW" is, but they know what they want to do. So I did a search for "audio recording" - and the first result is "Online Voice Recorder" (hardley what you would call a DAW by rather a simple web based voice recorder) followed by "Audacity", followed by how-to articles. If you put in "record music on my computer" you also get a ton of "how to" articles, but not a single DAW on the first few pages (except for Audacity). Other generic recording searches reveal similar results.
Just this cursory look at this area appears to show that there is a huge potential marketing area that has been completely overlooked by any of the DAW companies. Seeing as Audacity is open source and not really backed by commercial marketing resources, it is interesting this is the one DAW that shows up most often (although even it is not typically that high on the results list). One would think that SEO of your product would be a prime interest to these companies.
In the past, there had been a ton of discussion about how Cakewalk didn't market SONAR very well. Based on these generic audio recording searches, it would appear no one is doing a very good job.
Personally I find it hard to believe that the likes of Avid and Steinberg haven't spent a lot of money in the areas of SEO, marketing and customer acquisition over the years. It's highly unlikely that they haven't tried to rank highly for search terms like "audio recording" and "mixing software" at some point in the past. The reality is that sometimes, regardless of how much money you throw at SEO, you're at the complete mercy of Google's search algorithm. Today's Google is
not ranking brands for such generic search terms. They have over time refined their algorithm to return results that are more useful to the consumers than vendors (which is how it should be), and as such they now rank things like informative blog posts and articles more highly than they rank vendor's websites. They also rank stores which sell products more highly than the products themselves.
So if you search for music production software, you'll get a ton of informative articles and blog posts about that subject instead of DAW vendor's websites. Many of those articles discuss the various DAW's available. Similarly, if you do a search for vacuum cleaners or dishwashers, you're not going see the likes of Dyson and Zanussi on page one. You're going to see online stores which sell those products.
So instead of throwing money at futile attempts to rank highly for "audio recording," the major DAW manufacturers will instead be doing their best to get themselves into the kind of online publications which rank highly for those kinds of searches. This could mean things like offering incentives and freebies, or issuing enticing press releases which get music tech journalists writing about them. And instead of spending money on pointless Google Ads which nobody clicks on, they'll be spending obscene amounts of money to market on Twitter and Facebook, platforms upon which they can promote themselves through enticing video content.
I think the reality is that search engines are probably overrated as a source of new customers when it comes to things like DAW's. Social media is where it's at now, and this is where the big $$$'s are being spent.