If you’ve ever been shopping for a grill and wanted to research Dyna-Glo’s options, chances are that you went to the wrong website. How do we know that? In a time when going online for information about a product or company is second nature for most people, Dyna-Glo doesn’t even have a landing page for their grills.
If you’ve ever searched for the Dyna-Glo in Google, the top ranking website seemingly isn’t even affiliated with Dyna-Glo. It appears that somebody else noticed Dyna-Glo’s lack of web focus and created a website that looks like it could be a Dyna-Glo corporate homepage. Upon closer inspection though, it’s just a site with Amazon affiliate links for Dyna-Glo products and ads. That’s a pretty genius thing to do, but one has to wonder why Dyna-Glo hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care.
What’s worse, when we searched for the term “Dyna-Glo grills” (no quotes in the search), the aforementioned website made up multiple spots on the first page of results, and we couldn’t find Dyna-Glo’s actual website. We gave up looking after going through 5 pages of results. If you look at data from Search Engine Optimization company, ahrefs, the top ranking site gets monthly search traffic of about 11,500 compared to the actual Dyna-Glo’s 2,500. Let’s repeat that, the actual Dyna-Glo’s website gets 22% of the search traffic that a non-official homepage gets. To make matters worse, if you’re one of the lucky people to find Dyna-Glo grills website, you have to scroll past lots of heaters and heater accessories before you find an actual grill.
So, where does Dyna-Glo go wrong? For that, let’s look the structure of Dyna-Glo. They are a brand that’s part of a private equity owned company called GHP Group Inc. It’s a similar structure to other companies in the outdoor cooking space. The difference though, is to the consumer it looks like they are trying to establish the holding company GHP Group as the brand and Dyna-Glo as the product, which is just confusing. Dyna-Glo’s homepage is https://ghpgroupinc.com/collections/dyna-glo and as you see the domain name is ghpgroupinc.com. The problem with this is it’s unlikely GHP Group is a household name, and the appearance to their website makes it look like GHP Group is just another internet retailer selling Dyna-Glo grills.
There are many examples of holding companies existing in the background and having successful brands. Middleby for instance is a large, publicly traded company that owns Kamado Joe, Masterbuilt, Char-Griller, Lynx and Viking amongst other brands. We’re going to guess that when most people want to research the Masterbuilt Gravity Series line of smokers, they’re not Googling “Middleby” or even know that Middleby exists. Similarly, Blackstone griddles are very popular on the internet, but they’re a product under the company Blackstone Products that has a parent company called North Atlantic Imports, LLC. It’s very unlikely that anyone is searching for North Atlantic Imports when they want to find out about Blackstone griddles.
The only reasons we can come up with that GHP Group doesn’t establish a Dyna-Glo grills web presence is:
- They want GHP Group to eventually become a known entity
- They are content with the traditional brick and mortar sales channel and aren’t worried about internet research or direct to consumer business
- They are unaware that this is happening
- They don’t know how to make a search optimized website
Whatever the reason, it’s a dangerous strategy because they are potentially missing out on sales today and into the future. It’s also potentially dangerous for their brand equity, because it’s likely that most people don’t realize they’re viewing an un-official Dyna-Glo grills website.