I Can Get You on the Front Page of Google!

Tell me again why being on the front page of Google is something I should care about? I get these calls all the time. They interrupt my day and distract me from whatever it is I'm doing at the moment. They don't take "no" easily and I don't like to be rude. But the fact is, I don't CARE if I'm on the front page of Google. I care that someone actually picks up the phone and calls to schedule an appointment. And search engine optimization companies can't promise me that.

We typically get sucked into trying one at least once per year. It happens when business is a bit slow and we're on the verge of dancing around a fire with a mask in order to make the phone ring. Someone calls and they're just a wee bit different from the last one. So ever hopeful, we agree to try it and pay the "small" set-up fee only to find that if it generates any calls at all, they are from people who are either outside our service area or who want to know why we're charging a hundred dollars more than the other guy they called.

Some of these search engine optimization (SEO) companies want to replace our grammatically correct text with stuff that makes me cringe. (I certainly don't want to be grammatically incorrect on the front page of Google!) Some of them have added misleading key words, the worst of which was "cheap". That's just not a word we want to own. We want the client who is concerned with quality and value, not "cheap". One of these SEO companies opened a Google AdWords campaign for us and we were hit with charges from the SEO company AND from Google. Now that was an expensive surprise!! And the effort it took to get that cancelled! Have you ever tried to talk to someone at Google? It's like trying to talk to someone at Microsoft. It can't be done. The only thing you can do is appeal to your credit card company. In the end, we had to cancel the card and have a new card issued to keep Google from charging us for the campaign that we had not authorized in the first place.

Anyway, bottom line - I don't care if I'm on the front page of Google. We CAN be found on Google. One of our clients from yesterday told me she'd found us on Google (even though it probably wasn't the first page). Everybody knows that the first page is filled with people who paid to be there. If I'm searching for something, I typically skip right over the "sponsored" results and I don't think I'm the only person who does that. So now, when they call me to tell me that they can get me on the front page of Google, I simply say "I don't care about that." It pretty well ends the discussion. "I don't care" isn't one of the objections they're trained to overcome.