Research Before You Pay For Advertising

If you pay for advertising, ensure you do your homework!

I had a telephone call today from an Internet business directory services company who specialize in providing promotion services for small to medium enterprises in the UK.  I’m not going to name and shame the company since this isn’t the objective here.

The objective is warn you that if you receive these unsolicited phone calls from advertisers telling you they can get you 30 calls per month, do your homework before you say yes!

I’m not suggesting that every advertising company out there will hype up sales and your return on investment but my conversation today proved that the big advertising companies do it and there may be nothing but fluff behind their promises!  Lets face it though, someone has to pay for their TV, Sky and other media advertising campaigns.

Anyway, here’s what happened…

I received the call from a very nice young man who told me he could almost promise me a top position in Google.  When I challenged him, he gave me the search term "search engineering" to type into Google.co.uk so he could prove his point.  Uh Oh!  The company he was trying to find with this search term was no where to be found and after 7 pages, I gave up.

He embarresengly said "I did this up until yesterday and it’s worked every time."  So I asked him if he knew "how" he got the company to the top of Google?  He couldn’t answer.

But he’d not done yet, so he gave me the search term for a plumber in a local town and BINGO!  He was at the number one position on Google.  BUT… there was zero Google ranking, which does not have to be that big of a deal right but, neither was there any traffic stats.  Now again, I know Alexa is only a guage, but when it shows me "No Data" and there are zero links, the only suggestion I had to offer was that this plumber must be the only one in his town with a web presence!

But no, this wasn’t it either.  The ONLY reason this particular plumber got a #1 position on Google was because he was the only one using this particular keyword phrase, in this particular order and with that particular search term as his domain name.

And I wasn’t done yet!  I decided after the call to give the friendly plumber a call and he was very pleasant.  He told me he paid £300 for this two page web site.  He pays £11 per month on hosting and £29 per month for the directory service.  For my US friends reading this, that’s almost $600 for the two page website plus an additional $40 per month.

And this is the interesting part… how many equiriries has he had from this website since it went live a couple of months ago… a few!!  A totally different story to what I’d been told.  I.e. that he was doing very well and receives a lot of business from it! 

I bet this particular company uses sites like his on a regular basis to sell their services and I bet very few people contact the website owner - or company owner if it’s a physical ad - to correlate the facts. 

Now going back to our search term "search engineering",  only 72 searches were made for that term during the month of September according to inventory.overture.com and even more interesting, when you type the term into Google, most of the sites displayed on Google.co.uk are engineering specific and NOT search engine optimization related.

For this plumber, this is some expensive advertising since he is totally at the mercy of a big organization who has used search engine placement to get him to buy into their services, despite the fact that the keywords they use are scarcely being searched and may not even be targeted.  So the business generated from the websites and the services they sell may never even cover the advertising costs.  

Hope this post demonstrates how important it is for you to do your own research before embarking on any advertising campaign, or spending money with a web designer or web developer for that matter.

Good sales,

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