 | | There is no such thing as easy Google money. |
A few years ago I got a call from one of my old friends from the Yellow Pages industry. He was so excited that he was practically hyperventilating.
"Reed," he told me, "you have got to buy into this new Yellow Pages website we put together! It is cheap to develop and it is number one in all of the local Google searches!"
"Number one in everything?" I asked incredulously.
"Yes, I'm number one in everything in my county!" he responded.
He then had me open Google and search dentists in Cedar County (I changed the county name to protect his privacy). He was number one. I then typed in "lawyers in Cedar County". Number one again! His website came up first in every search with the phrase "Cedar County".
At that point I started to get excited. Could it really be that easy to be number one on Google? I immediately called my IT guy in and told him the good news. He too was very excited.
Ten minutes later my IT guy came back into my office crestfallen. As it turns out, you can determine exactly how many times a phrase is typed into Google by using their keyword tool. When my IT guy plugged "Cedar County" terms into the keyword tool he found that none of them got more than ten monthly searches! Most of them showed no searches--zero. My friend had basically wasted thousands of dollars for something that got absolutely no results.
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The number for some searches is surprisingly low. There are only 22 Google searches for the term "Lawyer Boise" per month!
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It was a tough lesson, but one I'm really glad I learned before shelling out the big bucks to implement it. I'm no Scrooge, but saving money that would have only gone to waste sure does make Christmas a little merrier.
Merry Christmas,
Reed
P.S. If you are ever interested in seeing how your industry does on local Google searches you can ask your Impact sales rep to walk you through Google's keyword tool.
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