Man and van Canterbury – why businesses fail

March 14, 2010 9:33 pm admin Google Adwords, SEO

It’s obvious that the best way to source a product or service is to ask around for personal recommendations.  That’s what was done recently when looking for a man and van to do a house move.  It didn’t come up with any decent results so Google became the next port of call.

The original phrase typed was ‘man and van Herne Bay’ but the search results were so poor that it was considered ‘man and van Canterbury’ (bigger area) would get better results.  How wrong can you be, and what a perfect way to demonstrate how backward many businesses are.

Having typed ‘man and van Canterbury’ into Google, there were many Sponsored Links results, plus the naturals.  As PPC experts, the first focus was on the Sponsored Links to see what was there and there wasn’t a single advert that referred to Canterbury – but several other more generic or ‘outside the area’ adverts displayed.   Lesson number 1 for all those advertisers: wake up – you’re wasting budget and probably haven’t a clue why!

Having seen how inept the average PPC advertiser is, it was the turn of the natural Google results to come up with the goods.  Top of the list was www.manandvankent.co.uk, which looked really promising until clicking on it brought up a message of ‘The site manandvankent.co.uk has been disabled. Please contact support’.   It’s always good to see that Google are providing a quality service allowing such rubbish to be top of the search results.

The next search result led to http://services.vivastreet.co.uk/removals+canterbury, which had a few small adverts so inadequate that they weren’t worth exploring further.

The following search result (http://www.helpiammoving.com/removal_companies/CT.php) didn’t have anything local enough, even though the page was supposed to be about Canterbury.

A few chuckles came from the site http://www.alternativetransportservices.co.uk/, which was a really cheesy, noisy website in geezer speak using phrases such as ‘Get cheap moving products & services for the geeza’s and the birds too..cheap cheap’.   OK for a laugh but utterly useless in the search for ‘man and van Canterbury’.

The search went on and on – poor result upon poor result ended up with the thought of “so how do all the genuine man and van companies in Canterbury actually get business?”.   This applies to many types of businesses in various areas.  It’s not hard to get good natural Google positioning for a business that’s geographically focused.   For a man and van business in the Canterbury area it would be a piece of cake to get plenty of enquiries purely on the basis of the surrounding search results being so poor and irrelevant – even if not in top Google position.  Equally, PPC adverts would also get great results because there’s no competition that refers to the Canterbury area.

This is just one example of why businesses fail and covers 3 areas of failure:

1. Those businesses that advertise with Google Adwords but do it inefficiently will find themselves with irrelevant clicks plus campaigns that gain impressions but few clicks.  That marketing investment will largely be down the drain.

2. Those businesses that appear in the natural Google results but aren’t switched on enough to realise that they could be cleaning up because of the poor competition around them.  How much effort does it take to type in the phrases that apply to your business and take a good look at what appears in the search results and then decide how to beat that?

3. Those businesses who aren’t at all focused on being visible within Google when people type phrases related to their type of business.  Those are the ones sitting around with time on their hands, accepting that the economy is down, or there’s too much competition out there, or whatever other excuse is convenient.

In all three cases above, businesses that fall into those categories deserve to wither and die.  While no-one expects companies to be experts in how to win business from their websites, it’s not rocket science to write down a few notes and work out where business isn’t coming from, and then to start investigating how to turn that round.

How many man and van services that cover the Canterbury area will be sitting around with no work in a weeks time?   There’ll be a few without a doubt but who knows who they are because they’re invisible to those of us who typically turn to the web to find such services when there’s no personal recommendation that comes up trumps.