Local business Search engine marketing mistakes
Filed Under (Search Marketing) by Gogo on 07-04-2009
A few days ago, I got a call at home from a local carpet cleaning company.
Apparently a family business, a sweet sounding, seemingly older lady made the initial pitch. Since I was engaged, I asked her to call back in 1 hour and she agreed. About an hour later, a gentleman called and introduced himself as the proprietor of the carpet cleaning company and explained that they had been in business for over 20 years in the area. After about 5 minutes with this guy on the phone, I was fed up…
He constantly interrupted me, put words in my mouth and exhibited a somewhat aggressive tone. Being a marketer (and former telemarketer) I kept my patience all the way till we got to the price quote. That’s when things finally out of hand.
His quote seemed a little high to me but I was expecting him to tell me the “special reasons” why his business was different and worth paying more for (other than “just” being in business for 25 years). That’s not what happened.
What happened instead was this guy was virtually berating me on my own time for possibly thinking about calling him back…so, sadly,
…I hung up on him.
Of course I quickly googled this company and found that the first search engine result was titled, “Jerk”!
It was a negative review by another prospect complaining about his treatment on the phone by this same owner.
If you own a local business, you have to make sure this does not happen to you!
One of the advantages of adopting the content based website strategy I recommend is that you can very easily win the search engine battle for your business name. Other ways to keep an eye on your online reputation include using services like Google news alerts.
