Our Director of Clinical Services stuck his head in my office the other day. “I just got a phone call from an internet marketing group. They claim they can guarantee us a top ten listing on Google for ‘family therapy’ related search phrases. I told them you would call them back.”
No, I won’t be calling anyone back.
I won’t waste my time on what is either hype or a scam. Google’s algorithm for ranking web pages is one of the most closely guarded secrets on the web. Unless you were called by one of the people on this page, the guarentee is worthless.
More importantly, I informed our Clinical Director, we don’t care if we’re on the top ten of a Google search or not.
That statement caught him by surprise and required some explaining.
The purpose of our web site is to increase the number of new clients at our office. We don’t really care if someone in Newark, Dallas, or Portland finds our site while searching “family therapists”. We already know that people aren’t willing to drive much more than 100 miles to see one of us.
We do care that when people add “Tulsa” or “Oklahoma” to their search phrase that we are at the top of the list. Those are the potential clients we want to impact.
We don’t need to pay anyone for that service. We’re already there. We met that goal when we fired the people who managed our site and I became our webmaster.
But… you can pay me whatever you were willing to pay the marketers who called you. I won’t turn it down.
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Bowden,
At Lakeview, the pastor has recently made the decision not to spend the (obscene) amount of money on a Yellow Pages ad for 2009. We’ll be doing our advertising through Google and probably online in our newspaper as well. There are fewer and fewer people using the Yellow Pages these days. Google is simply easier.
Now, there’s no way (as you suggest) to drive up your own results from Google searches. But you can still advertise on the page that displays those searches. In other words, when “Baptist” or “church” is entered in with our home town, an ad for Lakeview Baptist will appear along the right hand side of the results page.
When we check with our new members, none of them have visited because of the Yellow Pages. We’ll see how this works.
For years, the Yellow Pages were our single best referral source. Now, the internet is. But not until we fired the “experts” and took responsibility for our own web site. We use the same dynamic publishing platform (WordPress) as used on this blog. WordPress has made it easy to use static pages to create something more professional looking and less blog-looking.
I don’t know why anyone, professional practice or church, would pay huge bucks to have someone else – someone who doesn’t know you or your target audience – to present your public face to the world.