Google Me This
I received a piece of mail a few days ago — old fashioned, analog mail, that is. It was a bright yellow postcard from a local company that provides a service to homeowners. I don’t want to give their name away, but it’s three words: an adjective expressing a quality of service, followed by a noun (the thing they work on), and a noun based on the action they perform. Let’s say it was Best Floor Refinishers, just to make things easier.
So… Best Floor Refinishers sent me (“RESIDENT”) a postcard offering a $30 “off-season” discount rate. (Yes, I know floor refinishers don’t have an off season. The name is just an example. Pay attention.) The postcard also displayed the logo of some apparently authoritative national agency, implying that they have every right to use that “Best” (or something like that) in their company name. There was a toll-free telephone number, along with three other numbers for specific towns in the area: Cambridge, Needham, and Medford (say it with me: “Meffa”).
The postcard also contained a message addressed to “Dear Past Customer or Current Resident,” about the importance of refinishing my floors (or whatever) for safety’s sake. “BE SAFE, CALL TODAY!!” Moreover, I needn’t worry, because my “satisfaction is GUARANTEED !!!!!!”
Fascinating as all that may be, the thing that really caught my attention was right under the company’s name and logo: It was the word “Google” in a font very similar to Google’s own logo, but in all black letters, followed by a colon and the first two words of their company name, mashed together into one word and intercapped. Sort of like this:
Google:
BestFloor
OK, fine. I ran the search, and here’s what I got:
Well, no Google. I meant “BestFloor,” because that’s what the postcard said to search for.
At any rate, the top result for both [Best Floor] and [BestFloor] was the same site: bestfloor.com, which happens to be the site of Best Floor Refinishers. Pretty impressive, eh?
No! It’s not impressive at all. What are they trying to tell me — are they bragging that they rank #1 for the first two words of their company name? That they rule the SERP for their domain name? Wowzers.
I think they just wanted to let me know where to find their site, but rather than just telling me the URL, they tell me to search for the domain.
I’ve known plenty of people who navigated around the web this way. If they wanted to go to Qwerty’s Qoncepts and they knew the URL, they’d go to Google or Yahoo and search for qwertysqoncepts.com. This is what we in the search marketing business refer to with the technical term “stupid.”
It’s doubly stupid for a company to promote itself by telling people to search for its domain name, especially without the TLD. What would happen if their competitors over at bestfloor.net got to work on improving their site and took the top spot for [bestfloor]? Our postcard pals would be sending their potential customers straight to the other guys.
A word to the wise: if you want your print material to let people know where they can find your website, give them the damned URL. A one-step hunt for it is one step too many. At best it’s stupid. At worst, it’s an advert for the competition.
Tags: Advertising, Domain, Google, Marketing, Search, URL
Category: Marketing, Search
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Comments (4)
John J. (5 comments) on 27 Mar 2008 at 2:12 pm #
GM was doing this for a while in their TV ad campaigns, “Google Pontiac to find out more,” and I thought the same thing…
qwerty (63 comments) on 27 Mar 2008 at 2:28 pm #
Yeah, I remember that. I think that was also back before Google decided it was OK for people to use their trademark as a verb.
Chris B (2 comments) on 28 Mar 2008 at 4:17 am #
This is supposedly quite common in Japan now (I don’t remember where I read this), and I see it becoming used more and more. Most people don’t know the difference between typing a domain name in the address bar and in the search box, so I suppose it makes sense.
Rupert (1 comments) on 09 Apr 2008 at 6:19 pm #
If I get to a website that is so poorly laid out that I can’t find what I’m looking for, it often takes less effort to go to Google and type, “site:shiznit.com ‘eye of hell’”. Another example is sourceforge.net - they have every variety of URL for projects; far easier to hit ‘home’ (http://www.google.com/) and type, “sourceforge jabbin” than expect the sourceforge.net site to make the location of the project as trivial as this.
If you were genuinely interested in locating the ‘best’ flooring company to work on your floor, would your decision be more influenced by the junk mail or the results of your efforts at devising the perfect search terms: “+cambridge +flooring refinish” ?
Another aspect of this marketing might be the tack taken by a car insurance company (think progress) where the customer is led into the belief that the company is honest and and fearless of competition (presumably because their prices are so competetive). So, go ahead, type in “BestFloor” in Yahoo! if you want because our website is (currently) the most impressive you’ll see.