Some of Alan's views on this digital marketing malarkey ... there's more on: AlanCharlesworth.com

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

good typo practice

I wrote about SEO for misspelled words in this entry: spelling and typo opportunists - well here is an example of good practice.

For reasons known only to itself, my laptop was playing with the 'number-lock' facility, so when I pressed the 'o' key, I was getting a '6'. I noticed this whilst searching for the Ford website - and look at the SERP I got on Google:
Yep, those clever Ford marketers had realised that this might be an error made by searchers, and had bought the keyword 'f6rd' - well done, full marks.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

PPC landing page waste

I was looking to hire a car, so I searched on "car hire Sunderland" and got these 'sponsored ads' on Google.
So I clicked on the top listing [yes, the one that cost the advertiser the most] and arrived on this landing page:
What a waste of my time and the advertiser's money. This wasn't a landing page for car hire in Sunderland - it wasn't even for car hire in Great Britain. Needless to say, I didn't bother filling the details for a quote - and I booked the rental with another company.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

confused? You will be

My car insurance is due and as my current insured has bumped up the price [I don't get the online 20% discount offered to new customers - why is it that new customers get a better price than an existing one? But that's another rant] so I went online to check-out the prices. Now, here in the UK, Confused.com has been running a big ad campaign to get people to use the site, with 'users' [read : actors] going on about how easy it is to use and that you can state what cover and conditions you want.

I did this, stating quite clearly that I wanted a £250 excess and legal cover.

As can see below, not one of the 'results' met this criteria [to save space I have shown only the top returns. If no one could meet my criteria they shoul say so - and suggest I ammend my criteria, not show me a whole load of quotes that I have not asked for. So much for the 'usability' they make so much of in the adverts.