Your SEO is shit

So here I am bedridden (I blame this manflu killer flu that’s been doing the rounds). After getting a few hours kip in the morning, I switched on the TV and came across the ‘Change4life’ advert.

This ad is designed to get families to change their lifestyles so that they can eat better, move more, live longer, blah blah blah. Anyway, at the end of the ad was an unusual call-to-action (I think Orange have used it in the past). I was instructed to ‘search for change4life’ (or google ‘change4life’ as most people will do).

Ok so I do that and get the following SERP:

Now as you know, people are a lot more ‘SERP savvy’ these days and trust organic listings more than sponsored listings. Hence why PPC and SEO must work together in the SERP’ so you would think that the Change4life site would have secured first place in the organic listings. WRONG! Even though there is an NHS article about the Change4life campaign in first position, the intended site that they want us to go to is in second position and we all know the importance of securing first position, oh dear. You may argue that they have some sort of coverage with the article in first position but you have to navigate way below the fold (after muchos content) for the actual link to the intended site.

Moving on. A lot of people will also search for the obvious variant ‘change for life’. I did this, and got the following:

Once again, PPC is all good but look, there’s no sign of any organic listings. WTF! Surely, getting some sort of organic exposure for an obvious search-term variant is vital? Granted, it doesn’t happen overnight but why not use another URL to promote? One that doesn’t have any obvious variants.

Does all this really matter? Well, I certainly have no reason to use this site so a no for me. However, this campaign is funded by taxpayer’s money so yes it does matter.

Is all our hard-earned taxpayer’s money going straight to Adwords? If so, what a flipping waste. If they sorted out their SEO and maybe invested in a decent URL, there wouldn’t be the need to invest in PPC. Instead, this money could be invested in something far more useful OR are people ignoring the sponsored ads, clicking on the first result in the organic listings and finding it’s irrelevant? If so, it seems as though we won’t eat better, move more and live longer after all.

Ok rant over and back to bed.

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