There is a company “A.” It has a key business “AA.” For this, it purchases equipment, maintains offices, staff, ISO-9000 certification, and more. The company considers itself the trendiest in the “AA” industry. I don’t use direct names because they have very “talented” management that simply fires people for any complaints or dissatisfaction tracked on social media, and I feel sorry for their marketers. They won’t find another job afterward, and here’s why.
To promote themselves, they created the “AA” portal. There, they compiled what is essentially an encyclopedia on “AA,” slightly altering the texts. They set up navigation and so on. In general, if someone searches for either the name of company “A” or a question related to “AA”—often a query that describes the symptoms of the problems that “A” addresses—they are almost guaranteed to find the “AA” portal as the first link, adorned with the “A” logo and named the “A” portal, with the domain “A.ua.”
The portal also makes some money through advertising, PR in professional blogs, and serving as a marketplace for professionals in “A” and so on. However, its main goal is to promote “A” — otherwise, it would have been created as an “AA” portal, not an “A” portal.
And here the user, looking for a specific solution to their particular problem, is bombarded with tons of SEO texts but doesn’t get a phone number or an address to call. They get NOTHING AT ALL. I’m not joking. I’ll show you the specific address in private; I don’t want to do it publicly for the reasons mentioned above.
After 2-3 minutes of clicking around on links (wow, the portal’s traffic is increasing), the person leaves the site and moves on to the next link in their search.
On the “A”.ua portal, there is a place where you can find a phone number. It’s a small banner measuring 115×25 pixels, leading to a website with the address http://blah-blah.”A”.ua. The banner is strategically placed in the upper right corner of the site, but not at the very top where commercial banners rotate; it’s slightly lower, just below the site’s header and right before the next advertising block, next to a similar banner encouraging charity under the patronage of “A”. In the overall volume of advertising on the site (not counting the modules for social media links, online tests, tag clouds, and other nonsense), this banner occupies less than 10% of the space and, of course, is neither visible nor perceived as a serious link.
In addition to the lack of a phone number, the portal’s guest will have no idea what to do next. This is the essence of AIDA or “Call to Action.” Even the website navigation is not designed in a way that makes it clear whom to contact, what steps to take, and what actions to actually pursue. If a user arrives through a search phrase describing a problem, they are presented with a comprehensive article that… outlines the problem and its possible causes. However, nowhere in the article is it mentioned (or perhaps I only skimmed through five articles, and the others state this) what specific actions to take, whom to call, what to buy, and what the practices and solutions for such problems are in the world, particularly in Ukraine, and how “A” can specifically help.
In other words, it is assumed that a person, after visiting the site and spending time on an SEO-driven text, will figure out to go back to the homepage by clicking on the main logo, and then find the right banner amidst the clutter of ads. Oh, and they can only return using the browser’s back button, since the navigation on the portal is completely disconnected and some “branches” are left hanging. Overall, it’s convenient for search engines to find “tasty” texts, but not for people trying to solve their problems.
Well, I think I’ll help people out, call them and let them know that there’s no phone. After all, I have good acquaintances working there, and I care about their well-being.
The summary of the conversation with the chief marketer is as follows: “This is not site ‘A’. This is portal ‘AA’, and there shouldn’t be any ‘A’ phone numbers there. A person with eyes will see everything and click on the banner — we are confident of that. Goodbye.”
It turns out that it’s perfectly fine for visitors to the domain “A.ua” not to find phone number “A,” while those coming from search queries receive all sorts of information, often, as I mentioned earlier, useless, but not the phone number.
In other words, SEO has been driven to the brink, as instead of healthy PR, they created a cannibal with the same name, distracting potential clients from the essence and drawing attention to itself. This is generally characteristic of a large number of marketing departments — forgetting the core purpose of their existence. When winning “Cannes Lions” becomes the main goal instead of increasing sales.