Right now, somewhere in your community is a person who needs a funeral home. Maybe they are at a hospital sitting beside the bed of their aging parent who is about to pass.
Knowing their parent prefers cremation, they pull out their cell phone, open up Google and search for “cremation service near me”.
Will they find your funeral home?
Or will they find someone like Heritage Cremation Provider?
Unfortunately….Google gets to decide.
And unfortunately, Heritage does a better job of playing the Google game than 99% of funeral homes. That’s why they show up on the first page of Google results in almost every community in the country.
In my last email/blog post, I mentioned that Google is getting ready to roll out a major update this summer which could significantly impact your website’s organic ranking. I also said that Google has a pattern of creating a problem and then offering to fix it for a fee. Here they go again…
It is important to understand that the Google algorithm is constantly being updated. In fact, they reported an incredible 3,234 updates in 2018, an average of 9 per day. Here’s a link to a page showing all of the updates going all the way back to 2000.
https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
So why does Google change the algorithm so much?
The main reason is that they are obsessed with providing the searcher with the best response to their query. A big problem that Google is constantly up against is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants who are using questionable tactics or loopholes to rig the results in their favor.
In the SEO world these tactics are referred to as “black hat”. SEO consultants using black hat tactics try to work around Google instead of working with Google. They are often successful in the short term but never in the long term.
In contrast, “white hat” tactics work with Google by complying with their rules and giving them exactly what they are looking for without trying to rig the system. The results don’t come as quickly but they last a lot longer. By the way, my SEO guys only use white hat tactics.
Google has to constantly change the algorithm in order to penalize “black hatters” and reward “white hatters”. It’s a classic good vs evil battle and it keeps a lot of SEO consultants booked solid with clients who need their help in order to stay on page one of the Google results.
But who really benefits from this battle? Google!
That’s right. They create a problem for business owners who need to be on page one in order to connect with their customers. The owner hires an SEO consultant but has no idea what kind of hat they’re wearing.
Pick the wrong consultant who uses the wrong tactics and your site can be banned for life….ouch!
What’s the solution….Google Adwords, their paid advertising service. Google is bringing in over $100 Million Per DAY via Adwords. That’s a lot of revenue!!
Are they intentionally making the job of ranking your website hard so that you will spend money with them on Adwords? It sure sounds like it to me…
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with Adwords, other than it’s darn expensive. In fact, we often will use Adwords as a temporary solution while the “white hat” SEO tactics take effect.
When it comes to getting your site to rank properly on Google, my advice is to get help. This is not something you should try to do yourself in between meeting with families and running your business.
But be careful who you hire. There are far more a lot of SEO consultants than claim to be wearing a white hat but will quickly switch to a black hat when a client presses them for quicker results.
By the way, I’ve read some insider reports on the big update Google is going to roll out this summer and Heritage Cremation Providers should be worried.
The SEO tactics they’ve used so successfully are being reclassified from white hat to black hat. I won’t be surprised to see them disappear from the Google results in the near future. So sad….
John
