If your town doesn’t rank on Google do you a) do some SEO or b) change the towns name?
The Telegraph reports this morning about a town in France struggling to attract tourists because of poor Google rankings. The town, called “Eu“, is apparently losing 33% of tourism revenues due to the poor rankings.
The Mayor of the town has the following comments:
Marie-Françoise Gaouyer, the local mayor, now has two options – to pay internet giants like Yahoo and Google thousands to put the town at the top of all “Eu” searches, or change the town’s name.
“The second option appears the most sensible,” said Mrs Gaouyer, adding: “As far as the internet is concerned, we have to bring ourselves up to date.” Mrs Gaouyer’s favoured option is Ville d’Eu (Town of Eu), with other possibilities including Eu-le-Château and Eu-en-Normandie.
The mayor, who believes tourism revenues are down by as much as a third because of the town’s current name, now wants all of the alternatives put to the local population of some 8000 in a referendum.
I have these comments:
How much will it cost to re-brand a town? I’m guessing SEO will be cheaper.
How many people search for the town of Eu anyway? If nobody searches for you then it’s not really your SEO campaign that’s lacking.
The website is a .fr domain without any English pages on it which means that anybody from the UK wouldn’t see it in the search results no matter what the town was called. At present they are only really promoting to French people and that’s a pretty poor strategy for a town wanting to attract tourists!
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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
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Read the 17 comments below, or add your own!
Sounds to me that you should get in touch! I bet you could easily persuade them to send some SEO euros your way as an experiment, if nothing else.
Hmm you can actually pay google to rank top? maybe big corps can.
They should just tack on some useful words, like:
“tu Brute?’
Okay that was reaching……
I think they need to rethink their assumptions and whoever wrote the article at the telegraph needs to actually use a search engine to test out their statements.
I just tried the search in Google.com, Google.co.uk, AND Gooogle.FR and I see nothing but european union references, went to page 5 and still nothing about french grammar, and the author tries to pass off the european union references as “oh yeah, there might be a couple of those too”. Sheesh!
The towns website does however show up on page 2 in google.fr so it shouldn’t take too much SEO to bump it to page 1 there.
But if they think they should try to compete with eu, as in european union, in the other versions of Google, they are smoking some very fine crack there in that little town.
And using PPC, ouch! How many bad clicks would they get? OMG! the volume of people searching for eu term, most obviously looking for info about the european union, would translate into a very expensive PPC campaign with a very low ROI.
And the mayor says the tourism revenue is down 1/3 because of the bad rankings? WTF? what are you basing that on? You used to have top rankings and saw 1/3 more visitors? No you didn’t.
Tourism in France has been hit hard for past few years. Oh look, on the telegraph website here. High Euro makes it expensive for non-europeans, and you might have heard something about a little “global financial crisis” that’s been going on.
When B&Bs, Hotels and other tourism dependent businesses across France are seeing declines of 20% and 30% why should it be any different for one small town with a little 2 letter name?
Either option they choose (name change or PPC) will be expensive and achieve very little results.
Google controls the world…stop worrying about MicroSoft!
Check out my Daily Gif Blog when ya have a chance.
DB
Nope, they should do a PR campaign associating themselves with Google (results) that will get them in the news.
Look, it’s already working
Get rid of that Mayor. With statements like that its obvious he’s oblivious to sustainable change. Change the name of a town to get ranking! WTF, clearly not with it.
Interesting news and great find!
Well every body speak about SEO. Interesting topic discussed above focusing to way to make yourself prominent for Public.
Its a bit of a silly name anyway, EU would obviously be picked up as the European Union by all search engines, surely no matter what SEO they do they couldnt replace all the pages that abbreviate the European Union and refer to it as EU… I think they should change the name to Mini Euro Disney and work on getting something in the town that people will want to actually see, if they have something work coming for then they will be found no matter what silly name they use… I cant remember the last time I picked a holiday destination based on Google rankings, hmmm
Oops sorry thats supposed to be “worth coming for” not “work coming for” ^ lol
Great information thanks heaps
It’s not clear if someone what this “unknown” city has to offer (places, entertainment). In other words: What are the keywords for that town.
You can’t be ranked for nothing! You need to offer something.
Can we be all paranoids? Is all about Google branding. If Big Brother wants your town can be the center of the universe.
But also having such a news could get some links to their site right ?
Think some steps ahead
local ad company advertising gateway did a pretty good job getting my pizza shop on the map. pizza in san clemente, ca.
It’s an interesting tactic. To be completely honest the whole PR stunt of doing this will do more for their tourist board than actually getting ranked on google!
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