When you can’t be found on Google

I recently dropped my Blackberry bold while rushing to a departure gate in Gatwick airport (I left my ipod at home and had to go back for it) which resulted in the rear casing becoming permentantly loose and falling off randomly while using the phone.

SEE:

So I called O2 (read un-human corporation)  to see if there was anything they could do for me.  As expected, even though I have been a loyal O2 customer for 8 years there was nothing they could do for me, except sell me a new phone at around £450 (awesome).

Now I’m not the kind of person that let’s things like this get in my way so I started looking online for a company that a friend introduced me to a little while back. They make very cool custom replacement parts for Blackerry, iphone, PSP etc.  And seeing as how I needed a new back plate for my broken bold I thought that I’d slplash out on something a bit flash. The company I am talking about is called Colorware, but I didn’t know that when I started my search as it had been months since I checked out their site, so I began with quite a straight forward query:

http://tinyurl.com/lxyeoe  – Clicking this will run the same Google query I ran “custom blackberry housing”.  Now I can accept that Colorware might not be very “up” on SEO, so I tried again, and again and couldn’t get the Colorware recommendation from any site within the SERP.

This was the beginning of my frustration, so taking stock, I tried to think about where I’d first seen a post on Colorware and jumped areound a few tech sites that I read regularly like Gizmodo etc.  entering Blackberry query strings into their search boxes, scrounging round old forum posts and still found nothing.

Did I give up?…. of course not ;o)

I changed my search tactics. I knew that they also customised iphone covers and thought that because the iphone and anything to do with it is juicy link bait, I would be sure to find something using the same query strings replacing the work “blackberry” with the word “iphone”, so I began my search:

http://tinyurl.com/l3vbnh- this is the first query replicated using the word iphone instead of blackberry.

Nothing…….. So I tried a second query:

http://tinyurl.com/njxs8s – BAM ! – This  gave me the result I was looking for.

So what does this teach me?

If you have a great site and a great product, then please, market it:

• Run a PPC campaign, several if you’re a geek like me.
• Find out who is linking to you and ask for relevant anchor text.
• Protect your brand early online:  www.colourware.co.uk takes me to a completely unassociated site.

Follow those rules and I’ll be back for more, don’t follow them, and someone less stubborn than me will quite possibly never know who you are trying to appeal to as a company, or what product you are trying to sell>

Know how I am going to search for your product and put yourself in my path, optimize simply and often and you’ll definitely get results.

Love,

Callum