We are still number 1 for “search engine marketing” in the Netherlands

// September 4th, 2009 // No Comments » // fun, work

As most people know, I work for Tribal Internet Marketing in Dublin. The focus of our Irish office is Search Engine Marketing, we do a lot off Pay Per Click advertising but also some Search Engine Optimization. I spend most of my time looking at the Irish and UK markets these days, but this afternoon I was checking some of our Dutch competitors to see what has changed for them in the past few months.

One of our competitors launched a new website and I immediately noticed the screenshot from Google on their homepage. The screenshot shows that they are number 1 in the organic results for the keyword “zoekmachine marketing” (dutch for “search engine marketing”). At first I was shocked because we had that position for a long time, it looked like they did a better job then us. The screenshot:

After taking a closer look at the screenshot I realized that there are a few things wrong with it:

• There are no Adwords ads showing up, highly suspicious for a popular keyword like this one.
• The page title says “search engine marketing” and not the keyword they used “zoekmachine marketing”.
• Their brand name shows up bold and Google only does this for the keyword they used in the query.

The only conclusion I can make from these facts is that they used Photoshop (or a similar program) to make it look like they are number one for this important keyword (especially if you are in this business). I think they used a screenshot from a search on their brandname to make sure they would be number 1. Is this misleading for their (potential) clients or not?

A quick search in google confirmes that we still have the number 1 position in the Netherlands for what we do best, search engine marketing!