You’ve heard the phrase ‘like trying to sell ice to an Eskimo’ – well that’s just what happened to us this week with a call from that well known provider of SEO services, British Telecom who tried to get us to buy into their BT Web Clicks service.
Like any company we get our fair share of sales calls – it comes with the territory, however it does make us a little vexed when the pitcher hasn’t taken the split second that it would take to realise that we offer the precise services they are trying to sell us. Well, not quite.
The delightfully friendly lady I spoke to promised that BT would get us listed in Google, Bing AND Yahoo – not to mention a few of their selected directories. I have no problem with directories, however the only SEO benefit I could see from being listed in the ones they owned vanished when I saw that all links were nofollowed. How many purchases have you made starting with a search on a BT directory? Yeah – I thought so.
Now I would have thought that one of the first rules of sales is to know your customer – so why they thought they could sell SEO to an agency who’s primary business is just that is beyond me. And what would be the downside of not investing in their offer? I was informed that their directory may outrank us for searches of our company name.
Can’t say I was that worried.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had a moan about companies mis-selling and misleading customers over the workings of SEO. Usually it is smaller outfits who are guilty of such misdemeanours, however for a massive corporation like BT to sell such a product (as honestly as the salesperson could as she was at least decent enough to admit she found SEO ‘a bit of a dark art’) under the trust and recognition that their brand has is disappointing to say the least.
So if you have found this little post via a search for BT Web Clicks then do yourself a favour and speak to us before you consider investing in such services.
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