The following is a letter written by Josef, owner of StealthMachines, to Google CEO Sundar Pichai in response to our company’s frustrations about our google search rankings. As anyone who works with SEO can attest, SEO is a discipline in and of itself… and our company would like to focus more on serving our customers and less on advertising to new ones. As it stands, google search engine results are extremely difficult for a little company like ours to do well in, so we are always having to think outside the box to grow as a company. Big corporations and marketing engines push all the little guys down with content which doesn’t serve the searcher well but scores well in Google’s engine.
You can help us! Share www.stealthmachines.com and any posts that you like with your friends on social media, and be sure also to like us on Facebook, Google plus, etc., as these are all factors which contribute to getting the word out. Thanks!
Mr. Pichai,
My name is Josef. I am the owner of a boutique computer company called StealthMachines which, for many years, has enjoyed a cult following of thousands of loyal customers within our niche. For a large chunk of time we received the majority of our new website visitors from Google Search. We were doing so well in Google Search that we were able to focus exclusively on what we do best: building the best custom gaming computers on the planet. Then one day in around the year 2011, the number of new visitors being routed to our page by Google slowed to a trickle, and everything else seemed to eventually freeze as a result. The only reason we’re still in business is because of the simple fact that our previously satisfied customers kept coming back again, and again, and again.
Since that time, we paid several SEO firms. One of these firms charged $8,000 to bring our search engine ranking up over the course of six months… and during that time our SEO rank only plummeted. We have, for many years, spent an incredible amount of our profits on trying to improve our search engine results, and the results are never very good,… and always the ROI is less than we put into it.
This is hard for us because we have now placed a vast allotment of our budget into SEO, but the results for some time have been mediocre at best. In spite of following Google best practices and using Google products (we have spent over $3,000 on AdWords netting a whopping – one conversion), my little company now finds itself grasping at straws in order to try and hit a target which we literally cannot see. Will the next $5.00 I spend on better SEO or Adwords convert a sale, or will the next $11,000 I spend amount to the bankruptcy of a 13-year-old company? I have no way of knowing.
My team and I utilize the resources which Google provides. I know a lot more about SEO than I ever wanted to when I started a computer manufacturing business, and we do our best to implement webmaster tools and other recommended Google Products at every turn.
At the end of the day, my passion is gaming computers. It’s all I know, it’s all I love, and instead of my little business spending time, money, and brain power on that, we are spending more and more time learning about Google’s latest algorithm. We are not good bloggers, but we are excellent gaming computer manufacturers!
I seek your help because my company would like to focus more of our efforts on what we do best, and less of our efforts trying to convince the Google engine that we are as worthy as our customers have known for years. If my engineers were busy building computers instead of writing content and looking for link sharing opportunities, the quality we could deliver to our customers would be that much better. I hope you can find a way to help companies like mine to focus more on intangibles which Google doesn’t seem to notice such as providing a quality service or scoring the highest reviews, and less on tricking the Google engine into liking us.
Thank you.
-Josef
Owner, StealthMachines
https://www.stealthmachines.com