If your town doesn’t rank on Google do you a) do some SEO or b) change the towns name?

Hmm you can actually pay google to rank top? maybe big corps can.

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.

Anybody entering the word “Eu” in a search engine is likely to get a number of results, but most will be a reference to the past participle of the French verb avoir (to have), not to the pretty market town in Normandy.

The search also brings up pages related to the European Union.

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.

Nope, they should do a PR campaign associating themselves with Google (results) that will get them in the news.

Look, it’s already working :)

Interesting news and great find!

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

Great information thanks heaps

Can we be all paranoids? Is all about Google branding. If Big Brother wants your town can be the center of the universe.

local ad company advertising gateway did a pretty good job getting my pizza shop on the map. pizza in san clemente, ca.