One of our clients is a web retailer. Their model is that they pick up products in their niche that aren’t widely available outside of their local geographic market and sell them on the web. Most of the manufacturers they deal with are “old style” businesses — they have manufacturing plants and their idea of marketing is to offer the grocery stores a coupon to give to their customers. If the manufacturer has a web page, it hasn’t been optimized at all.

So here’s the interesting phenomenon. Our client carries about 400 different products, and works very hard to optimize for the long tail. They may not do very well for the generic terms in their niche, but if you enter a particular product name they’ve got the first three entries — a storefront, a reference page, and a blog will generally come up in the top three. The rest of the first page is usually social media stuff about the product that eventually points back to their web site. The manufacturer is often not even on the first page. That’s the best traffic of all — people that are looking for a specific product generally convert. This client claims a 10% conversion rate from the search engine traffic.

Another result is that our client gets about 20 phone calls a day from people that would like to complain to the manufacturer about something they bought in a grocery store. I didn’t believe it until I heard a few calls myself. People automatically assume that since Google ranks you #1 for a product name, it’s your product. I even heard a caller accuse our client of being evasive because the caller “knew” that our client was really the manufacturer and was trying to dodge their call. Google told them that this was the right place to call.

The other common phone call is “Yes, I’d like to buy such and such. Can you tell me what grocery stores in my area carry this?”. Again, since they’re #1 in the SERP they obviously must be the manufacturer.

It’s a good problem to have. Taking those customer service calls is often an opportunity to sell the customer something else or convince them to buy it over the web instead of a grocery store. But it points to a problem of perception that is quite common.

People think Google magically knows more than it does.

Being #1 in the SERPs just means that the page has met the requirements of a mystical algorithm. It says nothing about the real world. And being #10 doesn’t mean that rightfully you shouldn’t be #1. After all, if you type in the name of a product, shouldn’t you logically be shown the manufacturer first?

I think this just shows how much search engine technology remains in its infancy. Some day we’ll look back in wonder at how anyone was ever able to find anything without a computer that could read and understand the entire internet and answer our questions correctly the first time.

Kind of like how I wonder how anyone was ever able to program using punch cards. Oh wait, that was me!