About 5 months ago, I created a research post on pest control marketing, specifically looking at what it takes to complete in online marketing and branding for pest control. I chose the Staten Island area, because it’s a fairly large area without a large online branding presence.
Five months seems to be a decent time to post an update. So out of the five websites that ranked on the front page of Google for the search term “Staten Island Pest Control,” how many are there now?
One
All five were poorly designed websites, and all five seemed unlikely to rank on the front page for long. Sure enough, there they go. They are no longer ranked on the front page of Google. Some are not even within first several pages. They’re gone.
Now, the one that remains is actually the worst of the bunch. It’s riddled with copied content, spelling errors, and no writing of value. But with each update it appears that they come closer and closer to disappearing, and soon one can expect that all of these websites will be gone forever.
Our Experiment
We decided to try to see how easy it would be to compete for ourselves. We created a Staten Island pest control website ourselves. We gave it no marketing, no blog posts, no incoming links and no updates. We simply created a basic website and decided to let it run to see how it goes. And how did it go?
Not bad! With no marketing, it took only two months to get the website on page 4, and with each Google update we’ve gone higher and higher, to the point where we’re now near the top of page 3 almost on page 2. That’s with no social media, no incoming links, and no regular updates and added content. I suspect we’ll be near the top of page 2 in a few months, with a chance at the front page.
Overall, more evidence that good content matters. There are other important parts of online marketing, but if you simply create a website with some quality content, you can help your website thrive with very little else.
