Chris Johnson is a colleauge of mine at HubSpot.
Here's a rough transcript of a recent call:
CJ: Hello Mr. X. You recently did a search at Google for "The Best Search Engine Marketing Program Available 2008". It looks like you found us. Are you trying to optimize something?
Prospect: blah blah blah.
Two things that made this blogworthy, atleast in my opinion.
- That's Long Tail. We certainly didn't set out to rank for that "search phrase". It happened, though. I'd imagine that noone will ever type that phrase again. But, when we add up all of the 1 time relevant phrases that people type, it starts to add up to a lot of visitors and leads.
- Google Delivers "the Best". It's interesting how people ask Google, a computer that crunches our links to determine quality, for the "best" solutions. During Mark Roberge's presentation on SEO yesterday at the WBJ Sales Summit (his slides), he used the example of searching for "best plumber". Sam Wildt raised his hand and made the point that the person that ranks at the top isn't necessarily the "best". Mark agreed and explained that Google makes their best estimation. The crazy apart about it... is that many people start their search with "best" in front of their search term. They must believe that Google brings back "the best" or atleast some approximation of it that helps them start their buying process.