The search demand was for the service’s own words, not for comparisons

The situation

A business-services company asked whether another marketing tool could raise its traffic. Our own strategy had answered the same question shortly before.

What it looked like

That strategy said the consultation page had no form, so enquiries could not be counted. In this review we added a claim of our own: for three rounds we said the company’s annual fee was unknown.

What was actually true

A form had been live on that page for months, embedded from an outside form service. Its few enquiries were all for services it sells; the client’s own log showed about four in five arrive by phone or email. The annual fee was printed on every service page, and it was larger than the one-off fee. On search: of twenty comparison terms, four had measurable demand, a few dozen searches a month together. Price terms, and the foreign-location versions of one service, came back below what Google reports. The plain words for the individual services had thousands a month, with almost no advertisers competing.

How we found it

Google’s keyword data, the live pages, and the form’s records set against the client’s log. We withdrew three wrong turns: a competitor’s traffic from topics this company does not sell, a market estimate missing two place names, and comparison terms proposed before they were measured. When a paragraph of our recommendations was called untrue, two of its three claims proved unchecked; checking them turned up the fee.

What changed

A language-checked letter to the client, with every measured term attached, including the empty ones. It was sent. Nothing changed in the client’s systems.

Where it ended

Two questions to the client are open, and they set the plan’s direction. Our tool could not break search impressions down by query; it dropped the request and returned what looked like an answer. That breakdown is needed before any content budget.

What we did not claim

The two earlier claims, withdrawn once the pages were read. And no traffic figure on the estimated competitor numbers.

Why it matters beyond this case

What a company says about itself is the least reliable register there is, and that includes yours. ---

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