Googling For Business & Pleasure by Debbie Bennett

Once upon a time, Google told you what was popular. I remember in the mid-to-late 1990s, you could type something into Google and the top however-many hits would appear on the page. You could be reasonably sure that what was at the top was actually the most popular link for that search. Back then I was very involved with the British Fantasy Society and my address was the submissions address for several of the publications. 

In 1996 or so, if I googled my name, I’d be most of the first page of hits – either as me personally or me with my BFS-hat on. I even wrote a blog about it 10 years ago! I shared the second page with the Debbie Bennett PR agency and somewhere there was a Debbie Bennett racing car driver, which always struck me as a bit crazy. 

Jump forwards 10 years and the entire first page of Google is various pages of the Debbie Bennett Funeral Director’s website. This is a UK company with 3 offices in NW England and it has an almost-identical domain name to me – I’m debbie.bennett.co.uk and this company has FD suffixed to the end. Now I’m willing to concede that Google caches stuff and there are so many bots on the web now that who knows what is genuine anymore, but really? The whole of the first page of Google? I can’t see any sponsored entries, but there are business listings etc 

Now I admit I am a little tired of being emailed pictures of the recently-deceased and orders of service etc. I’m not comfortable with this. Initially I forwarded stuff on, then I emailed directly and suggested they might want to alter their website to have the FD suffix in capitals and a different colour from the rest of the url. Last time I looked, it hadn’t changed and I confess that now I bounce the email back to sender with a polite note that I own the domain and I don’t do funerals! I do wonder how many of their customers land on my web site by mistake and wonder what they’ve done … 

But search-engine optimisation. That seems to be what it’s all about now, doesn’t it? It’s no longer enough to be active online, to have lots of things with your url on it – these days you presumably have to either be good with the technology or pay someone that is. Or both. I don’t actually have a clue. I’m the second link on page 2 of Google these days. Page TWO! I might as well be invisible on page 2. Followed by more funerals, PR and Debbie Bennett the singer, who has probably never quite recovered from having her listing merged with mine on Apple! 

So what do you have to do? I suppose I could actually post more on my personal blog but these days my well of creativity runneth dry once I’ve done this monthly blog. I do use Facebook (a lot), Instagram (a bit), Twitter (even less these days) and I now have an account on the still-private, invitation-only Musk-free Twitter replacement BlueSky. Since I’m in at ground level with BlueSky, I am actually trying to interact more than I’m normally comfortable with, in an effort to get noticed. YouTube involves sound and/or vision and TikTok scares the s**t out of me. I’m thinking eventually I *might* try doing some readings of my own stuff, but I hate the sound of my own voice. 

And anyway, none of that pushes you up Google’s rankings, does it? I tried searching for my first crime thriller Hamelin’s Child – and that did give me the first page, although it’s not a common title or term, so not particularly surprising. And high up the list is a paperback listing at Blackwells, which did surprise me as that’s more of an academic university bookshop, isn’t it? All my paperbacks are listed there at bizarrely random prices. I also found I had 3 audio reviews at ACX which I’d never noticed and don’t appear to move to Amazon. But how important is it to be high up in Google’s rankings? Nobody actually looks for your books there – they’d go searching in their ebook store of choice. I guess it becomes more important if you are looking for agent representation or a traditional deal, so maybe I’m just worrying about nothing?