An article in the Telegraph last week claims that a town in France called Eu is considering changing its name to achieve better search engine rankings.
According to the mayor, tourism revenues are down by more than a third and believes that this is in part due to its poor search engine rankings. According to the article:
Marie-Françoise Gaouyer, the local mayor, now has two options – to pay internet giants like Yahoo and Google thousands to put the town at the top of all “Eu” searches, or change the town’s name.
“The second option appears the most sensible,” said Mrs Gaouyer, adding: “As far as the internet is concerned, we have to bring ourselves up to date.” Mrs Gaouyer’s favoured option is Ville d’Eu (Town of Eu), with other possibilities including Eu-le-Château and Eu-en-Normandie.
Well, its certainly nice to see a Mayor who is willing to do whatever it takes to promote his town – but changing your name (town or business) seems a bit drastic. Although the site ranks well within France (in French) – it is the overseas visitors that they seek.. but it seems to me that building and promoting a web site that demonstrates the benefits of visiting Eu would be a more sensible approach.. build the site’s credibility around tourist terms and forget about the town name for the time-being… once you build it, continue to add strong content and promote it for terms that tourists are actually searching for (aka SEO ) (I doubt many are actually looking for Eu) – then it will start to rank for many other terms.
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