Energy Saving Trust spent £272,000 to be top of Google

Energy minister Joan Ruddock has revealed that the Energy Saving Trust spent £272,000 + VAT over the past 12 months on Google adwords – this is a form of advertising where organisations pay for their webpages to appear at the top and alongside certain web searches. The minister also admitted that DECC, the Department for Energy and Climate Change have spent over £424,997.50 including VAT on other online advertising campaigns.

It could be seen that paying to be top of Google is a key part of any communications campaign for the Energy Saving Trust, when they are informing the public about free insulation or the boiler scrapage programme, however, why are they paying to be top when a keyword search of the ‘Energy Saving Trust’ already places it there? So they appear top for FREE anyway, and same goes for the Carbon Trust and Act on CO2. Click on this top sponsored link (which most people do) and you’ll be contributing to Google’s profits and UK deficit. We even spotted the Carbon Trust and the Energy Saving Trust trying to outbid themselves for certain keywords in 2009!

At sust-it we spend a great deal of time trying to rank high within Google’s natural searches (unpaid for page rankings within search engines) as this is our lifeblood. Paying to be top is out of the question with our limited resources!