Page 20: Invisible by Default

"That is page twenty. We typed vidai.ch and found nothing," I said. My Rover, a young graduate engineer, one week into the job, was on the call with me. We had already logged more hours that week than either of us expected, learning each other's pace, learning the tools. Now we were staring at a search result that did not exist. A business built on being remembered by name could not be found by its own name.

Technology tools somehow feel different from the people we work with. Since Microsoft took over LinkedIn there have been subtle yet important changes that have been made to the tool. The most important one is a small setting called Sort messages by relevance instead of chronology. What this does is gives the algorithm a free hand. The tool discreetly defaulted this setting. Since I have not used LinkedIn so actively for a decade, my return earlier in the year was a surprise. I felt most of the messages were irrelevant. Almost every corner of the tool actually was asking me to become a premium member.

They call it monetization.

We in the real world face a choice with the small changes defaulted in our tools and the additional francs we need to pay to access what was either free or something we never needed earlier for a healthy productive life. Adjust unconsciously, or learn the mechanism well enough to work around it.

The biggest price is being paid by the small business. The voicelessness one feels, the inability to reach our clients without the unsolicited intermediaries are real. It is best summarized by an exchange with a career coach. "Your blog sounds just like a LinkedIn post," she said. I stayed quiet and even felt a sting of guilt.

The research of the last week has answered what I was unable to explain just weeks back. I know why posting it here is better. It is digitally sovereign. I control my content, my visibility and can tune my messages, volume and brightness better to my audience. No algorithm can consider what I have to say as less relevant because I did not pay the participation tax called Premium accounts. Small businesses have precisely this challenge. I must admit, though, that I do not have most of the skills yet, nor do I have the experience. Pioneers from the field of SEO and GEO have already taken time to educate me and provide tools. We will learn and aspire to use our skills in making the world a bit more equitable for small businesses. A client who is willing to experiment with us will be a welcome opportunity. We will not do this to make money but to learn. The only ask at the moment is you are close to us and we relate to you. Work with you might tell us whether this is more than an idea.

When Vidai acquires a business, we will use these skills not blind to the algorithms but with courage to invest in the detail and to claim the visibility we deserve.

About the Google search results I mentioned earlier, my Rover and I did not sit with it for long. Within a few hours we had built a full workflow, a series of actions on how to solve the problems, a bunch of products with a 3-tier pricing structure including warranty. The kind of structured offering I would hand a client. It felt like progress. It grew far bigger than the problem on hand. Vidai's ranking absence. We took steps back, and reduced what had to be done drastically as the week was flying by with little to show. A change in the Google Search Console. A handful of files including a well-structured Q&A, more accurate sitemaps and a few words of code scripted by Claude into index.html. Lots and lots of backlinking to our other web presence. A profile on localsearch. A listing on Trustpilot, a company page on our favorite, LinkedIn ;). None of it needed a tiered service or a slide deck. It needed someone to sit down and do it.

A week later, vidai.ch was number one for its own name.