Think twice before you believe a “best of” blog here in Bali.

We are all guilty of it, we sit down, open our browser, get onto Google and type in “The Best…..Wedding planners, Florists, Venues etc. when we are in search of information to help plan our wedding.

But how reliable are these “best of” blogs and why should you think twice before you believe that these lists have gone through any kind of scrutiny?

The wedding industry is hot with competition, and here in Bali it is down right fierce and it’s no wonder with the sheer scale of weddings performed here every year. If you type “wedding planner Bali” into google you will get just over 8 million results, while not all of them will be relevant to what you’re searching for, do you actually have the time to find what you need? Probably not.

That is where the you see the title “The Top 15”, “Bali’s Best” and they are oh so enticing. Subconsciously whenever we see a “best of” list we believe that whoever has put this list together has had some type of criteria that each of the participants must have met. Unfortunately, this just isn’t so.

The Directories and Blogs that list the “best of” articles are businesses, first and foremost, and what does a business need to run? That’s right, money.

These lists are all paid for by each participant, they are essentially big adverts. There is nothing the participants have to do, or meet to be on these lists other than pay a (incredibly large) fee.

Now while these are a great source of information they should not be relied upon as accurate. These are simply just companies with a large marketing budget. In fact, some of the best performing wedding companies here in Bali don’t show on these blogs, aren’t signed up to directories and don’t even appear on page one of Google. So how do they get known? Good old fashioned word of mouth.

While we all understand that technology has changed the way we do things, seek information and generally live our lives, having these behemoth companies come in to a market place, take over online and require payment so that your business is “seen” again only hurts the smaller businesses. Businesses that run on small profit margins, that are in the industry because they love what they do not because they want to make the most money.

So our advice to all future brides and grooms. Don’t get sucked in by these companies that do nothing for the industry, that receive payment to deceive online searchers with their “best of” clickbait…….try something different and check out page 2 and 3 of Google. You’ll be surprised what you find.

We would like to note that here at The Eleventh Agency any "Best of" blog or recommendation has received no payment, we just wrote about them because we think they're ace.