I recently heard two contradictory opinions over the value of using the word ‘free’ in a marketing context.

The first was in conversation with another SEO professional, who described how they couldn’t persuade clients to adopt Google Analytics as a measurement tool. Its crime? Being free.

The fact that Google don’t charge a penny for their excellent, comprehensive – I’d go as far as to say must-have – tracking software apparently puts a lot of clients off, including some FTSE-100 blue-chips.

It reminded me of a brief I was given in one of my earliest SEO roles. The client didn’t want to rank against any keyword that included the word “free”. They only wanted traffic from customers who were willing to pay for whatever it was they were selling.

At the time I thought that was bonkers. Surely you’d take the “free” searchers, even if 99 per cent of them bounced straight back out from your site? After all, one per cent of a lot is better than 100 per cent of nothing.

This view was enforced recently when I attended an excellent “digital picnic” hosted by Leeds design agency Elmwood. One of the speakers was Ajaz Ahmed, founder of internet service provider Freeserve.

By no coincidence at all, Ahmed is a huge fan of the word “free”. He stopped his company’s invoices from carrying the legend “FOC” for free-of-charge work, so he could get that hugely emotive word “FREE” in, instead.

Think about how much Freeserve cost. It was a dial-up service, so you paid local-rate phone call charges for as long as you were online. It certainly wasn’t free.

It didn’t have a monthly rental fee, which most ISPs did at the time – although this charge was only dropped when BT brought out a call-charge-only service just before Freeserve was launched.

So, in actual fact, Freeserve was NEVER free. The word was just in the business title because, as Ahmed says, it is one of the most emotive in the English language.

And yet there are people out there who turn their noses up at Google Analytics because it’s free? That’s crazy. But people do equate price with quality sometimes: every student of product positioning knows that the toughest place to position your product is in the low price/high quality quadrant.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, especially in the Web 2.0 world where people demand more and more for less and less. Ultimately, if you can’t sell something that’s free, you probably need to look at how you’re selling it.

See Ajaz Ahmed’s speech in full. For free!. Thanks to Alex Nelson and Vimeo.