I might recommend saying "Contact us" or "Coming soon" – I also thought this was a glitch or that you were attempting to serve personalized pricing and it wasn't working.
> It's one of the reasons why I point people to using Wordpress + SEO plugins like Yoast, which deal with most if not all of these edge cases automatically.
This is pretty good advice, though what we see more commonly is that Yoast is misconfigured (or not configured at all), which causes more problems than it solves. Another thing that happens is solutions like Yoast will throw lots of errors that actually don't matter because Yoast's goal is to drive interaction with Yoast. It's not always easy to make the distinction.
But yes, for a lot of people "just use Wordpress" is a good solution, and an attentive Yoast install can be super helpful!
Google Search: Surprisingly smart in some ways, surprisingly dumb in others.
And this sort of thing doesn't just make a difference in indexing, but also in other places like analytics – Google Analytics will see a page with a slash and no slash separately, for example, which makes it hard to get an accurate picture of what's performing.
Yes, a lot of companies try to use paid early, and not only do these leads not convert as well to revenue, they also requires continuous investment. The hard thing, but much better thing, is to invest in content and organic, but a lot of founders don't think that way.
I also wonder if early-stage marketers can get a lot of credibility / leverage in their organizations by focusing on product marketing.
Other random observation – a lot of marketers seem to not be able to figure out what works, and then the solution they offer is spending more money. (This isn't always a marketing problem, could be a product issue that the marketing team can't influence.)
(Disclaimer, written by me)