Choose Your SEO Company Wisely

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By Gord Collins of Bay Street SEO

The business of search engine optimization is reaching a feverish pitch as the market is conservatively estimated at $400 million. That kind of money has spawned a lot of me-too optimizers. These “Johnny come latelies” make plenty of promises including top ranks on any keyword phrase. Rarely do they deliver top quality sales prospects, even if they should be lucky enough to actually rank well for any length of time. The key to preventing the aftermath is for SEO clients to be sensible and to understand the sales pitches of fraudulent SEO companies. Discover their sales tricks below.

Thousands of optimization service providers of all skill levels are making their pitches customers via phone and e-mail. Their offers are too often generated from their conversations with SEO prospects. They know what people want to hear and they present their pitch in a way that can confuse prospects or get them comparing prices instead of the end-value. The telephone conversation is their way of more aggressively controlling the website owner and getting past their common sense. As in any high pressure tactic, they get the “target” consumed with dreams and rankings. In a real consultative relationship, the rankings and dreams are background thoughts, with discussion over the things that have to be done to get there take precedence.

As a business person, you don’t want unqualified visitors to your site. These are people that look at one page and quickly leave. Those visits may look good on Webmaster stat sheets, but it won’t do anything for your business. Developing, utilizing and offering the visitor something is the key to quality visits and quality SEO.

The Keyword Candy Store

Yes, buyer beware is the first thing that comes to mind, but we shouldn’t forget that when these operators fail to deliver the promised rankings, it makes us all look bad. We’re all judged under the assumption that SEO companies can’t be trusted.

There’s another situation that occurs frequently too that results in bad feelings and failed expectations. That’s when the buyer wants to exploit the SEO firm – the old something for nothing scheme. They demand guarantees, or they offer up “profit sharing” schemes to the SEO as their way of spreading the huge profits they’re going to make. In an ideal world, we would have these exploiters calling each other and leave the rest of us alone. This is what’s going on in the SEO world.

When suspect optimization providers approach business people, it sets an ugly tone for the industry. They make unrealistic promises, cast doubt on all SEO practices and their unsolicited mass e-mails leave the business owner with a sour impression of even professional SEO companies. It’s a mess legitimate providers have to clean up.

I receive e-mails from SEO spammers frequently telling me I can have top rankings for a fistful of dollars. Phone calls from India are common too and companies such as Traffic-Power are noted for their telemarketing tactics. Spammers don’t sit around and wait for their own site’s rankings to rise either, if it every will. They get on the phone and market directly.

As a potential SEO services buyer, you should watch for these sales tactics:

• When they let you pick your keywords like you’re a kid in a candy store, you know you’re in for a ride.
• They insist on monthly maintenance fees and refer to the frivolous reports they’re going to generate. Fraud artists love daily keyword ranking reports covering all the search engines. Professionally-generated rankings don’t vary that much and don’t need daily attention. You can sleep at night.
• They promise rankings for keyword phrases and they haven’t even studied your company or the search marketing space to see if they are appropriate.
• They don’t offer an SEO audit as part of their service. Would you let a marketing firm take hold of your company’s marketing without a marketing study?
• They talk too much about Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. For most keyword phrases, these search engines deliver such a small amount of traffic, you can’t really justify talking about them let alone optimizing for them. Most legitimate optimization efforts for Google will also spill over into Yahoo and MSN rankings.
• They don’t talk about real problems. The SEO that points out the potential problems is the one you should take seriously. Would you trust a surgeon that said nothing could possibly go wrong?
• Ranking guarantees. This is the timeless classic. They used to sell park land in Florida.
• They plan to set you in a link network they’ve created. This network of sites usually borrows pagerank from other sites you don’t even know about. When you stop paying their monthly fees, your links disappear and so does your rankings. So here, you’re actually “renting” your search engine rankings. You don’t own them.
• Doesn’t do SEO copywriting and content development. That means your ranks will depend entirely on links from other sites which may disappear, and for which you’ll have no control over.
• Agrees to everything you suggest and doesn’t flinch at your outrageous requests.
• Focuses on details yet doesn’t have the foggiest idea of what your company really wants to achieve (i.e. qualified prospects and customers).
• Depends on paid text link advertising ads for rankings. Paid placement is always vulnerable to detection and deletion.
• Encourages you to focus on price and not on the end value of the real targeted traffic that will become customers.
• Relies totally on keyword suggestion tools. Many sites have ranked at the top for popular suggested keywords and received no traffic. Keyword suggestion tools aren’t accurate. Many keyword phrases are grossly overrated and over estimated. It takes judgment and research to find the best keyword phrases for a particular client. This is another thing that can’t be automated.

There’s many more sales tactics in use, but the main points here are that they always appear to be giving you something for nothing. If you don’t feel like you’re trading value for value with them, and they don’t mention drawbacks and the possible downside of the SEO project, then you’re being had in some way. Your SEO should be totally honest with you, not just say what you want to hear, or avoid saying what you don’t want to hear. If they’re honest with you in describing your situation, they’ll be honest with you in finding the right solution.

The opinions expressed are those of the author and not of MarketingFind.com.