It is sad, but a lot of businesses get scammed by SEO companies claiming to get your business ranked in the number one position of Google every day.
These ranking promises and high monthly SEO fees is really what puts a bad taste in everyones mouth when talking about search engine optimization. You can’t fully blame the SEO company though, the business owner should have done the research and had enough knowledge to make the right decision when picking the SEO company.
In this post, I am going to go over some things to consider when searching for a SEO company.
Before we get into the details, I suggest you read my article on off-page SEO. This post will help you understand how Google and other major search engines determine how they rank websites. The off-page SEO article mixed with on-page SEO and a good content strategy will lead to top SEO rankings.
Let’s get started. The following are examples of bad service offering from SEO companies:
Guaranteed Rankings – If any SEO company offers guaranteed rankings, this should be your first red flag! If you have read my other posts, you should know that no one knows how the search engine algorithms work exactly. SEOs have a good idea, but they are always changing and optimizing to try and display the best results. Because of this, you simply can’t guarantee rankings in search engines.
Instead of offering guaranteed rankings, the SEO company should explain to you how to properly optimize your website for search engines and the importance of content and link building.
Secret Formula or Insider Tips – I always get a laugh at this one. The truth is that there is no secret formula. Google provides guidelines and tactics that you should follow to optimize and rank your website. Companies that provide SEO tools analyze hundreds, if not thousands, of websites to determine what works the best when ranking websites. This information is shared and benchmarked for SEOs to analyze and learn from.
Google is very smart when it comes to ranking websites. They can determine unnatural versus natural backlinks, if you over optimize content, have a mobile friendly site, and a huge number of other things just by crawling the web. The search engine has a HUGE amount of data that they use to analyze and rank websites. It is also always changing and taking in new factors in order to provide the best results.
With all this information, do you really think someone could have a “secret formula” to just magically get your website to the top? I sure hope not. If you buy into this “secret formula” service and it works, please let me and the rest of the world know immediately. I will be waiting..
Free Services – Again, please read my other posts to understand the process of what it takes to properly optimize and rank a website in the major search engines. The tasks outlined in my various posts take a lot of time and require a good amount of work. Anyone that can offer and do all these tasks for free must be up to something fishy.. Sure, maybe they can help optimize a couple of pages on your website for free, but there is no way they can offer rankings or any type of organic results for free.
You get what you pay for!
Bad Results
If a business picked to go with a SEO company that offers any of the above services, they without a doubt got bad results. This is mostly due to the bad tactics they used to get your website ranked fast. Since the business got bad results from their SEO campaign, they probably don’t have very good things to say about SEO.
I agree 100%. It is sad to hear about what so-called SEO companies have done to try and rank websites. Some tactics have even resulted in negative SEO results! If I was burned by a SEO company, I would feel the same way about starting another SEO campaign for my business.
Now that you know about some shady SEO service offerings, you should now know how to spot the bad SEO companies. In the next post, I will go over how to find a good SEO company.
If you have any questions or need any help, feel free to contact me.