We focus on the SEM and CRO elements of digital marketing and work with third party SEO service providers whenever the technique could be useful in a specific campaign.
(For a primer on the difference between SEM and SEO, see my blog post entitled SEO or SEM?.)
Through the years, we’ve found it extremely hard to source a reliable SEO agency. At the risk of painting an entire industry with a broad brush, the field is full of con artists.
Let me first take the case of countless SEO agencies who contact us out of the blue. We get at least 2-3 emails per week from such agencies.
They all begin with the claim that our website is ranking low.
When we ask them what’re the keywords for which they tested our website’s SEO mojo and found it to be poor, most of them vanish.
The few of them who do get back will enlighten us with the information that our website ranks low on keywords like “marketing” and “digital marketing”.
“Duh. Thank you, Captain Obvious”.
If our website ranked high on such extremely competitive keywords, I’d be sipping the proverbial diaquairi on some Caribbean island and not struggling with a fly-by-night SEO agency.
Moving on from these spammers, let me share my experience with the SEO agencies we discover after online / offline research.
A couple of them fixed up appointments and did a “no show” for the concalls or face-to-face meetings without prior – or post – intimation.
One or two came back with a price of $$$$ for page 1 ranking within N months. While their proposals ran into several pages about how they’d build backlinks, do keyword stuffing, and so forth, they were silent about the keywords for which they’d do all these nice things.
When pressed for details, they told us that they’d be in a position to share that information only a month or two after starting the assignment.
When we asked them how they were able to quote a fixed price without anchoring the baseline keyword set, they sheepishly admitted that their effort estimate was based on boosting our SEO juice for company-specific keywords like – ahem – our company name!
As though we needed an SEO agency to help us appear on top of Google search results when somebody ran a search on our name! As you can see from the exhibit on the left, our website already has excellent SEO ranking for this keyword.
We also came across a couple of agencies who promised “pay for performance SEO” but, the moment we got into brasstacks, they demanded a setup fee before they began work!
ResultFirst makes false promises by claiming pay for SEO performance but begins work only after you pay a setup fee! http://bit.ly/a10NUE
— GTM360 (@GTM360) May 21, 2010
So, whether it’s the agencies who spam us or the ones we reach out to, we keep hearing lies and obfuscation. And fairly crude ones at that.
If you’re higher up on the value chain of “being lied to”, you may be subject to more sophisticated subterfuges like the ones described in 3 Big Lies Your SEO Consultant Is Telling You.
Scamsters are fast eroding SEO’s reputation. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it – SEO is too important for that. It’s time practitioners and customers of digital marketing got rid of fly-by-night SEO operators from their midst.