Lee Hogan While numerous moral search engine marketing firms serve Internet customers nowadays, some infamous practitioners also exist. One of them called me simply the opposite day.
“We can get your website to be number one among search engines, like Google, for the pinnacle 20 seek terms you pick,” promised the telemarketer. I don’t normally deliver telemarketers the time of day, but somehow, I determined this fellow to be exciting. It has become a chilly and snowy day in Michigan at the moment. By hook or by crook, I felt warmer simply listening to him glow approximately the sunshine beaming through his workplace home windows.
“Show me effects,” I asked. So we cruised the net together, and he showed me a few client websites that did have pinnacle ratings. At first look, the income spiel sounded like a substitute invitation. Still, after taking a while to consider and compare his business enterprise, I decided that what this friendly younger salesman provided changed into nothing more than a rip-off.
As I did my homework, several purple flags jumped out at me. By getting to know his employer online, I discovered that they employed no less than 250 telemarketers soliciting SEO customers continually. With all due admiration for the size of this organization, I observed it challenging to agree that they might carry the numerous search engine marketing customers they have been recruiting in a significant way.
I asked the salesman about this the subsequent time he called. He informed me that their SEO carrier changed notably automatically, built on proprietary technology that changed so ahead that no other company should compete. If you failed to seize it, the previous sentence contained crimson flag #2. In the words of the antique adage, “If it sounds too exact to be true, it probably is.”
The above was the handiest, but it was the top of the iceberg. Upon further questioning my enthusiastic income contact, I discovered it wasn’t my url they wanted to sell. Their plan becomes a good deal more excellent and advantageous–for themselves, this is. They could set up URLs to be doorway pages to my website. Their URLs, now not mine, might be optimized to get high in the search engines like Google and Yahoo.
They would maintain control of and ownership of the URLs, so if I ever went out of the enterprise, they might sell all that traffic–and cost I had paid so dearly for–to certainly one of my competition—the appealing quality deal for them. I pay them significant dollars on an annual foundation to pressure traffic to a URL which they–now not me–personally. Of course, I might benefit from something sales got here through their URL so long as I persisted in stepping up cash.
I had a fantastic pal who fell prey to this scheme some years back. An unscrupulous SEO “expert” talked her into paying large greenbacks for a website with a URL that the SEO firm owned and controlled. The search engine marketing company billed my pal more than they’d initially shriveled for. When she balked at the invoice, they threatened to close down visitors to the website online.
While this firm also promised hordes of visitors and pinnacled search engine listings, the only substantial visitors my pal ever received were garnered through pay-per-click. To make matters worse, the search engine marketing company hid links to their sites at some point in the HTML of her website.
Another fault I determined with the search engine optimization firm stated first in this newsletter turned into the search phrases they crowed about taking the first location for. They have been as an alternative obscure. It’s a pretty mind-blowing accomplishment to come up first on the web for the search period “furnishings” or even “log fixtures”. But if you design a web page that brings up your enterprise first on Google for a seek of “Birmingham Tuscaloosa Avenue Dry Cleaners”, a large deal. And that’s what this search engine optimization firm turned into doing.
“I can get you a median of one hundred hits consistent with the day,” he told me. Then he showed me stats on several of their customer’s websites that had constructed as many as 100 hits in line with day over a year. I don’t know approximately you, but I need more than a hundred specific hits per day on my internet site. I’ve done the types of numbers- and higher- independently. Why must I pay them for what I bear in mind to be mediocre consequences?
Of all the bad practices cited above, the one I located most offensive changed into the concept that the search engine optimization company must personalize or manage my URL. While proudly owning the URL could look like an excellent idea for the search engine optimization firm (they may continually acquire their charges by threatening to close down the website), it isn’t always so nifty for the consumer. If I pay a company to build my business, I need them to do just that–develop my commercial enterprise. Delivering a firm to make visitors to a URL they own is like paying them to construct their enterprise–and that, in my view, is the most giant search engine marketing scam of all.