I’ve been thinking a lot about how SEO specialists market themselves and try to attract new business. Truth is that most decent SEOs don’t!. They never need to advertise their services, never mind solicit new clients, so it surprises me as much as it irks me whenever I hear of people I know being sold a bit of an SEO dummy.
I’m not interested in outing anybody so for the purposes of this article, let’s change the name to something suitably Glaswegian…BAWBAGSEO. This list just serves as an example of stuff I’ve discovered going on that I believe no decent web or SEO professional would ever involve themselves in. Furthermore, if you are a business and considering outlaying for some SEO on your site, steer clear of any of these scenarios…
- BAWBAGSEO carries out SEO work for Client A and gets Client A good results. BAWBAGSEO then approaches client B, who is a competitor of client A and offers to optimise client B’s site for a long tail search term that Client A hasn’t optimised his for. You read that right…SEO’s offering out sloppy long tail seconds to client competitors. Very poor.How to avoid: Ask your SEO if they have any other clients in a similar sector to yours and what their policy is relating to this.
- Aside from providing SEO services, BAWBAGSEO also runs 3 day “all you can eat” SEO courses at a £1000 a pop so participants can then carry out SEO successfully themselves (alongside running their day to day business)
- Scaring client B into SEO expenditure (preferably supplied by BAWBAGSEO) by showing them their site’s W3C validation error report when BAWBAGSEO‘s validation report has twice as many errors as client B
- Guaranteeing page one results for long-tail, traffic-light, highly specific search terms. A recent post on the consistently excellent Hoboweb blog titled How many clicks does a no 1 ranking in Google get compared to No 2, 3, 4 & 5 threw up some pretty interesing data that shows how much potential traffic can diminish past the first few results. Of course, using the Google Keyword tool, you can find out roughly how many searches across the Google network there have been for a specific search term. I reckon it’s even tougher now because the first page of search results is getting so clagged up with Google Places, Adwords and other Google bolt-ons. Remember folks..technically, a page one result could be position 10 and you’ve got to ask yourself how much of a return on your SEO investment will this get you?
- Beware the one month contract. Any SEO relationship needs to be set up for the long haul. If an SEO tells you they can achieve everything they need to achieve in one month they are lying.
I guess we all know companies similar to BAWBAGSEO. Has anyone uncovered any other unsavoury SEO practices they’d like to share?