We’ve had a lot of people contact us about dealings they have had with less reputable SEO companies offering ‘fantastic deals at rock bottom prices’.
Most of these are not going to do what you expect them to do. The simple truth of the matter is that if its too good to be true then it normally is.
Things to look out for when offered SEO:
- Expect to be told exactly what the SEO company plans to do for the money. If they are just going to change a few tags about then its likely they aren’t going to do much useful to your site.
- Guarantees are almost always a lie. Nobody can promise you a first page ranking position. Most likely the companies who offer this will either get you on the first page for a limited time using Pay per click which will disappear as soon as the budget has run out.
- Refusal to explain what they are going to do. If the company mentions secret techniques or proprietary information it should set off alarm bells. There are very few reasons to use anything like this in SEO, most of it is just good old fashioned hard work.
A bad SEO job on your site can do real harm to your web site. It is entirely possible that you could be banned from the search engine’s index making your site disappear from all search results. It often takes considerable effort to recover from being banned.
Expect to get what you pay for. If you are paying rock bottom prices the vast majority of the time you are going to get rock bottom service.
One of our clients was told by an SEO company that they would get him onto the first page of Google for £250. All they did was add him to Adwords with a advert that nobody was likely to click on. His advert was on the front page, but it did absolutely nothing for his business. The only other changes they made were to add some keywords to the bottom of a few pages and stuff the keyword and description meta-tags full of keywords. Not only does Google ignore the keywords tag completely but the description tag is only for human readers. Stuffing it full of keywords was only going to hurt his web site’s results in the search engines.
Steven Lockey
SEO and Online Marketing