When price doesn’t reflect the quality of service
Price doesn’t reflect quality of the service, as you can read hear about an SEO who takes 350$ an hour just for stuffing the keywords. Okay… He probably did more than that, but still, the company is paying him almost 1/50 of their revenue, wouldn’t you expect much, much more?
It’s just unbelievable how many rip-off search engine optimizers there are in the world. I have seen so many companies that offer “SEO services”, meaning they stuff the meta keywords on all of the pages with the same list of words that aren’t very related to the services of the company. The rates are not as high as the above example, but for this work they should pay the client. The problem with Search Engine Optimization is that clients don’t know anything about it’s just hard to check whether they did anything at all.
Many SEO companies specialize on just delivering the good news. They don’t do almost any optimization, any link building… They maybe do something on a few pages. But the key of their “job” is to present pretty graphs and some kind of reports, that actually don’t say anything. And the clients won’t ask what do those numbers mean just in fear of appearing stupid. And if the clients do ask something, those so called SEO’s will either make them look stupid or give them another piece of useless information.
Some techniques unethical optimizers use what a “great job they did”:
- Paid search engine listings. Many clients just don’t know that results on the right hand are ads. So the unethical SEO’s pay for those results, show them to the client and get paid. After this they drop the ad and the client has been ripped of. This scam works less and less, because more and more companies are aware of Adwords.
- Pretty graphs with selective or fake info. Some SEO companies just show the good news (increased rankings for unimportant keywords) while leaving out the bad news (decreased rankings on keywords that really matter). Some just totally fabricate every piece of information.
- The famous “You rank #1 for your name!”. This is the oldest trick there is. If someone is looking for your company’s website, they will find it, probably even if it isn’t optimized at all. Remember, it’s important to rank for keywords that are related to your products and services, not your company name.
Some clients will sense something fishy, but those are rare cases and they can’t know for sure. But I guess this problem isn’t only in this industry. It’s the same with website design, programming and doesn’t stop with the online world. The only way you can protect yourself is by doing the homework!
