This is a follow on to my original post of ‘5 Ways To Tell You’re With A Deadbeat SEO Company‘ with 5 MORE great ways to tell if you’re getting scammed out of your cash for little or no result! There’s a lot of good work going out there in the SEO world, and I’m not knocking that – but at the same time there are some really shoddy double-glazed window salesmen out there, which is the point of this post!
1. You ask them how page titles affect search engine rankings and their eyes glaze over.
Apparently some SEO companies these days think that SEO = Link Building, god knows how they came up with that ridiculous idea but it was probably from some cult article about how ‘Google was different from all the other search engines’ that was published in the 90’s.
You cannot succeed with link building alone, and I would actually go as far as to say that you can succeed without it altogether – so what does that say about its value?
2. The office is totally silent, and people who talk are given the evil eye.
A healthy office is an office which communicates, it’s a group of individuals who are all trying to achieve a common goal together. If the office is totally silent, then it’s simply a group of individuals who happen to be working in the same place – and what the hell is the point of that?
Lack of communication within an SEO company in particular is a sure-fire way to identify a deadbeat. Lack of light-hearted talk also kills morale, and lack of morale affects client work. Do the maths.
3. They give clients advice on SEO, but they don’t actually use their own advice.
These are proabably my favourites, when you find SEO companies who advise clients to update and add to their site content frequently… but they haven’t updated their own content in about 6 months. They advise clients to blog every day with meaningful and relevant content, but they themselves have a neglected blog filled with guess what? Link building spam! Or if you’re really lucky you might find a company who advise their clients to construct dynamically generated page copy, and then replicate that copy across multiple domains – but mysteriously they aren’t too keen on implementing this practice on their own website.
4. 80% of their employees have worked there less than 2 years.
SEO isn’t exactly the most exciting of industries so it’s understandable that people may move on, but when the turnover rate is so high that the company has a full set of new faces (other than management of course) every year, then you know that something is wrong.
5. They employ a high number of ‘work experience’ students, and people with no qualifications.
How is it that you are paying premium prices for SEO but you account manager doesn’t have a background in professional website design, usability or interface consultation, internet marketing, standard marketing, or web development?
If you’re paying £500-£1000 every month for a few hours work, then how is it that the people doing the work haven’t had anything more than on-the-job training?
The Moral of The Story?
Recognise shoddy work! You wouldn’t hire a builder with a crew full of teenagers with no exerience who can’t answer your questions, so why not apply those same standards when hiring an SEO company?
Look for people and companies who are active within the industry, and when I say that – I mean actually active within the industry, writing an interesting and up to date blog and being referenced by top SEO sites. Not ponsing about because they’ve been nominated for a bunch of local business awards, thinking that this somehow makes them ‘high-profile’.
Get your money’s worth, and avoid the above! – What experiences have you had with SEO con artists? Let me know in the comments below!
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December 1st, 2008 at 2:59pm
I think the same is true of web in general, was trying to explaining it to a friend the other day.
The only way I could find to compare it would be ringing an electrician from the Yellow Pages to have an outside light fitted and ending up with anything between floodlighting and a candle.
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:13pm
haha good post john!
January 25th, 2009 at 10:35pm
The points about the awards seem moot. I’ve carried this gripe from the first article and here you make the same claims again. Why not recognize local awards, I live in a country of 160000 poeple, most websites geared only towards local traffic. What’s the point of being recognized worldwide when there are so many companies doing the same SEO thing? The 4th fastest man on the planet doesnt get a medal if if he’s the “4th fastest” on the planet. Which is basically the same way awards work in general. SEO itself being basically bullshit since the main techniques that actually drive traffic should be implemented in the site by the developer and the rest the result of marketing on the part of the site/business owner.
I find it confusing why you still have an article about not scamming when that’s all SEO amounts to. Contradicting your whole viewpoint, link building seems to be the only left for an SEO company to do that doesnt actually scam the customer. Interesting reads none the less.