* This is part 3 of the ‘Real SEO’ series. *
So this is going to a be a semi-informational and semi-rant type post for today I’m afraid, I’m sure you’ll learn something about SEO but most of all you’ll learn something about business ethics.
SEO is a coveted industry, it’s a bit like Formula 1 in a way… everyone is trying to achieve the same thing but no one wants to tell eachother what works and what doesn’t because everyone else is the competition. As a result (and as I’ve said many times before) the SEO industry is secretive and very often dishonest, which is what I’m going to touch on today.
This blog isn’t specifically geared to teaching SEO techiniques, it’s meant to cover all the bases whether you’re providing SEO yourself, or whether you’re a small company considering taking on a company to perform SEO work on your site – as such this is really an article for everyone to take note of, not just the techies.
SEO has a nice little foothold compared to other web-services, there are no REAL measurable results, there is no definition of what it is, and almost no one understands it. How brilliant is that? Companies are charging thousands and thousands of pounds (a MONTH) for an invisible service! Which reminds me a little too much of a certain emperor with new clothes.
The problem with this is that it makes it incredibly easy for SEO companies to rip off their clients, after all, how can a client question the quality of the service which they receive when they neither understand nor know what it is? – I for one really hate this mentality, I’m not in business to make money by ripping people off, and the proof is in the pudding – 90% of the enquiries that I get to my web design and internet marketing business are based on word of mouth recommendation.
So enough preamble, how are SEO companies ripping people off?
Well talk to any SEO company and they’ll likely tell you that the work they carry out consists of an ‘initial’ SEO evaluation of the site, followed by a monthly ‘maintenance’ fee for ongoing specialist work. The truth however, is a little further from this pretty picture that they paint for you.
The initial fee, regardless of the sometimes astoundingly high price, is almost always justified – the evaluation of a site down to the last detail takes a LOT of work and all of the work carried out and the documentation provided takes specialist knowledge and skill. The biggest benefit that any site will get is in it’s initial SEO work, which really is an all-encompasing list of changes that need to be made in order to improve the site.
The monthly maintenance crap on the other hand, is exactly that, crap. You are generally charged £250-£25,000 per month (depending on how many hours work you want done), and the companies will happily tell you that this is necassary to ‘maintain’ your high rankings in the search engines.
Well I’m going to tell you exactly how YOU can do that, without paying them!
All that ‘monthly maintenance’ work consists of is link building, and quite often in the form of spam which is more likely to hurt you in the long run than help you. For those not familiar, link building is the process of acquiring as many links as possible all over the internet coming back to your site; this is done by posting comments on blogs, posting on forums, starting additional spam blogs which only exist for the purpose of link building, and using YOUR money to pay other sites to link to you.
This is NOT specialist work, anybody can do this and you could pay a 16yr old schoolkid less than minimum wage and he would probably do a better job than most SEO companies (who do it so much that they are bored to tears and only put in a half-hearted effort anyway).
The only monthly fee that can be justified is a consultation, a small review of the site each month to track it’s progress and offer further advice to the site owner about what THEY can do to keep improving it.
The second you hear anything about a 12-month contract or fees based on rankings achieved – run for your life from the scammers!
Here’s what YOU should be doing on a monthly basis
- Update your site – as often as possible, daily is best.
- Start a blog, and USE it, this contributes mostly to the above point, and also to the next one.
- Add content, add user reviews, add articles, add detailed hand written product descriptions.
- Actively seek to get reviews of your products from other sites, send out freebies if you have to.
Doesn’t look like much does it? That’s cause there’s not much too it! It’s really a case of time rather than effort, you just need someone who will actively do all these things for you.
Bare in mind that starting a blog and NOT using it is generally worse than not starting one at all, so think long and hard before you do, and assess whether or not it’s something that you will have the time and resources for, but know that if you do, the rewards are plentiful.
And finally
Reputation management is something that is becoming more and more popular (and important) these days on the web, you should regularly scan for sites linking to you.
Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and type in your url, this will give you a full list of all the sites linking to you.
You don’t want contentious or sites with a bad reputation linking to you, both for branding reasons and for SEO reasons, as in the long run all the people who try to cheat the search engines get found out, and penalised.
So
I hope you’ve learned something, remember the true form of SEO is honest and consists of improving a site to make it rank better, not gaming search engines or trying to rip off clients for services that don’t do anything.
Don’t agree? Or feel you’re being ripped off right now? Drop me a line in the comments and tell me what you think!
If you liked this article then please help out this site and Vote for us as at Favelets
Related posts:
August 31st, 2008 at 5:05am
It’s an ugly market in a way. As ugly as most of the SEO companies’ source code. Now that’s not too beautiful! As a web developer, I can detect these SEO scams… but when I think of all the people who aren’t aware, it’s a tough one to swallow.
August 31st, 2008 at 1:15pm
Hello mate, thanks for commenting! I completely agree with you, it really is a bit of a shambles at times. What’s worse is when you have a client come to who has already had an existing SEO company work on their site, and spent thousands of pounds, only for me to have to tell them that the company in question haven’t actually done very much of anything…
September 1st, 2008 at 11:47am
Well SEO is not just about ripping clients off… nor is it just a waste of time after the initial consultation…
the ” maintenance ” doesn’t involve only commenting on blogs … but a lot more is done to make the site more visible over the internet…
And again, this maintenance is definitely necessary because the rankings can never stay constant .. not just because your competitors are doing it too … but also because the algorithms of search engines are revised regularly…
so keeping touch with all these and staying updated is not easy… and hence the professionals have a good demand these days.
As for the ripping off… i agree some people overcharge and don’t even work … so for that it’s just that you need to choose your agency wisely.. and fix a budget before hand…
SEO services aren’t that bad after all … and they can be really cheap as well as effective at the same time.
But i loved your article nonetheless… :)
September 1st, 2008 at 8:44pm
Thanks for the comment, even if you did choose to spam me rather than writing your name ;)
And people wonder why I keep this blog on rel=”nofollow”?
As for the rest, I have witnessed in more ways than one the actions of several large reputable SEO firms and I speak from experience, sure not all companies are the same and there are some great ones out there – but in my opinion the vast majority like to pull the wool over their clients’ eyes.
September 19th, 2008 at 4:12pm
Real SEO: Means Not Scamming Clients | Real SEO http://tinyurl.com/4fqsy7
September 26th, 2008 at 3:32pm
Hi John,
A very interesting article. We seem to get an email at least once a week from a so called ‘SEO Expert’ who claims they can get you on the front page of google within seven days and other ridiculous claims. We have used a very reputable company who carry out all the SEO and online marketing for a company I used to work for and they are very honast and open about what they do and what you are paying for. I think it is best to use a company you have had recommended to you rather than choosing one of the many SEO companies that are cropping up.
Like the design world, it seems that the SEO industry is suffering from too many start ups coming in and under pricing the more established and professional companies that are out there.
September 26th, 2008 at 6:36pm
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the comment! This was in many ways my own rant on the SEO industry the way yours was with regards to everyone being a designer that I commented on.
I agree with you that it’s important to work with a company which you know and trust, but even then it’s worth knowing exactly what you’re paying for because a lot of SEO companies out there are content in their own minds that what they are doing is fair but morally they are simply ripping people off.
Just in the last month I’ve come across two VERY reputable SEO companies who are outsourcing non-specialist work for £100 a month and charging over £1000 a month. To me that falls so far outside business ethics that it borders on extortion.. some people might say that makes me a bad businessman, but I don’t believe in overcharging people for work just because they don’t understand it.
October 15th, 2008 at 7:20pm
Great points! Companies are all too often promising the world and delivering rotten cheese. The best advice you can offer someone buying SEO is don’t believe it if it sounds too good to be true.
Edited by Admin: Please don’t put spammy keyphrases instead of your name, incase you hadn’t noticed, this blog is nofollow.
November 19th, 2008 at 6:50pm
Good article and for the most part I agree but I think it is slightly wide of the mark. Monthly fees are not just about SEO – they’re about performance, ramp to conversion and ROI. I don’t agree at all that results are not measureable. Any ethical SEO company will perform “process engineering” to obtain results and by results I don’t just mean position – I mean conversion. This is a skill 95% of SEOs can’t perform hence the negative press about fees.
We are highly skilled, consider ourselves as ethical and we’re totally up front about our fees. We give professional advice, produce good results and charge monthly fees ONLY if we think it will benefit the client. We DON’T employ cheap labour and we DON’T charge monthly fees where they’re not neccessary. For example, a brochure website in a non selling low competition marketplace – we optimise the site taking it to the clients desired level then leave them to manage it inhouse afterwards. No monthly fees neccessary.
I disagree with “Affordable SEO Services” about fees relating to Algo changes. We have many sites that have never had a code change in years but still remain on page 1 for their key phrases. No one knows when or what the algo changes are so I’m puzzled by this.
I agree totally with John above about these “super SEOs” charging clients £1000s whilst farming it out to India for £100 a month. This IS a rip off. We know of one large SEO company who were charging their clients big monthly fees but they never ranked above a similar site we optimised. We never charged our client more than a few hundred pounds a month and obtained better results. Needless to say the other client approached us in the end but we couldn’t take them on as it would conflict with our existing client.
Depending on the project we charge monthly fees accordingly. Most small business sites we only ever charge a few hundred every now and again for metrics evaluation or landing page adjustments – ie something that will benefit the client. If a new page is not doing well then we charge around £5-600 for A/B testing and this has never been an issue for any client because we get them new business and sales. We also have a web design depertment so we understand how a well designed and optimised page will rank as well as convert customers.
This post paints a bad picture about monthly fees and effectively tars good SEO companies with the same brush. Agreed…when a page is optimised it’s optimised BUT most ethical SEO companies are not performing SEO – they’re performing “internet marketing” and there’s a big difference. The monthly fees are justified by the ROI’s and if any company spent £20k a month without seeing any ROI then I’d be very surprised.
The current problems are due to the wave of new SEOs charging stupid fees who have no marketing and analytical skills or even a track record!
To understand monthly fees you need to understand the clients expectations in their marketplace then apply appropriate services that will achieve a decent ROI for the client. This applies to any company large or small.
Take an online product store for example. Most SEOs have never heard of Google base. Google recommends uploading data feeds on a daily basis. These feeds are hand written for Atom or RSS, require skill and are very time consuming to write. Add to this PPC management, display advertising, heat mapping, conversion tracking and CPA reduction methods then it’s ridiculously easy to justify fees. This is far too much work for most companies to do inhouse therefore the associated monthly fees are far from being a rip off.