Top 5 ways SEO companies lie about results
April 24th, 2009 by Jim Keller
For SEO companies, it is important to cite previous successes in ranking & conversion in order to make a sale. However, in the SEO world, it’s also very easy to outline previous “successes” in such a way as to make them look more significant than they actually are, at least in the untrained eye of the potential client. Reputable, honest SEO companies will recognize these tactics, and will (hopefully) be eager to debunk them for the sake of helping the client choose the right company. Here are the top five ways (at least that I’ve seen) that SEO companies make past results look a lot more impressive than they actually are:
- Taking credit for ranking…for their own company name
I’ve seen SEO companies tell clients to search for their name on Google to show that they rank at #1 for their own company name. If you can’t rank for your own company name, either your company is named “blog”, or you’re just not even trying. Even if you are able to fill the entire first page with articles about your own company, there’s nothing impressive (or conversion worthy) going on there. - Ranking for phrases no one will ever search for
Some SEO companies will make it a point to note how they rank at #1 for phrases like “the best greatest Internet company #1 in Philadelphia”. Maybe they do, but no one’s searching that term. In fact, you can easily find out what the actual search volume is for any given keyword on Google before you decide which phrases to target. For example, tomorrow this blog post will probably be ranked at #1 for the phrase “Jim Keller’s super wonderful informative seo blog”, but it doesn’t matter because no one’s (normally) searching for that phrase. - Claiming pay-per-click / sponsored ads as a #1 positioning
I’ve also seen SEO companies tell clients “look, we got you to page 1″. When the client asks “where? I don’t see it”, the SEO company then directs them to the sponsored links on the top or sides of the search engine results. Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a valuable tool for Internet marketing – there’s no question about it. But anyone who’s willing to spend enough money can get a #1 sponsored link position almost immediately, because positioning is based on how much you’re willing to pay, not by actual content relevance or domain authority. You don’t even need an SEO company to get a first place ranking in the sponsored ads, you just need to sign up & pay the bill. - Claiming to have intimate, exclusive knowledge of Google’s algorithms.
No, they don’t. Even Google has debunked the myth of SEO companies with “special relationships” or “detailed information” about their algorithms, so this one is just a flat out lie. Maybe you can bend the truth by doing what every SEO does, which is to study empirical results and then make educated guesses about how the search algorithms work, but that’s hardly “detailed information” that’s exclusive to one company. - Focusing on raw traffic and “hits” rather than actual conversion rates
Many “lesser” SEO companies don’t even breathe a word about conversion to their clients. They’re too focused on making the Google Analytics graph go up and to the right to notice how many of those visits are actually resulting in warm leads, product sales, or whatever the goal might be. All too often, clients are completely unaware that there is more than one page to Google Analytics. Their SEO company sends them a report that consists of the monthly overview (which is interesting, but probably not helping much, especially if no one points out the 87% bounce rate), never indicating what the results actually mean or how the client can measure them in dollars and cents. For any business looking to undertake an SEO campaign, I recommend educating yourself on Google analytics as much as you can so that you know what’s possible and what to expect. Google’s Conversion University is a great place to start, though it may be a bit technical for some.
There you have it – Five things that give SEO as a whole a bad name. Clients often get soured on the whole notion of SEO thanks to companies who promise the world but provide no actual results.
Tags: seo
