You’ve got two firms pitching you on their SEO services. One costs thousands of dollars per month, the other hundreds. There is a temptation to think “Well, I’ll try the cheaper SEO services and see if it works out. If it does, I’ve saved a lot of money. If it doesn’t, then maybe I’ll go back to the other one.”
The trap here is that affordable SEO services have a very low chance of being effective. Someone who tells you they can provide full-service SEO for your site for less than $500 per month is either inexperienced, giving you a super deal, or misinforming you about what they can achieve. Or they could just be straight out lying to you. I wouldn’t count on it being a super deal unless the person providing the SEO services to you is a family member or a buddy.
The fact of the matter is there is no magic formula for effective SEO. There is no tool that automates the process. Effective SEO takes a lot of time, both in terms of hours per month as well as months themselves. Here are some of the unethical or downright dishonest practices I’ve seen SEO firms participate in, just to get a client hooked.
1. The long-term contract. There is no reason for you to sign a long-term contract with an SEO firm. The only reason they’re trying to get you to sign a 12-month contract is so that once you’ve paid them for three months and you realize you’re being taken advantage of you’ll have to either keep paying for 12 months or buy your way out of the contract.
2. Lots of work up front, then little or nothing. Some SEO companies will provide legitimate SEO services for 2-3 months, and then slown down to a small fraction of what they were doing or stop altogether. This type of practice is generally combined with a long-term contract. But it might be months before you start to suspect they’re not doing anything.
3. Fake rankings. Some SEO firms will get you ranked for keywords that don’t bring you any additional business. They’ll give you reports that show that you’re #1 for a particular keyword, but if you look a little deeper you’ll notice nobody searches for that keyword.
4. No service at all. In some cases, a firm doesn’t provide any service at all. I recently heard of a company that provides web design services and offers SEO services as an additional service. However, if somebody signs up for SEO, they don’t do anything at all. They don’t even have an SEO expert on staff.
Unethical SEO firms don’t just cost you the money you pay them, which may be nothing more than several hundred dollars, there is also an opportunity cost. After going with an affordable SEO firm that uses unethical business practices you may have lost six months in which you could have been building an effective SEO campaign and improving your bottom line. How much is that lost opportunity going to cost your business?
Granted, it’s not only affordable SEO companies that rip people off, there are plenty of very expensive SEO firms that are also dealing dishonestly with their clients. The only difference between an affordable SEO firm and an expensive one is that while the affordable SEO firm is almost certainly providing an ineffective or non-existent service, the expensive one only may be.
The point is to avoid getting ripped off, and here are some tips on how to avoid being ripped off by an SEO company:
1. Check references. Of course no SEO company is going to give you bad references, but if they can give you three or more good ones at least you know they’ve done a good job for somebody. If you don’t check references then for all you know they’ve never had a happy client.
2. Ask questions. Do research on SEO and ask them a lot of questions. If they can respond clearly, confidently, and what they say seems to make sense, that’s a good sign.
3. Make sure they provide monthly reports. I’m amazed at how many people hire SEO firms that don’t provide any monthly reports. Any competent SEO company should provide monthly reports that show ranking performance, indexed pages, incoming links, total website traffic, website referrers, and more. If an SEO firm doesn’t provide this then they’re probably avoiding showing you the lack of results they’re getting for you.
4. Go with your gut. Trust your instincts. Some companies will just give you a feeling that something isn’t altogether legit. But sometimes you won’t realize how uncomfortable a certain company makes you feel until you can compare them to another, which leads to #5.
5. Talk to multiple companies. Don’t just go with the first company that comes along. Get proposals from at least three companies, and perhaps as many as ten. The more proposals you’ll get, the more you’ll be able to make the right decision.
6. Talk to an objective third party. If possible, find someone who is an SEO expert who is willing to help you screen proposals from SEO companies without trying to get inserted into the bidding process themselves. You may know someone who has an lawyer as a family member, and they always talk about how their brother the attorney gives them free advice. If you can find a friend, relative, or a friend of a friend who is an SEO expert and who is willing to give you some tips, it can save you a lot of pain, time, and money.
I’ve found that by doing a simple search on google for SEO or search engine optimisation, and selecting the top three or five, then it becomes easy as to which SEO will work for you. As they are actually able to demonstrate what they have achieved against a highly competitive search term.