8 Facts About SEO Companies That’ll Keep You Up At Night

There is nothing more annoying than opening up your mailbox and finding half a dozen unsolicited mails from SEO companies telling you that your website does not rank in Google and they have a personalised plan for you to get your website to rank. This is usually written in rather bad English and the price they want to charge you seems to good to be true.

The thing is, it usually is too good to be true. If you are one of those individuals who has accepted the offer made by these SEO companies, let me keep you up a little at night…

Cheap is usually bad

If you are going to do SEO properly it is going to take time and money. SEO companies that can afford to offer their services at really low prices are probably doing one of two things:

• Nothing
• Black hat automation

Neither of these is going to get you the traffic that you want.

There are services on offer in the big, wide world of SEO that will make you cringe. There are people who will sell you links on websites that are supposedly high authority. There are services that will put links to your site on hundreds or thousands of websites. There are services that will send “free” traffic to your site.

They are all either incredibly dangerous to your domain health or totally useless to you as a business.

Link building is explicitly against Google’s Guidelines and no SEO company that truly has your best interests at heart is going to buy links or blast your domain with hundreds of links from websites of dubious reputation.

The “free” traffic that is offered by services like Babylon is bot traffic. Sure, it looks great on your Google Analytics but it is traffic generated by computers and will never get you a single lead or sale.

So few companies actually do it right

There are a lot of aspects to doing SEO that many SEO companies actually don’t understand. While it is a simple concept to understand, the technicalities can be incredibly complex.

Getting a website to rank in Google for some keywords is really easy. You just have to choose keywords that are very specific and have a very low rate of competition on the internet. An article or two and a few people paid to do those searches and click through to the website and you’re golden, right?

It is getting a website to rank for searches that will actually bring in leads and targeted traffic that is tricky. It takes quite a bit of work and dedication.

SEO companies can actually guarantee nothing

If you are approached by an SEO company that offers you guaranteed rankings for any keyword, run! The thing is, SEO companies actually cannot guarantee a single thing other than that they will do the work you are paying them to do.

The do not control Google’s algorithm. They do not control your competition. The only thing they can control is what they do to your website. Unless they have full control over every aspect of the factors involved in SEO, they actually cannot guarantee anything at all.

The efforts are not forever

There seems to be a misconception that once you rank for a keyword you are going to stay on top and reap the rewards of your efforts forever. This is not the case.

Why don’t SEO companies tell you this?

Because they don’t want you to think that you are going to be tied into a large SEO contract forever. It just seems like a scary, expensive, long term commitment and they don’t want to scare you off.

The thing is, your competition is not going to rest just because you got to the top for that high demand search phrase. They want to knock you off the first spot and claim it for themselves.

SEO should be an ongoing and continually evolving activity. If you stop all your work then Google concludes that you are no longer active and will slow down how often it relooks at your site. This gives your competition the chance to do more work and take your spot. If you keep creating that content and earning those links you are going to keep your rankings.

This doesn’t mean that you have to go full bore the whole time. Once you have the rankings that you want you can slow down, just don’t stop. You need to keep an eye on those rankings and make sure that you keep your hard earned spot at the top.

Too many SEO companies charge you for doing nothing amazing

Something that drives me nuts when I look at what SEO companies offer is that it is so basic that it will actually do nothing for your site. Here are some classic examples:

Submit to search engines

The only search engine worth actually submitting your site to is Google, maybe Yahoo. Why do you want to have your bandwidth used up by dozens and dozens of search bots that will actually bring in very little or no traffic? Aside from this, most search engines will eventually find your website anyway on their own.

Ranking for your company name

This is really daft. The odds are that if you have created any content on your website you will automatically rank for your company name anyway. You are the only one with that name after all.

Super long tail keywords

When you look at your SEO report take a good look at the keywords that you are being ranked for. Are the really specific? Did it only take a month or two for you to rank for them? Have your sales actually increased as a result? No? Then it is pointless and you would have ranked for those keywords anyway on your own without the supposed help of your SEO company.

It is going to take time before you see results

This is another thing that SEO companies don’t like to tell you. SEO done right takes at least six months to start showing results. If you are in a more competitive industry then it can take years.

When you sign that three month SEO contract you are wasting your time and money. You should be looking at this as a long term investment that will only start to show a return on investment in a year or two.

Don’t get me wrong – you can get some results in three months, but they won’t be long lasting and will generally not be revenue generating.

SEO companies sometimes outsource – badly

This is especially scary. There are websites like Fiverr and SEOClerks that offer a lot of supposedly good services for really low prices. If any SEO companies are using these services they are asking for trouble. These services are accomplished using automated software and duplicate content or bots. When you add up all the potential problems, you are left with a high likelihood of being deindexed for violating Google’s Guidelines for SEO.

If your strategy is not changing, it’s not working

Google is constantly updating their algorithm to take more factors and more human emulation into account. Search patterns and demand changes with time. Your SEO strategy needs to keep pace and change with the times.

SEO companies should regularly check that the demand for the keywords they are targeting is still there and they should be keeping an eye out for new potential searches to add to their strategy.

If you are not sure that the SEO companies you have hired are doing their job, ask us! We can take a look at your reports and ask a few pointed questions. A site audit can go a long way as well…