Search Engine Marketing Spot

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Ok so maybe the title is a little strong, but if you do not know me I speak my mind and normally don’t hold back my thoughts. Consider that my disclaimer for this article. 

You hear the phone ringing, knowing that your sales person is more then capable of doing the job, you keep working on your projects. On Friday you have your week ending meeting as normal to go over what projects need to be finished for next week and which others need to be started. Afterwards you chat with the employee’s about what they think of the internet marketing industry and the role search engines play. After about twenty minutes your sales person brings up the fact that they have been getting quite a few phone calls with some potential clients and now new clients asking about placement guarantees. They had either read an email, website advertisement or heard a sales pitch promising first page rankings, rank number one on google after a month for any keyword, increased traffic, more sales and the bucket of crap that company sits on. So this day we all stayed a little bit later and endulged on the topic of search engine optimization and search engine marketing companies who are full of shit and just take your money and run.

A client called in through a referral to inquire about our services, pricing and how it works. This is all fine because almost anyone who calls in will ask common questions like this, or at least I hope they do. Well this caller had received an email advertisement offering search engine optimization, guaranteed first page rankings or your money back. Here are some red flags to watch out for and hand back to that company to wipe the crap off there ass because they are full of it.

1. Email advertisement offering search engine optimization could be considered a red flag by some people because if they are so good they why do email advertising? If they can guarantee first page rankings for there clients, why not get first page rankings for there own website and get there clients that way, oh wait they didn’t put a website in there email. All you see is a gmail.com, redirected URL to a landing page or an out of country phone number.
2. In that email the company states they work with major search engines first hand to get you better results. There is no search engine marketing company that I know of that has employees who work for any of the major search engines. Maybe they know people and get some information, but nobody has an insider that can change the SERP’s to boost your clients website. (if you do, please let me know so we CAN TALK) 
3. You can not guarantee any type of results to a client for competitive keywords. You could probably guarantee first page rankings for a keyword that has no competition and a very low monthly search volume. Why would you want to target those low keywords though, that will not bring any good traffic to your clients website. Oh wait, you don’t call them clients, you call them loan defaulting individuals because your taking there money and not doing anything for them.
4. “We submit your website to thousands of search engines.” Everyone has either heard or read this famous claim. They do not submit to thousands of search engines, its more like they submit to 30 search engines and thousands of FFA link sites and free directories. So the directories are fine, any backlink you can get is not a bad thing. However there is no need to submit to search engines anymore and the FFA sites are nothing more then spam sites and link farms. Your website will fall off of those type of sties before any search engine spider comes to crawl there pages. Any company offering this service to you I advise you just walk away and keep your money.
5. Companies who give you nothing but reports, either via email, fax or postal mail. So these reports tell me where I rank for keywords, what keywords still need to be targeted, monthly traffic volume and traffic estimation reports. Then there is the famous submission report that tells the client that hours and hours of work was put into submitting there website. The average person would have no idea that the submission report is all automated submission and does not take much time at all. Companies that do no work to your website, or make very small changes to your website have no clue as to what they are truly doing. So you guessed it, take most of those reports, crumple them up, send them back and tell them to use it as toilet paper to wipe there butt because there full of shit.
6. Guarantee number top 3 on google but will use PPC to do so. This one is where it can get very expensive for any website owners paying a company to do nothing more then open a PPC campaign. PPC is a great way to draw extra traffic to a website if it is a company’s budget. What these marketing companies will do is find out what keywords you want to target and set the minimum CPC to whatever will get the site in the top 3. Depending on the industry and keyword, that bill can and will get extremely high. These companies normally do very little keyword research, and do not test out which ads produce a higher CTR or ROI. If a company is guaranteeing top 3 google, chances are they are using PPC and stay away.

It is the companies that use tactics like I have listed above that give the search engine marketing industry a bad name. Companies who have been burned in the past by a bogus SEO campaign or a PPC campaign then resulted in a huge bill and no real results. If you have experiences or stories of your own please post them here so others can read them and see what else to look out for.