I’m never controversial, in fact I don’t even like upsetting people if I can avoid it! But something happened yesterday that has made me so bloody furious I can’t not write this post.
I received a call from a company last week enquiring about my SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) services. We had a good chat and scheduled a meeting for yesterday afternoon.
Look – I know that my industry had a bad reputation a few years ago with keyword stuffing, link farming and suchlike but I really thought that over the last two years or so we had turned a corner and all the “bad boys” had been flushed out.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look that way.
I’m SICK AND TIRED of supposed “SEO Experts” fleecing money from small businesses. I’m a small business and I know how hard it is to earn a decent income, the last thing we need is to pay for something that gets absolutely no results. Or even worse – has a negative effect and actually harms your website.
As usual I did all my pre meeting investigation – technical website audit, on page content audit, domain statistics check etc. It was clear that while from a user perspective the site was functioning just fine, Google didn’t like it at all and the organic search rankings, visits and conversions were very, very low.
I arrive at the meeting with my data and a clear process in my head of how I could help them. The conversation was going great until we got down to the nitty gritty and I said “It’s clear you’ve had no SEO work performed on your site so we need to start at the beginning”.
There was a very awkward silence for at least a minute and then a response of “Actually, we’ve been paying someone to look after our SEO for the last 18 months”.
My heart sank and I started to feel some anger building up in me.
I tried to smile and said “OK, so could you please let me know what they’ve been doing and the reports they’ve provided”.
The response – “Umm, well they’ve created several blog posts that have our keywords on them and they don’t really give us any reports”.
I couldn’t hold back any more and told them matter of factly that their SEO Consultant didn’t have a clue what they were doing and whatever they’d paid for their services was wasted money as they hadn’t done ANYTHING that would improve the website, in fact some of the things they’d done had actually harmed it in Google’s eyes.
I tried so hard to hide my outrage but I obviously wasn’t doing too well. The Managing Director said to me “I can see you’re a little bit cross about this”.
Sadly, it’s not the first time I’ve had this discussion with a potential client and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
I know most small business owners wouldn’t know how to check if their SEO Consultant is doing what they say they are and if it’s making a positive difference.
My point is THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE TO – it’s the Consultant’s job to prove it!
So if you’re a small business that’s looking to get some SEO work done on your website please, PLEASE do the following when you’re contacting companies:
- Ask for references – ideally 4 but no less than 2. Ask the referee what keywords their site has been optimised for and then Google them!
- Check out their reviews/testimonials. If they haven’t got many or they’re super old then don’t use them
- Ask what reporting you will receive and what frequency
Please don’t be put off using the services of an SEO consultant – there are lots of “good guys” out there, you just need to find them.