7 Things SEO Snake Oil Salesmen Do - Backlinks and On-Page SEO

Just about every businessperson I know has crossed paths with a Black Hat SEO who made sweeping statements about search rankings, saying things like “bot,” “automated,” or thinly veiled references to a wheel for an insanely cheap price with no mention of on-page SEO.

It’s easy to be seduced by this sort of salesmanship. There’s a reason that infomercial hosts gesticulate wildly like ravaging lunatics proselytizing their products as the latest, greatest, must-have items this side of Tuesday: hyperbole sells.

This two-part series is dedicated to 7 specific things that will come up when shopping for SEO that are red flags for work that do the opposite of what is intended.

7. Only Talking about Link Building

Though link building is an integral part of an overall SEO strategy, I must emphasize part of.  Link building is a long-term strategy that works concurrently with on-page SEO. Having one or the other is like having a car without an engine:

Having substantial backlinks but garbage on-page SEO means no one will use your site; having great on-page with no backlinks means you’ll be harder to find in search results.

Hiring separate companies for link building and on-page SEO is fine. If you hire one to do everything and they say your entire strategy will just be link building, beware. If the next words out of their mouth are “It runs itself!” then you should also be running.

6. Installing links to anything more than just their company page

Companies will put a mention of their company in your footer if they have done substantial work on your site. This is nothing out of the ordinary and often isn’t noticed. A Black Hat SEO will take this to the next step and install entire link farms to link to other clients’ sites to sap your PageRank and improve their sites.

This is a lazy tactic that ends up hurting their clients more than helping them, but even more so is a malicious use of your digital real estate. Make sure you’re informed of all additions the company is installing to ensure they actually are improving your SEO and not just beefing up other clients’ sites. 

5. Offering copy writing for a poverty wage

A decent writer is hard to find. An exceptional writer is ever harder to find and more expensive. Spending $100 for a dozen articles seems a good idea for about 12 seconds until you realize that there’s no native English speaker that could write something worthwhile to your visitors for a price so low.

Farming copywriting is a fairly common practice and not a necessarily bad one. It can keep content costs down and speed up turnaround. However, the price of the writing is usually indicative of the quality of the results; Black Hat SEO uses low-grade resources to produce low-grade sites with nominal impact. 

Doing simple math will tell you what to expect: does it equal $2 per hour? Or $20? In short, see examples of the writer’s work before you hand over a single dollar. If you suspect they are farming work out, get more information on whether the copywriters are native speakers or not. This could be the difference between copy that sells and copy that makes visitors fall asleep.

4. Having unarguable ideas about link wheels

These never work. Link wheels involve creating secondary off-site pages that will be used to A. Generate content B. Link back to your domain to increase PageRank. So far so good?

Not exactly. Blogs are a completely legitimate way to create links to your domain without being spammy. However, Black Hat SEO tries to game the system and can create dozens or hundreds of pages full of content unreadable to actual humans just to host backlinks. Google has made substantial updates to penalize or completely remove websites that do this from their search results. 

A proactive SEO strategy involves quality targeted content generation. If a proposal wants to create large number of off-site pages to host content and backlinks, it may be time to look for other strategies.

Lookout for Part 2 – Top 3 ways to spot a SEO Snake Oil Salesman!

This two-part series is dedicated to 7 specific things that will come up when shopping for SEO that are red flags for work that do the opposite of what is intended. Our partners at SEO Austin helped inspire this post.

The Hunch Free Club

Are you getting the most from your marketing dollars? We strongly suggest that all of your campaigns provide measurable return on investment. That’s why we love these digital marketing tactics:
 
Social Media: Sure it’s the new black, but that’s because it harnesses the power of so many different marketing disciplines. Part PR, part direct sales and part web strategy, the beauty of SM lies in the ability to engage prospects where they live, and track those conversations back to your website.
 
Affiliate Marketing: Word-of-mouth works. So why not align your business with online leaders that already have built-in communities? Most affiliate marketing is commission-based, so you only pay when your ads work. That’s the smart kind of thinking we like.
 
Loyalty Programs: The easiest audience to sell to? Your existing customers. By incentivizing your clients to remain true to your brand, you not only sell more to them, you also create brand ambassadors that spread your message to their network. Double score!
 
SEO: No great mystery here. People are searching Google for your product or service. Rank high enough and they’ll find you instead of your competitor. It’s all trackable, measureable and easy on the wallet.
 
Ad Networks: This is the intelligent way to serve banner advertising. Networks utilize demographic, geo-location and behavioral targeting to only put your ads in front of the most qualified prospects. This saves you money while improving click-through and conversion rates. Boom!
 
If you have questions about any of these channels, don’t be afraid to drop us a line or stop by the lab. We’re always up for jawing digital marketing strategy over an icy brew.

What If Your Website Could Talk?

If there were a plugin for your website that would alert you if anything ever went wrong or wasn't working right, would you use it? What if it didn't just talk, it printed out detailed, color coded, easy to read reports full of useful insights, trends it's monitoring and a treasure trove of other data that can outright drive your marketing efforts? That might be kinda handy. You know how in movies based in the future, people wake up every morning inside their talking house and it tells them the news, the weather and their schedule? Yeah, it's kinda like that except the voice is mine, and it isn't all that pretty in the morning.

Say It Loud

Your website is talking to you, you're just not listening to everything it's saying, only the emergency “oh crap, the site is down” things. If you're shootin' from the hip and wondering why some ideas work but only for a short time, or why they're not working at all, it probably isn't you, it's your site. It needs your help, and if you don't have a good analytics package installed then you'll always be in the dark about why customers are abandoning their shopping carts or why sales are low on Saturdays and immediately higher on Sunday. What if you could take your numbers and compare them to other sites in this industry of similar size; essentially your competition?

Read Between The Lines

It's like finding out why your "check engine" light is on. You wouldn't plan a road trip unless you knew your car wouldn't die on the road — so why would you take the same chance with your business? A good analytics package should serve as both a diagnostic tool and a GPS. I'm not an actual Droid, but analytics talks to me in a language I understand. If you want to know more about how your website actually works, give us a call. We can get you tuned up and ready for the road in no time.