How to spot an SEO scam

Let’s face it, Search Engine Optimisation is fast becoming perceived as the “dodgy plumber” sector of Internet Marketing. And whilst it's understandable label - is it entirely justified?

As business owners we’ve all been plagued with faxes and emails offering quick fixes to “get you to the top of Google for £99” and within just 24 hours too. No sweat there then!

In reality, professionally applied SEO is one of the most effective forms of marketing you can undertake for your business and in almost every case it is, by a big margin, the most cost effective form of online marketing. But it is a very misunderstood area.

Provided you pick a good supplier who knows what are the right things to do AND has the skills to do them – which typically will involve some on-site changes to your website, commissioning new articles to add to the site and syndicate around the web, plus a bit of paid for online advertising to balance out traffic – you really can grow your business dramatically and extremely cost effectively. In fact it is not uncommon if you use these techniques effectively to be able to double the size of your business within 12 months.

Obviously you need to have your business proposition, your product strategy and your marketing plans sorted out too. as the Internet isn’t a panacea for business ills. But in synergy with these elements SEO really can help you knock the competition for six and keep them out of the online game. And better still, a skilled SEO firm can generally also help you complete any of these missing elements too.

And within the mix, SEO really shouldn’t be the problem it is fast becoming. SEO is an entirely predictable discipline, not a black art, as many practitioners would have you believe.

So how do you ensure you pick a good supplier and be certain they know how to do the right things?

This document reproduced here in the SEO Brokers website is the first of a series of reports that will take you on a journey through the world of Internet Marketing. SEO Brokers aim to bust some of the myths about SEO and share with you secrets that many companies would like to keep hidden. By the end of this paper you will have answers to questions such as….…..

  • Is it all a scam
  • Are big claims really possible?
  • And what is SEO exactly anyway?

Once you’re armed with this information you’ll hopefully never fall prey to a dodgy SEO (or Pay Per Click) salesman ever again!

And we go one step better than that. SEO Brokers will also guide you how to use and understand some simple tools so you can run some quick checks on your website, or even that of a competitor. It’s great fun and jolly useful too.

OK, let’s start at the beginning. What’s SEO all about? It’s all a matter of context. In the UK, roughly 80% of activities online begin with typing a phrase into a search engine. Notice we said “phrase” – as the search engines have got better and better at producing reliable results we’ve all learnt that you don’t need to type in generic single words to get a result, you can ask for exactly want you want and Google will find it however jumbled your set of words, even if you type in a longer phrase or set of keywords. So when you are thinking about your business online, remember to think “niche” too and include these long phrases as possibilities.

We also say "Google" as for most searches, it’s the engine of choice preferred by around 60% of people in the UK. There is some variation by country and for highly specialist technical searches using other engines but in general terms, Google wins out. Put all these numbers together and it means for most businesses and website owners, 50% of your traffic, sales, whatever, are likely to be influenced by Google…wouldn’t we all love to have that kind of power!

The remainder of websites traffic is most likely to be from returning visitors, people that guess the web address / URL etc or, of course, other search engines such as MSN, Yahoo, etc (remember we are talking “in general” here, not your site specifically).

OK, so we now know Google is important.

How do we get that 50% of important traffic?

If you’ve studied Google closely you’ll know that a typical page carries adverts in the right-hand margin and top two or three entries at the top left of the page. These areas are the Sponsored Links, otherwise known as Adwords – this is becoming something of a generic phrase for all the search engines’ various types of PPC or Pay Per Click advertising (also known occasionally as Paper Click).

The advertisers that appear here are out-bidding each other for keywords that they deem to be important to their specific business; hence it’s a great way of attracting quick, short-term leads. With Pay Per Click you pay for actual clicks to your website, i.e. the CTR (Click Through Rate). Prices vary from a few pence to £10 or more per click so it’s vital to also track sales conversions.

PS: With online marketing you don’t generally pay for impressions, i.e. the number of people seeing your advert which marketers would liken to Opportunities To See or OTS in traditional media… this is free online unless you buy banner adverts, skyscraper adverts etc or pay for a sponsorship period.

So we’ve uncovered the first way you can get your site to the top of Google, not even in 24 hours – it could take you less than 24 minutes.

And this is the first of the scams you could run into….companies pretending to talk about SEO (which we will explain in a moment) when in reality they are running simple to organise PPC adverts. They’ll charge you £99 when you could get to the top of Google yourself in a matter of minutes probably for less than £10…..but of course you’d only be there at best for a few hours until your budget was spent on those first few click through to your site which may not even translate into a sale.

So is PPC to be avoided because of this? No, not at all – we think PPC is a great way to get instant demand into your business and its real strength is you can turn it on and off like a tap.

OK, so PPC is quick, but is it strategic?

This is trickier to answer as every business differs in terms of what they need to achieve from the Internet and whilst PPC is simple to get started with, it certainly gets complex as it is very easy to waste budget once you start spending. So we recommend when you hit a budget of around £500 a month its time to think about seeking help, as simple but little known techniques can cut 30% off the money you pay to Google or other engines without impacting the leads volume generated. Net result: a better ROI for your business and the advice will often pay for itself many times over.

However, in general terms it’s fair to say we don’t think for most businesses it’s a good idea to plan your strategy around PPC alone. This is because as quickly as you can start a campaign (and build plans around those leads) somebody can outbid you on your chosen key phrases…..so in less than 24 hours or 24 minutes, in fact in say 24 seconds you’ve lost that sale you were counting on operationally today as you get out-bid by a competitor. Perhaps even more significantly, if Google chooses to increase its advert pricing rate-card, i.e., the minimum bid price per click, or its own pricing strategy, all prices escalate up. This has happened before and it means that businesses on thin-margins can be out of business literally overnight. Google may be better off- but that’s hardly much consolation from the dole queue.

So we are not dismissing PPC advertising, it has an important place in every business owner or marketer’s toolkit – but we urge caution. And we recommend you question how big a footprint PPC should have in your marketing plan versus other activities.

We’ll give you the numbers, you decide for yourself…

The figures aren’t easy to obtain but according to research from our partners, the vast majority of businesses are basing their entire online strategy on driving in leads via PPC advertising – either with Google, Overture / Yahoo or MSN. So as a sector PPC now accounts for 87% of budgets in the UK alone.

Now this would be OK if those 50%+ of search engine driven visitors all came via those PPC adverts, but of course they don’t. In fact, just ask yourself how often do you click on an advert yourself?

Google (and the other engines) obviously doesn’t volunteer this information and who could blame them for inferring directly or otherwise that most online business is driven by paid (right hand side) adverts? So at this point, let's pose a question. To merit that 87% proportion of budgets, what proportion of website traffic do you think goes to websites via the adverts (versus clicks on the natural listings on the left hand side)……would you say it must be 87%, 60%, 40%, 30%?

No. It’s not 87% or even 47%. Only around 23% of visitors click on the paid adverts, whereas 77% (Source Google Eye Level Chart Analysis) of visitors prefer generally to click on the left hand natural or free listings. They’re called free because the business or sites featured here haven’t paid a bean to Google for the privilege of being there… they are at the top of the engine for the phrase being searched on because they deserve to be and Google feels it’s the most relevant entry for the phrase being searched on.

So think about it. Almost 100% of businesses are chasing “Adwords” type online prominence (and pushing the cost up for each other) when in reality they are chasing just 23% of the market. Not necessarily such a great plan is it?

If you’re a numbers person the 2007 ratio of spend on PPC -v- SEO is actually £6.70 to £1.00. So when you factor in this market share click-through figure, the imbalance in spending is actually closer to a ratio of 22 to 1, driven mostly because PPC is instantly accountable.....or put another way, £21 of marketing budget is chasing customers via PPC for every £1 spent on chasing the same traffic via SEO......this represents a real marketing bargain.

So maybe this is scam number 2 and something that big PPC spenders haven’t worked out? It makes sense to spread your budgets across both channels rather than just keep paying the search engines.....do this and you can beat the other 20 marketers that don't "get it" yet!

This leads us nicely to what SEO is really all about.

SEO is about getting a site to the top of the natural listings where most people click (very few people go beyond the front page of results so “top” effectively means one of the first 6 top ranked entries on Page 1, or at the very least on the first 3 pages of search engine results) without paying the search engine owner every time someone clicks on your entry, i.e. your traffic is free and your conversion rate also becomes less critical to make a profit.

You can of course optimise a site yourself (more on that in a minute) so that apart from your time and necessary disbursements, it would of course be entirely free traffic.

Because it’s a specialist area, and easy to get things wrong, most businesses choose to outsource their SEO activity. And if you commit the same spend to SEO as you dedicate to PPC, it should deliver a much healthier ROI – roughly in the ratio of 77/ 23 or about 330% better for similar results.

  • The reality is that SEO can do even better longer term, as once you get to the top of the engines, you can be awarded Trusted Status, which in simple terms means you stay at the top without so much effort provided you don’t make serious errors… it’s all so the engines can keep down their own costs (but that’s the subject of another article for another day!)
  • So with professionally implemented SEO your ROI can keep on improving over time, whereas with PPC it’s likely to decline as bid prices keep rising and new competitors enter the market. Also, when your PPC budget is gone, its gone, ie, it's a tactical rather than a strategic purchase just like most advertising - whereas SEO is more akin to Brand Building.

Now back to our scamsters… if you could pay £99 would you deserve to be at the top of Google compared to a hard-working website owner? Of course not. And Google doesn’t think so either, so they have invested $billions to develop technology to try and work out which sites (or in actual fact which pages, as Google ranks pages not websites) deserve to be at the top.

So SEO, properly planned and implemented, is a series of complex and ever-changing techniques designed to ensure your site ranks highly and that the leading engines notice this and act accordingly. It’s not about tricks or black-hat techniques as used years ago to promote gaming sites etc. It’s about doing the correct things consistently over a period of time – typically six months and beyond.

This leads onto scam number 3…hiding things in the website.

Lots of people have heard how a leading German car manufacturer (who shall remain nameless) got banned on Google by keyword-stuffing lots of relevant keywords into their site but hiding them by making the font colour the same as the background page. It was an old trick and eventually Google realised it and plugged the gap.

And there are lots more tricks like that which Google and the other engines know about. Some engines turn a blind eye, Google doesn’t… again, the subject of another article about how you can develop a strategy to exploit this!

Lots of IT staff, web designers and SEO firms know about these tricks and still think this is how you get a site to the top of the search engines. But they’ve failed to keep up with the search engines’ vast investment in technology (investment fueled no doubt by their desire to nudge businesses towards Pay Per Click spending).

So techniques that used to count for 100% of the points allocated by the search engine algorithms (which is how they rank sites) now don’t...in fact they account now for only around 20% of a typical sites points.

So scam 3 is watch out if you are being offered SEO services by a company that still thinks SEO all revolves around meta tags and key-word stuffing!

OK, so you are getting an idea of how PPC and SEO interact and awareness of how SEO sellers might pull the wool over buyers’ eyes. Are there any more tricks of the trade?

Unfortunately yes.

Scam 4 – you’re not really at the top when you think you are!

Some companies sell services whereby they are allegedly scoring well on Google for certain trades but in reality you are signing up for an entry in a portal or trade directory, i.e., your money is building their brand, not yours. Two techniques apply here, the worst is whereby statistics are produced to show that your business was indeed at the top of say Google on a given day.

The reality is that for a given keyword, your business did appear at the top but on closer inspection it was from 1.30pm to 1.45pm….what they don’t tell you is that they switch traffic to your competitor at 1.46pm. Can you think of anything worse - not only are you not at the top all the time, you are helping fund a competitor.

The other trick here is to show you a demonstration, i.e., look how “Plumber in Milton Keynes” comes top, assuming you are in Milton Keynes of course. It comes top because they keep demonstrating in that trade area with that example (so the engines notice the click-through and conclude it must be relevant) and they may even be demonstrating a PPC driven entry on the right hand side or top two left side positions (but you know about scam 1 already).

Scam 5 – “but my business appears at the top".

You really are at the top of Google, you typed in the search yourself, you did it several times, and it’s on the left ahead of other businesses…..what could be wrong with that?

The most usual trick here is that you are searching for your business name, i.e., your url. But think about this from a search engine perspective…a site contains lots of content, what one thing is most likely to be about who you are? The business name, a.k.a. the site name itself.

So if your business is called Acme Plumbers and your web address is acmeplumbers.co.uk when you type acme plumbers in a search engine, isn’t it likely they’d give preference in the algorithm to the name to find the best result?

Not surprisingly engines give the url prominence, in fact so much so that you don’t even need to keep including it in your body text on the site that often.

So you’ll typically be number one for your business name / URL - but neither the web developer nor the optimiser has done anything clever here at all.

If somebody other than Acme Plumbers comes number one, say Beta Plumbers is at number one, Acme at number two, they probably have got some parts of the Acme site badly wrong or Beta Plumbers understand offsite SEO and are using the 80% algorithm points to get ahead of you!

If you'd like to understand more about any of these issues or how to use SEO to get ahead of your competitors, through a mixture of onsite SEO techniques, PPC tactics and strategic offsite SEO contact us for a free no-obligation discussion.