I think this is a pet peeve that a lot of proper SEO companies will agree with, and that is Web Design companies that try and offer SEO services when they clearly do not know what they are doing. I have noticed quite a few times that they either offer it considerably cheaper than what I would charge or even claim that you can do it yourself.
Now before anyone bitches at me, obviously you can do SEO yourself, it is not some mysterious skill that only a select few can master. In fact if you are in a non competitive niche and you are competent with computers it might be worth you doing the SEO yourself. However the example of self SEO I am talking about here is a company that basically installed a script onto the clients web-site that allows them to add articles to the site. The articles then use a keyword rich URL with the keyword in the title and a link to the article is placed in the site-map. The company in question then charge a monthly fee for this.
The first problem I have here is the fact that there was a monthly fee for a script that probably took a few hours to write, surely it should be a one off charge? Secondly while it is good to have lots of new content on your site I do not think placing the links in the site-map is ideal, if anything it looks a little spammy, especially as the example I found included articles ripped off from places like Wikipedia. The client clearly has not been informed correctly about SEO, as far as I am aware there was no link building taking place and with the duplicate content the client could be landed with penalties at any time.
The other type of service is cheap SEO. I have noticed this become more and more common especially with companies that use outsourced services. I have no doubt that there are some brilliant SEOs based in India or Peru or wherever but I am sure the ones that are good probably can get away with charging similar prices to their western counterparts. Most of the time I find these cheap services rely on directory submissions and poor quality article syndication.
One example I found was a UK company advertising the fact they use non UK based SEOs and because of this they could offer their services at a much cheaper rate than a UK SEO. For a few hundred a month you could have an SEO working several days a month on the site.
Looking into some of their clients that appear to of been with their services for at least a few months I found:
- 0 onsite optimisation had been done
- Between a few hundred and a few thousand low quality directory links.
Considering a few months SEO must cost £500+ that does not seem like very cheap SEO. I could skip the middle man and get someone from Digital Point or any other SEO forum to submit a site to 1000s of directories for a anything between $50-200. That is quite a bloody impressive markup!
The other problem with these types of SEO services is that they all claim great success when in fact the results they achieve are poor at best. Getting a website for obscure long tail search terms like “Small business networking services hull” is not going to get any traffic, so the few hundred spent on these cheap SEOs has been completely worthless.
Unfortunately there is little point in educating SEOs about this problem as we already know about it. It is trying to educate the clients about it and unfortunately until they experience a bad SEO they have a tendency to go with the cheapest SEO available, which in turn makes them suspicious of SEOs in the future and gives the SEO industry and bad rep!
