8 Signs of Bad SEO Company For Small Business.

2016-03-01 | 4503 Print PDF

8 Signs of BAD SEO Company For Small Business.

Are you out on a search for an SEO company to help you rank your site on search engines? increase your website traffic and daily inquiries? you have hit the right spot! But how do you know if you are dealing with a reputable one? How do you know the service they provide you are authentic? This and several other questions are what feeble other small business website owner's mind, when it comes to sourcing for SEO Companies to execute SEO SERVICES.

I have put together some 8 cogent points to help you identify bad seo companies, if they do fall under any of the points laid out, you should have a red alert on and stay clear from such seo companies.

You may also want to Read 8 Things SEO Specialist Do On Websites

1.) Guarantees Sound too good to be true

Now the saying that if it sounds to good to be true it definitely is, if you have an SEO company offering such guarantees like, help you rank your site keyword within 1st and 3rd position on Google, you need to be weary, because at the end of the day what you will get out of it will not be substantial.

They might probably rank your site for a keyword that is not searched for at all, eg rank your domain keyword on the 1st to 3rd position...this is quite common or they offer to rank your site for a low keyword phrase. If an SEO Company promises to get your site ranking on number one for your keyword then you need to know that their is something fishy going on.

They do not own nor does Google provide backdoor access to their search algorithms that will aid any seo companies to rank your small business website. Please do not fall short on such savvy cheap talk.

2.) Free Trial Scam

Now this is an easy one, in fact most novice small business owners fall for this one because its FREE, but the truth is the scam artist knows exactly what he/she is doing here. They tend to offer you a free service, you at the other side will provide them access to your small business website, they rank your site for very useless search phrases and show it to you as work done. Then later you decide you don't want to work with them (being smart yourself) and not to forget, you already have given them access to your website...now what do you think will happen? they probably will solicit you for other SEO work by damaging other reputable work on your site, eg like your link architecture ie the way your website links are structured, this is how search engine spider will read them via your sitemap submissions.

They might offer to provide free services like meta data, robot.txt or sitemap even url submission services, all this are free things you can actually do yourself so seriously this are just a one day thing to execute for yourself. Donot let them get close to you via free trials that are not valuable, if they truly want to offer a free trial then they should do one for a medium keyword...if the seo agency can offer this for your small business then I do think they are worth your time, but you still need to read the rest of this list to be sure your on the safe zone.

3.) Pricing Services/Packages

Watch out for their prices! SEO Companies will try to hard sell to you and the frontier for this is to offer you low priced services that are over hyped and not worth spending on. Imagine paying for a very high PPC on Google AdSense for keywords that only drive 100 visits in a month...now picture the same idea for SEO. Would you pay more for keywords that are low queried or pay more for keywords that are high volume searched? Never fall short for a fixed price SEO, their are no such thing as a fixed price SEO packages, why? because SEO is unique and every small business seo is unique to their niche. eg a keyword under baby shoes is not relevant to dog trainings, each keyword value varies with the amount of SEO work to be executed by the SEO Company.

So if an SEO company or SEO Agency are offering you some sort of fixed pricing, then you need to ask them if you will be providing them with keywords, if you do provide keywords that are of high value, you will note the price will change.

You should read our topic 8 Things SEO Specialist Do On Websites to understand what is required by a standard SEO Agency to execute for your small business seo.

4.) Bulk Search Engine Submission

This is also a selling point on some seo website, they will tell you they can submit your url for free to 1000 search engines that really do not matter, this search engines have zero to No relevancy to your business success online. Some Bad SEO companies will use the idea of mass search engine submission to bait unsuspected clients. First thing first, search engines do not need you to submit to them before they can spider your website, they already do that, the only time it is recommended for you to manually submit to search engine is if you must have added anything of value or changes to your website and you need it to be updated, then a search engine submission is mostly recommended. The worst part is BAD SEO companies will over do this, they will submit your url to search engines on a regular basis...this is totally wrong and will only hurt your site more.

5.) Link Baiting or Link Exchange

This is one of the plaguing issues of BAD SEO, seriously if your SEO Agency is trying to sell/buy you links to rank for your keywords on search engines, please do pocket your money and teleport yourself out of there! The issue with this is more than obvious, first as soon as you stop paying for their link baiting or link exchange program your site will start to decline, SEO does not work like that, a proper executed SEO does not work in respect of quantity of links, they may say things like PAGE RANK to improve your page rank, serious Google the creator of Page Rank is no longer following this signal and your site or url strength are now determined by AUTHORITY your domain and page authority are factors mostly measured on the web. Scores like 50/100 or 70/100 will make your site an authority on the subject it denotes, and anything more than that really takes years of online establishment, a website authority can be measured using moz explorer tool.

6.) Unsolicited SEO Offers

Have always wonder how many people out there must have fallen for this one, with the number of spam emails from SEO agency that claim to have Google partnership and SEO works to show, or even mention your site and point out keywords you could have ranked to beat your competitors.

All this are email scams, one they should know better, sending out unsolicited SEO offers to people that did not subscribe to them, imagine they even send one to our SEO agency as well. What we do is simple we move them to the trash, see this so called seo companies are not interested in your work, imagine them sending out a mass email message to 1000's if not millions of emails out their via email extractors on the web, and picture if they had 100 response, please how do you think they will be a able to dedicate or manage such large volume? they probably will execute useless seo on your site, if they had a customer baseline is it not wise to maintain retention than focus on client acquisition? since SEO is undergoing process that seems to evolve?

Seriously seo companies that send out unsolicited seo offers are basically doing hard sell, they just want to make enough money as possible and move on to the next agenda, they do not spend the time to execute research, build a strategy or have one that will provide a long lasting solution to your request.

When next you receive such emails from seo companies promising the moon and the stars, you do not need to think twice, ask them how did they get your email address?.

7.) Search Engine Ranking Position Drop

This one is a bit tactical, because most of the so called SEO agency will sweet talk their way out of this. They will start with things you do not understand and use ambiguous sentences only to confuse you. They may state that the cause of this is due to recent update to algorithm, now an algorithm change may or may not cause your drop on serp, it may only fluctuate with a very low margin of position 2 to 4 with the worst being 2 to 6 if you have anything with a 5 gap drop then your site has really been hit! I mean if it drops from 1st to 6th position within a day and remains their then you know this is a crappy seo work and might lead to penalty from Google.

Bad seo companies will use sales pitch that they can rank your small business site within a week or a month, this is not feasible, because it takes time for search engines to index your site. They will propose to submit your url for indexing which will occur within a week, see if you submit your url to search engine to index you will only put it in a que of others that also want the spider to come back to crawl their site.

As stated above you only need to do any sort of submission when you have new content or changes done on your website, this seo agencies are not the owner of the search engines and can not in any way speed up the rate at which the search engine spider will index your site, please beware of such facade talk.

8.) Top Secret SEO Sauce

Seriously have you ever tried to ask what your SEO agency is doing on your site and they told you its top secret, a no can tell method they use to optimize your site to rank? I need to give my hat off on this one, because its either they do not know what they are doing themselves or are practically outsourcing your site to a seo freelancer.

You cannot call them any time but always have to fix an appointment or always mail in your inquires with a late response from them, all signs of a bad SEO company.

They are too busy to address your needs, why would they in the first place accept your work when they already have a crowded pile of other seo work to handle?. Listen if your seo agency do not communicate with you regularly and do not answer your questions with a convincing conviction then their is a high chance your swaying into the zone of a bad seo company.

You may also want to Read 8 Things SEO Specialist Do On Websites

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Author

Olatunji Adetunji

I am a seo web analyst and have a love for anything online marketing. Have been able to perform researches using the built up internet marketing tool; seo web analyst as a case study and will be using the web marketing tool (platform).