Stop getting hit on by SEO “Experts”
Barely a day goes by that I don’t get an email from somebody – usually in the backblocks of India, Pakistan or the Philippines – promising to ‘get my website to the top of Google’.
If you run any kind of business, no doubt you get the same kind of emails. Y’know, those spam emails.
These emails last a nano-second in my in-box, before I hit the delete button. Here are just a few reasons why:
Reason #1: These people always start their pitch with “I’ve been studying your website and notice that it has big problems etc etc..”
If you’ve been studying my website, you would’ve noticed it has my phone number prominently displayed. If you want my business, call me on the damn phone. Don’t be lazy.
Reason #2: If you were any good at marketing yourself, and weren’t so damned lazy, you’d figure out that sending an email to somebody you’ve never met, from a company I’ve never heard of, expecting me to leap at your fabulous offer with open arms, is no way to start a business relationship.
Reason #3: if you’ve been studying my website, and you’re so observant, you’d know that we specialize in real, effective, manual-labor search engine optimization, for scores and scores of businesses all over the world. But you didn’t bother looking that hard, did you…you just fired off a lazy email, among thousands of similar emails, to thousands of small business owners, hoping that some of them will be so ill-informed, they’ll leap at your fantastic offer.
You may have picked up that this practice makes me a tad cranky. But I get positively livid when our own long-term members get the same kind of nonsense offers.
One Australian business owner who’s been a Member of Worldwide Salon Marketing for more than a decade called us this week after receiving one of these delightful offers, in this case from Canada. We’ve been driving this Member’s online advertising and organic search results for a long time, so she wanted to see our take on this company’s offer.
“It didn’t take long to do some research on this company,” says our Member Services manager, Peter Doman. “The reviews we found were scathing.”
“These guys are not to be trusted.
Its the same deal, telling you that they can guarantee first page rankings when in fact you are more likely to be blacklisted,” said one reviewer.
And…
“These guys didn’t even know a damn thing about SEO work or how to set up adwords… To top things off they didn’t even have the right ranking data from my website…
Poor form but it can sucker in the unsuspecting,” said another.
(There are plenty more like this, you can read them here.)
Once presented with this information, our Member wrote back:
“Thank you so, so much, Peter. Based on the reviews, I will give them a miss. Thank god once again for WSM.”
The lessons are clear.
1) There will always be somebody, somewhere, promising a lower price. But in all things, you get what you pay for, by and large.
2) If something sounds like it’s too good to be true, it usually is.
3) Do business with people you trust. They might not be perfect, they might not be the cheapest, they might not get it absolutely right, every time. But people you trust will likely trust you too, and will bend over backwards to put things right, as soon as possible.
