How SEO promotion firms cheat customers

Appeal to SEO optimizers, promoting sites on a professional basis, is fraught with all the same pitfalls as the purchase of other paid services. The main problem lies in the fact that people who are thoroughly versed in the subject, prefer to cope on their own, or by the forces of workers hired to implement ready-made, well-thought-out schemes. On the contrary, those who know only what results they want to achieve, having a bad idea of ​​the ways of realization, are more often forced to resort to the help of specialists from the side, without having enough base to evaluate their actions critically. Naturally, not all companies enjoy the freedom of action, which as a result they have, in full compliance with the professional ethics and interests of the client.



In this article I’m going to talk only about some of the pitfalls that a customer who is not too advanced in SEO can easily get caught by ignorance. What unites them is that these are not potential dangers, not fantastic scenarios, but quite real things, the consequences of which I have seen with my own eyes and corrected with my own hands. And each time it was annoying for the owner of the site, who had to pay twice.



So, you turned to professionals for help, who promise to promote and upgrade your website with all the proper SEO tricks, which, frankly, have the most general idea. How not to give yourself to spend? What to pay attention to? Below, I quote four frequently used phrases when discussing conditions that should make you alert.



“Individual approach and the most modern techniques”

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We are all adults here and we understand that phrases about flexibility and a special approach to each client are usually a little more than a formula of politeness. So it is with internet marketing. Rigging your personal project will be on ready-made patterns, ideally more or less considering the specifics and specific requests. This in itself is not criminal, but this fact should be taken into account, especially since the desire for stability has other consequences.



How is the arsenal of company strategies formed? Like everything and always in the SEO industry - by trial and error. Tools are tested to evaluate the effectiveness, the most reliable and effective are selected, filtered and combined into sets for an integrated approach. Dramatically change the concept - always a risk, update the toolkit - time and labor costs. Naturally, without urgent need, no one will do it. Therefore, if the company assures you that it monitors every movement of Google and makes adjustments to its methods every time the algorithm changes a little - turn on skepticism. Strategies will change exactly when optimizers in practice will make sure that the old ones no longer work, and not earlier.



Below you will see how the lag and inertness of optimizers can affect the results on a specific example. But the general principle should also be remembered. Always keep in mind that in nine out of ten cases you will be offered a standard set of tools for your request - yes, even if the set of services included analytics.





"Guaranteed promotion in the TOP 10"



This phrase is dangerous because it is absolutely true. They promise to put your page in the TOP of this or that search engine, and you will pay for the fact of its presence on the first lines. But TOPs are different, and not all of them are worth the money that is paid for them. What the customer is convinced when nothing has changed.



I have often seen such a scheme in action: several narrow queries are selected that are well suited to the topic, but with almost zero competition, the site literally takes off in issuance, creating the illusion of rapid growth, and very soon adorns on the first page. Softened by this spectacle, the client willingly pays for it, especially since everything is fair for the letter of the contract. He does not suspect that no other results than moral satisfaction are foreseen: there was no competition, because there is no demand from the users either. The company simply took the path of least resistance and least efficiency. Cheating? Strictly speaking, no, but that does not make it any easier.



The saddest thing is that I can not advise an easy way to recognize this dirty trick. The fact that it is difficult to break through to the top by the most popular requests and it is necessary to lower the bar - and this is exactly what the experts will answer if pointing them to the low frequency of the short circuit - is true. However, beyond a certain threshold, which is difficult to determine precisely, the demand for short circuits becomes too low to make sense to bet on them. The task of the optimizer is to correctly find the balance between two extremes: to find a niche for yourself with good potential, but not too much competition. If the optimizer does not do its job, then what remains for the customer? Obviously, trust, but check. Perhaps it would be useful to at least get an idea of ​​the gradation of frequency and run through the eyes of "Semantic core: 6 hellish errors" to be able to screen out empty or "inflated" short-circuits on occasion.



"The CPC must be at least ..."



In contextual advertising, the game is often also conducted on an imperceptible imbalance between costs and returns. You will be convinced that it is beneficial for you to set the price per click higher - the system operating on the principle of auction will give preference to your ad and will see the advertisement faster. In fact, this is true. But before you fork, it would be nice to look at the case from the other side. And even from several sides.



First of all, no matter what rate you choose, people will see your ad. Perhaps it will not appear to them immediately and not in the most visible place, but this is not as crucial as they are trying to impress you.



Secondly, the priority and “visibility” of an ad is determined not only by cash infusions. Over time, CTR begins to play a big role - in other words, the percentage of people who are interested enough to click on your ad.



This also leads to the “third”: your final goal is not views, but transitions. So, it makes sense to focus on what will provide them: an informative, slim, eye-catching advertising text and well-chosen shortcuts that correctly sort out the target audience for you. Therefore, do not let us pay off your money from having to work on quality content and do not be afraid to bargain.



"100% reliable referrals"



The topic of referral sites brings us back to the first point, namely, to the rapidly changing realities in the world of search algorithms and SEO agencies that live at their own pace. Speaking frankly, the purchase of links, even in the most accurate and conscientious execution, always belonged to the "gray" methods, coupled with a known risk: Google does not really like when they are trying to deceive him. But optimizers managed to adapt themselves to Penguin's habits - resource bases, massively placing paid links to anything, were sharpened for him and until recently could be considered relatively reliable. However, with the debut of Minusinsk, they at once became obsolete. Does this mean that SEO companies are now actively re-checking and updating their resources? Most simply strenuously hopes for the best.



I emphasize: the problem is not even that you find yourself embroiled in an adventurous reference scheme and with a high degree of probability you will get poor-quality referral sites - this is still all right. The problem here is that not only you, but even specialists, due to lack of data, cannot yet accurately assess how much the risk of using this method has increased after starting Minusinsk and, accordingly, how to compensate for it. Speaking frankly, many do not even try. From the entire list, this is probably the only tool that I advise you to simply give up, at least for a while. The situation is now so unclear that no vigilance will help here to lay the straw here. And the more persistently you are convinced that everything is under control, and they guarantee complete security, the more you have reason to doubt the veracity of these words.



Thus, having considered four common ways to fool a client, we come to a disappointing conclusion: in order to catch a specialist in low-quality work, you need to be very good at understanding what he does. Be careful and read! I, for my part, hope that this article will not only help the reader to protect his offspring, but also encourage him to educate himself.