Unsuspecting website owners are falling prey to the scams of so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) companies promising unrealistic traffic and search engine results. Suncoast Internet spoke to one such SEO company this week that had been targeting one of their clients.

The scenario: The client had been contacted by an alleged SEO company offering to promote a search term, or keyword phrase, that potential customers might use when looking for the client’s business on internet search engines. For a fee of $1000, the company were promising to have the client’s website at the top of the search engine listings for this keyword phrase.
Fortunately, the client referred this SEO company to Suncoast Internet as the designers of the client’s website and they were able to intercept the call. When Suncoast checked up on the popularity of the keyword phrase being touted, it transpired that nobody on the internet was using it as a search term.  The client could easily have been conned into spending $1000 on promoting worthless keywords. However, a quick search on Google reveals that many other people out there have been hit by SEO scammers.

How do you know you are being targeted by a SEO scammer?

Their own site only has a low Page Rank: If you have Google tool bar installed on your web browser, you can check the Page Rank of the web page you are viewing. The Page Rank is Google’s view of the importance of that page. The lower the Page Rank, the less important Google considers the page to be and it won’t feature highly in any of its search results. If the ‘SEO company’ can’t get a good Page Rank for their own site, how will they do it for yours?

They guarantee you a page 1 web ranking: The fact is that nobody really knows how the search engine algorithms work. Factor in the unpredictability of competitive websites who are also trying to get on that first page of search results and you can see that it is impossible to guarantee high listings or traffic.

They are phoning from an obviously busy call centre: Quite honestly, if they have a call centre full of telemarketers touting for SEO business on a continual basis, how much personal attention will your website receive?

They promise top search engine listings for obscure, long tail keywords which aren’t actually that popular as search terms: If the search term they are trying to sell sounds a bit obscure, you can check its popularity for yourself using the free Google adwords keyword tool.

They are too cheap: In contrast these particular SEO scammers, some companies will promise to optimise and promote your site for very little money indeed. If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, as the old saying goes. A proper SEO campaign takes many hours of search term research, modifying the content, promoting it through quality links and thinking up different ways of driving traffic to the site. It’s not a cut price process.

They can rank your site in 48 hours: If this were possible it would save legitimate SEO companies and their clients a lot of time and money. It can take weeks to see the initial effects and it can take months for the results to start going in the right direction.

What to look for in a legitimate SEO firm:

When you hire an SEO company, check out their credentials, testimonials and success stories first. You should expect them to provide regular reports on the performance of your targeted keywords and the facility to be able phone up and chat to a consultant for advice or feedback. A good SEO company will have years of experience and practice in the methods that are most often needed to produce results and, as is so often the case, you usually get what you pay for.

Tags: search engine optimisation, SEO, SEO company