Like Me? Follow Me.
Three things that really get my goat day-to-day as we try to run a SEO business. In no particular order they are:
- Recruitment Companies - we must take at least 15 calls a day from agents looking to provide us with staff. We're fortunate enough to be growing but they should learn that the way the market is at the moment we don't need to employ recruitment agencies. We see new CV's everyday and can avoid paying their often exorbitant fees.
- Indian SEO Outsourcing Firms - again we receive probably 4 or 5 emails a day from Indian firms looking to acquire outsourced work. We've tried it and it doesn't work.
- What makes me most angry are the unsolicited emails from other substandard SEO Agencies that think by running a simple script they can win our business - they don't even stop to consider that as an SEO business we really don't need to employ another agency.
Perhaps the spam database they've bought doesn't provide enough information to tell them who they're emailing?
We've just had one today from a company up in Lancaster. This "senior search consultant" expects me to employ him because we "don't appear on the first page of Google" (he doesn't say what for even though we have lots of first place listings) and he can help me "blow my online revenue off the charts".
He knows he can do this because, according to the writer, our page rank is only 5/10, we only have 401 pages indexed in Google and we only have 295 inbound links indexed by Google.
OK, at least they have taken the time to find some information out about our website - even if they haven't looked at the website itself, but not only is their information only partially correct (a PageRank of 5 is pretty good, we have more than 401 indexed pages and we have many more than 295 inbound links) but they haven't looked at the quality of our meagre 400+ pages, the authority of those inbound links and they have no information about the keywords sending us traffic, how we rank for those keywords and whether those visitors convert into sales.
Ultimately, though, the inaccurate and meaningless statistics they have spewed at us in their email and the obvious mistakes they've made in targeting another SEO firm to offer their SEO services to reveal the real difference between his SEO business and ours.
They are not interested in the company behind the listings - or they'd have checked out our website more thoroughly. They're not concerned about building quality relationships with quality businesses and helping those businesses improve their online offering - they're interested in getting as many responses as quickly as possible from whoever will listen.
Their backlinks reveal a mess of sites with keyword stuffed title tags and little attention paid to the usability of the sites and their ability to convert visitors into sales. Their work is clearly about rankings achieved through whatever means possible.
On the other hand, our work is about providing a service. That service isn't just about rankings - it's about quality. It's about building strong relationships with our customers so that we understand their businesses and their goals and how we can help them achieve those goals. We do more than just improve listings in Google, we help companies improve their brand reputation, their brand recognition and the service they offer - and we feel proud when we see our clients' businesses grow because they are the most important part of our business.
Sadly, many businesses still don't know enough about SEO to tell the difference between seo companies. They see an email with a bunch of technical drivel and they start to worry, and if the service is cheap enough and the SEO agency promises a high enough ROI they'll hand over their money - only to be disappointed when they don't come close to achieving that ROI.
What this boils down to is that we really need some form of Quality Standard for our industry to prevent businesses outside of our industry losing money on hiring experts who are not really experts at all.
