1. Jargon

The SEO industry is full of jargon, even the acronym SEO itself is Jargon, which doesn’t mean anything to most of the general population.

Companies talk about using ISAPI rewrite to implement 301 redirects to ensure PageRank is transferred from back-links. They may also talk about using CSS for your h1s and h2s, targeting the long-tail of the search using optimised landing pages with the correct META content, spiders, crawlers, algorithms, the list is endless.

While this type of Jargon is certainly useful in facilitating communications between professionals, some unscrupulous SEOs may use it to deliberately confuse clients into thinking the work is more complicated than it really is. Over-use of jargon can also be used as part of a “smoke and mirrors” approach which establishes the SEO as an expert, exploiting the knowledge gap between the client and themselves. If jargon is used, it should be explained to clients, thus educating rather than confusing them.

2. Exaggerating the differences between search engines and the effects of updates.

A claim I hear being made a lot is that the search engines all have different and constantly changing ways of ranking sites, so you need an SEO company who is able to monitor this and stay “ahead of the game”. In truth, the major search engines use fairly similar methods – if you do the SEO right you’ll rank well in every engine. It is true that the search engines are always updating in order to try and to provide better quality results – however as long as you don’t do anything sneaky the chances are that a search engine update will not have much effect on your rankings.

The fact that the search engines do update from time to time gives unscrupulous SEOs a great excuse for when a site starts performing badly. So an SEO company uses some dodgy techniques to perform well in Google, Google updates itself and catches on, suddenly the site isn’t performing so well. The company can just tell the client that Google has, “changed the rules” and now they are going to have to work even harder to perform well – ideally increasing the SEO budget!

3. Selling “Guaranteed Rankings” for menial keywords

This is one of my favourite ones, and something that I see all the time. SEO companies will say things like, “guaranteed top ten rankings in Google or your money back”. This may sound like a good deal but not if you know one simple principle of SEO: the less competition there is for a search term, the easier it is to rank for. So if I guarantee you a top ten ranking for an obscure term like, “Cheap Second-Hand Blue Fishing Rods in Nottingham” I can definitely get it with virtually no effort simply because no other sites will be targeting this term. The problem with this is that nobody will be searching for this term, so the ranking I’ve got you is worth literally nothing. I doubt many of these SEO companies would guarantee a top ten ranking for a highly competitive term like “Hotels”.

It is now generally accepted amongst decent SEO professionals that rankings are not that important, it’s traffic and conversion that matters. Web Pro news just released a video interview about this with the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts. However since SEO has been traditionally associated with rankings, many people outside the industry still place a lot of importance on them – and some SEO companies exploit this.

4. Using Outdated techniques

This fact that the clients’ knowledge of SEO can be a little behind the times can also be exploited in other ways. For example it used to be worth submitting your website to a number of directories, and exchanging links with hundreds of other websites as a way of increasing your rankings in the major search engines. Going back even further in SEO-history it was necessary to submit your site to the search engines themselves. It is widely known now however that these techniques are not effective any more yet you can still find many SEO companies offering directory and search engine submissions, as well as link exchange services.

I’m sure the companies offering these methods know that they don’t work, but that doesn’t matter to them – what matters is that the clients think they work and are thus prepared to pay for it.

5. Secretly Outsourcing Work

Not only may you be paying for work that will have no effect on your search engine rankings, but the company may not even be doing the work themselves. I recently heard about an SEO company who was offering 100 directory submissions a month as part of a very expensive retainer. While submitting a website to 100 directories may sound time-consuming, there are companies in India who will offer 1000 directory submissions for $100 (don’t do this by the way, it is useless!). Similarly you will be able to find companies who offer hundreds of useless search engine submissions, or carry out reciprocal link exchange for a similar price. There is nothing wrong with outsourcing work as long as this is done with complete transparency and the work is actually worth doing, but sadly this isn’t always how it happens.

6. Over-charging

OK so you can find examples of this in pretty much every industry you can think of, but the fact that SEO is relatively new and poorly understood means that it is particularly open to over-charging. I’ve seen a pitch quoting £500 to install basic Google Analytics tracking on a website. While I recommend people use this excellent free web analytics software, most of the time Google Analytics can be added to a site in about 2 minutes – so that would be £250/minute – bargain! Another thing to bear in mind that sometimes a few very simple changes can have a dramatic effect on a website’s performance in the search engines (something like making the name of each product appear in the page title tag if this had been missed out). The fact that great results can be achieved with very little work encourages some companies to simply lie about how long a job took to do. Things like rankings reports can also be created in no time at all, simply pull one off Google webmaster tools for example.

7. Using SEO to sell unnecessary work

I’ve heard SEO companies say things like, “The new site will be written in .NET so it will be much more search engine friendly”. This is complete nonsense, the search engines do not care which programming language has been used to create a website – a lot of the time they can’t even tell. This type of technique is often used to talk clients into large development jobs, for example rebuilding an old table-based site using divs (sorry for the jargon there!) – while it is obviously better to use more up to date and neater methods to build a site, as far as the search engines are concerned, it doesn’t make a lot of difference. If your SEO company recommends you undertake any type of development work for the purposes of SEO, do some research to see if it will really make a difference before agreeing to do anything.

8. Charging a retainer for doing… nothing

What a lot of SEO companies love more than anything else is a “retainer” contract, where you pay a monthly fee for a fixed number of SEO hours. What many people don’t realise however is that once your site is ranking for a particular keyword, the chances are it is going to stay there (unless your competitors all suddenly decide to optimise at once). So if the SEO company is tracking say, 100 well ranking keywords, all they really need to is keep an eye on things.

If you have an SEO on a retainer and all you get is an occasional ranking report then the chances are they are doing… nothing! I heard about one agency in London who were charging a client £3000/month to rank number one in Google for their own brand name. In my experience of SEO, 90% of the time companies will rank for their own brand name without you having to do anything!

Another thing to bear in mind is that if you have a useful website, the number of visitors may increase naturally as word spreads about your site and more people link to it. So the monthly increase in traffic you see may have nothing to do with your SEO company!

I’m all for retainers (they help pay the bills after all!), but an SEO should be constantly improving things, finding new keywords to target, making recommendations, building links etc. In fact SEO is now more than site structure and link building, it is a form of marketing. This means improving the whole user experience, adding value, and ensuring users come back to your site on a regular basis. This will lead to natural links which is the best thing you can do for SEO once the foundation of your site structure is in place, so there is certainly a lot that SEOs should be doing as part of a retainer.

9. Selective Reporting

There are a number of different ways to report the progress of an SEO campaign – for example traffic reports, rankings reports, sales etc. So the site is not getting much traffic? No problem, why not just send the client a list of keywords that they are ranking highly for in Google – that’ll look good! Remember rankings for non-searched terms don’t really mean anything but never mind. Have rankings plummeted? That’s fine, just show them a list of keywords that are bringing in a lot of daily visitors. There’s a great book written by Daniel Huff called, “How To Lie With Statistics” which talks about how companies are able to put a positive spin on pretty much any result by showing the right stats. The sheer number of different statistics available from a website makes SEO especially susceptible to this type of misleading behaviour.

10. Fear

Some SEO companies like to make out that if you do one little thing wrong, you’ll be permanently banned from the search engines. Put an h1 tag in the wrong place and you can say good bye to your business forever! One of my favourite supposed SEO pitfalls is the dreaded, “duplicate content penalty” – which incidentally doesn’t even exist. Would it really make sense for Google to be this harsh to webmasters? In fact unless you are doing something seriously dodgy you’d be hard pushed to get penalised. Often, SEO companies like to mention famous examples of companies getting penalised for using seriously spammy tactics (BMW, GoCompare etc) in order to scare clients in to using them should they wish to avoid the same fate.

Part of the reason we set up this business was because we were unhappy with the prevalence of these shoddy practices in the industry and wanted to offer clients something better. If you want to pay a large monthly fee for a guaranteed number one ranking for “Cheap Second-Hand Blue Fishing Rods in Nottingham”, and to be bombarded with meaningless jargon and statistics then we’re afraid we can’t help you. If you want your SEO campaign to drive quality, converting traffic to your website then (as the great online marketer Barak Obama says), yes we can!