SEO is one of the best investments you can make for your business. There is no substitute for being the first option your prospective client sees whenever they look up what your company offers. That is exactly what good search engine optimization services provide. The thing is, everyone and their brother thinks they know how to rank websites these days. There are so many people that claim to be able to rank a site higher in the search engines but in reality, they will do more harm than good to your website. In fact, trusting the wrong person with the SEO of your site could penalize your site to the point where it won’t show up on the search engines at all, let alone ranking on the first page.
This is what qualifies me to speak from a level of expertise on SEO:
So how do you know which SEO service provider to trust? This article will serve as a guide to help you decipher between the SEO experts that you want to work on your rankings from the kids sitting in their mother’s basement pretending to have the necessary skill because they watched a couple of videos on YouTube and thinks that qualifies them to collect money to rank websites in the search engines. So let’s get into it.
Cookie Cutter SEO Prices
Look, we understand that you want to shop around for a better price when having SEO done to your website. The thing is, when it comes to search engine optimization services, you get what you pay for. As harsh as this sounds, if you are looking to pinch pennies, then you are in for a very rude awakening. There is no way that quality SEO services can be done for $500 per month. That doesn’t even come close to covering the hard costs that a good SEO has to rank a single website each month, let alone them make any money. If you get someone that is charging you that amount of money per month, then there are one of three things going on.
- The first is that they are a newbie and don’t know what they are doing, so you should run away and never look back.
- The second is that they don’t plan on doing any real SEO work and just plan on doing menial tasks that don’t cost any money at all and they will pocket your monthly payment for a few months all the while telling you that “SEO takes time and you have to give it a few months.”
- The third option is that they are using automated, spammy tools to build incredibly bad backlinks that used to work 5 years ago but will do nothing but get your site penalized now.
So now that you have those three options…what do you choose? Would you rather pony up and actually pay for results or choose one of those three options?
Fake SEO Testimonials
This is one of my favorites. It really cracks me up when SEO sites have testimonials on their website from Mike S. or Mary T. or whatever other names you want to pick out of a hat without a company or brand attached to it. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to throw a bunch of great looking testimonials on your website with stellar results to make yourself look better than you actually are. The average business owner looking for SEO services wouldn’t think twice about these being fabricated, so it usually works. So how do you decipher which testimonials are fake and which are real?
- Look for company or brand names that are attached to the testimonials. It would be extremely silly for an SEO to put testimonials from a company on their site if they never worked with the company at all. So if there is a brand attached to the testimonial, it is probably legit.
- See if the SEO has testimonials on their Linkedin profile. These cannot be faked. They are from real business owners. If there are more than a couple of good testimonials on Linkedin, chances are, the SEO is legit.
Expert SEO Knowledge
You want to make sure that the person you trust to rank your website knows what he or she is doing. Taking a $47 course on the internet does not qualify a person to rank a website. Believe me, the level of knowledge it takes to be a good SEO and actually rank sites at will is worth a whole helluva lot more than $47, so there is no course out there to teach the expert level SEO techniques.
Another mistake is looking for college grads and people with all sorts of degrees. Your marketing degree means absolutely nothing in the world of SEO. I have personally worked in several agencies and every single college student that has come in with some Business or Marketing degree and thought they knew what they were doing has been like a deer in headlights when it came to ranking a website with the big boys. And some of them had multiple Master’s degrees. The fact is that this kind of knowledge is not taught in colleges. It can’t be. It changes every month. So if your SEO is not staying on top of everything that is going on in the world of SEO, if they don’t eat, sleep, and breathe SEO, then they are not going to be able to rank your site ahead of your competition who is using one of these SEO gurus.
Your Web Designer Can Not Do SEO
I don’t care how pretty your website is or how great your web developer is, they can’t rank websites. I don’t know how many times I have heard business owners say that they will just have their web development team rank their site for them. This is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make. Web developers develop websites. They do not rank them. Period. They do not know how. To be honest, 9 out of 10 of them actually hinder the ranking process when they develop the website to begin with.
So in closing, if you are truly serious about ranking your website ahead of your competition, you have to find a good SEO. The unfortunate truth is that most SEOs are not good. And if your competition has an SEO expert on their side, and you go with a cheap monthly rate to save a few bucks, you are just going to waste that money and watch your competition get that much further ahead of you and make it even more expensive for a real SEO to catch up to them in the future. So do your homework. Find an expert. And get real SEO services that yield results and watch your business take off like a rocket ship!