One of the most frustrating things about being a SEO guy, I am constantly asked to review websites that have a SEO company running a scam. SEO scams are masked well with superior reporting and data skewed in such a way that they always point the finger back at you and your website?
Here are 3 quick ways to determine if you are in a SEO Scam.
1) If the SEO company promises you that you will get more business, leads, and inbound phone calls from their work – Watch out. I constantly hear from these business owners that the SEO company promised they would get more business by being at the top of the search rankings. Just because you get to the top of the rankings doesn’t mean a thing.
Just like in PPC marketing, you should constantly review the inbound sources of your traffic in your analytics. If the inbound traffic is relevant to your website, then your CTR ( Click thru rate ), bounce rate, and conversions should all have good numbers. If you have an extremely high bounce rate, that means the traffic is immediately leaving the page they landed on because either it isnt relevant to what they were looking for, or they didn’t like what they’ve seen.
2) Another common theme amongst SEO scam companies is their linking strategies. Links are like votes to your site, the more votes the better rankings. But not all links are the same. Links should only come from other relevant websites. So if you have a manufacturing company, you want links coming from other manufacturing relevant websites.
The scam companies will post links all over the internet. On worthless blogs, comments on articles, and farm for links. This type of linking strategy is easy to identify by analyzing your inbound links with a link checker. I just analyzed another businesses website to find they had literally thousands of links, decent 1st page rankings, but had absolutely no leads to show for it.
A further look at her traffic revealed that the majority was coming from India and other Asian countries. She had no idea that she was getting ripped off because the SEO companies reports were excellently full of fluff.
Look for the fluff in your SEO reports. If you are getting first page rankings and traffic to your site but no leads, give us a call at Funnel Science and we will research the current SEO campaign and reveal all of the details that your SEO company isn’t.
3) If the SEO company never mentions how they plan on increasing your conversions, the red flags should be up. Every SEO company that I have ever seen promises their work will in some way increase your business. The only way proven to get more E-Sales and leads is through focusing on conversions. Most SEO companies will not correctly setup conversion tracking code because they know this is the true ROI metric.
Funnel Science will not take a client for a SEO campaign until they have a site that is proven to convert.
There is absolutely no point in sending traffic to a site that can not turn the traffic into leads and sales
If you a have a feeling that your SEO company is scamming you, your gut feeling is probably correct. Give Funnel Science a call and we will conduct an SEO Audit and provide reporting and interpret the data for you. Call 1-877-301-0001
