Search engine optimisation (SEO) is great for every website on the internet. If you want to attract more organic visitors to your website from search engines, then you need SEO.
With so many SEO experts and specialists out there, it can be hard to decide which person or company to go with. And therein lies the problem. With a growing market comes a growing number of scammers and snake oil salesmen who see an opportunity for some quick $$$.
Why You Should Never Trust an SEO “Specialist” Or “Guru”
An important thing to understand is:
Not every SEO company or “guru” are as good as they claim.
That’s right, some SEO individuals or businesses just want your money without doing the work.
To help stop you falling victim to these so called “specialists” we’ve compiled a list of the most common SEO lies that you should never believe. If the SEO “specialist” tells you one of these lies, then you should take your money and run!
Let’s have a look at the most common SEO lies.
We Can Get You to #1 on Google!
The first and one of the most common SEO lies out there is promising to get a client to number 1 on Google. Let’s face it, every business wants to be number 1 on Google, you know it, we know it, but more importantly, they know it.
This lie is them telling you what you want to hear and promising you the world. It’s basically a good sales tactic to get you hooked. In reality, no SEO company or guru can guarantee rankings yet alone promise to get you to the number 1 spot.
Every industry has different levels of competition and thinking you can just roll into any and get the number 1 spot is delusional. After all, do you think an SEO “guru” could get you to number 1 for the keyword “news”?
Definitely not, with so much competition from big names such as the BBC, Telegraph and the Guardian, you’d be lucky you make it on page 10.
If a company or guru does promise to get you to number 1 on Google, then you should ask them:
“How come you’re not number 1 on Google for the keyword SEO?”.
Unrealistic Time Frames
Another common lie that these so-called SEO “specialists” use is promising you’ll see results in only a matter of days. This is a lie for 2 reasons:
The first is that they don’t have control over how often Google updates your website and the second is that it takes months of work to see results.
Depending on how big your website is and how frequently you have updated it in the past will determine how regularly Google crawls it. Promising better rankings in a matter of days is a silly thing to do especially when you don’t know when Google will next crawl the website.
Even in the unlikely event that Google did manage to crawl your website in just a few days, your increase in rankings probably wouldn’t be noticeable. Backlinks need to be built slowly; web pages need to be optimised and tested while content needs to be created.
6 months of hard work is a realistic expectation before you can start to see improvements in your search rankings. SEO requires lots of hard work, patience, and constant testing. If someone thinks they can do all this in just a couple of days, don’t believe them.
The More Backlinks The Better
If they can’t reel you in with the promise of getting to number 1 on Google or improving your rankings in a matter of days, then they’ll probably try to sell you backlinks. A long time ago in the SEO world, backlinks were a huge factor in determining your rank.
In the old days, more was better, but times have changed. Google now regularly checks your backlinks and puts emphasis on the quality of the backlinks rather than the quantity. This means you can no longer get away with spamming millions of backlinks over the internet; you’ll actually lose ranks if you do that!
Although more backlinks are technically better, they need to be high-quality, relevant links. A common trick that many SEO “specialists” will do is tell you how important backlinks are. They will then get you to buy a million of them for only $10! As a rule of thumb, cheap backlinks are never worth the price.
As good as it might sound, getting a million low-quality spammy backlinks overnight is bound to do serious damage to your rankings. To give you an idea of what bad backlinks are, be sure to check out this awesome post over at monitorbacklinks.com
Just remember that 3 or 4 high-quality backlinks can boost your rankings more than 1000 average quality backlinks. More is not necessarily better.
Our Techniques Are Too Complicated to Explain
For anyone who’s new to the SEO industry it can seem very complex and a bit smoke and mirrors. If you don’t have any experience in SEO then many companies and “specialists” will take advantage of your lack of knowledge.
If you ever try to ask them “How do you do it?” or “What techniques do you use?” you’ll most likely get the answer “It’s too complicated to explain”. Most of the time this means they don’t want you to know what they are doing because they’re doing such a bad job of it.
For example, the backlinks we covered earlier can take a long time to find and build up. The last thing they’ll want to tell you is that they’re actually using an automated program to spam links for you!
They can also use your lack of SEO knowledge to come up with some great excuses when they are behind schedule. The most common ones will be “We’re waiting on Google” or “The new update has affected us”. Basically they’ll say anything to get you off their backs.
To summarise, if they can’t explain how they are hoping to increase your ranks in simple terms then they’re probably up to something dodgy. Make sure you have a good understanding of how they do something before you give them any money.
We Can Double Your Profits
As the name suggest, SEO is all about search engine optimisation. While SEO can significantly improve your search engine rankings and bring you more visitors, there is no guarantee you will increase your profits.
Many SEO “specialists” will focus just on SEO and not on improving your website’s conversions. If you have a conversion rate of 2% and you bring in 1000 visitors a month, you would expect 20 people to buy your product or “convert”. If you doubled the number of visitors to 2000 a month then you would expect your conversions to be 40 people. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
When it comes to improving rankings and getting more visitors to your website, there are a number of ways to do it. The most common route is to optimise your website for certain keywords relating to your given industry. Depending which keywords you focus on can determine which type of visitors come to your site.
Think about a website that sells chairs, which keyword is more likely to convert:
“chairs” or “buy a chair”?
Most likely the keyword “buy a chair” will bring you less traffic compared to the other. However, these visitors will be much more likely to convert. This means that improving your rankings doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll increase your profits; it’s all about which keyword the traffic is coming from as well.
If an SEO “guru” promises to double your profits, then you should remember that such promises are lies.
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