When you’re in the search engine optimization game, you encounter a lot of distrust wherever you go. People don’t understand SEO, so they treat every interaction like you’re a mechanic in a skeazy shop, telling them their radiator has snake-tubes or something. To be honest, we can’t fault people for feeling this way, because there are so many scammy SEO companies out there.
How do we know? We get emails from them every day. Check out the following:
With hundreds of ranking variables in search engines, plain, old-school SEO is not going to get your online business anywhere. In today’s times, you have to Reach – Connect – Engage with your audience to get MORE out of your $$$$. So, let’s get to the point. It is a blend of search-social-mobile-local that is going to make a dent and get that gold trickling into your pocket. What we do? We identify the right channel (SEO+Social+Content+Local) mix for you, and create a campaign model that serves as a blueprint to scale and repeat success.
This is clearly either a mass spam-email or the work of a lunatic. Who else would send a company an email offering to provide for them the very service they offer? It would be like emailing a five-star restaurant with an offer to come in and microwave them some hotdogs.
They continue:
Obviously, we are not the only Search marketing firm that provides this service, but I assure that the quality of work we do, is not matched by anyone else in our peer group.
Really? So not only are they offering their services to a competing company, they are insulting us in the process. The simple fact that they are spamming out emails wildly already proves they are more than “matched by anyone else,” they are a joke, and they give the industry a bad name.
This is why honest SEO companies have to fight through so much bull just to convince people that they are, in fact, honest. For every legitimate company offering a genuinely functional search engine optimization service, there are 100 (or more) of these spammy SEO companies looking to turn a quick buck on the ignorance of random consumers. It’s the shotgun approach. You shoot out a million emails and at least one is bound to hit someone you can take advantage of. It’s disgusting and it gives everyone who performs SEO an immediate mark against them in the eyes of the consumer.
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
Unfortunately, there isn’t anything we can do to stop spammers. The Can-Spam act does its best, but it’s power is very limited. We can hope that other businesses who aren’t particularly SEO savvy don’t get caught up, but they must. If this technique didn’t work at least a little, then the spammers would already have moved on to something else.
In the end, all we can collectively do is offer honest SEO at a fair rate. You’re not going to change the outside perspective of the industry overnight, but you can make each morning a little brighter than the one before.