I can’t take it. I have to say something. I don’t want to run into another client who has been lied to, scammed, or manipulated out of money by freelancers, firms, consultants and employees. It’s especially hard when clients call me in to fix their marketing holes but don’t have the budget to make changes because they just spent it on this cracker jack site that isn’t solving any problems. Working as a consultant, my job gives me access to the amazing opportunity to help businesses and business owners reach their potential. Unfortunately, it also means I have to see and address the manipulative tactics used by the industry to get money out of you. These are some of the most common phrases I hear when business owners are being taken for a ride.
1: There are a ton of problems and they need to be fixed
This is a classic approach by web companies to get you to purchase their services. They do some form of crawl or analysis of your site and they find a ton of things that are wrong and need to be fixed now before your site takes control of your lives and destroys the world. The problem with this approach is that there is no exact standard as to what is considered perfectly correct or right when it comes to web development. This especially applies to SEO.
Because every website has a different goal, every search query has a different destination and every user has a different need, this forms literally billions of permutations on what factors need to be present to create a site that is perfectly designed for the perfect keywords and the perfect user. Now, all automated tools are not designed to measure all of these permutations. Instead, they have a generic set of factors to look for. This is made even more complicated by the fact that search engines like Google have over 200 factors that apply to ranking a page and while some are more important than others, others are extremely negligible when it comes to ranking your site. Rather than spending your time worrying about your keyword in your H2 tag, which only has an estimated .o2% ranking factor and will show up as an error on most SEO tools, you should pay more attention to the information and content you are delivering to your users.
The worst part is if you fall for this trick, your website and targeting could be taken off course and you could lose money. Here is a good example.
That is Google’s ranking according to Hubspot. 65/100. On MOZ, they have a page authority of 97/100. Not perfect. After running Google through Moz, Hubspot and a other generic SEO and SEM tools, it would seem that they have a lot of issues. If I approached them about fixing all their issues and make them perfect according to an automated marketing tool, then it would take Google away from it’s core business and strategy.
Keep in mind, you may legitimately have issues on your site and those issues could lead to lost revenue and rankings. Just be very cautious when being pitched about problems.
How to get the truth: Asking for specific changes and documented results from similar changes can help weed out unnecessary changes. If you are not a web or SEO expert, it may also be a good thing to consult with a web expert to confirm what you are purchasing in another company.
2: We can get you ranking first on Google
There are a few problems with this statement. The first question I ask is “rank for what?”
A colleague of mine performed an experiment one time where he made up some completely random phrase. I think it had to do with purple lions. Within 48 hours, he was ranking first for that phrase. Technically, with that result, he could say that he ranked me first in Google. If I was a company that just blindly followed my SEO or web company, I could have forked over money for seeing our rankings increase. In your industry, you have a small, sweet set of keywords that will actually bring the perfect customer. The biggest problem is these keywords are usually also targeted by your competitors. In a highly competitive business, lets say, “Pool Cleaning” in Phoenix, you would need to outspend, out market and outperform all of your competitors to even get on the first page. Honestly, you would need to put more time, energy and possibly money into it to even be visible. It’s possible but that SEO/web company has no idea (until they get started) if they can rank you for your target keywords on your target budget. At this point, it’s easy to turn to less relevant, lower performing keywords to get your rankings up but that doesn’t mean it’s going to bring in your clients and in some cases can be hurtful to your business.
For all you SEO guys, I’m not discounting the practice of ranking targeted long-tail keywords for traffic boosting. I’m just making a point that even though you can rank them first for purple lions does not mean that “We can rank you first” statement solves their ranking problem.
One day, a client called up and asked me to confirm the data that a SEO company was feeding them from work that SEO company was doing. According to the report, the SEO company had been growing their inbound links and their traffic had spiked over 3 months. The business owner felt something was off and had me look into what was going on. The company was gathering links from online directories and the crawlers and spam traffic from those sites were causing a spike in traffic. The problem is that that traffic was completely valueless to the company. Needless to say, the work was not worth the thousands spent and the company was soon removed.
How to get the truth: Once the person or company starts their SEO work, ask for a list of your industry specific keywords and track the performance of those keyword rankings on a tool like Spyfu.
3: The data confirms our findings.
This is a favorite go to by people all over the web and marketing industry. Data can be an amazing tool to confirm processes and give direction to companies. In the hands of someone trying to make themselves look good, data can be the biggest enemy. As a consultant, one of the scenarios I come across frequently is a companies CEO or owner believing their company is the best in the world (slight exaggeration) because someone in the marketing department is showing them positive snippets of data. More often than you would expect, that data is being fudged to make that person, or the department look better. This same things also goes for third-party contractors, they will show you data confirming that they are doing a great job but without actually going over every piece of data, it’s possible that they are only showing you data to get you to be happy.
Lie – “Look!!!! That thing we did got some traction.”
Truth – “By bots. Don’t tell our CMO.”
Another problem I see with data and analytics is people frequently using it to confirm opinions rather than basing opinions on data. Even something as truthful as data can be twisted through the wrong lens.
Lie – “Referrals are the absolute most important method of acquisition on our site”
“See?!?!?!?! Referrals!!!!!!”
Truth – Most of those are spam visits.
How to get the truth: You might be able to go in and see the data but one thing you can do is compare any data you are given with your sales or revenue charts. Good changes in data will be matched in revenue.
Marketing agencies, freelancers and employees want to look good about being able to provide you with the best service. Sometimes this looks like fudging data and presenting facts in a strategic way that might not fully represent how you are doing. Always test and challenge those assertions to make sure that the full narrative is explored.
Photo : MarkJaysonAranda