Four SEO Company Red Flags you should Watch Out For - Web Marketing Adelaide

July 8, 2013 by Nick Morris 2 Comments

In this video I’m going explain a few red flags that you should be aware of when hiring an SEO company.

First up, the meta keywords tag – now this is a tag within the HTML, where we can put some keywords in there for the page. Way back in the beginning, this was a way that search engines used to figure out what the page was about, but the major search engines have come out and said that they haven’t used this keyword tag for 5+ years. So any SEO who’s saying “we can optimise your meta keywords tag,” obviously isn’t up to date on SEO news, and this is bad news for a company who’s gonna be doing SEO for your business.

Search engine submissions – The process of submitting a website to a search engine is ridiculously easy, it’s just a simple form to fill out, so this shouldn’t really be considered as a selling point for an SEO company. It’s more likely, that they’re using this language to make you think it’s a plus for their service as when it’s really not. They might say something like, “we will submit your website to X number of search engines,” it could be 100, 150 to 500, or even like 10 is still a red flag. It’s also worth considering that you don’t actually need to submit a website to search engines for them to find and crawl it. As long as there’s a link pointing to that website from somewhere else, then the search engines will find it and will get indexed anyway. And if you do submit versus getting a link – this isn’t going to actually impact your rankings, it’s just going to affect when your website gets found, so your actual rankings are not going to be impacted at all by the submission process, so this is definitely a red flag. I think they’re using this language to manipulate you into thinking that this is a plus for their service when it really isn’t.

If the SEO company talks about a number of links they’re gonna get you each month, this is definitely a red flag. First of all, it’s quality not quantity of links that really makes a difference in your link building, so just having a number doesn’t really tell you anything about the quality of those links. Also, the fact they’re giving you this number without even knowing anything about your business, about your industry, and about the market that you’re targeting, suggests that they’re actually going to be using black hat tactics to get these links, and this something you certainly want to avoid.

Ranking guarantees – now this is a very popular way of marketing SEO services. You probably know that most of the top SEO services in the world do not offer any kind of ranking guarantee, and there’s a reason for this – it’s because ranking guarantees almost certainly suggest that the company is using black hat tactics to get those rankings. Think about it, they’re offering this guarantee without knowing anything about your business, or your market, or your industry, so it’s almost certain that they are using some sort of scalable technique, probably buying links, which is a definite no no as far as Google is concerned and this is a black hat tactic which you do not want to be participating in because it could negatively impact your website; and not in a short term, but possibly for a long term as well.

So be very careful of these four red flags when you’re trying to hire your SEO company or if you’re sort of doing SEO for your own website. Stay away from information that describes these techniques as being useful for your website.

Thanks to the Majoran Distillery for the jumper I’m wearing in this video, more on that here.

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