ReliableASPNETHosting.com | Best and Reliable ASP.NET Hosting. The search engine optimisation industry has inherited somewhat of a bad name over the past several years. The SEO industry and online marketing services industry as a whole has huge market growth but little to no regulation and no real barriers to entry. We have seen the rise of many fly-by-night operators and companies using questionable sales tactics and practices to ride the revenue wave, but have also unfortunately seen many small to medium Australian businesses being burnt and a large influx of businesses feeling disillusioned by SEO. And rightfully so.
This article is aimed to help educate Australian businesses in the market for an SEO provider on proper selection criteria, what to be wary of when speaking to SEO companies, common misconceptions and things to look for in good vendors.

Guaranteed First Page Rankings

This is a golden one that has been done to the death by the SEO industry and there are a few major flaws with this as a selling point.
In their guidelines, Google actually discredit and discourage businesses from using vendors that guarantee a first page ranking. First page rankings alone are meaningless, and are a means to an end. For example, a vendor may guarantee they can get you 5 keywords on the first page in the first six months, but which keywords?

For example:

The keyword “Plumber Sydney” generates 1,600 searches a month
The keyword “Best plumber in Sydney north shore” generates 0 searches a month. Both are page one rankings, but which one will mean more for your business?
The big trick here is that most of these vendors will not allow you to select the highly competitive keywords, or these keywords will not be the ones targeted in the guarantees, only the easy and more obscure terms that will generate less or sometimes zero traffic.

Although long tail traffic can generate positive results, the basis of this guarantee is that most of these terms could be ranked for with a little input or effort and subsequently generate little traffic.

Page one rankings do not necessarily equate to success:

Rankings are inherently unstable and volatile. In competitive and even non-competitive environments rankings fluctuate even hourly. Rankings are typically measured once a month and not a good transparent metric for success. Your overall traffic could go up for keywords you are not even measuring but the ones you are measuring which generate no traffic are going down. Are you actually winning or losing?

Cookie Cutter Keyword Packages

Many SEO companies have specific ‘off the shelf’ keyword packages for different businesses with fixed amounts of links, keywords, articles and social bookmarks. If you hear or see any remnants of a fixed package run for the hills. You have to remember at the end of the day SEO is a marketing practice and NOT a technical practice. Good SEO companies are all about combining content, online PR and technical development work to meet strategic business goals. These goals will be different for every business, thus a one size fits all approach is bogus and usually an indicator of outsourced work.

A good SEO company will offer:

• Strong scoping and consultancy to understand your businesses goals, clients and market space
• A tailored strategy that combines content, technical SEO work and online PR to get you in front of the desired customers
• Industry based experience: What works in one industry may not work in another for SEO

Many SEO vendors make tremendous claims of having a high quality network of websites and links that will help sky rocket their clients businesses into the ranking stratosphere in little to no time. Before we explain the fallacies in this structure it is important to understand the concept of linking and Google’s notorious Penguin 2.0 update.

Here is a laymen’s explanation of links and the relation to Penguin 2.0:

“Google wants to rank websites that are popular, popular websites are websites that are talked about by other websites with these other websites linking back to your site. For example Nike releases a new shoe, lots of fashion websites link back to Nike talking about said shoe, simple right? In the past before Penguin 2.0 Google predominantly looked at the volume of links you had, rather than the quality, now the converse is true, so it’s more about getting quality links through online PR rather than copious amounts of links from anywhere and everywhere.”

SEO is about offline marketing in an online environment. Take the above example; if Nike were to release a new shoe and rather than just do orthodox press releases and advertising, were to build hundreds of sites linking back to their main website which attracted no traffic – would this make them popular? No. Google heavily penalised these networks after Penguin 2.0.

How to Select the Right SEO Company

Conclusion

There are a lot of fallacies in the SEO industry, so be wary of these when you are in the market for a vendor. Educating yourself on SEO is the best defence against getting ripped off and making a bad monetary decision that will take 6-12 months to realise. Don’t be afraid to hold your vendor accountable and ask the right questions, education on SEO is the backbone of being able to identify the tricks in the industry. This will arm you with the right knowledge to ask the right questions to get the right answers.

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