I was searching for "SEO" the other day and, as I usually do, I had a look at who was advertising on the term. To my significant surprise, I saw a firm best known for domains advertising its SEO solutions. Network Solutions now sells SEO and guarantees top 10 results.
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5 Comments


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Wonderful. While some may use their service and later realize that they are not providing real SEO services but the problem is a LOT of people will use their service, feel ripped off, and decide that all SEOs are nothing but scammers. I mean if a big company like Network Solutions did mot produce results how can the company that I never heard of do it.
This is not much worse than SEO consultants (like me) promising a good return for a few hours of in-depth site analysis.Buyers of SEO services should understand that strong SEO involves not just one SEO but a team of geeks, marketers and SEOs (e.g. social media guru with influencial accounts, programmer/designer/copywriter to create compelling link bait and develop a website toward a unique direction, traditional link auditor/builder, technological consultant (for debugging 301s, etc), keyword research specialist (optional), PPC campaign manager, project manager, etc) and hire them over the course of at least 6-12 months.Yes an SEO/buyer of SEO services can implement all that but it takes alot of time to implement everything single-handedly. Just having an SEO consultant give you a list of W3C validation errors, 301 redirect problems, unoptimized TITLE tags, landing page CTR optimization tips etc isnt going to help because you still need to spend months implementing them and if your website doesnt offer anything of value, no amount of marketing will help.
I cant believe youre apologizing for their behaviour. Theyre bottom of the barrel and youre basically saying its legit because buyers should beware. FYI, thats why there are things like the Consumer Protection Act... Sheesh. As to making it sound like you need a small brigade to handle all those things, I handle most of them for my clients myself and theyre delighted with my services. My lonesome, one-man-I-wish-I-could-afford-help-for-the-boring-chores-operation. By the way, floppy, thanks for submitting this :).
"My lonesome, one-man-I-wish-I-could-afford-help-for-the-boring-chores-operation.":) I can relate to that."As to making it sound like you need a small brigade to handle all those things"Like I said, it depends on how quickly your client wants results. I do most of the stuff myself, like you, but if a client wants link baiting services, for example, I refer that client to a link baiter. I dont have the time to run a PPC campaign AND run an extensive link audit AND email .edu domains AND debug 301s AND craft a killer link bait AND maintain a poweruser Reddit/Digg/Stumbleupon account to push stories to the front page AND write great copy for press releases/blog posts/whatever.Yes I can probably do all that if all I did was consulting and if I had months to implement everything, but I think that type of business model just dont scale unless alot of it is automated."I cant believe youre apologizing for their behaviour."Gab, I am in no way apologizing for anything, claiming their services are legit, or advocating buyers beware. Fact of the matter is that there are alot of SEOs - even those highly visible in the industry - who can write great blog posts but dont have the skillset to execute any of it.We can all laugh at services selling Keyword tag optimization or "submit to 1,00 search engines" but the problem of lack of quality digs much deeper than that. Just because an SEO doesnt sell search engine submission services doesnt mean that the SEO can execute.
I just saw that now Halfdeck. I get the point now and can sympathize with waht youre saying. I think I may be a bit guilty of sharing ideas that I cant always execute on, but at least theyre legit ideas that make sense and are credible. And mostly, what I share is stuff that I have done or seen in my research.