Why fixed fees can be bad news?

Whatever type of advice you require, be it medical advice to financial advice, you will always be expecting them to be a qualified and experience professional.

But with Search Engine Optimisation this isn’t the case. There is no specific degree you have to take to become qualified, you don’t need to take any courses or exam, you don’t even really need much experience before you can start dispensing your advice. All you need to know is more about SEO then the person you’re selling it to and they will be none the wiser.

All they will need to do is mention a few search engines, make a few promises like “you will be page 1 position one within a month”, throw around some SEO terms like Meta Tags and Pagerank and they will seem like a professional.

Now this is the main problem with the SEO industry, everyone thinks they are a professional and few people actually know how to execute it. It’s difficult to tell between the scam artist and the real professionals and many Estate Agents do fall for these scams all the time.

Yet this isn’t necessarily very hard to spot if you know what you are looking for. Here are some things to help you spot the scammers:

1. They will promise you a position on Organic Search (e.g. Page one; position one for Estate Agents in London on Google). Check through their portfolio to see which of their clients are on page one!

2. The SEO service will be a one off payment. SEO is an ongoing service that you and the SEO consultant will be working on continuously.

Most SEO experts will offer a monthly rate depending on the amount of work that needs to be done on the website.

With a one of payment you are giving them the chance to take your money and run.

3. With the one off payment you will also be able to tell if they are a fraud if they haven’t looked at your website in depth. If they haven’t done this they won’t know how much work needs to be done and what your websites strengths and weaknesses are. Also a competitor’s analysis will have to be done for them to see how much work will need to be done and how long it will take before you are likely to see results.

For proof that they have looked into your website you can always ask for a “Web Review” or a “SEO analysis” of your website. Most experts will offer this free. For our free web review click here.

4. Giving specific time scales is a near enough impossible thing to predict. Some competitor’s websites might have very high authority in the eyes of Google which will make it very difficult for you to start competing with them.

On average it’s usually between 3-6 months before you start seeing good results but if with high competition can take anywhere up to a year.

If someone promises you will be on page one within a month, they are most likely scamming you as no one has control over that.

5. Saying they work for or with Google. Google don’t offer a Search Engine Optimisation service and they also give away secret tips to certain companies. They also can’t personally place a website in any position as Google is run by an algorithm.

So think before you buy, don’t fall for their tricks and remember there aren’t any short cuts in SEO.

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant