SEO often receives critical comments. Some say that it’s a way to “game the system” by figuring out the algorithms of Google and other major search engine platforms. However, SEO is perfectly legal and an accepted practice if we do this properly. SEO allows us to optimize our website, so it could rank better and faster in search engine results. Without SEO-based optimizations, it will take much longer to gain desired rank in search results.
Unfortunately, it is very easy to perform bad practices during SEO activities and not all webste owners are aware of them. Some snake oil SEO gurus only want to steal money from website owners by offering questionable or even dangerous SEO methods. Fortunately, there are some easy ways to detect these bad SEO professionals. A common sign is that their offering price is so low that it seems too good to be true.
This is a strong sign that we could be dealing with a bad SEO professional. They may promise #1 rank with just $25 a month. This is impossible to do, because many large corporate spend millions of dollars to rank well with highly competitive keywords. SEO isn’t cheap and we need work really hard to achieve good results. Top positions with popular keywords could give us millions of dollars in monthly revenue and we can’t achieve that with only $25 a month.
If SEO professionals promise to easily that we will get number one position, we should check it deeper. It is actually possible that we will get number one position only on specific country or region. There’s no SEO professional that can speak on behalf of any major search engines. There is no guarantee that a “proven” method will allow us to rank higher. Snake oil SEO firms tend to promise too much and deliver too little.
Professional SEO should also deliver monthly reports. SEO firms must be honest and open with what they do. Most of all, they need to be really transparent with everything they do. Reputable firms won’t hesitate to report everything to clients, even setbacks and failures. Bad SEO professionals could be quite secretive. This could happen when SEO firms have virtual offices and they don’t allow us to go to their offices.
With good SEO method, it should be quite easy for us to obtain enough leads per day. Bad SEO professionals also rely too much on directories and link building. It is really easy to abuse both methods. They may use illegal methods to create backlinks. They may use link farms to create thousands of links in a single website. Directories that are overcrowded with links could also deliver very little SEO benefits, because they are not functioning directories in a real practical sense.
Bad SEO professionals may have little consideration with content. In reality, content has significant importance in ensuring that we have high position in search engine result. This could be quite hard to achieve if SEO professionals don’t work hard to determine what kind of content that we need to have.