I was looking at Raleigh’s Craiglist tonight in order to post my own SEO ad when I noticed something. There are a lot of people offering SEO services, 62 to be exact. Can they all be reputable?
I decided to poke around a little deeper.
In my humble opinion, mine has the only decent headline, ” How to show up on Google’s first page”. I wanted to use a more SEOish headline that would hopefully compel the reader to click. Some of the others were heaped in with $99 website design, so I ignored those.
One ad boasted, “I know how to get you listed on Google, etc”. Well, he should, after all he “through the ‘expert’ tract of the international SEO conference in NY City”.
Another from weboids says that, “results are typically seen within 14 Weeks!”
This one was interesting in that the link to their website wasn’t a link, how’s that for an optimized ad?
The ad from the freelance writer was interesting because he didn’t over-hype, he only promised he could get his text in front of “hundreds of people”.
The one to be very afraid of is SEO w/Guaranteed Results. How can he guarantee results when he doesn’t know what results I may ask for? What if I want to rank #1 on Google for the word “Google”?
This one was interesting because they’ve been doing search engine optimization since 1995! I guess they were optimizing all of their clients for Yahoo and AltaVista.
So what’s a normal small business to do? Homework.
Here’s a checklist you can use to eliminate the very worst of the hucksters.
- They tell you that you need to buy links.
- They have a “special program” that they can use to [fill in the blank].
- They talk a lot about meta keywords.
- They guarantee a No. 1 ranking
Some of the things you want to hear are:
- They want to understand the basics of your business.
- Results can be measured and quantified.
- They don’t have to do anything “sneaky”.
You can see a fantastic recent article which lists some of the worst SEO nightmares at InsideCRM.
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