SEO Snake Oil Persists
Adam Henige
February 19, 2009
As my company approaches its one year anniversary in the world of search marketing, I have to say that I have been pleasantly surprised by the level of professionalism and skill I have experienced when competing with other Michigan SEO companies. Considering the number of prospects that I talk to who have been burned by shady SEOs in the past, most competitors we have run into in person have been nothing but reputable white hat providers.
Of course there are exceptions. Recently I was speaking with a potential client who had received a proposal from another company that was exactly half the price of our extremely reasonable proposal. This client had a minimal budget, but wasn't in a terribly competitive market so I figured we could help her out at a pretty discounted price, and we could both come out ahead.
Being cost conscious and absolutely new to search engine optimization, we were obviously up against a wall. The more I thought about it, however, I couldn't help but wonder how this company could provide any type of results for the amount they had proposed while still making a profit. I asked the prospect if they could provide me a basic synopsis of what the competitor was offering on a monthly basis, and I got three words that just blew my mind, "Search engine submission."
Really? REALLY? I had to calm myself down initially, as I knew I was dealing with someone who was understandably naive to search marketing, but I was just infuriated that someone pretending to be in our industry would offer this up as a service and take someone's money each month. Particularly in this situation. This prospect's existing site is already indexed by the five major search engines and every other search engine I tried.
For the uninitiated, here was Comscore's numbers for search engine market share in December of 2008:
Google 63.5%
Yahoo 20.5%
MSN 8.3%
Ask 3.9%
AOL 3.8%
As you can see, there really isn't a market outside of these five engines. So what is the point of submitting to additional engines and paying for it each month, particularly when the site is already indexed by every search engine that's worth its salt?
I did my best to explain to the prospect what this meant, though I'm not sure it was understood. Regardless, if we don't win this job, yet another person is going to feel cheated months down the line. They'll wonder, "How come my rankings didn't go up on Google?" The answer? Because your faux-SEO firm wasn't doing anything that has any impact on your rankings on Google or any search engines that matter. It's just a matter of how much money spent and whether they will trust legitimate SEO companies in the future. If you're a legit SEO, please pull for us, because if the tables are turned we'll be pulling for you to the benefit of us both.
Of course there are exceptions. Recently I was speaking with a potential client who had received a proposal from another company that was exactly half the price of our extremely reasonable proposal. This client had a minimal budget, but wasn't in a terribly competitive market so I figured we could help her out at a pretty discounted price, and we could both come out ahead.
Being cost conscious and absolutely new to search engine optimization, we were obviously up against a wall. The more I thought about it, however, I couldn't help but wonder how this company could provide any type of results for the amount they had proposed while still making a profit. I asked the prospect if they could provide me a basic synopsis of what the competitor was offering on a monthly basis, and I got three words that just blew my mind, "Search engine submission."
Really? REALLY? I had to calm myself down initially, as I knew I was dealing with someone who was understandably naive to search marketing, but I was just infuriated that someone pretending to be in our industry would offer this up as a service and take someone's money each month. Particularly in this situation. This prospect's existing site is already indexed by the five major search engines and every other search engine I tried.
For the uninitiated, here was Comscore's numbers for search engine market share in December of 2008:
As you can see, there really isn't a market outside of these five engines. So what is the point of submitting to additional engines and paying for it each month, particularly when the site is already indexed by every search engine that's worth its salt?
I did my best to explain to the prospect what this meant, though I'm not sure it was understood. Regardless, if we don't win this job, yet another person is going to feel cheated months down the line. They'll wonder, "How come my rankings didn't go up on Google?" The answer? Because your faux-SEO firm wasn't doing anything that has any impact on your rankings on Google or any search engines that matter. It's just a matter of how much money spent and whether they will trust legitimate SEO companies in the future. If you're a legit SEO, please pull for us, because if the tables are turned we'll be pulling for you to the benefit of us both.
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