Blackhat Blues: If it Sounds Too Good to Be True..

Perhaps the number 1 most important thing for our clients or any potential  internet marketing client in Phoenix or elsewhere to remember is: search engine optimization (SEO) takes time. Nobody likes to hear it, and we’re not doing ourselves any real favors by reiterating it, but it’s the truth.

When it comes down to it, honesty and integrity are the most important elements to a successful business relationship. If you decide to hire someone who promises page 1 results in a week, month,  or even a couple months and you’re not already ranking well for those key terms, something foul is afoot. That honesty and integrity we were talking about is probably no where to be seen. SEO is less like a paintbrush and more like a hammer. It’s a repetitive, time intensive, and sometimes brutally painstaking process. Anyone who claims to have a magic bullet is either lying, or using some practices that will very quickly get you found out and banished from the Google index. And that’s about the very worst thing that can happen to any internet marketing campaign.

How Do I know Who’s Legitimate?

The first red flag of course is the claims of immediate results we already mentioned. You can pump all the money into a PPC campaign you’d like, but it’s still much better to rank organically in the long haul as well. If one day you no longer have the budget for PPC your site will fall off the face of the planet. So sure, with the right know-how most people can get their site on page one with the right PPC strategy and budget, but if your potential marketer is claiming page 1 organic results immediately, that is a warning sign. The next are any mentions of “buying links”, “link farms”, “directory sites”, or really anything that sounds like Google might see as cheating. You will also want to steer clear of cheap content farms that can contain duplicate content from other sites, causing your site’s credibility to be harmed and penalized by Google. Write the content yourself or use a trusted marketing agency like New Wine Web Design.

Unlike medical website design in Phoenix, where you can see the results, test them, and judge with your own eyes, SEO can be a little tricky to judge. We’ve had clients in the past who have simply lost patience and, happy with their site design, decided they’d try and figure out the SEO side themselves. To get an idea of where your site is ranking for terms you want to be found for you can always read this article, however having a trusted business partner to help you find the best terms, properly optimize your site, do all the heavy lifting of blogging, email campaigns, reviews, on-page optimization and more can be quite helpful. The benefits of finally reaching page 1 for those coveted terms will do wonders for your business, so don’t give up on all of us due to a few bad apples!

Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (11/9/2015) St Boniface’s Catholic College, Plymouth (Flickr)

Scroll to Top