I just spoke to one of my new customer… and God… I’m angry.
Mainly because I hate when small businesses with not a lot of SEO knowledge get bully by “SEO companies” and lately I have seen so many cases of this type of “web marketing experts” taking advantage of their clients websites.
This is my top 5 on how to detect if your web marketing company is a bully
1) Your web company tells you that a CMS (content management system) is simply tooo complicate and expensive to setup. That is better for your business to remain with a HTML static site and pay them each time you want to change any content on the site.
The reality:
Change today to a CMS… move to wordpress, joomla or drupal. Leave that company, free yourself.
CMS is the today, the tomorrow… the future.
Real internet marketing companies should allowed their clients to create their own content. Remember: You are the expert in your own industry. So why limit the capacity you may have of creating a bigger, larger and better website.
2) Your SEO company offers guarantee 1st place for keywords that nobody looks for.Reality: I love this one, because this one is so easy to apply and many bully-seo-wanna-be-experts apply this …
I love the sentence: “We rank 1st of a keyword with more than 100.000.000 results in Google”.
Ranking 1st means nothing for a low quality keyword.
No traffic in that keyword highway mate?
3) Your SEO company decided to add their lovely links in your website footer.
Reality: Come on guys! Do you really need to sneak a link in a footer… just because you DID the job? Are you so starving for links? Is that your best SEO strategy? Take all their google juice and send them to your website? It feels like when you buy a car and the car dealers sticks a horrible red sticker in the back of your car:
“Another car sold by Bully the Car dealer”
4) Adwords is the best way….for us to make money FROM you.
this is one of the bully actions that is destroying many small businesses in Australia . The Adwords Specialist that decides to brain wash the small business owner towards the mentality of “forget SEO and instead pay us to manage your adwords campaign” . Yes boys and girls… this is the new strategy, adword companies that simply play the game of bid high, bid high while yu pay us % to manage your ads.
I love the fact that there are so-called Internet Marketing companies out there that still promote that Adwords is a better option that organic traffic.
Question for you : What happens when you stop paying for adwords? You loose the leads.
What happens when I stop paying… mmmm I don’t pay for adwords… why? All my traffic is organic.
I’d agree almost totally with what you’ve said Gabriel, but just one tiny point about CMS’s – the only danger is if the client has full control over the entire content of the site then makes what appears to them to be minor changes to the text – this can create some big seo headaches for us, we’ve had a few ‘why’s my site just dropped two pages’ phonecalls because of that. We tend to keep the ‘main’ optimised text locked up and let them blog, add news, etc, etc themselves.
I guess we’re one of the few web design and seo companies out there who actually care about their customers (it seems that there are lots who don’t!!)because we never charge if customers just want to make a few small text changes here and there – we’ll do it for them and make sure the seo isn’t compromised as a result.
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