There are hundreds of honest, ethical white-hat SEO companies across the globe and, being one of those companies, it really irks us when we hear stores from clients of their past experiences with other not-so-ethical (or at least inexperienced) companies and individual SEO consultants. Big dreams and small budgets help convince new and small business owners to believe just about anything. No! you can’t spend $100 and get on page one in a month. It simply can’t happen. SEO takes time. If you want good organic Google rankings you’ll have to put in a lot of effort (or pay someone to). The only way to get noticed in the short term is to pay for ads. As well as paid ads CAN work, you’ll be paying for them forever unless you care also working on your organic rankings.

Here are a few SEO lies that should make you run and hide from any SEO company that spews them:

Guaranteed Top Rankings – LIE!

Any SEO company worth their salt should be able to get you ranked very well for most if not all of your services, markets, etc, but no one can guarantee it. There is no single magic formula that works for all clients or industries. What worked for the few dozen clients we’ve had success with may not work for your business. The best way to know if an SEO company can help you is look at their other clients. Ask them to show you reports, analytics and get references. If you’re told you’re guaranteed to get #1 rankings on Google, especially in a short amount of time, it might be time to look for another company. Or at minimum get a contract that gives you your money back if they don’t produce (which they’ll never agree to)

SEO is the Only Thing You need for Success – LIE!

Anyone who tells you that has no understanding of the greater Internet Marketing strategies that encompass many areas including SEO. If you really want your business to succeed you need to be attacking on all fronts – SEO for sure, but there’s also social marketing, PPC, content marketing and dozens of smaller things that will push your site to the top and get your phone ringing.

It Doesn’t Matter What Industry You’re in, We Can Help – LIE!

This is an easier to believe lie because it kind of makes sense. If you believe SEO is a single magic formula then you’d believe what works for a mechanic would work for a lawyer or plumber. Of course the best practices of SEO and Internet Marketing are the same across the board, but the application of those best practices varies form industry to industry and even company to company within an industry. A Good SEO consultant will work with you to understand your business, your specific goals and targets before starting their strategy. If an SEO company doesn’t understand your unique industry and business they will hit a very low ceiling in terms of helping you with your rankings and Internet exposure.

More Links is Always Better – LIE!

This is SOOOOO wrong! In fact, more links will likely hurt your efforts if not get you banned form Google altogether. Anyone can buy links, get reciprocal links, post to forum with your url in the footer. Those methods are easy… AND against Google’s webmaster guidelines. The rule of thumb in SEO, especially links is: The easier it is to do the less likely it will help and more likely it may penalize you. Of course links are good, but they need to be honest organic links that another person independently chooses to give you because you have interesting content on your site.

Duplicate or Similar Content is Fine – LIE!

Again, it’s easy to reuse content from other sites, and applying the rule above, that easy task will not help you one bit. Google knows who had that content first, so why would they give you credit for stealing it? Even reusing your own content in several places won’t help your rankings. That’s not to say if you wrote a beautiful article that it should be on your site, social media, newsletters, third party blogs. Just make sure you get it indexed on your site first and use the canonical tag on the other places to ensure Google knots the source. If an SEO company tells you it’s ok to have duplicate content, hang up the phone and block their number.

More Keywords is Better – LIE!

This is a hard topic to explain to most people because this is another one that makes sense. That is unless you fully understand Google’s Hummingbird update from a few years ago. Once upon a time you’d want to have a page for every term and variation of that term that your business deals with. For example an car accident lawyer may want pages for “car accident lawyer”, “car wreck lawyer”, “car accident attorney”, “truck accident lawyer” and so on. Believe it or not that used to work, but now Google see that tactic as spammy, useless content. Keywords in terms of analysis won’t ever go away, but keywords in terms of density and variation in your content is long dead.

If it Sounds Too Good…

…it probably is. Look at it this way: If SEO were that easy then everyone would be doing it and everyone would be on equal ground and everyone would be #1 (which obviously can’t happen). The only way to get long term top rankings is with consistent effort. After a custom analysis of your current site, competitors, etc, we recommend starting out aggressively to get you moving as quickly as possible then taper off effort and cost over time. Usually within 3 months our clients go form off the map to a decent spot. That means most related searches are on page 1-2 and climbing.

All that’s to say give us a call and we’ll help you get to where you need. And, we don’t lock you into a contract.