My Travels on the Net

There are hundreds of companies doing search engine optimization; many of which are on the up-and-up. However, because the industry is so competitive, many make guarantees about results that sound good but are often of little or no value. They use linguistic smoke and mirrors to make it sound like you’re getting a good deal but in reality they are doing very little for the money they are charging you. So how do you tell a valuable guarantee from a useless one with out having to become an expert in search engine optimization?

Today’s issue of the RainMaker Report has a good article “Leprechaun Repellent And Other Meaningless SEO Guarantees,” by Scott Buresh of Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing, that tells you what to look for when evaluating the guarantees made by search engine companies.

The one point I would add to the article is about local versus national search engine optimization. My sister owns a tattoo shop in San Francisco and she recently got a sales call from a scammy SEO company. They claimed they would get her top rakings for phrases like "tattoo shop." Sounds good right? Wrong! Her shop is in San Francisco. Why should she pay hundreds of dollars every month to rank #1 for "tattoo shop" across the country? It’s not like people in New York or Boston are going to fly across the country to go to her shop. For a fraction of what this company was going to charge her, she could rank well for “tattoo shop San Francisco” which is much more likely to drive qualified traffic to her website and her business than the general phrase “tattoo shop.”

Labels: seo guarantee, tattoo shop san francisco