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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Link to ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Blog

Fire your SEO company today.

Posted: 19 Jun 2013 05:00 AM PDT

In a world post-Panda, post-Penguin, it's fair to say that you never know quite what's lurking behind the corner. What measures will Google roll out next to stop webmasters in their tracks? Will they single out the bad guys, or will there be collateral damage? Will that collateral damage be your website?

Whether you pay someone to "do your SEO" or whether you do it all yourself, now's definitely the time to down your tools and think long and hard about what you're doing. Are you pumping zillions of links to your website and expecting it to rank well until the end of time? Or are you publishing quality content instead?

Five years ago SEO was a game of "who could build the most links the fastest". The problem is that search engine algorithms have caught up – they know the tricks people use to game rankings. That's why search engines are placing increasing emphasis on quality content. Links are easy to build – I could build millions at the click of a button. Creating high quality content has no short cuts – someone actually has to sit down and write it. That's why ranking sites based more on content than back links is a smart move on the part of Google and other search engines. If you want those top rankings, you'll have to work for them.

What's your SEO company doing?

Around Christmas a friend asked me to devise a content strategy for his ecommerce website. I happily obliged. He'd spent thousands on a swanky design and it looked amazing – he had some weak rankings but that was only to be expected with a new site. He told me he had an SEO company already working on the site. No big deal, right?

We spent the next few weeks writing awesome content for his product pages. Instead of publishing duplicated manufacturer descriptions he wanted everything totally bespoke. We all know that Google loves unique content, so it was a wise move on his part. As we published content on his site traffic gradually increased, as did sales, thanks to all of the weird and wonderful long tail keywords his site was ranking for. Everyone was happy.

Roll on Penguin 2.0 and the rankings on this website tanked completely. I decided to run his site through a link checker and I noticed thousands of links built to his website (a UK ecommerce website) coming from Chinese and Russian sites. His "SEO company" had been building the worst links I've ever seen. What's worse is that he was paying hundreds of dollars each month for their service – his strong rankings lasted less than three months.

To cut a long story short, he had to abandon the domain and move his site to a fresh domain. It then took a few months for the site to establish itself in Google, but thanks to the unique content it featured, it ranked well with very few links. Starting on a fresh domain cost him big in terms of lost sales, time and stress.

Stop looking over your shoulder – fire your SEO company

Your SEO company won't thank me for saying this, but you might. Do you really know what they're doing? I mean, really? Are they building crap links from blog networks and comment spamming tools? The best way to check is to use a free link checker such as Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO. Look at the links being sent to your site – are they any good?

I challenged a group of friends from my local business club to do this. Initially they were way out of their depth, but eventually all but one of them managed to put together some kind of audit of their site's back links. Of the eight people that did this, all of them had absolutely awful links pointing to their sites courtesy of their SEO companies. I'm talking links from high Page Rank homepages with outbound link counts of 150+, blog roll links, blog spam links, links embedded in spun articles published on WordPress.com and Xanga. How these sites were still in search engines at all is beyond me.

The one person whose site didn't have thousands of low quality links pointed to it had hired a marketing/PR agency that also dabbled in SEO. The links pointing to their site were mostly organic, a result of topical press releases and interesting survey results they'd published. There wasn't a spammy link in sight in their link portfolio (in fact, I was a little jealous when I saw it for myself).

You might not be in control of your link building, but it's you that will pay

Building a business based solely on leads or sales generated through search engine traffic is a recipe for disaster – whether you're a white-hatter or a black-hatter. When Google pulls the plug on your website it'll feel like a train has just hit you. You'll have all kinds of questions going round your head: How will you pay the rent? How will you feed your kids? Will your rankings ever come back?

Don't get into this position. First off, don't rely solely on search engines to feed leads and sales to your business. Secondly, pay close attention to what your SEO company is doing – lots of companies out there build poor links for short term gains – they don't care about the longevity of your site in the SERPS, they just want to make a quick buck or two.

Of the eight people from my business club, one couldn't be bothered auditing his links, one had a great link profile, the other six will probably have problems as a result of their back links. That means across the world there are lots of sites that are nothing more than ticking time-bombs, waiting for their number to be up.

Take your budget and spend it elsewhere

As a result of the audits my friends completed, they fired their SEO companies and made use of the saved cash each month by hiring content/blog writers, social media companies – some even invested more money in their PPC campaigns. Search engine traffic isn't the be all and end all of internet marketing. There's so many more sources of quality traffic out there – open your eyes!

Website content such as blogs and articles is a fantastic investment. As more and more emphasis is placed on content, it will only become more important. There's no time like to present to publish quality, unique content on your website – there's no longer room for sites featuring heavily duplicated, low quality content in the search engine rankings. Good content never goes out of date and it'll never get your site penalized like back links can.

As a small business and website owner I hate to see others get ripped off. In the past I've had the wool pulled over my eyes by marketing companies and snake oil salesmen. Take it from me: SEO is one of the worst industries out there for chancers and shysters. Audit your SEO company's work today before it's too late – if they've done a bad job fire them and look into alternative, more sustainable ways to market your site online.

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