Common Tips to Avoid SEO Scams

Common signs of an SEO scam include Guaranteed page 1 ranking, $1,000-$3000 monthly retainers, and vague responses to strategy.

SEO is an industry with many tactics and best practices, this leaves business owners vulnerable to SEO scam artists and being taken advantage of by people looking to make quick easy profits. We hear horror stories daily from our clients and also have to turn down clients due to poor mentality when it comes to SEO and how it works. First, let's look at the 3 most common signs of an SEO scammer.

Guaranteed Page 1 Ranking: Think for a second, every keyword you search comes up with 10 results on page 1. If there are 100 companies who want that keyword how can an SEO company guarantee you one of those top 10 results? Short answer: They cannot. They can implement a strategy and with enough budget and experience their strategy might out perform your competition, but to what extent?

This guarantee is for a keyword that is easy to rank for and gets very little traffic in the grand scheme of things. Maybe something like "Best Plumber in Jasper Arkansas" this search will probably not yield much traffic to a plumber in Arkansas. If you got here looking for a plumber we linked one for you in the yellow keyword. Sorry about that I just needed an example.

The point is that this isn't necessarily a scam but rather an oversight. They did rank you on the first page for a keyword so the guarantee is met, however you're under the impression that it will be for a word that actually brings in sales and that requires more than just a basic optimization for $299 a month. It requires consistent backlinking, article optimization, and blogging on the topic.

$1,000-$3000 Monthly Retainer Scam: Many SEO agencies offer services within this price range. Often times they are outsourcing these services overseas. There are many great SEO professionals in Pakistan that offer great services for a great price, however, there are also a lot of scams and misinformation put out about what services actually push the needle.

This isn't the scam part per say. The scam is that YouTube guru's are telling people to charge this much because a business owner won't even question it. If you're good enough at sales you can get 40 business owners on a $1,000 a month retainer pay $500 a month for SEO services and pocket $20,000 a month. Real SEO agencies offer their services at this price range so it's hard to distinguish a scammer from a real agency.

The problem is that you are paying $3,000 a month for $500-$1500 worth of SEO and the rest is going towards paying a project manager. Be weary of SEO in this price range and lower, Although once business owners get used to looking for this scam the price range will probably go up sadly. We cover what services the company will give you below in the article.

Vague Responses to Strategy: A scammer often doesn't know exactly what they are going to do to rank your site. They will offer things like a free audit or some sort of gimmick where they will look at your site and try to find one thing wrong to justify working with them.

Then they send you an audit from some tool like SEM Rush, Ahrefs, or Surfer SEO, says that you need to fix all of this and cannot tell you their plan to fix it, or why it needs to be fixed. But due to the ignorance of the industry business owners just buy in thinking it's a nice looking report!

It's like going to a mechanic, the audit is looking for minor issues with your car to sell you on. Often times these issues are often not even close to the main reason your site isn't ranking. Your site probably lacks content, header and meta tag optimization, and a skilled writer that can consistently write optimized non duplicated content blogs for your services.

Are SEO Retainers A Sign Of An SEO Scam?

SEO retainers are common and are often viewed as a necessity for agencies. However, scammers know this and charge massive retainers to make themselves appear more trustworthy, when in reality they are paying someone else to do your SEO and pocketing the profits.

Due to the nature of the relationship between SEO agencies and business owners, many SEO agencies feel a retainer is a must have and for good reason. Many business owners will attempt to pull out of SEO contracts early either because they do not want to pay for the services anymore, or they feel that they are ranking now, no need to continue paying for this useless service.

Bottom Line: Yes, SEO retainers are a sign of a scam, however, they are also simply a contract between the business owner and the SEO agency.

Understand what you are paying for. With Koalaty Marketing for instance we focus on Pay Per Sale marketing because if we fail it's money out of our pocket and we care about our customers. Not all agencies do that, most agencies offer a retainer model that covers the basics of SEO, they will be vague about their services but SEO will include these services:

Website Content Creation & Blogging

Backlink Generation

Site Speed Optimization

Keyword Research

Competitive Analysis

Meta Tag (Title & Description)

Schema Markup

Image Optimization

Header Tag Optimization

Duplicate content issues

Duplicate meta descriptions

Duplicate title tags

Broken internal links

Pages that can't be crawled

Internal images that are broken

Sitemap & Indexing Issues

Robots.txt format errors

301 & 302 redirect "if applicable"

Pages returning 4XX status code

Pages returning 5XX status code

Broken canonical URLs

No canonical tags

Redirect chain and loops

Incorrect URL formats

Alt attributes

URL's that are too long

And more!

While some of these services can be one off purchases, almost all of the optimization services offered should be looked at and tinkered with monthly since the keyword is to optimize. For optimal performance your SEO professional should be constantly looking for ways to improve your site.



For more information on what SEO is read our article.