Sleazy SEO Sales Tactics
Date: July 15, 2015Category: Author: David Hall
We had two clients who were approached by competitors recently with a similar sales approach. These clients sent us copies of their reports on their websites, and I wanted to comment on the reports and the tactics, as they seem to me to be less than honorable.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of this going on in the SEO industry–obfuscation, trying to impress prospective clients by throwing around terms that they may have heard but don’t understand, and misrepresentations of various kinds.
The competitor sent each of these two clients a lengthy report titled “Website and SEO Audit.” I’m going to analyze their claims in three blog posts. This first post is about general aspects of their claims, and a common SEO sales tactic of overgeneralizing.
Deception by Generalization
To help you understand this deceptive technique, let me make an analogy in a subject area a little easier for most people to understand. Let’s say you have hired professional landscapers to take care of some rental property you own in a distant state. Then let’s say there is another landscape company, XYZ Landscaping, trying to get your business. XYZ sends you a report that is a critique of your existing landscape company and in it they say, “There are places on the property where the grass is either diseased, under-watered, or completely missing.” It turns out that they are referring to the driveway where it is true that the grass is completely missing. While they have technically told the truth, they have not given an honest assessment of the property.
This is basically what this competitor has done in this report. They included an assessment of the Title Tags, Header Tags, and Meta Descriptions. And then they make blanket judgments. For example, in each of these reports they say, “The title tags on [your website] do not meet standards because of one or more of the following criteria: duplicate, missing, or exceeds the recommended character count.” They make similar declarations for the other tags.
Their problem is that if they made an honest overall assessment of each of these sites, they would be hard pressed to come up with something to criticize. Both sites dominate local search results in their respective communities. One is the unquestioned number one dental website in its market. It has a number one ranking in general search, and a number one ranking in local search for its primary search term. The other dominates a very competitive suburban market with over 300 dentists. It has the number one ranking in general search and the number two ranking in local search for its primary search term. Both websites also have a number of other search terms for which they rank very highly.
Yes, there are pages without “optimum” title tags. In every website we do, there are pages that are not written for the search engines. We call these utility pages–the request an appointment page, the map to the office, the patient registration forms, meet the staff, and similar pages. Other pages may have been created by the previous website company and we saw no need to optimize them as they weren’t targeting significant search terms. I call what they have done here deception by over-generalizing.
Additionally, it would be more honest if they made clear that meta descriptions do not impact the rankings of pages at all.
Beware the Google Rankings Promise
My second criticism is about their rankings promise to one client. One red flag to look for in any SEO company soliciting your business is a promise that they will get you a certain ranking. They will never put any teeth in a promise like that–they won’t promise you a refund if they fail to reach it. In the case of this company, the promise was made to one of these clients over the phone and was not put in writing, and it was that they could get him to rank in the local search pack for neighboring communities. But if you know local search, you know that this is very difficult. Google knows where you are, and will almost never let you outrank a dental office that is actually in the target city of a search term. Furthermore, it’s becoming beside the point and almost deceptive to speak of rankings in that way, because people are putting geographic terms into their searches much less frequently these days. They will search for “dentist near me,” or simply “dentist,” and trust Google to figure out the location thing.
But there is another point that really highlights the emptiness of this promise by the sales rep. Let’s start by giving you a little background. On their company website, they have a rotating slider featuring four testimonials. Three of them are physicians, but the first one is a dentist, Dr. Michael Tischler, who shares this testimonial: “My SEO traffic increased by more than 33%.”
So they are touting him as a great example of their SEO skills. Fair enough. While at Infinity Dental Web, our average increase for new clients is to triple their traffic within the first 12 months and increase it by 75% per year thereafter, a 33% increase is at least worth mentioning.
But let’s examine this company’s performance for Dr. Tischler in light of their promise to our client. Interestingly, his market situation is very similar to our client–both are in small cities of under 10,000 population, with adjoining larger cities within 10 miles. The adjoining larger cities in the case of Dr. Tischler are actually less competitive than they are for our client. So it is actually quite revealing to discover that Dr. Tischler does not appear at all in the local packs for these adjoining cities. In other words, the promise they made to our client they are not able to perform for their own flagship client.
Here is that search results page. I have circled the local pack. While Google allows up to seven dentists to appear in this local pack, you can see that they only display three for Kingston. So there is plenty of room for Dr. Tischler here, but Google simply isn’t interested in showing a dentist here who isn’t actually in Kingston.
This is not to fault the SEO work that this company has done. Just like our client in his city, Dr. Tischler ranks #1 in his city for his primary search term. It’s the sales claim that is a problem. Their claim that they can get our client to rank in the local pack in nearby communities is without foundation.
Conclusion
In the introduction to these reports they sent to our clients, they say that search engine optimization has become a pretty straightforward task of simply creating a great, useful website. It states: “There is no secret to developing a great SEO strategy.” Then it makes reference to SEO tricks that used to work in the past, and explains that today it’s simply a matter of building a great website and Google will recognize it. “If you build a great website, Google will recognize it, and reward you with a prominent ranking that simply cannot be achieved with shortcuts.”
But that is followed by this 40-page report explaining their bag of SEO tactics that are supposedly not currently being employed by the website being evaluated. It implies that these are secrets that they know that the competition doesn’t. This contradicts the introduction where they state that there are no such secrets.
The truth is that Google has indeed gotten very good at discerning a quality website. If you build a great, useful website that addresses topics people want to read about, uses original content, and provides a great user experience, you have done the bulk of what Google asks for. The bag of tricks they refer to in the bulk of the report are, in large measure, a distortion of what really works.
Unfortunately, this company isn’t alone in promoting this type of sales tactic. The SEO industry is replete with sleazy sales tactics, many very similar to what I have discussed here. They seem to prey on the geek-y nature of this knowledge by throwing out terms and techniques that aren’t understood by the business owner, to try to get them to believe that they know what they are talking about and the current website company doesn’t. Beware.
Read the other two posts in this series:
The Google Authorship sales pitch
Is there a 500-word rule for content?
We had a most interesting thing happen with the comments on this post. Someone entered a comment and did something quite tricky and most interesting. Impersonating me, they used my email address. They’re undoubtedly aware that many WordPress blogs have a default setting that allows comments to appear automatically if the writer has a previously approved comment. However, we have disabled that, and all comments must be manually approved. So I got to see this before it went live. Here is what they said, impersonating me:
This was so clever, I have to chuckle. Clearly I got under someone’s skin big time. And it leads me to get into a little more detail about how these local packs operate. Notice that I said in the text of my post that it is very difficult to appear in the local pack if you’re not in the community. Not impossible–just difficult. We do have clients who appear in the local packs of adjoining communities, but in every case there are either no local dentists in that pack, or maybe just one. In the case of Kingston, NY, there is only one local dentist qualifying for the local pack for Kingston NY dental implants. So Google displays Dr. Tischler’s listing and also another dentist in Lake Katrine, NY. But what Einstein told our client was that since there were only three dentists in the local pack for his adjoining community that they could get him into that, which doesn’t appear to be true.
Additionally, it is apparent from Dr. Tischler’s home page that the primary search term Einstein is targeting with his website is actually cosmetic dentistry, not dental implants as this writer claims. The local pack for Kingston, NY cosmetic dentist has two listings, neither of which is Dr. Tischler.
Anyway, it gives me a chuckle to think that someone would try to turn the tables on me, accusing me of the sleazy tactics, when they are refusing to identify themselves and rather, are impersonating me to try to make their point. Cute.