Search marketing...
The dangers of search engine optimisation
By Jon Fletcher - Managing Director
Those of you with sales experience will know just how difficult it is to say to a potential new client: "Sorry, we can’t help you." But this, frustratingly for us, is a common response to new enquiries.
The enquiry usually starts off "We’ve just had our new web site go live and we now want to get it to the top of the search engines" or "We’ve been live with our web site for 6 months and we don’t seem to be getting many visitors."
There is a whole web industry based around this thing called SEO or search engine optimisation, and the majority of companies who promote it (usually with endless cold calls from inexperienced telesales staff) make it out to be a bolt-on that can be applied to any web site to get those elusive top ranks. "Design your web site and let us tweak it to the top of Google for only £100 per month" is the basic message. Are they offering a valid service?
Let’s look at this from a number of angles:
Common sense. A top ranking on Google for a popular search phrase will bring a massive response in visitor numbers, enquiries and sales. All this for £100 per month, too good to be true?
because it’s paying to be there and Google’s not seeing any of the money. Will Google sit by and let this
Anyone who has paid for one of these services will know that it just isn’t that simple, and, if results are achieved, it is more through luck than judgement. The resultant business model of adding new clients faster than existing ones leave, forces the SEO companies into yet more telesales - drawing resources away from any form of service development.
In some ways it is fortunate that typical SEO offerings do not work because the consequences of success can cost a great deal more than £100 per month. Let us imagine that by using a cunning combination of techniques, an SEO company manages to persuade Google that your site is the best example of its type in your sector for a range of popular phrases. The visitors flock in, the phone starts ringing, orders pile up, more staff are needed, higher stock levels, bigger offices - your company is going from strength to strength, fantastic! Then Google notices that sites, yours included, have top ranks as a result of SEO rather than Google’s measure of quality. They change their way of ranking sites to fix the problem and… visitor levels plummet, the phone goes quiet but the stock, staff and offices are still there.
This isn’t a fictional notion conjured up to make a point. Google regularly updates its algorithm (the calculation by which it decides on the rank of pages) and has done since it started. The primary reasons for these updates are to ensure that the ‘best’ sites float to the top and those trying to gain unjustified SEO advantages sink to the bottom.
Of course, SEO is not all bad - it’s just that many online marketing companies succumb to the temptation to abuse it. SEO can be at its most effective when seen as a technique that presents your information as effectively to search engines as it does to people. Take a look at our article "What does Google want?" for more information on this subject.
If you are contacted by a company that talks about SEO but puts the emphasis firmly on content development and the removal of anything that hinders search engines, it’s worth continuing the conversation. If not, then you’re best off putting the phone down – it may not just be your time that’s wasted.
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