Getting a little tired of SEO firms/consultants

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dogfighter

dogfighter

Irish Prick
May 21, 2007
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After working with a number of SEO consultants and firms during my career, reading a lot of discussions/blogs, and reviewing many a proposal for SEO services, I have to say I'm getting tired of a lot of these fuckers. Starting to seem like a lot of self-important snake oil salesmen flaunting how much they matter online, even though they're insignificant to the rest of the world.

1. Nobody builds links.

When I get a proposal for SEO services, the first thing I do is print it out and have my assistant highlight every paragraph that contains the word "link". When I read those paragraphs, what do I see? Directory submissions, article marketing, reciprocal link pages, etc etc etc. The world is full of Assistant Publicists, Junior Salespeople and Stock Sales Trainees who cold-call and pitch their way to a paycheck.

So if I (and a lot of other tooth-cutting yuppies) could do that shit in my early 20's for $26k/year in New York City, why can't you manage it at $100/hr?

2. Reports, analysis, recommendations.

How many pages does it take to bury me in bullshit? "We conduct extensive keyword research and blah blah blah make recommendations for blah blah blah potential link targets blah blah blah competitors' rankings and keywords ..."

So all that sounds to me like maybe 5-6 hours of work for a medium-high competition niche or industry. Now explain to me why you've budgeted two months for this in your proposal?

If you're actually running a business and you don't know what keywords people use to describe or find your product/service, fucking drown yourself in a bucket of AIDS.

3. The business of excuses.

I was just reading a thread on High Rankings forum and there was a link to a Search Engine Land post that I hadn't seen before:

5 Reasons Why Rankings Are A Poor Measure Of Success

I almost swallowed my tongue when I saw that. Now these dime-a-dozen SEO "consultants" are falling over themselves to push this agenda... that search engine rankings... are not a good measure of a search engine optimizer.

It's like George Carlin said about Catholics... when something goes right, praise god. When something goes wrong, the lord works in mysterious ways!

Also doesn't help that I know from personal experience that a lot of these big names have never actually handled a site in their life, and I know several others who are blatant scam artists.

To those who are considering hiring an SEO consultant, be fuckin wary. Don't hire some washout programmer to do your marketing, because most of these bozos are just computer science majors who were out of a job after the bubble burst. If you don't understand the proposal at least as well as the person who wrote it, find someone who does and ask them. And INSIST on being BCC'ed on every outbound link request made on your site's behalf. Don't let some punk tell you that they sent out a whole bunch of link requests just yesterday if you can't see proof.

</rant>
 


Quality sites have quality content which acquire links naturally.

Rather than outsourcing "SEO" to some consultancy, hire a web manager to make sure that you're building a website which gives people a reason to come back. That's far more valuable than any report some SEO consultant can give you.
 
As someone who ocassionally freelances as an SEO, I have to agree with you. About 80% of SEO consultants are charlatans who make use of lofty language to confuse people. Having said that:

The reason why most people will not actually build links and relationships for you is because the assignment is temporary. Proper SEO takes years, and they know they will not be around. Also, when you enter a content/link sharing relationship with another webmaster, you need the approval of the client. This takes time, multiple meetings and other wastes of time that can be avoided by just not building links properly. Dealing with clients is so much BS that the really good SEOs work exclusively on their own projects.

As for "rankings not being a good indicator of SEO" - of course that sounds ridiculous. But I sometimes have to support this statement, because its really not my fault if Google decides to change its algorithm, or place some sort of mysetry sandbox around the client's site. I don't want the client pushing me to revise the SEO and redo it without any extra payment. That's why I put "no guarantee of results" clauses in my contracts. Also, if the client wants to see results, he needs to be involved. I do SEO for small businesses, and the owner can really spare the time to post on craigslist/a forum/hubpages once a week. It is deeply disappointing for me to see that I optimized a site well, but the owner neglects it and it doesn't reach its potential.
 
zany zoroaster said:
It is deeply disappointing for me to see that I optimized a site well, but the owner neglects it and it doesn't reach its potential.
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Well your contract needs to reflect YOU doing that work for a monthly retainer. The small business guy probably doesn't have time to deal with it -- or doesn't see the ROI.

Every single SEO client (small business) we take on is billed for 30 minutes of work a month for 2 years after the balloon payment in the beginning months.

It lets us spend a few minutes a week making sure they are still ranking, get another link, have a hubpage updated - whatever is needed to keep them on top.

You need a clause in your contract about the probability that rankings aren't permanent and might need a boost of extra work in the future to stay ranking well.... and you deserve payment to do it.

(we do mostly local seo -- but national seo is different and really requires constant work - so you should bid accordingly.)

We haven't lost a client yet because of the monthly charges - I think it actually helps because they KNOW they don't have time to do piddley stuff like hubpages, or directory submissions.
 
I believe the best success comes from an approach better dubbed "Web Marketing" of which SEO is only a small part. Directory submission, article submission and all that jazz is nothing more than a commodity. But what drives your websites' marketing strategy?

If "SEO's" fail to approach consulting in this manner, I think they should just give up, PM Kamesh and ask if they can white label his services.
 
dogfighter said:
To those who are considering hiring an SEO consultant, be fuckin wary. Don't hire some washout programmer to do your marketing,
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Thankfully you ended up with that. One of my clients is a national firm, everyone knows their brand but not for the right reasons. They don't need link-building (at least not in the traditional sense) what they need is someone to clean up their brand-name related searches. No amount of analysis or even link-building alone is going to make that happen.

They're looking to bring someone on in-house (they wanted me but I'm too expensive) so they've asked me to review their applicants for a good grasp of web marketing concepts. I've seen three types so far:

1. Developers/designers who think they know SEO because they managed to get a flash site indexed (woo-hoo). Ask them about link building and they tell you about RSS feeds.

2. Direct marketers who just assume they can do anything with "marketing" in the title. They make some really pretty landing pages, and then fuck up their PPC setup and end up paying $1,000s per lead.

3. Sales-BS artists. Greasy guys looking to get out of their car salesman job. Oh, you were the internet manager for Dodge, eh? Ever do anything besides eBay? Didn't think so.

I believe there are very few people who actually grasp SEO on a level that makes them competitive in any situation. Most people find one thing that works and cling to it like a drowning rat to piece of wood.

In short, a good SEO is like a good lawyer or doctor: if they need your business, you don't want to work with them.
 
I think that companies who actually care about building a long-term web presence are going to bring operations in-house more and more, and maybe hire a consultant or two to help them find qualified candidates and build a team.

They'll need to weed through the 15 year olds billing themselves as some made-up title, fuckin "social media marketing expert". Some kid with braces who can't vote, shoot, drink or drive is suddenly an internet marketing pro because he knows how to use Digg. You look at the avatars and "about me" photos for some of these little pricks, it's like a daycare center. Pronoun-happy motherfuckers talking about "our approach" and "we aim"... just stop it! It's great that you can get a wireless signal from your treehouse, but your dad and your teddybear don't qualify as employees.
 
There are a lot of scammy bullshit ones. That said, I know of several who work their ass off on sites. and I don't mean submitting articles. Real link building. They're not afraid of paid links, not a stranger to good link bait.
 
dogfighter said:
They'll need to weed through the 15 year olds billing themselves as some made-up title, fuckin "social media marketing expert". Some kid with braces who can't vote, shoot, drink or drive is suddenly an internet marketing pro because he knows how to use Digg. You look at the avatars and "about me" photos for some of these little pricks, it's like a daycare center. Pronoun-happy motherfuckers talking about "our approach" and "we aim"... just stop it! It's great that you can get a wireless signal from your treehouse, but your dad and your teddybear don't qualify as employees.
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but if they can get consistant homepage diggs, who really gives a fuck who they are...
 
nachoninja said:
but if they can get consistant homepage diggs, who really gives a fuck who they are...
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I wouldn't hire someone based solely on their ability to frontpage Digg stories.

In a way, I agree: I don't give a fuck who they are because I'd just contract them, wouldn't ever hire them for anything long-term as Digg will be going the way in a few years anyhow.
 
All right, I'm chunking some shit up against the wall here, lets see what sticks.

dogfighter said:
Don't hire some washout programmer to do your marketing
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I'll take a programmer who can automatically build links over most of the SEO "experts" any day of the week. I'd bet a buck that spammed guestbook links are worth as much a "professional directory submissions". That said, I would get much more creative with what a programmer can do to help than guest books. Potential is basically limitless.

nachoninja said:
but if they can get consistant homepage diggs, who really gives a fuck who they are...
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word! even if they are just kind of good they are still better than most pro SEOs.

SniperRyan said:
I wouldn't hire someone based solely on their ability to frontpage Digg stories.
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This is linkbaiting in it's purist form and you are a fool if you don't want this person on board. If digg goes away, something else will emerge in the social marketplace. These people will follow the crowd to the next big thing and end up doing quite well there.


Furthermore, I think it is downright irresponsible for someone to want to outsource 100% of their online promotion. It's your company (site, whatever) and you know your business much better than anyone else.

If you want it to succeed, roll up your sleeves and get to work. Lead your online marketing instead of relying on someone else. If not, you are really better off just dropping $100 for someone to optimize your title tags and rely on links from the chamber, BBB & yellow pages than to expect someone to write articles or whatever to push you to the top.
 
erect said:
This is linkbaiting in it's purist form and you are a fool if you don't want this person on board.
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All I'm saying is that from a in-house perspective I wouldn't hire anyone who just does social link-building.

I agree that business owners should get more involved with their web marketing, but CEOs need someone who translates business goals into web marketing strategy, and re-translates things like backlink counts, traffic, rankings and cost-per-lead back into real metrics for their business.

Digg stories, link-placements, buying links, article writing... they're all tools under the category of web marketing. Too many firms hire a person who does one thing well, when they need to hire someone who understands what these tools can do and when is appropriate to use them, and can then express that usage in meaningful data. They don't need to know how to do everything, just when to do everything.

Very few companies now have an in-house, dedicated SEO person (and by 'few' I mean relative to say, those with direct mail marketers), and it's because someone so multi-talented to be able to see synergies between your business model and Google's might as well be their own CEO.

And so here we are. :rasta:
 
I don't disagree with anything you said ... a CEO of a fortune 500 is not exactly the person I was speaking about. I was actually under the impression that the services dogfighter was whining about was out of house labor .. subcontractors or whatever. Perhaps I missed that point. I'll reread after the buzz wears off.

more shit for the wall :::: isn't it odd that very few companies have in house internet marketers? I mean, they'll pay some chap $75,000 / year to cold call random businesses but they won't pay someone the same for a 24/7 salesman (through search). Fatal business mistake in my opinion.

Also, the in-house SEOs of the few usually double as a developer/graphic artist/hardware repair guy/M$ office troubleshooter. No wonder all of the competent ones are hanging out here @ wf giving our old boss the finger ,,|,_
 
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John said:
I get about 20+ emails every day from seo firms offering me services for my sites, it's a pain in the ass.
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Is it in regards to a particular one of your sites that shows up on the first few listings in Google in the first place?

A friend of mine ran an online comic shop in Aus for a while (sold the business about 3 years ago) and was consistently in the top 5 of the BigPond/Sensis, Google and NineMSN searches during that period for the terms revolving around buying comics.
He'd get emails daily from people offering to "improve" his search rating...
 
If you think that's bad, we have it completely arse backwards in the UK.

In my local area the main selling points are submitting your site to search engines - which didn't even work in 1998, never mind 2008.
 
Not to digress, but I'd just like to say that "fucking drown yourself in a bucket of AIDS" is my new favourite thing to say. I can't wait for the next telemarketer to call me, holy shit.


Frank
 
well.... yeah we're all a bunch of rip-off merchant clowns, naturally... but then so is pretty much everyone else. I have to pay through the nose for solicitors, accountants, dentists, plumbers... you name it someone wants to make a profit.

Dogfighter- looks like you've taken the trouble to work out the real value of SEO, shame most 'clients' don't bother. They just want 'SEO' because they heard it was good and everyone else has it. How many times when recommendations are made, the changes aren't implemented on the site and then the client wants to know why the 'magical' SEO hasn't worked.

How many times do I have to see businesses who decide to get a website, hire a monkey who makes the webpage look pretty in flash, java, ajax etc and then walk away... Have marketing departments that do not have anyone with half a rats ass clue what online marketing involves, but think that's OK because they came from a DM background and it's the same old shit but with the interweb... and think that DM is 'real' marketing not all this online crap...

But actually Dogfighter is right, the best thing a company can do is hire an SEO consultant to train your in-house team, give you advice on the initial technical problems / content issues and explain what constitutes a valuable link etc... and then let you handle that crap on-going internally. We do those kind of workshops for people and for me that's where you get value for money.
 
erect said:
I don't disagree with anything you said ... a CEO of a fortune 500 is not exactly the person I was speaking about. I was actually under the impression that the services dogfighter was whining about was out of house labor .. subcontractors or whatever. Perhaps I missed that point. I'll reread after the buzz wears off.
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I wasn't whining dickhead (pun intended). I'm talking about a large, possibly even majority, group of snake oil salesmen and fly-by-night pseudo experts who reflect poorly on all of us who work in internet marketing in one capacity or another. It's like that commercial for TheLadders.com -- "When you let everyone play, nobody wins".

If my tech stocks took a dive because too many deadbeats bought homes they couldn't afford to keep, then you'd better believe there's a correlation between these undertalented opportunists and the future of our industry. Don't be a NIMBY, this effects all of us.

erect said:
more shit for the wall :::: isn't it odd that very few companies have in house internet marketers? I mean, they'll pay some chap $75,000 / year to cold call random businesses but they won't pay someone the same for a 24/7 salesman (through search). Fatal business mistake in my opinion.

Also, the in-house SEOs of the few usually double as a developer/graphic artist/hardware repair guy/M$ office troubleshooter. No wonder all of the competent ones are hanging out here @ wf giving our old boss the finger ,,|,_
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You just wrote my life story. Got into internet marketing because my interest in the web made me a shoe-in for everything from email marketing to MS Office troubleshooter when I worked in traditional marketing and PR.

Now that I'm exclusively internet marketing, I double as a developer/graphic designer/legal council/IT guy -- just like you said. There's a survey, I don't know if it's from SEMPO or who, but it actually said that a really high percentage of in-house internet marketers spend a lot of their time doing these activities for their company.

And I really don't give a flying fuck about digg. If my company starts manufacturing mouse pads with pictures of Ron Paul cornholing Bill OReilly while installing Ubuntu linux on an iPhone, then I'll buy some front page stories. Every geek who figures out how to game some social news site with one uber-narrow demographic is not a social media expert.

I *LEGALLY* burnt a $10M online company to the ground in a weekend because they overstepped their boundaries, and it's not even a line item on my resume. So don't tell me you're a fucking "online reputation management expert" because you set up some Google alerts for your company name. You gonna tell me that Clickbooth couldn't afford the best "online reputation management expert" money could buy? Then how come Shady, WF, Sphinn and Skewism are all on the first page of Google for their brand? Beat me to death with the bullshit bat why don't you
 
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