21 Signs A SEO Company Is Bad At SEO

Following on from our Best SEO Companies series, I thought it appropriate to talk about how you can spot a bad SEO company.

1. The SEO company contacted you via email, phone or mailer despite their supposed skills with search engine optimisation!
2. The SEO company offers “instant” or “quick” results. Above board SEO takes time. One caveat would be in instances where your website already has an extensive link profile in comparison to the competition, but poor onpage SEO. In these rare cases some ranking improvement can be achieved quickly. In the vast majority of cases SEO campaigns often take many months.
3. All the SEO company talks about is keyword integration, keyword density and inserting keywords into meta tags. Keyword stuffing worked well a decade ago, there is a lot more to SEO these days.
4. They avoid the topic of link building (or worse still don’t offer any link building within their packages). Building links is where SEO’s earn their worth.
5. Their link building campaign is just directory submissions and trading links with hundreds of irrelevant sites. These sorts of links aren’t of great value in the eyes of Google.
6. The SEO company tries to bamboozle you with statements like “we’ll submit your site to over 1000 search engines!”  The vast majority of your search engine traffic will come from a handful search engines which have probably already indexed making search engine submission redundant.
7. The SEO firm always talks top 10 and tries to impress you with the idea of being ranked in the top 10 for three word phrases – Read Google CTR – A good SEO firms will compile keyword reports and will work with you to select keywords  to target based on a combination of value, potential traffic and present competition, and should be aiming to rank as high as possible (hopefully first).
8. The SEO firm guarantees everything unconditionally. At the end of the day Google is an entity unto itself. So no one can honestly guarantee anything and when they do they often are just guaranteeing worthless results.
9. SEO firms that talk about “Google PageRank” too much or make promises about improving your PageRank. The reality is PageRank is trivial when compare to achieving good rankings. That should be the focus of the SEO firm.
10. They don’t think anything other than SEO is worth investing in. SEO is just the first piece (albeit a big piece) of an online marketing strategy. Quality SEO firms will be willing to discuss other aspects of internet marketing such as conversion optimisation (great when used in conjunction with good SEO) and complementary marketing campaigns like PPC, Social Media and Email Marketing; even if they don’t offer those services themselves.
11. Many SEO firms want large retainers for work already completed. Make sure if you are paying a retainer that they are still continuing to work and develop your SEO campaign (ie continued link building, content development, new keyword phrase optimisation etc).
12. The SEO firm doesn’t have a proven track record or isn’t forth coming with their previous client portfolio that shows current top 1 rankings for valuable two word phrases.
13. They are unwilling to explain how they SEO sites. SEO isn’t rocket science, so they should be able to explain it to you in layman’s terms. Those that aren’t willing might be hiding their black hat SEO strategies or the fact that they don’t know anything about SEO.
14. The SEO company implies that you won’t have to change at least some of the content on your site, add additional content or that the content on your site isn’t important in maximising the benefits of SEO. Content is what Google sends people to you site for – it’s an important part of any SEO strategy.
15. The SEO firm say it’s only important to optimise your homepage. Whilst the homepage optimisation often proves to be the most fruitful that doesn’t mean employing good SEO on the rest of your site won’t achieve a good ROI.
16. The SEO company implies there are no risks to SEO. Search engines do apply penalties to sites and even deindex sites that attempt to game their ranking systems. Whilst the search engines are advocates of website owners using good SEO practices, however there are grey areas when it comes to SEO.
17. The SEO firm doesn’t rank well in major search engines for their own company name. Seems crazy but there are SEO consultants out there that don’t even rank in the search engines themselves. I often suggest when looking for a local SEO that simply searching for “SEO Location” is a great place to start. So for example if you live in Sydney search for “SEO Sydney” and look at the top 10 ORGANIC results.
18. People within the SEO company don’t participate in the SEO community. The search engines like Google are refining their algorithm all the time and most good SEO’s will have at least some involvement in SEO/webmaster communities to some degree.
19. They want to charge per keyword. Whilst this wouldn’t instantly imply someone was a bad SEO, but the vast majority of good SEO companies just don’t operate like this.
20. The SEO company says they can achieve good rankings irrespective of the competition. Competing for search engine rankings is pure competition. At the end of the day only one site can rank first for a search term, and if there are millions of sites competing for that term then ranking for it is going to be difficult to achieve.
21. They contacted you. Once again the point of SEO is to get people to visit your site and contact you. There is also a huge shortage of “good” SEO services out there and the SEO’s worth hiring aren’t out there scouting for more business.