Beware of Search Engine Optimization Companies Charging a Flat Monthly Fee
- June 04, 2012
- Bradley Taylor
written by Brad Taylor
In the last few years we have noticed companies that offer to run Internet marketing campaigns for a flat monthly fee. They say that they will achieve all of these great things online for your website. They usually charge $99 a month or some such amount.
I am here to tell you that after taking over websites for many of this type of companies former customers that they do very little for that fee. Some of them did absolutely nothing. And others did much more harm than they did good.
I am writing this article in hopes that people see it and know the truth about these monthly “Search Engine Optimization Companies”. I want to break down what happens in an outline format.
I. You Get What You Pay For
A. How much work will a company actually do for $99? Very little. Just like with any other job on earth, you get the amount of effort out of somebody that you pay them for.
B. SEO isn’t a trick. It isn’t hocus pocus. It simply consists of hiring somebody that knows what they are doing to put in the hours to get it done. What are these things?
1. Clean Code and Good Site Structure
2. Unique and abundant industry specific content
II. More Harm than Good
A. A great deal of these type of companies use automated submit programs. These look like spam and technically are spam to a complex system like Google. Your ranking will be hurt by this.
B. Many of these companies who actually add content will add content that is also posted elsewhere. This is referred to as “duplicate content” and Google tends to punish websites that use it.
C. Many times an automated feed is used to publish content to a website. This is a trick used to deceive the website owner, not to actually build quality content. This also is a punishable offense by search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
I am not in the business of criticizing other companies. But instead I would like to inform people of a fraud that may be perpetrated upon them. The end result is not just being out whatever money that was paid to these companies but your website may actually be hurt for a very long time by their careless efforts.
The only time I have a monthly fee charge available for SEO is when we have a solid amount of work that needs to be done for a customers site over a period of time and they prefer to pay it off monthly as opposed to all at once. A good example is a client who signs up with Olympus web needing extensive code fixes in their existing site, heavy inbound link campaign and wants a solid fifty content article addition as well. We will quote the price on this deal and spread out the payments monthly as the work is being done.
