Full of eastern promise?
We’ve got an in-house marketing team that looks after the SEO requirements for many of our customers. Anybody with an email address and a website however will have been bombarded with emails at some point from Indian (normally) marketing companies offering fixed price results. Normally these are of a slightly dubious nature and are easily dismissed, but what is actually on offer here?
SEO – fixed price results
This is the normal lure, and the first mistake that Indian SEO companies make when pitching to an even slightly savvy customer. The fundamental truth of search engine optimisation is that there are no guarantees with regards to results; something we’re extremely open with our customers about. Search engines such as Google shift their goal often and results change as often as the wind. You can make improvements to a site and its online marketing and normally see results, however the extent to which these translate into desired rankings can be unpredictable.
What’s the catch then?
Well this is where the dishonesty part comes in I’m afraid – once you’re in a contract with a foreign marketing company and paid your money, you might be in a contract for a year. The first and most likely result is unfortunately that you see no results and your money is gone. Most of the less reputable optimisation services work in this manner. The company promises the earth but just takes the money and disappears.
The dangers
There’s more to this though, there are other “bad neighbourhood” SEO firms that will attempt to gain results by creating huge amounts of link spam on their partner websites. The goal of this is to create lots of links on other sites in order to make your site appear more important to search engines, and perhaps rank higher.
This can be extremely risky. The huge amount of new links (often from heath, gambling, timeshare websites) can sometimes boost your site in the rankings and you may think you’ve got a great value SEO service. But these gains will be short term.
Google is king
Google is an all-seeing being, not only is it extremely good at working out when somebody is doing something unscrupulous to boost their rankings, but it also has a huge anti-spam department specifically tasked with removing and penalising sites that attempt to manipulate rankings.
Your list may rank for a few weeks, or even a few months. But sooner or later it will be penalised and you’ll find yourself pushed deep down the rankings, or even removed from the google index entirely. This can be disastrous and even be the undoing of an entire company
Our approach
The only way to do it properly is to play the long game – there are no short cuts. We’ll work with you to improve your site, obtain link partners naturally and increase the reputation of your site to get it ranking properly
Listings that take longer to accomplish are infinitely more long-lasting and robust.
Feel free to get in touch and talk to one of our in-house marketing experts – we’ll be happy to help.