Rogue SEO Consultants

Over the last few months my biggest request for information has been based around businesses who pay for their SEO consultancy and who want a second opinion on the job done.

To be honest it is hard to be completely objective since the first impulse is to analyse the SEO work and then start to pull apart the mistakes rather than look for progress. there are some instances where a website may not have the functionality to provide on page SEO improvements and in other examples there may not be full disclosure on the part of the person requesting the consultancy.

I like to think I get a good balance, there are times when I have savaged an SEO agency for thier shoddy consultancy and times wher I have named and shamed in forums when it is a blatant case of ripping off people.

In the current climate SEO budgets are created from hard pressed marketing budgets and many SME companies simply cannot afford to lose their money with no ROI. I have no issues with pay for performance seo consultancy but people who are in the ripoff business will not want results based fees, any SEO agency who sidesteps that as a proposal should be given a wide berth.

That said of course there has to be some structure because no agency should have to bear the brunt of fixed costs with the risk of a company pulling the consultancy fee just as success blossoms. I had this in the life insurance industry whereby we worked on a smaller aggregator and got their listing in the top 5 for the term ‘Life Insurance’ only to find they refused to pay the performance fee of 5k for each month they were in the top 5.

Of course our world is a grey/black world and it did not take much work on my part to ensure they would not stay there but then why should they. This company made a lot of money in the four weeks they enjoyed position 3 and left me out of pocket.

Does that mean as a consultant I would shy away from PFP? No it just means that I set it up differently, the vast majority of businesses looking for SEO will be happy to pay for their success in search listings and for each one that goes bad there will be ten that enjoy long term relationships with their consultant.

Of course some agencies do a great job, some do as well as they can, this is usually evident and generally its the linking strategy that lets an SEO campaign down.

I will continue to offer assistance with this type of consultancy, it puts me at odds with a section of the SEO vendor industry but what the hell, at the end of the day I am here for businesses to benefit from their hard won marketing budgets not to play cuddles with the SEO community.