Why Would Someone Think SEO Is a Scam!

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Vitaliy and I was lucky enough to get an awesome position at nvision solutions. Before starting this job I had been working for a company that primarily focused on the number of clients we had over the quality of work that was being provided to them. This is what most agencies do nowadays because this was a business model that has been proven successful up until Google released some updates. The quality of work had to be increased and with quality also comes a higher expense. The issue is that agencies are having all these clients that have been paying a low amount with good results before and now getting no results. The clients don’t want to spend more money and the agency is having a hard time adapting to a new business model. I have learned a lot about what it takes to provide high-quality traffic, content, strategy, and ideas to grow businesses in the digital world from various research online and reading the Google Webmaster Tools guidelines. From the time I had started working in the digital marketing field, I got to speak to a lot of business owners from various niches and industries. A lot of the times I come across people telling me that they fully believe that SEO and online marketing, in general, is a SCAM.

Why Would Someone Think SEO Is a Scam?

Here is a great article to read about what business owners believe some of the obstacles to doing Digital Marketing are, Marketing Profs

Obstacles

• The lack of strategy
• content creation
• increasing conversion rates
• search engine optimization/Marketing

These were rated as some of the issues people are having nowadays. We need to ask ourselves:

WHY IS THIS?!

There are a few simple answers to this question which I am going to cover in this post.

SEO turned into a whole marketing solution

SEO isn’t just about building more links than your competitor as Patrick mentioned in his previous post. SEO is changing rapidly and as print is slowly going out of business, digital marketing is becoming the go-to solution for people looking to drive business. SEO used to be about providing quantity vs. quality which yielded high results. The issue with that was that searchers were misled into information that they did not want to see on the SERPs.

I remember being interested in hypnosis and the only thing that I would find on the first page of Google was sales pages that lead you to the bottom of the page asking to buy an eBook for JUST $49.99 instead of $200.00. Thankfully Google and other big name search engines caught on to this trend and started coming out with algorithmic updates that changed the game as we know it. Googles goal is to find the most relevant piece of information to what the user is searching for. With that said a lot of low budget SEO work was hurting businesses and people started getting frustrated. Most of the big SEO agencies are having a hard time adjusting their services to be quality because all the clients they have been used to paying $300-$500 a month and getting 0 results. With so many people being misled and paying for what they are getting, people start thinking that SEO is a scam and that they don’t need it.

The article I posted above proves my point even further and shows that people are having trouble with the above obstacle list because:

1. They don’t know how to do it themselves
2. They can’t find the right company to do this for them (because there aren’t too many real quality solutions)
3. They believe that it’s a scam and don’t want to spend the money

I have seen this trend from clients with the above 3 points. Leading to the closure of their business or losing on a lot of potential business. They could be getting from real quality digital marketing solutions. People used to spend A LOT of money on yellow pages. Yet when it comes to the internet (which is something they don’t quite understand). They don’t want to spend the money and understandably don’t understand why they should spend a lot of money. When they can go and spend $300 a month for someone making them false promises.

The Good Wine Story – Why People Are Struggling to Find The Right SEO Company

There was once a guy who made a lot of money one day. He decided that he wants to go to a restaurant and order the most expensive wine bottle they had. He went to a really high-end restaurant and the server asked him if he would like to have a glass of wine. In the meantime, while they are preparing the bottle for him. The guy said Okay bring me a glass of the second best wine you got. He drinks the glass, a server comes back and asks if he would like another one. He says “sure bring me the third best glass of wine you got” and he drinks his wine. The same thing happens until he finishes 5 glasses of wine. This guy is pretty lightweight and he ends up waking up at home not remembering what happened, and not remembering drinking the very expensive bottle. He gets angry and thought the server cheated him. So he runs to the restaurant and asks the server where his bottle went. The server said “you got so drunk that when I gave you the bottle, you smashed it”. The server showed him the camera and indeed he was so drunk he smashed the bottle on the ground.

The moral of the story

Is that this guy went through all these glasses of wine. But by the time the good one came he was already drunk. At that time he was so drunk he didn’t care what the good wine tasted like. He wasn’t careful with it because he was already so drunk from the lower quality wine. This is exactly what is happening in the SEO world. People go through all the bad agencies providing low quality work at low or even high prices. People get too fed up to go and spend the right amount on a company providing quality work. There are many ways to find out if an agency provides quality SEO work. Check out this post by Patrick: 4 Tips On How To Choose An SEO Agency.

As a client.

You should educate yourself and do your research. Before hiring a digital marketing agency because you can end up going through a headache. We here at nvision know how to do quality SEO work and we know how to drive quality traffic to your website. We don’t just say we do, WE HAVE THE PROOF. If you would like to speak to someone who understands the technicality of SEO. But can also translate it into a language that you understand. Make a quality strategic plan for your website and implement it. Than nvision is the solution for you!