The search engine optimizers are in your e-mail box, they’re on your voicemail, and they’re showing up in your lobby asking for a “quick meeting.”
These are the people who explain that your site can easily start showing up at the top of the search rankings on Google and Bing.
Some of them must be decent, honest people who know what they’re talking about. I just haven’t met one of the good ones yet.
The SEOs, as they are called, I’ve met have all been full of crap. They talk a great game, and they make big promises. They don’t deliver in the long haul.
SEO Results Are Usually Temporary
Some of what they do works. Your site goes up in rank and starts appearing at the top of the search engine results pages.
Eventually, invariably, Google and the other search engines catch up with the techniques used by the SEOs and your rank drops. In fact, you usually end up ranking worse than you did before paying the SEOs.
Historically, the SEOs have done things like built spammy links on other sites, paid for links, and attempted to make a site seem popular and highly regarded when it is neither popular nor highly regarded.
Don’t Wind Up in Google Purgatory
Google updates its algorithms constantly in an effort to give its searches excellent results. The search engine has recently rolled out some big updates, and it’ll keep improving its system week after week. With each improvement, Google pushes the good sites up in the rankings and drops the low-quality sites using spammy SEO techniques further down.
Sometimes, and this happens more often now than ever before, Google does more than lower the rankings of the poor quality sites. Google will actually penalize and punish the sites attempting to manipulate the rankings. Those sites will be condemned to Google purgatory. They’ll have to do some apologizing and take corrective action before they’ll be allowed to rejoin the rest of us on Google.
Every law firm I know that has been punished by Google has been put in that position by an aggressive search engine optimizer. In every case, the SEO promised to improve the rank of the law firm. Things haven’t always worked out as promised.
What Should You Do When the SEOs Call?
- Hang up. Don’t hire one. There may be some great SEOs out there, but you’ll have a tough time finding a good one, and you won’t know whom you can trust. My policy is to stay away from them entirely. Plenty of them are still selling the exact services that have resulted in penalties.
- Build a website that’s helpful to your visitors. Give them what they need. Build a site that’s popular and highly regarded because it’s worthy of being visited. Provide information, tools, and helpful material for your visitors. Google is good at what it does, and it’ll figure out that you belong at the top of the rankings.
Without an SEO and with a useful site, you’ll rank well. Visitors will come to your site. You’ll end up with more clients and, having saved the dollars you would have paid to the SEO, more money.
