7 SEO Services You Should Avoid Like The Plague

If you own or operate a website and you actually are looking to make money from that website, you need to engage in a search engine optimization campaign. If you aren’t already, you needed to start engaging in such a campaign yesterday, but it’s also never too late.

What if you have never engaged in such a campaign before though? You might be thinking

That’s okay. Frankly, even for many SEO veterans, the beginning of a new campaign can be intimidating, despite having the blueprint of past experience. There’s a lot that goes into an SEO strategy, and if you’ve never done anything similar to it, it’s not uncommon to feel a paralysis of indecision and confusion.

This is especially true if you’ve decided that you are going to hire an outside SEO service, and not go in-house.

When you hire outside help for something you’re not completely familiar with, you don’t know how to distinguish red flags from normal selling points. There may be a couple of phrases and pitches that sound incredibly appealing, but are actually indicators that you are going to spend a lot of money for poor, potentially even counterproductive work.

And unfortunately, while there are many, many honest actors in the SEO space who are eager to further their respective clients’ interest with integrity and transparency, there are also too many out there who sully the good name for the rest.

That’s why I’m here to help. If you’re new to SEO and you can’t decipher the good from the bad, here are a few characteristics of a bad SEO agency that should set off alarms in your head.

1. Lack of Specialization

I believe that agencies that specialize in one or two areas of SEO – such as content creation, link building, site audits, content optimization, technical SEO, or are niche-focused – are going to provide greater returns for their clients than SEO agencies that do it all.

When you’re an expert in everything, you’re actually an expert in nothing. And these sorts of full-service agencies will often end up stretching themselves too thin. I don’t think it’s done in bad faith and there are certainly exceptions, so “red flag” might be too strong of a term, but it’s something to be mindful of when hiring SEO services.

2. Archaic Focus

SEO changes really rapidly. The best practices of 2015 are not the best practices of today (not all of them, anyway). Unfortunately, some SEO agencies get really good at what they do, but as things change they can’t adapt, and the thing they were good at is either mostly or wholly irrelevant. Some agencies got really good at submitting content to article directories: that’s something that won’t work out well for you today. 

And if an agency is leading their pitch with stuff like H1s and meta descriptions, that’s an agency with an old way of thinking. This isn’t to say that H1s and meta descriptions are something you should ignore. They are, of course, very important but won’t get you very far in a vacuum and should hardly be the point of emphasis in an SEO sales pitch.

Here’s a shortlist of more egregious terms that are definite red flags:

• Web 2.0’s
• Blog commenting
• Tier 2 links
• Content spinning
• Article submissions

3. Broken English Pitches

There are plenty of good faith, amazing SEOs out there internationally. Don’t hire the ones who send you emails in broken English out of the blue, however. Anyone who has ever registered a domain gets a dozen such pitches almost instantly. 

The lack of scrutiny in prospecting for clients is a red flag. If they’re trying to pitch American clients and don’t take the care to write their pitches in the language their potential customers speak, that’s an instant sign of carelessness.

Really, any kind of cold SEO pitch, whether it’s via email, call, or something else, should be treated with skepticism, in my opinion.

4. Lack of Transparency

I once talked to a potential client about his previous experience with SEO. He told me hired an agency a year before, and in that year he never saw a single report. It took me a few minutes to successfully pick my jaw up from the floor.

This is a particularly extreme example, but there are agencies that don’t value transparency in their work. And typically, that means they’re probably engaged in some shady practices that could do you harm in the long run. You should be able to see all the work you are paying for.

Agencies vary in how often they report, but monthly is usually the standard. Make sure to ask questions about reporting frequency and access to their platforms when looking around. The more transparency, the more likely you have found an SEO agency that’s confident in its processes. 

5. Link Schemes

There are the aforementioned archaic practices, and then there are outright schemes. There is a difference. The former are practices that might not earn you a manual penalty from Google, but aren’t likely to do much to bolster your efforts either. Schemes are, well, schemes, and can ultimately do a lot of harm to your website, even if there are short term benefits. 

The schemes I’m talking about usually involve blog networks. There are many SEOs who will set up a network of sites under their own control in order to get them to link to each other, thereby hoping to get search engines to recognize these links as valuable links. They’re not. Sometimes these links will come in the form of ‘rentals’ or ‘exchanges’ as well.

You want to hire an SEO service that does link building the right, white hat way, otherwise, you could be in for a world of trouble. 

6. Too Many Promises

As someone who sells link building services, let me tell you that I envy other people who sell products and services which really do produce guaranteed results. It must be nice for them, but it’s not the reality of SEO services.

There’s an old saying in SEO: “It depends.”

We say it a lot. It’s the answer to many, if not most of the questions we receive. That’s because in SEO that’s the truth. It depends. There are almost no guarantees. 

The only thing you can really guarantee is the time and effort you will invest. So if you see ads that promise a certain amount of traffic or a certain amount of keywords to rank on the first page, move on to your next contact.

7. Bad Website and Content

You won’t see this too often (even the worst actors know that they have to try to put up a decent facade), but every so often you’ll come across a website selling SEO services that are suboptimal. It could have bad UX, the design might look it’s from the 90s, there may be little-to-no content, etc. 

The point is that while website design and SEO aren’t the same thing, it’s a display of a lack of carelessness that is uninspiring. Would you buy a new car from a car salesman who drove in with a car with a smashed-up bumper and scratches all over? Probably not.

And it’s not just the design of the website; look at the website’s content, as well. An agency that is actually selling valuable SEO services should feature some form of non-promotional content that highlights SEO information (tips, best practices, etc.), either on their own site or even on other off-site SEO publications.

If all the content you’re finding is low on the SEO information, but high on the sales pitches, that’s a red flag. An SEO agency should be able to write about SEO effectively without selling themselves. If they can’t do that, that typically means they don’t really know what they’re doing.

Conclusion

When looking to hire an SEO service, some of these red flags are harder to recognize than others. Some of them are going to be clear from the advertising (avoid companies that overuse the word “guaranteed” in their copywriting), while other signs are only going to be recognized through multiple sales calls. 

Be sure to ask as many questions as possible when you’re looking around for an SEO. Some of your questions may feel like “stupid” questions, but they actually might go a long way in terms of recognizing who you are potentially about to hire.