The more I research my follow web professionals, the more upset I’m becoming. Small business owners everywhere are getting ripped off by too many of these companies. They are playing into your fear and ignorance. Frankly, it sickens me. Here are some of the top things I’m seeing.
- They overcharge for things.
I know a company here in Dayton that charges $50 a month for web hosting. I own around 100 websites and I’m paying $10 a month TOTAL through HostGator. Ridiculous! - They simply don’t care about your success.
A buddy of mine in the home improvement industry showed me his site over the weekend. The very large out of state design company made no effort whatsoever to even get “Dayton” or “Ohio” into his site title. Takes a whole 2 minutes to add this. He had no idea that he was losing all that traffic and potential rankings. Sloppy, sloppy sloppy! - They lock people into ridiculous contracts
I guess they have to so when you find out the truth you can’t leave! - They register your domain name under their company’s GoDaddy account and won’t give it back
That way you can’t leave! - They make promises that are impossible to fulfill
I know of an out of state SEO company that advertises getting someone ranked #1 for 400 keywords for $150. First of all, to get ranked for that many words, you would need to be a major site like Amazon or Ebay. Secondly, in the fine print, they actually just sell a report to get you ranked for one of those keywords. Big whoop. We give away a better report for free that will show you how to get ranked for 5 keywords! - They bait and switch on pricing
They will advertise something dirt cheap on the site and then kill you with add ons. - They use scammy black hat techniques to get you ranked
I know of a web design company in Middletown that still uses the “hidden text trick”. This basically involves putting a bunch of text in white at the very bottom of the page to fool Google. The search engines caught on to this about 10 years ago and now it can get you into major trouble. - They just don’t know what they are doing
I know of a company here in Dayton that is a “pay per click Google Adwords consultant” but its pretty obvious from their own ppc ads that they aren’t even using simple techniques like Ad Groups to show relevant keyword targeted ads correctly.
I’m certainly not saying that everyone does these things. Like any industry, there are good and bad players out there. I just wanted to expose the things that are out there so you can plan accordingly.
Carlos was able to affordably transform my web site from "just being there" to getting me to the top of important search engines in just a couple of weeks. My leads have improved dramatically!!
