Thursday, July 02, 2009
Steve Johnson
I just had an SEO company cold call me on the phone this afternoon, trying to sell me their SEO service. Are times so bad for the SEOs that they have to resort to cold calling for prospects?
I thought Congress passed a law that made it illegal to conduct commercial phone solicitation? The "Do Not Call Registry"? I added my phone number to that.
If you've followed this blog, you'll know that my view of SEO companies is rather low. I know there are some ethical ones out there, but from what I can see, the bulk of them, maybe 99%, are snake oil salesmen, promising to cure your Google ailments, but only taking your money and not improving your traffic flow.
All of them publish blogs that disseminate unsubstantiated SEO tips for the purpose of making themselves sound authoritative, hoping to lure in potential customers. That information goes around the Internet and creates a lot of confusion, making SEO sound far more complicated than it really is.
Now that at least one SEO company is cold calling publishers on the phone, it lowers my respect for SEOs even more.
Here's how the conversation went with this SEO company...
SEO: Hello Mr. Johnson, I'm looking for the owner of Biker News Online.
Me: That's us.
SEO: We identified several keywords and phrases that your website should be optimized for, and your website is not ranking high for these words at all. Are you aware of that?
Me: I think you identified the wrong keywords. We identified specific keywords that will bring in specific audiences, and you'll find that we actually do rank very high for those.
SEO: Ok, I see. But the keywords we've identified are a part of your target audience...
Me: (breaking in), But I don't think you understand the target audience we're going after.
SEO: Well, that's what I want to talk to you about. We can run an analysis on your website to show you what keywords target which audiences, and how your website ranks with those keywords. Then we submit your site to various directories that match that audience...
Me: (breaking in) Well that doesn't sound like anything I need to be involved in, so I welcome you to analyze my website, and submit it to anyplace you'd like. You don't need me to do that.
SEO: Well actually, there is a fee of $9.95...
Me: (breaking in) Well I'm not interested in paying any money.
SEO: Ok, that's what I thought.
So be prepared all you publishers and affiliate marketers. Here come the SEO cold callers. ✓
Posted in 
1 Response to "SEO Companies Resorting to Cold Calling"
I have to agree with you totally. However most of the spam I get comes from a California based company via email saying how they can improve my rankings.
I replied 23 times (by the way the emails were from different people all from the same company) and eventually someone replied. He was not happy to find out I do SEO for myself. If they had bothered to check, instead of just using lists we could have saved each other a lot of time.
My response now is to attack their main term (will do this later in the week) and show them how to do it properly!
The other bug I hate is when they call to say Google only shows you as having 5 links; if they know anything about SEO, they will know Google do not display the full number of links. What they are doing is actually coning people to think they need optimization.
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.