Your SEO Company Will Make or Break You!
Am I being dramatic? I probably am a little bit. But it’s true that your Search Engine Optimisation CAN make or break your business online. Do it right and you will have as many qualified leads and sales as you want. We believe it is the most cost effective way to deliver customers to you who are ready to buy from you now. Do it wrong and best case scenario you just lose the money you spent on the service. Worst case will see you receive a penalty from Google that will see your site dropped from their results altogether. This is known as Google Hell! In between there are a myriad of different pitfalls and penalties dished up for breaches of Google’s terms of service.
These Day’s You Have to Do It Right!
Gone are the days where Google will forgive you for your sins. You can’t try out the cheap and nasty way first to see how you go then upgrade later. Because more often than not, the cheap and nasty SEO services will damage your site in Google’s eyes. Our best advice is if you can’t afford to engage a good quality service just yet, don’t do any! Or do some reading and learn about SEO and try out some of the basics for yourself until you can get a good professional to do it.
Why is SEO this way?
The reason SEO is this way is because of the SEO Industry and early iterations of it. Basically, we ruined it for ourselves – or some of us did. Some people took things way too far with the unethical and “SPAM” tactics, so Google had to act. You see, Google does not want you or your SEO Company deciding where YOUR site is placed in THEIR search results. They want their “perfect” search algorithm to decide – without interference from you or anyone else. So, over the years there has been this ongoing struggle between SEO providers and Google – with the SEOs trying to find ways to rank higher and faster and Google trying to catch out the cheats – or anything that falls outside their terms of service. Which means it’s often unaware businesses that get caught up in the middle.
A high level simplistic view is this: there are a whole lot of techniques that although have always been against the Google TOS and Webmaster Guidelines, they used to work OK in getting rankings and would go largely unnoticed and unpunished. And with a lot of these techniques, if they were detected by Google’s algorithms, usually just got discounted from affecting your rankings. Then in early to mid 2012, Google made some major updates. While they always have and always will make updates to how things affect the search engine rankings, these ones were particularly severe in how they affected people trying to game the system. Penalties became much more common and severe and standards in content and link quality in particular were lifted significantly. Things that used to work now do all sorts of damage. You usually have to start over, as undoing the damage is long, expensive and doesn’t always work.