Guerilla Internet Marketing

Some SEOs, consultants, and agencies hide their methods and ultimately mislead their clients. How do they do this? By not disclosing or blatantly lying about their methods used to obtain rankings and/or traffic. Why do they do this? Short-sighted thinking…

Here are some examples of where this happens:

Paid Inclusion
This is probably where I have seen the most blatant lies being told by agencies. Many will setup a paid inclusion account for the clients URL and shortly thereafter will brag to the client that they obtained a top ranking in Yahoo in such a short amount of time. What the client doesn’t know is that the agency/consultant used some of the funds the client paid them to ‘buy’ these rankings. Does it take some SEO and Internet Marketing know-how to achieve these rankings? Yes. However, they were not achieved through natural methods and ultimately will be turned off if and when the client decides to end the relationship with the agency or the agency decides it wants to stop paying for this.

Just in case you’re not clear on what paid inclusion is, it’s a method to get into Yahoo and a couple of other engines quickly by paying a fee and ultimately paying on a cost-per-click basis. This allows for a quick indexing, and some argue a preferential treatment for ability to rank highly. This is not like pay-per-click or sponsored search where your listing appears in an area separate from the natural results and is labeled ‘Sponsored Listings’ or some variation. These paid inclusion listings appear directly in the natural results.

Paid Text Links
For some time now, SEOs have been using targeted paid text link ads with keyword rich anchor text as a tool for ranking highly for competitive terms – with great results too. The problem is that Google has publicly expressed displeasure with this and is threatening to remove sites from their index that both buy and sell these ads. Will they really do that? Is it just a threat? I think so, and I’m personally not worried about it but potential risks like these should be explained to clients before implementing such methods.

Many SEO consultants and agencies mislead clients by purchasing these ads and implementing them on their own with the goal of achieving good rankings for the client. While their intentions may be good, the client should be aware of the risk involved, and should also be clear that if these listings are stopped for any reason, it will have a significant impact on the clients rankings for the terms targeted in the text link ads. Many consultants and agencies are vindictive and will be more than happy to see a client’s rankings plummet if and when they decide to terminate the relationship.

Outsourcing
Many if not all of the larger agencies outsource some portion of their work. Sometimes it’s limited to on aspect like link building or reporting which involves a lot of ‘grunt work’, other times they outsource key functions like search engine optimization and pay-per-click management and just keep account managers on staff to maintain the relationship with the client. Is this a terrible thing? Not necessarily. As long as they have strict specifications and standards for their work, and it is approved by experts within the company, an agency can deliver consistent results while having the ability to pass along a cost savings to the client. However, many agencies when questioned will lie and say that all work is handled in house. Some may go a step further and not only deny the use of outsourcing, but also strongly attack the use of sending work outside of the company…

Lies about experience levels of staff
Savvy business people will look at the Internet Marketing industry and see that:

1. It is relatively new
2. It is not taught using traditional education (college, etc.)
3. Agencies providing these services are growing at extraordinary rates
4. The talent pool is very small

What does this add up to? There is not a lot of experience out there! Most of the larger agencies are in a constant cycle of hiring inexperienced people and losing experienced people. If a company has doubled in size in a couple of years, that means half the staff has worked their for a very short amount of time. Sure Internet Marketing methods and strategies can be taught, but I have witnessed environments where people with no experience were handed accounts within a couple of weeks of starting. Obviously this is not the best situation for the clients that this ‘newbie’ is handling.

Do clients know about this lack of experience? Are they told the truth when asked? Often times the answer is no.

Using shady methods to drive traffic
An uneducated client may have their focus on the wrong numbers/metrics. Many choose to focus on rankings, many others focus on traffic. Obviously these factors are important in the overall equation of measuring the success of a site, but standing by themselves, these numbers don’t mean anything.

Take traffic for example. I had one experience with a client who brought in an additional consultant to help work on his campaign. He met him through a friend, said he had a lot of experience and proven methods for driving tons of traffic to a site. The client was so focussed on traffic that he forgot about quality. He paid the consultant and sure enough, the consultant lived up to his word and brought tons of traffic to the site. Good right? Wrong! After checking through the statistics, the massive amount of traffic that was sent to the site turned out to be driven by ads sent out to a farm of the shadiest sites on the internet – porn sites, gambling sites, etc. Almost all of the traffic was from countries outside of the US that not only couldn’t buy the client’s product, but were from countries notorious for hacking and other illegal activity. Most importantly, not one of the hundreds of thousands of visits sent to the site over the course of a month turned into a successful sale.

The client wanted traffic and he got it. The consultant may have given the client what he wanted, but did absolutely nothing to contribute to the success of the web site and probably caused significant long term damage to the site and the company’s reputation because of his methods.

Setting unrealistic expectations/False promises
There are many consultants and agencies out there competing in this space. There is enormous demand for Internet Marketing services as companies are realizing the tremendous success that a solid campaign can bring them. As any industry grows like this, it attracts many shady individuals that are looking to make a quick buck. When researching companies you will often see many claims like ‘top rankings guaranteed’, ‘money back guarantee’, etc. Obviously claims like these should make shoppers weary. How can someone guarantee the ability to rank any company for any term? There are various degrees of competition – some phrases are easy to rank for, some are extremely difficult to rank for. While there are proven methods and techniques to drive traffic and achieve good rankings, it’s not an exact science and specific results cannot be guaranteed. Even solid agencies with good track records can fall into this category. While they may not have claims like this in their literature, often their sales staff can get out of hand (they are salespeople after all…) and make boisterous claims like these when pitching services.

Now obviously this is short sided thinking and setting up unreasonably expectations in the beginning of a relationship will lead to a quick and unhappy end to that relationship. However, in the interim, the salesperson and the agency make some money. There is such a pool of demand that many are not concerned about building long term and lasting relationships. When a client leaves, they can fill that slot with someone else…

Honesty is the best policy
Professionally and personally I am known to be honest to a fault. Does this often make life more difficult than if I told a few white lies here and there? Sure it does. However, I believe clients should be aware of what I am doing and how it can effect them both positively and negatively. They should be made aware of potential risks, and if they don’t understand a particular method or strategy it should be explained to them. If work being done on their behalf involves setting up accounts with various partners, clients should have control over these accounts so that they could smoothly transition elsewhere if the relationship terminates for whatever reason.

Any marketer (through traditional media or the Internet), is ultimately working on the client’s behalf and it’s that company’s image, reputation, and future on the line. If we as marketers are looking to build long term relationships with our clients, we should be honest and forthcoming from start to finish.

After all, honesty is the key to a solid foundation in any relationship.