Hatton Marketing

Chatting to companies today, as we do, to find out what their problems are and whether we are the people to fix them, we were reminded of the bad SEO practice that masquerades as SEO advice given by some Guildford and Surrey digital marketing agencies.

A company we spoke with today had a 'search engine friendly' website built by a local digital agency, but with no header or title tags... OK... This rang alarm bells... The content had no keywords...interesting... and the navigation was built using images...umm... The person we were speaking to asked us why we thought his two year link building campaign hadn’t got him many results. We wanted to give him a straight answer but to be honest, we just didn’t know where to start. We were filled with an urge to say “OK here’s what we’ll do: we’ll start from scratch for free.”

We were thinking not only of the wasted time, effort and budget spent on this campaign, but this guy had also wasted two years of opportunity. His competitors are now wiping the floor with him on Google and to get up near them again he’s going to have to invest heavily. It’s going to be a slow and costly process, one that he had thought he was already working towards. All because the digital agency he chose don’t know their SEO from their elbow!

As if we didn't know, it brought home to us why selling SEO services is sometimes a bit of an uphill struggle; of the companies who do 'get' SEO, many have had such bad experiences from their past service providers, they’re put off from ever doing it again.

Good SEO can deliver fantastic results and at a lower cost per visitor than Per-Pay-Click (PPC) could ever achieve, and is a vital part of any online marketing campaign.

But Surrey's SEO cowboys are causing so much damage in our area that it's actually starting to worry us.

So please, please, please... Fully vet your SEO company before embarking on a campaign with them. Ask for case studies, results and, most of all be realistic. If you don't know where to start come to one of our SEO workshops to learn the basics from a professional so you can be aware of what bad advice looks like - before you’ve paid for it.