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An SEO scam: $62k later

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Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#51

Post by soco »

logifail wrote: post #35
folbec wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One-Half the Money I Spend for Advertising Is Wasted, But I Have Never Been Able To Decide Which Half" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/

> "One-Half the Money I Spend for Advertising Is Wasted..." I once worked with a small company where essentially 100% of their PPC spend was wasted. Not half wasted, not mostly wasted, but completely wasted. The marketing manager was determined to spend her budget though, for fear of losing it, so month after month she tinkered with keywords, rewrote ad copy, and the ads ran and ran, sometimes people clicked, views w…

Well you had a marketing manager so what were they supposed to do? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." (Upton Sinclair and many others)

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#52

Post by spaceman_2020 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #37
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #33

> If this is what it takes to rank on a search engine, then there's something wrong with the search engine itself. This is precisely the problem, not likely the SEO agency itself. I used to run a content marketing agency ( not a SEO agency). Early on, I quickly learned that there were two kinds of agencies that dealt with content: SEO agencies that focused on rankings and traffic, and content agencies that focused on…

That's the gist of it. SEO is quantity over quality, you may get plenty of visits but it'll be low value; bots, people idly or accidentally clicking links, etc. Not potential customers, unless your website's primary revenue stream is ad impressions, in which case it doesn't matter much as long as they're views that the advertisers will pay for.

It does work pretty well for consumer brands and B2Bs focused on cheap, low-value, high volume plays.

The problem I see is SaaS and B2B businesses using the same playbook as a skincare brand for their content. That just doesn't work.

In OP's case, their content should have skipped written content altogether and focused more on podcasts and videos where they discuss specific problems they solve, even interviewing clients. Written content should have focused more on case studies and should have been used only to prop up the sales pitch.

The rest of the marketing budget should have been spent on sponsored listings on all these agency search websites and placements on relevant startup/small business podcasts.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#53

Post by ricardo81 »

'SEO' has a bad rep but there are legitimate concerns about how a site is made and how discoverable that information is.

I think of it as 'helping search engines understand your content', like preferably having your content in raw HTML rather than JS driven (less a problem nowadays with Google/Bing), a good site architecture, structured markup and avoidance of keyword cannibalisation.

Darker side is simply 'manipulating search engines'. Building pages for the sake of ranking, acquiring low quality backlinks, low quality content. Obvious paid for links on irrelevant pages. Daft things like keyword stuffing.

Google hires 10's of thousands of manual raters (at least last time I read about it) - generally if a site looks low effort and/or quality it's not going to succeed.

There'll definitely be actors in this world who know how to game Google at will, but obv plenty people who also think they can do a good job who actually can't, regardless of the ethics of how they do it.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#54

Post by tweetle_beetle »

Having worked in the industry (though not for a while), I think the only thing you should should be paying for is experience. Yes, there are lots of scammers, even in fancy offices with fancy testimonials. But ultimately the only way you can evaluate an unknowable system is through experience, and the only way to improve the quality of that evaluation is by running lots of experiments.

Only agnecies who have lots and lots of clients are getting enough of an overview to test techniques in a repeatable way, across industries, audiences, etc. This one appears to have less than 10 employees and listed SEO last in their own list of services - suggesting maybe one or two staff who do a bit of it.

There is no way you should be handing over tens of thousands to someone who clearly doesn't have a lot of experience in SEO. They can only give generic entry level advice and hope for the best, which is exactly what this client got.

Is a big agency a guarantee of success? Absolutely not. But a tiny agency is almost a guarantee of failure of ROI. That said, I have known some very smart self-employed consultants in the industry, I don't want to tar them with the same brush.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#55

Post by ricardo81 »

cj wrote: post #3

1) SEO works best when you create real content targeted at real users 2) SEO works best when its not your end goal 3) Google knows this and is smarter than your SEO agency. Ditch the agency and simply create legitimate content your users find valuable and google will rank it. It might take more than 12 months for everything to rank and pay off. But that's life. Google Ads exists for people looking for immediate resul…

Knowledge of 'technical SEO' is also beneficial. Using structured markup and using href-lang when the site spans multiple languages for example. The kind of things I'd guess are domain specific knowledge.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#56

Post by exodust »

It's not all bad, SEO help can be useful if your business lacks basic measurement, pages, titles, conversions etc. Or you have those things, but in a mess. "SEO" can branch into general site maintenace aspects I guess.

Too much SEO help can be unhelpful, as the article mentions, messing up your site with repetitive patterns cut from the same mold as millions of other sites.

In some ways SEO companies are like ChatGPT. Neither cares about the specific content, yet both pretend to be experts. Both apply a formula of sorts to generate output from a weird top-down angle. The resulting SEO copy has the tone of "pretending to give a shit. Shop Today!"

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#57

Post by philjohn »

tacker2000 wrote: post #15

SEO is basically snake oil. You try some things that someone in that dark corner over there tells you to do and have no idea if the black box called Google will rank you higher or not. Results are not instantly or even actually measureable. And in the end you spend cash and have no idea if it helped or not. Basically, like someone else in this thread already said, SEO is best if you are not doing it actively, but whe…

SEO consultants, yes, there are some snake-oil salespeople.

Most of the big travel sites have in-house SEO teams, who do A/B experiments, have entire frameworks for quickly rolling out changes to things like page titles, subheadings etc. across an entire site - and the proof there is in the pudding, search for "Hotels in XYZ" and they'll be on the front page.

But you're talking about a team of people, most on 6 figure salaries working full time, because the ROAS is there.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#58

Post by robertlagrant »

abatilo wrote: post #46
robertlagrant wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guidance was probably written by an internal Google equivalent of the agency in the article, not a Google engineer who knows how everything works.

You're probably right but my naive hope was that things like PageSpeed insights that measure things like accessibility and page speed would be a part of search rankings. I went from an average page rank position of 4 for relevant keywords to nothing and now there's 0 growth for views of my site. I'd have been better off just not touching it at all. Sad. Prior to making changes, I had consistent 30% MoM growth for 4 m…

That sounds... deeply frustrating. I've not done this stuff before, so the only thing I can suggest is: could you back out the changes and see if that makes a difference?

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#59

Post by input_sh »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #42
input_sh wrote: post #36

> We hope that this circus will eventually come to an end, and search engines will have to either improve their algorithms or people will lean more on solutions like ChatGPT, lessening their reliance on these engines. Do they really think ChatGPT is gonna do any better at generating leads? The same ChatGPT that provides fuck all links to the outside web? It's like they recognise one scam and jump head first straight…

I mean one thing I can see ChatGPT work for is customer communication, both sales and support; it's one of those things that is difficult to scale, especially on online chat windows where people quickly lose interest. For small companies that don't have the people or the money to hire an external web support company it can be a solution. But then, it'll probably be expensive anyway; they would have to train chatgpt o…

Okay but that has absolutely nothing to do with either driving traffic to your site or generating leads you can follow upon.

If their problem is finding promising leads, I doubt they don't have enough resources for interacting with customers.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#60

Post by xnx »

TheFragenTaken wrote: post #38
tacker2000 wrote: post #15

SEO is basically snake oil. You try some things that someone in that dark corner over there tells you to do and have no idea if the black box called Google will rank you higher or not. Results are not instantly or even actually measureable. And in the end you spend cash and have no idea if it helped or not. Basically, like someone else in this thread already said, SEO is best if you are not doing it actively, but whe…

It's not pure snake oil. You can make reasonable assumptions on any black box by controlling the input, and monitoring the output. ...but it's such a terrible industry, that needs major disruption.

Generative search results are that disruption
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