A client of mine in the real estate business was telling me the other day about a cold call he got from a sales rep selling Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. Apparently, someone at the SEO company had taken a look at his property website and drawn up a short list of related search terms, and passed the details to this young lady who was now quoting him a price for optimizing his website to show in Google’s top spots for those search terms.
But my client was SEO savvy as it so happened…
He immediately realised that the search terms this SEO company were proposing to optimize his website for seemed to be very specific and relatively uncommon keywords that would be easy to get top Google spots for. What’s more, they probably were not terms property hunters were likely to use.
Smelling a scam of sorts, he turned the tables around and asked the hapless sales rep if she could find out how much it would cost him to get number one spots for ‘property’, ‘real estate’ and a bunch of other impossibly competitive search terms. Apparently she didn’t have a clue about SEO, as she happily promised to call back.
The moral of this story is quite clear: There are unscrupulous SEO companies that think they can impress and scam unwitting clients who might not know that having the No.1 spot in Google is of diminished value if few people are searching on those keywords
So how do you spot a possible SEO scam?
Don’t get me wrong - in many cases, it makes perfect sense to target niche keywords that you can easily get top spots for, rather than keep fighting tooth and nail for the few keywords that everyone wants. But you must make sure that those keywords you target do get enough searches to make it worth the SEO effort. Besides, you will need to cover a much longer list of low-search-volume keywords with your SEO if you are to get any serious traffic going to your website.
Unfortunately, Google does not reveal data on how many searches individual keywords get each month, but there are keyword research tools you can use that take data from other search engines to give estimates of these figures. It also makes sense to find out how many other websites are using the keywords you are interested in (either using these same keyword tools or simply running a search on Google) so that you can see how much competition you are up against in each case.
So before you get anyone to do SEO on your website, ask them to tell you how many people are searching for the terms they are proposing, so that you can get an idea of how much traffic you can expect. Also do a little research yourself to double-check their figures. Only then can you judge if it is worth the money and effort and avoid falling for those scammers who won’t be delivering the real goods.
