September 10, 2020
Are you getting sucked in by SEO 'Expert' emails?
Have you been contacted recently by SEO “experts” telling you, your website can’t be found and that you need to do (laundry list of techy things) to your website to make it visible on Google? I’m going to share with you what happened when we received an email just like this so you don’t get pushed into a sales tactic ploy by someone who really has no idea what they are doing.
Our website receives approximately 10-15+ hours per month on improving SEO (search engine optimisation – the thing that makes your site be found on Google search engine). We use tools to test the changes we make which gives us a Technical SEO Score on our website and then we use this to make adjustments to increase the score. As a business who offers website design (including SEO work), we feel we need to be at the top of our game in this field and we work hard to do so.
On last test, our site was 0.1% away from a perfect technical score using the testing tool we use for general purpose testing. The highest website we have ever scanned in the world was 85.9% that wasn’t built by Outspoken Entourage. So in our opinion, the SEO work on our site is second to none. Of the 6 categories (using our identified search phrases) we strive to be ranked highly in, we hold the number one spot for 4 of these and we are number 2 and number 3 for the remaining 2 categories.
The list given by the ‘expert’ of things we needed to address looked like this;
We receive approximately 2-6 emails like this one each week for our own website. Me getting slightly ‘annoyed’ with the constant barrage of unsolicited emails telling me how these experts could make my website appear on Google better decided to run a test of the SEO Expert’s website. Providing me with a list of 61 items is simply a way to overwhelm in order to engage services.
We ran a test on the expert’s website and returned a score of 63.2. This score is 36.7% less than our own website and had a number of major flaws. We promptly sent them our own recommendations for their website which looked like this;
We then informed them that their tactic of simply overwhelming businesses with a bunch of ‘techy words’ was simply a ploy to get business and that they should “Get their own house in order’.
Whilst all of the technical details of what creates a website which will rank highly are far too numerous for this article, let there be a single takeaway for you.
An SEO expert cannot simply state you that you cannot be found ranking highly on Google without knowing the search phrase/s you are chasing (example ‘digital marketing Coffs Harbour’).
Search the query you want to be found for. If you are sitting there on page 1, well done! If not, let your website designer know which phrases you would like to be found under in search and get them to implement a plan to make it happen!
Remember, every business is receiving these emails and more than likely it won’t be a reflection on your own website’s performance.
