Why are SEO Times so Difficult?

A good question and not one that should be ignored… This was posed to me by www.craster.com, a client of mine, after sending him a marketing report on his website performance. I have been doing Pay-per-click and trying to find a decent SEO company that we could approach about getting up the ‘free’ listings, but this has proved more difficult than first thought.

The problem is that if you are a website designer you know that Google disregards (in the sense that Google is constantly updating its logarithms) anything you do that might improve your search engine ‘free’ ranking, Google have set the guidelines and provided they are followed all is well.

However, if any SEO guru, company or system started to succeed Google will take serious action to level the playing field once again. I.e. if you do something that gets you ahead of the game you may well be penalised later.

So one has to follow the guidelines, the trouble is that if you are an SEO company then you have to try and get ahead of the game and do things that are not always within the guidelines, the result is that you get a lot of cowboy SEO companies and these all reflect badly on the industry as a whole. This means that you have to vet any approach from an SEO very cautiously, equally they are aware of this and so try their hardest to make the sale. It is a non productive vicious circle.

There are good SEO companies, but I have yet to be able to afford them, prices are crazy and quality is iffy, the main thing is that there are NO Guarantees. The other problem is that I know from experience to promote a decent website you need to invest real time in it, hours if not days, you have to get all aspects of the website right not just a few keywords and thus an SEO salesman paid on commission as they often are, will be just adding to the companies problems, as there will not be enough SEO experts to go around, it is simple maths, the more successful the SEO company the more clients they may have, the less time they can spend on each client and their results will start slipping.

So difficult times for SEO, anyone who knows anything about SEO will understand that you either have to pay for real time to get this right or do it yourself, that puts the SEO companies in an difficult position. Bottom line; question them very hard before agreeing to anything.