Beware of SEO Scams!

guy scamming

It seems like almost every day, I am getting emails or calls from other digital agencies, “Can I speak to Lance Bachmann please? Tell him I can help him ranking on the first page of Google over night!” Companies are always trying to get me to switch from my agency to theirs (yes, even as the President and Owner of 1seo.com, one of the nations largest Digital Marketing Agencies). They throw statistics and fancy graphs at me telling me how much better I could be performing online compared to my competitors. Pretty funny, huh? They are barking up the wrong tree over here.

I’m not the only one getting these emails.  Recently a client of mine sent me an email asking about a solicitation they were sent from another agency. I can understand why they forwarded the message to me. It did not paint a pretty picture of the performance of their program. The letter went so far as to say their agency is different from other agencies because they “know their stuff”. They focused primarily on my client’s PPC spend. The graphs they used showed their budget is 1.5% of their competitors, suggesting that they should be spending more to keep up with the competition and how their agency can help them expand their market share.  On the surface, they made me look pretty bad.

There are a lot of tools out there for analyzing PPC programs. I use them myself and know that I have to take them with a grain of salt because there are no tools to show what the client is actually trying to accomplish with their program. I would never make definitive statements about what another company is actually doing. Sure, I can give a pretty close estimation of how much they are spending a month, and the terms they are bidding on, but there is a lot more to the story. This other agency really has no clue what they are talking about.

Here’s the truth…my client has a very similar type of company to the one highlighted in the email. My client operates international and they certainly could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to keep up with their competitors in PPC, but that’s not their strategy.  They have offices on four continents and over 80 locations just in the US. So why aren’t they spending $350,000 to keep up with the completion?  They are only running campaigns for 3 of their locations compared to a national campaign that their competitor is running. So yes, my client is only spending 1.5% of their competition, but that’s the way they want it.  Sounds like that other agency doesn’t “know their stuff” after all.

I need a good laugh once in a while so I still read the messages before I throw the email in the trash.

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