How Not to Get Ripped Off By Your Local SEO Firm

Local SEO Optimization has its fair share of amazing promises. Beware. When you start learning about local SEO marketing, one of the very first things you’re told is that Google puts a lot of importance on the incoming links pointing at a website. The more links you have pointing to your site, the better. A couple of years ago, with all other things being equal, this was more or less accurate. As a result, a local SEO firm in low wage countries, such as India and China, can just hire thousands of link builders and promise to create lots of links every month for less than a thousand dollars. Quantity was the main goal, rather than quality. Local SEO services do not work like this anymore. Over the past two years, or so, Google clamped down strictly on the practice of building large quantities of low quality links. Companies that invested for years and was used to hiring a measly local SEO firm to build thousands and thousands of links to their sites are now being cracked down, seeing their rankings vanish and their traffic drop to a small fraction of what it once was. The idea was to contact all the websites where those links are located and request that they be removed and then employ the Google link disavowal tool to neutralize what’s left. This is time exhausting work. People who come to a legitimate Local SEO firm can expect to pay between $5,000 and $10,000 for them clean up their bad incoming links, depending on its volume. It’s fairly clear that a lot of companies would find themselves in this state. The problem is that companies are still being drawn in and ripped off into signing up with shady SEO firms that build low quality links. You might have heard of clients "hiring a whole team of guys in China to build links" for them. Or some paying $1,000 a month for around 20 articles, and this or that. Right then and there you’ll know that they’re being ripped off. These numbers and figures are simply unbelievable. 20 high quality articles will cost way more than $1,000. Whenever an SEO firm brags a lot of PageRank, you can be sure they’re simply outdated. PageRank is a thing of the past. Try asking a friend, who’s paying for cheap SEO services, to send you a list of the links the SEO company was building for him, and surely, when you examine it, the links you’ll see there are "awful." It’s not just like he was paying a good amount of money and getting nothing in return, but that he was paying hard-earned dollars and the SEO Company he had hired was doing very real damage to his site. Getting ripped off is already a problem in its own right, but imagine paying money just to get back to where you were before you did any SEO. Get educated. Signing up for these fraudulent services can be prevented with the right amount of research.