Avoiding SEO and Digital Marketing Scams for Your Business

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) contributes as one of important digital marketing plan on the internet. Business that just have their websites launched need an SEO plan because it takes a lot of time for the websites to be recognized by their potential customers.

Many companies prefer to outsource the process and let the professionals do the job. However, it's always important to choose the trusted SEO company to avoid getting involved with digital marketing scams.

Before going to the points, you must first know the main category SEO falls into and how to differentiate them.

White Hat vs. Black Hat

SEO techniques can be classified into two categories: white hat and black hat.

White hat uses techniques that search engines recommend as part of a good design. White hats tend to create a result that last a longer time, follow the search engines' guidelines, and ensure that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose.

The counter part is black hat technique. This technique is the one that search engines do not approve because it violates their guidelines. Search engines are working around the clock to create new algorithms to prevent this method from being used to trick them. This method also uses spamdexing to manipulate the search engines' understanding of a category.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review.

An additional method that some may SEO companies may use, is the gray hat method, the combination of both white hat and black hat.

How to Avoid SEO Scams

The first thing to remember before hiring any SEO services, is to know that no SEO company can guarantee they can make your company website to be on top of worldwide search result for a specific keyword with white hat SEO. All they can do is trying their best to get you on the list.

There are many factors that SEO agency cannot control. This includes: competitors' strategies, customers' behaviors, and so on. For example, Google AdWords has millions of companies in their waiting list to be featured in the Google display advertisement, but not every advertisement is approved by Google, and this is not something that SEO company can manage.

You shouldn't blindly choose an SEO company that can guarantee a top notch result without further evaluation of their methods.

The second thing to do is to always have a thorough research for a particular SEO company and see their marketing efforts in previous attempts. You can search for their previous clients to see how their marketing history performed, all the way to what extent they are willing to promote your product via SEO marketing approach.

The credibility of an SEO company is determined by neither the size of the company nor the length of time they have been involved in the industry, but based on their performance and work quality.

Third is to make sure that the SEO company really understands the total concept of your product and having the legitimate setup for the digital marketing plan that is based on your company's target market. A reputable SEO company can come up with various ways of marketing plan to collaborate with their SEO marketing approach.

Never stick with a single marketing plan. There are plenty of them available. And there is always room for improvement for each.

Fourth, always do performance measurement of the SEO company and your marketing strategy. Being in the top search website list worldwide may not always be reliable because your performance indicators are obviously your sales revenue and return of investment. An excellent SEO company will be worth the money you are paying them for.

Choosing the right SEO company might take a lot of consideration. However in the brighter side, they are worth your time and investment as they are able to increase your brand awareness and most importantly, sales revenue.

Online marketing is nothing if you cannot make sales. By understanding how your chosen SEO company works, you can know their method. And by having your website perform better on search engines, all you have to do is to convert those visitors and potential customers to successful sales.