Back in the earlier days of Google’s search dominance, there was a lot of time spent on continuous search engine optimization, but those days are gone. The sad part is, there are still hundreds of companies out there that will still try to sell you on getting to the front page of Google.
They ask for some sort of long term commitment. If you’re one of those poor saps who happen to pay for one of these clowns to SEO your site, they’ll jam keywords everywhere, and put links back to your site on ‘link farms’ to try to fool Google into bumping your site into the top of the search results. Unfortunately, since the release of Hummingbird, a big change to Google’s search algorithm, that tactic will in fact hurt you going forward, and it could possibly even lead to you getting penalized to the back pages of the search results, which is bad news bears.
Even though that was almost 3 years ago, I still get occasional emails from asshats like Higher Matrix that look something like this:
Hi Covertnine.Com Team,
Are you interested to know the major reasons of your website’s impact in making online business? Following can be one of the prevailing reasons of your website’s performance:
• Your website is not ranking top in Google organic search for many competitive keywords.
• Your website has number of technical errors, making it difficult for search engine to find it.
…
Sounds interesting? Feel free to email us or alternatively you can provide me with your phone number and the best time to call you.
Best Regards,
sergio rocha |DM Consultant
PH. No: +1 805-900-0860
Skype: digital.marketinghm
These idiots are selling you digital snake oil.
Most of the time these SEO spammers don’t even look at your site. Search engine optimization should only happen once, or once in awhile just like a car tune up. If you’ve got a site built on a high quality content management system like Squarespace, or are following Google’s best practices with a CMS like WordPress, then chances are you’ve probably already got most of the things under the hood that you’d need. The only remaining things you’d need to do is submit an XML sitemap to Google, and get your Google Analytics linked to a Search Console account so you can see some of the keyword data people are searching for to find you. (or not find you)
That’s really it.
The only ongoing “SEO” you should be paying for as a small business is for content to be produced to help drive more customers and followers to you on an ongoing basis, and to share with your existing audience via social media and the like. So do us a favor, follow Google’s SEO best practices, get your site setup for SEO right once, and off you go, without sending money offshore to the shady idiots like Higher Matrix.
Related reading: The First Three Things We Do For Clients With SEO Problems