7 Signs of Bad SEO

SEO South Florida

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What is Bad SEO? | South Florida

SEO in South Florida is crammed with entrepreneurs who want to grow their business. The SEO firm you choose could be the decision that makes or breaks your business. So, how do you choose? How do you tell the difference between good and bad SEO? Here are 7 signs of bad SEO that you need to look out for to weed out those firms that don’t deserve your business.

1. Guaranteed number 1 ranking
If a company guarantees a number 1 ranking in their marketing materials or their sales pitch, run screaming. Without having discussed and analyzed your specific situation (like a good search engine optimization company should do), how do they know whether they can significantly improve your rankings? How can they guarantee you a number 1 ranking without knowing what you want? It’s simple, they can’t.

2. No questions
In order for a company to successfully drive organic traffic to your site, they need to ask questions. They need to know your business, your industry, and your goals. Only after asking you plenty of questions will they know how to strategically cater to your needs. If they aren’t asking, you should be running.

3. Evasive and secretive
Just like they should ask you tons of questions, they should never be allowed to avoid yours. SEO firms are not part of the CIA, nor are their strategies top-secret. A good company, who has your best interests at heart, will be open and honest about the strategies they plan to use to lift the ranking of your website.

4. SEO as a one-time deal
SEO is a long-term commitment, not a once-off product you can buy and get instant, lasting results. You can’t get a gardener just once and expect your garden to be beautifully landscaped for years to come. It needs maintenance. Any company offering their services as a one-time deal aren’t doing it right.

5. Free trial.
As you know, SEO takes time. Time that a free trial does not provide. Remember, nothing in this world is free. In this case, what appears to be free actually costs you time. Time you could have spent forming a relationship with a worthy search engine optimization firm.

6. Keyword stuffing
Have you ever experienced the type of anger that is only brought on by clicking on a link, arriving at an article, and reading the same word 15 times in one sentence? Have you ever wondered why you clicked on that article in the first place? The answer: keyword stuffing. Good SEO firms know how to make use of keywords without compromising the user experience. Bad companies don’t care. Luckily, these days search engines have caught on to this bad practice and penalize websites that keyword stuff. So make sure that yours isn’t one of them.

7. Bad back-links
One of the traits that search engines look at to determine the value of your site is based on the amount of good quality links from other sites to yours. One of the easiest and quickest ways to bump up your ranking is through high quantity links. However, it takes time to build up good links. On the other hand, the easiest and quickest way to get lots of links is to buy them. But these links are often of very poor quality and will actually harm your rankings. SEO firms that offer ‘free trials’ and ‘one-time deals’ employ such strategies to show you an instant (but short-lived) improvement. What they don’t tell you is that by using these bad links, your site now becomes guilty by association. Google penalizes sites for bad links, and if one of these sites gets banned for black hat tactics, it’s likely that yours will too.

If you hire a company who makes use of bad SEO techniques on your website, search engines will penalize YOU and YOUR website, not the company that did the work. This is why it is important to make sure that the professionals you hire are good at what they do and do not employ bad SEO habits. Bottom line, the more informed you are, the less risky it is when it comes to choosing a search engine optimization firm. Keeping an eye out for these signs of negative SEO will weed out the snakes and help you find a professional, organic search engine optimization service that focuses on real results.

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