Don’t be had by SEO Scammers
Search Logic (Simplified)
Prior to discussing our main topic – search, it is critical to discuss the precondition to having a discussion about it. That precondition is that it is a highly verticalized skillset and so are it’s clients. If you’re the average business owner, you probably already have a busy day. The best an SEO agency can do for you to educate you is to give you an hour or less presentation telling you (typically) about their successes, technical merits, plan and perhaps support and wonderful content – but none of this really teaches anything about search.
Another type of agency does a similar thing (out of ignorance of context – primarily) and that is to focus on relatively banal, minor points of importance in ranking. This whole process takes the form of showing you how horrible your website is by displaying tool-output-reports which highlight minor errors in big bold red in slide after slide or in a document if they are lazy. All this is intended to of course get you to invest your money in on-page (on site) optimization by them and perhaps increase the value of what they are offering.
But these tools they use, aren’t they reliable? Um no, not really…
If you take any of the common tools online and use them to conduct “audits” (readings) of just about any major company you’ve heard of, you’ll likely see numbers of errors exponentially higher than yours – what gives? how can they rank with horrible on-page optimization and yet you don’t?. The answer is simple – these tool makers are in the business of making tools to showcase errors, ask any mechanic about these tools and they’ll probably be familiar with what’s going on – the problems are maybe a little exaggerated, but not the bill.
So let’s introduce an entirely different way of looking at search and getting a grapple on the situation that doesn’t patronize you the reader, but simplifies what needs to happen in order for your website to gain rankings. I mean, really simplifies it.
Relevancy
Search engines function on relevance of content – pure and simple, it’s the business model of search engines. What is SEO? From your perspective it’s just a ‘way to get business’ from the search engines perspective its manipulative of their edicts and therefore trespassory, even punishable – they don’t like it. There is a silver lining however and that is that what they don’t like isn’t the actual SEO – its the practices employed, and the usual punishment is just ignoring them and therefore granting no rankings – or very little.
Search is concerned with relevance, what is the best thing you – as a business owner – can do to convey relevance to search? You can make your website into a repository of content which is relevant to your industry – something you know, understand and now (with AI) can outsource the creation of. A good “modern” SEO campaign incorporates a lot of unique AI imagery and a lot of unique AI writing which is then hand edited to add uniqueness.
Video & Offsite Resources
For businesses looking for clients on a national level, video is very important – and it’s important locally to some degree too, but more about that in a moment. Why video is another pillar of relevancy. If your website has a few tasteful videos which clearly and concisely explain products – or many of them, all the better – as long as they comport with the relevancy rule. This isn’t to straight jacket creativity – in fact, it makes it easier because it gives direction.
Often, business owners like to see things like globes and cinematic imagery, the kind of stuff that inspires, a camera perched on an eagles shoulder soaring in the sky! Well, this stuff may sound great – and clients often sign off on videos like these, they don’t help much – if at all.
A simple video of an employee explaining the utility of a product and showcasing how it works in a tasteful way will almost always connect better with a real shopper than a quasi-film noir color schemed video trying to beat MGM. Remember, relevance..
Backlinks
No matter how often I’m told it’s passee to focus on things like Domain Authority and Page Rank the more I laugh. The fact is if thousands of sites are linking to you, you’re going to gain an advantage over those that don’t have the same. The reasons for this are technical and as time moves on this may fade, but as of 2025 you can tell pretty accurately how good a website is doing by the number and quality of links pointing to it from other sites and you can also tell by the validity of these links upon inspection.
This sometimes confuses or even upsets clients.
Let’s say you’re a lawyer and you write a piece concerning a legal decision in the 1800’s – or something similar. A competitor may write a piece bashing it and link to it. The irony here is the competitor just gave you a backlink which benefits you, coming from a page very few people will ever even see – probably. You are the net winner in this scenario – even a negative one like this.
What about Paid Advertising?
Paid Advertising has it’s place – I’m not one of those old fogies that thinks paid ads are all the devil – not at all. Paid Ads work like rockets for takeoff on small campaigns and jet engines on perennial marketing conscious companies that employ them – correctly.
Paid Advertising is kind of perceived by a lot of people as “The easy but effective way” or “The more expensive but way that works well” and so on – when it comes to search. But paid advertising has a very serious achilles heel – it’s paid for, so its not necessarily relevant. That’s tolerable because it’s part of searches monetization strategy, until it isn’t. If search engines simply rewarded paid advertising more and ramped it up to level 11 in terms of what they could buy – they would lose the core reason users go there in the first place – relevant results. This would be catastrophic – akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face, very foolish.
It is for this reason that there is a market for keywords to naturally suppress this effect and it’s why Organic rankings have been, are today and will remain critically important to users.
I recently put about 250,000 words of content across roughly 145 posts onto a website, less than three months later it’s already outranking it’s parent website in an entire array of keywords – why? I stuck to the topic at hand and fielded high-quality content that was relevant to the topic and educated searchers. This in turn led to some backlinks and, while I was unable in this case to initiate a backlink campaign or blogger outreach component, I was able to add unique imagery to each post and to do my best to load the site with the right kind of CTA’s to generate leads.
If you’re an SEO shopper, I’m not telling you to contact me or call me, but go into the meetings with the agencies you meet with knowing full well what to expect:
1. You will be shown a ‘wow’ presentation about how great the company and its services are
2. You will be shown how horrible your site is and how much it needs help to be fixed to rank
3. You will likely be advised to invest in Paid Advertising
4. You will be sent a proposal AFTER the meeting – which is key and I will explain why next!
During meetings tons of information is thrown back and forth – you the SEO shopper – want to rank, so you’ll likely have competitors who you know about who seem to have better sites. The consultants from the agency will throw technical jargon, reports, presentations, etc. But here’s the thing – they want you to sit and pick over those documents, to scrutinize them, to fact-check them. Often times they will insist on getting you to commit to a second meeting to go over their proposal for you – which is, of course, logical and reasonable.
They know that during the prevailing time, facts fade in the mind, figures get tossed around in your head. You may even question yourself – Do I need this? Will it work? And then look at the documents showing so many errors and seeing such promise in their proposal – you decide to go ahead with it.
The umbrage I take with these type of agencies is simply the effectiveness. The reality is, SEO is very hard and in my experience, requires a pointed approach. Rather than sprinkling a handful of small AI made blog posts, a small PPC campaign, a small on-page optimization run and a small amount of overall work – focus on the core issue, content.
Content is a misunderstood term today so let me clarify what I mean by content – digestible information that both a search engine and a human being can understand. Your site could have 500 videos on it or 500 blog posts – or, ideally both! – either way, for each post made and every word uttered search can see that and if it views that content as factual and relevant, it pays attention. This is just the kind of site it needs to rank – the kind that conveys accurate information to searchers and keeps them in business.
Que Bono?