I was with a potential customer (now a client) the other day and they had been cold called by a sales rep from another search engine optimisation company.

The same customer also recalled a time when a seo tuned up on his business doorstop and cohersed him next door for a presentation the guy was giving saying there was space for him. The presentation consisted of the rep hailing the need for seo, without giving the audience any help whatsoever with their own search engine marketing, saying to tell them, he’d need to ‘kill them’.

I then remember hearing of a seo company “praised” in the ******* for ‘innovative advertising’ in a place you just wouldn’t believe.

If you are a SEO company and are sending spam emails to people, or bombarding people with junk mail, or cold calling potential customers, or spamming the hell out of people’s blogs - face it, you’re probably crap at SEO. Of course in a marketing and business sense, you’re doing nothing ‘wrong’ - ignorant people are parted with their money, quite unnecessarily, every day and in every walk of life (I think the local shop ‘did’ me for 50p this morning).

We don’t have a sales team. We’ve never sent out any type of mailer. We’ve never spammed anybody’s email. We’ve never targeted people who clearly have no knowledge of the industry. We’ve never cold called one person or company. We’ve never even dropped a postal mailer. In fact, we’ve never asked for work. In nearly 2 years - we’ve not spent one penny advertising our company.

We don’t make promises we can’t keep, we don’t keep the secret sauce from clients, we don’t rely on your ignorance of search marketing, we rely on our expertise and experience promoting sites in Google.

A good seo company gets most of their work from word of mouth, informative speaking engagements, forum participation and organic search, for instance. A great seo company has no problem helping clients learn the ‘easy’ stuff in seo (like unique good titles, unique meta descriptions, unique content), so the seo can concentrate on the more creative and technical aspects of the campaign (internal link structure and ninja link building).

SEO companies (like my own 6 ‘man’ team) don’t need to spend time thinking up “innovative” ways of getting leads, but as a result, we just don’t play the offline sales and marketing game. As a result of our marketing methods, I’m aware most of our eggs are in just a couple of baskets. We only target new potentials who are actually taking the time to research the benefits and pitfalls of seo themselves. To be honest though, these are the clients we’re looking for.

The reason the SEO industry is all too often looked upon as pond scum is that it’s the seo companies least deserving of wider attention that are out there connecting with the business world - crap or ‘unethical’ seo companies get in first - and as a result, dissatisfied customers lament the usefulness and integrity of an entire industry and service.

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