This particular design company boasted of being search engine savvy, and indeed even had several pages and offered a higher end product with ongoing SEO services. After seeing that, I assumed that the person I talked to would be well versed in the shop talk, and I could ask for a few examples, make sure of a few major points, and advise my friend to use them or not.
The conversation I had with this sales rep was littered with smoke-screens and impressive BS that would convince any but the most well-informed realtors that they knew their stuff. And I would bet that even their customers would argue that their search engine placement was ideal, even while bemoaning the fact that their leads were few and ROI was low.
As we progressed into the telephone conversation, the water got murkier and murkier, and I was appalled enough in these techniques to try and air them to the public. My questions and the programmed answers they gave are a lesson in why SEO companies have such a terrible reputation these days...
Templates
I started out the questions by inquiring about the templated sites they offered at a discounted $1600, as versus custom designed sites that were another $1800 in addition to that. So I said, "Do you find that your templated designs rank as well as your custom ones? Templates often have too much coding and a very limited ability to tweak for SEO techniques..."
He assures me that there is very little difference and he thinks my friend is going with the custom design anyway. Our templates do "pretty well" in the searches, though....
Right there I got a sinking feeling.
Without using true URL's, let me explain that this company specializes in For Sale By Owner, Do-it-yourself, directory type sites that customers can pay a fee online and upload their photos, verbiage, amenities and such into a form, which becomes a page on the website. My questions to him were like this:
- Will the created pages have independent title and meta tags?
The customer can enter that information, he answers.
- Is there any control at all over the URL's created by the program? (Some of the pages he showed me looked like www,mysite.com/123_dz_12345_/here_is_one_for_miami_ florida/)
- Can the font tags, header tags, alt tags, photos, etc be optimized?
You can change the fonts and colors, he answers. He isn't sure what the rest of that means.
***Long sigh coming from me. Can you imagine going into a popular site with hundreds of pages, and you, the customer, knowing how to optimize title and meta tags for each page? Obviously they know very little about on-page optimization, and it's not built into the programming.
So here's the clincher. "OK, I say. Show me a customer that ranks. Any customer."
He fumbles a bit, and says, "scforsalebyowner.com" (not the real name)
I type into the Google search "SC For Sale By Owner" and bang...it shows for number 2. I'm almost impressed...:-) It does show for its own URL anyway. He explains that she paid for the whole premium package with their SEO services and all.
But, I say to him, that isn't a search term. Is there a special city they service? He says that it's the main city in that state. (Remember, I'm not using the real location or website here) I type in "Charleston SC Real Estate For Sale by Owner", and it's not there. Bottom of the 2nd page, actually. I type in "Charleston SC FSBO". Not found. I type in "SC Real Estate For Sale By Owner". Again, nothing to be found.
Now he's backstepping. But she is optimized for SC For Sale by owner! And her homepage title tag is even SC For Sale By Owner. There are 1,470,000 searches for SC For Sale by Owner!
Huh???
Yes, he says. Look at the Google search results! 1,470,000 searches!
He means PAGES in the search results that are relevant enough to the term that Google shows them.
But to a clueless realtor or anyone not informed about search engines, this sounds like manna from heaven. I quickly check the old Overture Keyword Tool, and the number of searches for that exact term shows 38 a month. Take away the 25 website owners that are checking their own placement, and it's probably more like 5 or 10 searches...maybe less. So here is the smoke-screen.
At this point let me add that the charge for their SEO services is explained on the site thusly:
Setup Fee $500
These fees are used to submit your website to link directories and search engines to gain link popularity.
Additional Yearly Fees $499/yr.*
This fee is the monthly fee required to maintain your real estate websites optimization on a monthly basis. (Further down it explains this includes buying PAID links...Matt Cutts, where are you?)
Monthly Price $179/mo.
This is the start up costs and total of all the above costs. Total Costs to Start-Total of Above Items $1178
So this customer is paying $179 a month and paid almost $1200 to rank for a search term that gets 10-20 hits a month MAYBE. A search for the city and the words "real estate" number in the 30,000's.
I did a little more checking in Google, thanked the boy, and hung up. This is how these fly-by-night SEO services not only talk a customer into trying their services, but actually convince them that it's working. And this is why so many realtors think that SEO services are useless and they are better off to use pay-per-click or some other method of advertising.
I don't know what the answer to this smoke-screen selling of SEO is, but it saddens me to see a legitimate web design company using the same tactics as Traffic Power and other completely bogus services that are well known now. We, as real SEO practictioners, must find a way to educate the public somehow. The information on basic SEO and even Real Estate Marketing is everywhere on the internet...but seldom do you find easy to understand guides to the ripoff techniques.
