SEO – Fraud or Laziness: How to Spot & Stop SEO & SEM Waste & Fraud (PART 2)

SEO – Fraud or Laziness: How to Spot & Stop SEO & SEM Waste & Fraud (PART 2)

TRANSCRIPT: All right. We’re going to start with SEO today, then we’re going to get into PPC, and then finally display. So when we talk about SEO, I want to ask the question, “Is some of what’s going on, is it fraud, or is it just laziness?” First, again. Let’s level set. One of the easiest things for anyone to do is to attack the search engine optimization on any website.

There are some conflicting opinions about what is good versus bad SEO. And also, with the lousy SEO reporting that’s provided to most dealers right now, any site’s SEO can be made to look good or bad. It’s an art form in a lot ways and we need to understand that, but fraudulent SEO usually includes an attack on your current SEO.

All right, so we’re looking for what might be fraudulent SEO. Realize they’re always going to start by attacking your current SEO. Unfortunately, that’s also what the honest SEO companies are probably going to do if you’re currently being stolen from. So we’re going to talk about ways to figure out whether or not your SEO is effective in just a little bit.

Here’s another way. Fraudulent SEO usually includes an email, promising to get you to number one on Google. Okay, so it’s an email that just gets sent to you, and it comes from a Gmail address, which is really strange. They don’t even have a website. If they’re so great at getting you to number one on Google, why wouldn’t they have a website where they’re number one on Google for relevant keywords? Makes sense, right? Fraudulent SEO usually includes buying inbound links. When they promise to generate a lot of links for you, that’s fraudulent SEO. That could get you hurt.

Changing your Google Analytics account is always part of a lot of the fraudulent activity that happens today. So they’ll change your Google Analytics account, you lose all your past, all the history, and you can’t do the comparisons. And also, finally, claiming to have some sort of secret sauce, right. Something they can’t tell you about, that they’ve cracked the Google algorthyms and they got this secret sauce that’s going to get you to number one. I’m telling you right now that that is probably fraudulent.

Okay, so let’s do this. Today, let’s agree that for the average car dealer, all search is local. Okay. I’m not talking about every dealer out there. I’m not talking about the ones that sell a lot from coast to coast. I’m talking about for the average dealer. All search is local. So buying or ranking for a keyword that’s 2,000 miles from your dealership, that isn’t what your search goal should be, right. It’s too expensive if you’re doing it for SEM, Search Engine Marketing, or pay per click, and it won’t last with SEO. See, Google’s too smart to let you continue to rank organically too far outside your market.

See, they use something called RankBrain. And again, this isn’t a technical Google Analytics class, so don’t worry about this. But Google uses something called RankBrain. It measures the quality of a consumer’s visit to your site. So let’s say that you’re sitting there in Ohio on the red dot, right, and you’re ranking for Ford Tires nationally, right. I go to Google. I’m up here in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, the blue dot, and I search for Ford Tires.

I’m 2,000 miles away and I click on your organic search result. Well, guess what happens? I see that you’re in Ohio and I discover, “Wow, they’re 2,000 miles away.” I go back to Google and I choose again. And that little action quickly sinks your ranking, because all search for the average dealer is local and you’re going to tell RankBrain that you’re not a good result in my market. It’s as simple as that.