Janric Website Design

It is all well and good getting ‘experts’ to help you with your website, but watch who they are working for.

I was contacted yesterday by a local customer who wanted to rank well for a local search term. Now, this is something that I highly recommend. His question was simple “How much would you charge to optimise my website?”.

Do the terms send traffic?
But, I had been running research last week on loads of local terms and I guessed from that that his marketing consultant terms would yield little results. So, off to Google I went and yes, 0 monthly searches.

My next step was to look and see if he was close to the top anyway and I’d just have done a few free articles for him. I typed in the search terms and actually the main part of this website was 2nd on Google. His was nowhere to be found and a couple of other customers of mine were on page 2.

An expensive pink elephant
Conclusion – it would take a bit of effort to get him to the top of a useless search term. I explained all of this and even checked my own traffic logs. I was 2nd on Google and no hits from that term in the 13 / 14 months I looked back.

The relief!
His response – well obviously he had thought it was his chance to push his brand new business, so I expect he was a bit upset. But he thanked me and told me the full story. He had been approached by some self confessed SEO experts who had offered to do the job for him using that search term, for £1,500.

Don’t blindly trust those you don’t know
He didn’t mention which bandits made this offer, so I can’t name them. But, for a brand new business, that would have been a lot of money straight down the drain that he probably couldn’t afford.

Shame on them!

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