I’m here in order to answer one conundrum for you. For what reason is there such duplicity in the online SEO marketplace? Why is it so guaranteed that each time you venture forward in order to get yourself found in search engines, there are thousands of unreliable folks in the woods, offering dubious services at the price of transparency?
It’s Worse During a Crisis
The answers are very straightforward, but it’s important you get them. Why, you might ask? Because—and this is important—when people are feeling the pinch of no cash, the little guys do stupid things sometimes and the unreliable people start preying.
The Two Reasons You Need to Understand
So: there are a couple of reasons for the shiftiness that is everywhere in the world of SEO. One is old as the sun. There have always been types who have made money from zero, and historically, they have waited for rough times very similar to this one.
Our second point is the nature of SEO and the ad market online. Entirely due to what it is, it attracts shifty characters. This doesn’t mean you won’t come upon tons of solid SEO companies—definitely not, as there are tons of great companies doing business. But marketing has never lured entirely honest people across the board. There are a million shifty salesmen out there, something we’re all familiar with. Why would the internet not be susceptible?
Dusty Books are Full of Good Lessons
So, allow us to begin with the history first. In times of crisis, people don’t always use their heads. 1930s America isn’t only known for dust and the New Deal, but it’s full of drifters and grifters everywhere, profiting from the nation’s difficulties. Ever seen that HBO series called Carnivale? Its entire cast is essentially just variations on this theme.
Throw that together with some of the explanations for why we’re in this depression, mainly the concept that it’s entirely in the realm of possibility to get rich without doing any real sort of job whatsoever (one of the main ideas behind constantly ‘flipping houses’ in a mortgage bubble), and you’ve a difficult climate for honesty.
Nothing Different About This One
Unreliable SEO agencies take advantage of this economically-driven blindness by making the very same claims that grifters have been making for decades. They claim there’s a huge world just sitting there waiting to be monetized, and insist on the great profits, essentially from nothing at all. You only need to pay your fee to have the doors opened to this magic network, which, and this they never explain, they aren’t just enjoying themselves.
The idea is to theoretically cultivate some sort of god knows what, and the apparently legendary quantity of great visitors will amazingly create enough advertising profits for you to simply start receiving random cheques in the post-box.
Networks that Go Nowhere
Just what this mess of links, referrals and content is isn’t really specified, and that’s exactly what they want. As long as you’re handing over cash to the SEO company, that’s all they are concerned about (and thus you are the only cash source here).
If your promised profits never show up, they can’t really be blamed, because there was never a real foundation from the get-go. There are dozens of methods to muddy your dearth of profits.
Madison Avenue as a Historical Reason
Then we have our final part of my little explanation: the philosophy behind SEO and advertising itself. The world of advertising has always been a bit of a gambler’s game, and doing so online is definitely the same.
Of course with the rise in the incredible amount of analytic data available to us , SEO now can be more transparent than ever.
There have always been unreliable people ready to take your money, but now with the way the internet works, they’ve increased radically in numbers.
Look in Your Mailbox Sometime and Understand the Heart of Spam
Check this out: the US Postal Service gives ridiculous discounts for big amounts of post. Fundamentally, this is a waste of paper, or mail-spam, but slightly less irritating because it arrives in your post-box instead of in your mail account (maybe it’s far worse, to tell the truth).
If the US Postal Service is really just a giant spam conduit half the time, think of what must happen with the anonymous feeling the internet allows us to use. The count of potential scammers simply balloons out of our consideration.
Just don’t be distracted from the fact that the market of search engine optimization is a real business—they are the Madison Avenue of the foreseeable future. Choose a real, respected, and transparent one!