SEO Is a Scam

Search Engine Optimization has undergone enormous changes over the last few years as search engines have become the primary portal for most users looking for information on the Web. And while we've had some success with SEO on our own (JV/M usually comes up on the first page of search results if you look for "B2B Telemarketing"), we've now seen enough to conclude that almost everything that is sold today as SEO is a scam.

Before we give you the evidence that investing large chunks of your marketing budget in SEO is a waste of resources, let's start with the one part of SEO that is not a scam. That is, there are - without question - legitimate tools and techniques available that can help your company increase the likelihood that it will appear higher up in the rankings. But note: All of them are FREE.

The ones you need to know about are:

That's it. If you have to pay someone to implement Google Analytics on your site, it should cost you no more than a couple of hundred dollars. (It's free if you do it yourself; and, by the way, it's very easy to do.) But unless you're willing to spend literally millions of dollars, there is nothing you can do that will work better than Google Analytics. Everything else is a scam.

You read that right. The only way to actually win the SEO game is to spend millions of dollars. No matter what business you're in, if you're only prepared to spend a couple of thousand dollars, or even a couple of hundred thousand dollars, you're wasting your money. The price of a ticket for success with SEO today is millions of dollars. Unless you have that kind of money, as they said in the movie "War Games," the only way to win is not to play.

Note also that we said that by doing SEO you can appear "higher" in the rankings, not "high." You simply can't do anything for less than a million dollars that will have more than an incremental effect. And since you can do that for free, why spend the money?

We've suspected for a long time that paying for SEO was a bad idea, simply because it's so easy to do yourself. But when we saw this article in the New York Times, it made us curious enough to do some digging.

You know intuitively that the first page of the rankings is nothing more than a battlefield. Companies don't appear at the top of the rankings by accident; they obviously did something better than their competitors to get there. And if someone comes along and does it even better, they'll knock the top guy off and take his place. It's just "King of the Hill."

So you figure, or some SEO vendor convinces you, that if you do the right things you'll be able to displace whoever's above you on the rankings. And you'd be right; this is nothing more than a marketing investment where money talks. The problem is: How much do you think you're going to have to pay to get there? If you look at the numbers, it is truly staggering.

Here's the first test: Go to Google Adwords and see how much it will cost you to buy the search term that you really want for your business. Right off the bat you will see that there's a bidding war for the terms you really want. And chances are, you're not going to be able to afford very much, and those are just the sponsored links.

For the natural results, the SEO firms, and Google for that matter, will suggest that you try to be "more specific." That is, compromise on the terms you want. We for example, would like to be found when people search on the term "sales leads." After all, that's what we sell. But we found that there are two problems: First, what most people think of as "sales leads" are really just mailing lists. (We define a sales lead as a meeting with a qualified prospect who has a need for your product, and who wants to talk with you about how you can help.) How did that happen? It happened because companies that sell mailing lists bought up the term "sales leads" on the search engines. Oh, well.

Or they'll tell you that you have to focus your SEO program geographically. Forget that there are many business that are not geographically constrained; let's assume you're a house painter in East Cupcake. Here's how to solve the problem for free: Put "East Cupcake" in your Web site's Meta tags. How hard was that? Not very, and it's the best you're going to do.

The second thing we noticed was that if we chose another term, very few people actually used it to search. Most people have a very short attention span, and they search with impatience. So, for example, someone who needs our services might start by looking for "sales leads," and quickly realize that companies that sell "sales leads" are really selling mailing lists. (We should only hope.) So they switch to searching on the word "telemarketing." And what do they find? Call centers.

Now, if we were a call center, then all we'd have to worry about was what it would cost us to rank higher than our competitors (which, by the way, would cost millions of dollars that we don't have). But we're not. We are a "virtual shop that specializes in generating real, qualified sales leads using professional business-to-business telemarketing techniques." Is anyone really going to search on that? Not a chance.

So you begin to see the problem. You can't afford to rank high on the terms that you really want, and your prospects don't have the patience to search on the terms that you can afford.

This, though, creates a perfect opportunity for a scam. That is, an SEO vendor can sell to your hopes on getting a high ranking, knowing that it will always be just out of reach.

Clearly, SEO is nothing more than an arms race where the only ones who get rich are the arms merchants. But does participating really harm you, other than wasting your money? We think it does because it also wastes your time and your expectations. Time, at least, is something you can't get back.