The usual round of internet Scams - Adwords and SEO this week

Today I wanted to highlight a couple of Google Adwords and SEO Scams going round at the moment. This is nothing new I know but people keep on falling for them, so its worth explaining a bit about how they work.

Here are a couple we've seen recently.

Scam 1. "We'll get you on the first page of Google for £99 per month"
This consists of paying for Adwords, and in many cases only for 5 keywords. Looking at the keywords being "offered" on one such email, it seems that they select some which are never being searched for, so that they will not have to pay your money for anyone actually clicking on the ads. That means they can hang on to more of it themselves.

In addition 5 keywords are not usually sufficient for an effective Adwords campaign. With a new campaign you normally start with quite a lot of keywords, and then filter it down to the ones that convert the best, and bring you the most business.

So to summarise the above offer it is not exactly theft, but it is a very low qualty offering, which decieves the innocent into believing that they are getting a great deal more than they really are.

OK, on to Scam 2. This one says....
"We'll SEO your site for Free - you only pay if we get you on to page 1 of Google for agreed keywords."

This is another naughty one, because it fails to explain the massive difference between "easy" and "difficult" keywords.

Firstly lets look at a "very" easy Keyword.
it is going to be "piddlesnotpot". A few days after this post has gone live you will be able to search for this word in Google, and I guarantee it will be on Page 1. So that wasn't very difficult was it?

Lets take a more regular easy keyword (or phrase).
How about "laptop computer cornwall". Now only 172 sites use this exact phrase by today's count, so you could rank on Page 1 for Google for it very quickly. I could offer you page 1 ranking for a variety of phrases like that - not mentioning that no one is actually searching for them!

Now lets take a difficult Keyword. This is one that you'd really like to rank for - lets say "Laptop Computers". It would be fair to say that you could retire on a page 1 ranking for this phrase, because not only is it searched for approximately 5 million times each month, but the opportunities for converting those searchers to a valuable sale (£1000 per sale perhaps) are significant.

If the kind gentleman offering me a page 1 ranking would accept "laptop computers" as our chosen keyphrase, then I'd happily take him up on his offer, but somehow I doubt he will!

Summary:
There is a bit more to setting up either a Google Adwords or SEO campaign than these over simplified offers. The selection of the best keyphrases to optimise for is the crucial first stage, based on factors including traffic numbers, relevancy to your business, and the difficulty of ranking for each.

Then whether you are paying for the traffic (Adwords), or want to be on the google organic listings (SEO), you have to put a proper strategy in place which will get you the most traffic for the amount of cash you have to spend.

However tempting these offers may sound they do not meet either of these requirements, so please don't be taken in - we've heard from too many people who have suffered from schemes like this, and ended up spending money on either nothing, or not what they thought they were getting.

Some of them luckily do end up going on to doing proper SEO or a well managed Google Adwords campaign, with all the fantastic and measurable results that these marketing tools can offer. Some of them probably just end up thinking the SEO or PPC advertising just doesn't work, or perhaps doesn't work for them, which would be a shame, given how powerful and cost effective it is when done properly.