Why should a company use a professional SEO audit service?

1. Keep your existing SEO company, honest. Verify those traffic numbers and rankings from a 3rd party auditing service. Most SEO experts use black hat and/or fake traffic to fool unsuspecting customers into shady  services.
2. Keeping your website up to date and cleaned of any excess issues helps you compete online. A search engine optimization audit will find any hidden errors that are causing rankings to stagnate online.
3. Looking to and/or have recently redesigned your company website? A technical audit can save your existing SEO rankings from tanking after a site redesign. This is the most common issue we see at our offices.
4. Looking to hire an SEO expert or company? Let us vet their expertise. 97% of the digital marketing companies we test, do not pass. Protect your company and investment dollars before signing a contract.

Learn more about our website auditing services by calling 775-870-0488.

Over 89% of digital marketing companies are not qualified to generate quality leads for their clients.

View our guide on the worlds best SEO experts here.

We tested all of the top competitors in our local Reno market to see what keywords they ranked for in Google, and were SHOCKED to learn that over 97% of these supposed SEO companies did not rank for buyer intent keywords! How is it that a digital marketing company, that sells SEO services does not use SEO to acquire new customers?

Buyer beware. Even large, well known ad agencies are promoting their digital marketing services and do not use SEO either.

A quick search for the keywords that the agency ranks for will tell the truth of how technical savvy they are at their own marketing efforts.

Example report for a local Reno marketing agency where they rank for keywords, on page 7,8 or 9…where no one every goes!

Some local companies do not even rank on the back pages of Google search. They use billboards and/or online ads via Google PPC in order to get SEO clients. Very strange indeed. More and more businesses are becoming educated in how these marketing scams work. It is getting harder to trick businesses into shady marketing services.

Eventually these fly by night marketing companies will fall by the wayside.

Quick tips to vet your SEO company

1. Check out their reviews in Google. Why Google? Yelp and Facebook reviews are easy to game.
2. Track the amount of keywords the marketing agency ranks for. What page do they rank in Google?
3. Check the ranking stats of their customers as well.
4. Hire a 3rd party vetting service.
5. Make sure this company is actually located in the US. A number of foreign companies have front offices in the US, but all of the “work” is done overseas.

Arm yourself with the tools that experts use.

Invest in a company that has the experience and proven track record of successful wins for their own website as well as those of their clients. Always verify that data. There are ways that these companies can fake traffic and analytics. If you have been paying a company for marketing work and not seeing more sales, something is wrong. Do not trust their stat reports, verify with a 3rd party expert that will explain your real world rankings.

SEO Companies that reach out to you, unsolicited are usually in desperate straights (they can’t SEO their own company website) so they steal email addresses online and send out fake emails like the ones shared on the Worse SEO Hall of Fame WebSite here: https://www.claytowne.com/beats-digging-ditches/seo-marketing-spam-hall-of-shame/

Most small businesses get 3 – 5 sales calls a day from spammers trying to sell their Google ranking services. Think about it, if they were good at SEO, they would not have to call and harass you and your staff every day.

Calls from Google to Push Your Ranking a Fraudulent Indicator

Google will never call a business to assist them to improve their search engine rankings. Google provide various tools and knowledge bases to help web masters, search engine optimization experts and other information technology professionals understand the nature of SEO, but they never call businesses unsolicited.

Google has a support team, and customer service department that businesses can call for assistance, but never initiate contact with a business via telephone. source: https://themarketingfolks.com/seo-scam/

Those same small businesses receive several emails a day from supposed experts who just happened to stumble across your website and found some technical errors they can fix for real cheap. These emails are also scams. Never click on those links or call the sales number. They will automatically add your number to a spam call list, selling it to the highest bidder.

SEO is an investment, just like other forms of marketing.  Make sure to work with a vetted expert and try to not think that just by hiring a young person to do your companies SEO or Social Media Marketing will help save the day. More often than not, these people are grossly under qualified for the position and will do more harm than good to your rankings online.

You can save money by doing a lot of it yourself, but you should plan to spend at least 1-2 hours per day marketing your company, writing content, engaging with your audience, and building online relationships.

A good budget for a national business or a competitive local business is typically in the $2500 – $5000 per month range depending on the competitiveness of your industry. For a quality company that isn’t looking to make massive profits on you, that kind of budget should produce good results. You may not reach all of your goals depending on the competitiveness of your industry or if there is additional work that needs to be done (site design, etc) but you should see measured improvement. source: https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-avoid-seo-digital-marketing-scams

SEO is still in the early stages of development. Most businesses do not even know what it is and how it can help or harm their businesses. This opens up room for sharks to surf in and make a lot of easy cash.

I once heard a meteorologist admit that forecasts that predict the weather beyond three days are essentially just guesses. “Then why do you still offer them?” the interviewer asked. “Because the audience demands them,” he answered. Left unsaid was “Because the audience doesn’t know any better.” That’s where SEO is now. The public is still largely ignorant of the truth about Internet marketing, and the stakes are so high that there are more than enough dupes willing to pay for SEO that doesn’t work.

It takes many forms. Fast talking consultants pitch SEO campaigns that cost $50,000-$75,000 to medium-sized businesses, and even though the business owners are skeptical, they often pay because they don’t know what else to do. Web development firms charge small businesses $500 a month for ongoing SEO maintenance, which means precisely collecting $500 for doing absolutely nothing. Marketing companies charge you to enlist popular bloggers to link to your site despite the fact that their blogs have nothing to do with what you’re selling. SEO “experts” charge you to submit your site to hundreds of fly-by-night Eastern European web directories in the name of link building. Most of these experts won’t explain to you what they’re actually doing, and almost none of what they do works. In fact, they’re more likely to get you penalized than to actually help you. source: https://techli.com/2013/12/the-truth-about-internet-marketing-part-2-seo-is-a-scam/

How to spot fake reviews on Amazon?

Fake reviews are one of the biggest hurdles in the way of a good online shopping experience. Like all other online shopping sites, the menace of fake reviews also plague the e-commerce giant – Amazon.

Though Amazon tries hard to weed out the fake reviews, however as a buyer, we need to play our part. Spending a few minutes before making a purchase is all it takes to not get scammed by those glowing 5 stars.

So in this post, I’ll help you identify fake reviews with a few tricks that help me make sound shopping decisions.

Note: As an example, I will be using this new MaxBoost Google Pixel 2 case that my analysis (and my gut) tells me has fake reviews.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/identify-fake-reviews-on-amazon/