SEO techniques were designed to grow companies but SEO itself has become big business. Many businesses, particularly those that operate exclusively online, consider SEO marketing to be the most important arm of their advertising strategy. They annually commit a significant portion of their advertising budget to SEO. This has motivated the creation of SEO firms, effective and not, scrupulous and not. Businesses find that the best use of their advertising dollar requires researching effective techniques and choosing an SEO firm with deep experience and proven success.
Legitimate SEO Growth Is A Long-Term Strategy
The job of any salesperson that is using SEO, or any other marketing strategy to increase market share and increase sales is to optimize the purchase path. Some look at this as influencing potential customers to break down the barriers to purchase. If a business has fulfilled a need for their market segment, then they need to provide their customers with the information they need to come to the same conclusion.
One business technique for achieving market growth is sensitivity analysis. Sensitivity is the ratio of dollar revenue increase for each dollar spent on advertising. Marketers choose advertising techniques with high sensitivity to optimize their selling strategies.
If your competitors are using effective SEO techniques, then your own sensitivity to investing advertising into SEO will be very high. It will generally be in your interest to invest in SEO marketing. On the other hand, if you have an effective SEO strategy in place, and are on an equal footing with your competitors in that regard, then spending additional money on SEO would likely be unwise. If you are not matching your competitors in traffic or conversion, then exposure is not your likely problem. At this point, you would look at another part of the purchase path: the design of the website, the ease of the checkout process, or the quality of your customer service.
Enter The Black Hat SEO Firms
With this basic understanding of the power and the limitations of SEO marketing, it is easy to see that having an experienced and successful SEO team design your strategy is essential.
However, some SEO firms are established to promote businesses beyond the designs or intentions of the search engine providers. They seek to manipulate the search engine results to give their clients an unfair advantage in the online marketplace. In this way, they bypass the search engine algorithms and attempt to fool people who innocently come to the Internet looking for a product or service.
How To Differentiate Between White And Black SEO And The Cost Of A Wrong Choice
The key to making an informed choice of SEO firms is to understand the basics of SEO operation, and make sure each firm’s philosophy holds water. White hat firms will operate firmly within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Black hat companies will make promises that cannot possibly be legitimate.
For instance, some black hat companies promise they can get you to the top of the search engine rankings for any set of keywords. This is impossible for a legitimate firm. For instance, if you have twenty competitors, and each of you are using effective SEO techniques, then you will be somewhere in the top twenty, determined by factors other than SEO. (Of course, your competitors that do not employ SEO will likely be after the twenty of you that do.)
On the other hand, there have been illegitimate ways to manipulate the market that work in the short term. One of these is known as keyword cloaking. The website in question will provide a legitimate response to normal users, but will watch for the specialized IP address of search engine crawlers and respond to them differently, often by returning a hundred copies of the keyword.
Keyword cloaking is just one of the clever schemes devised by black hat SEO firms. However, as soon as the black hatters come up with a clever scheme, the search engine designers implement a counter. Not only have these designers become more effective at detecting scams, they have become more effective at penalizing websites that break the rules. Google’s latest algorithm release titled Penguin, detected many websites using unfair SEO practices, and reacted decisively. Some website owners woke up one morning in 2012 to find that their website rankings had dropped 50 positions! A year later, only 10% have reported recovering from Google’s blacklist.
Just Say No To Black Hat : Connect with AuroIN
Black hat firms will not just take advantage of your potential customers, they will take advantage of you. When you are blacklisted, they will leave you to the wolves and move onto the next client. A white hat firm like AuroIN is not only the most effective choice, it is also the safest.
