I’m currently working on a website for a Cheshire based locksmith and thought I’d take a look at the competition. I entered in a Google search and came across the website locksmithcheshire.co.uk. I don’t take any joy in naming and shaming, but this is an example that I really couldn’t ignore and superbly highlights the dangers businesses face when outsourcing their SEO to cheap service providers.

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I’m not going to waste my time critiquing the front end design. Instead I’m focusing on the content, in particular the first paragraph of copy.  Read the first paragraph for yourself and it’s instantly clear that this is copy written by an SEO provider whose first language clearly isn’t English. The quality of the content is consistently low, indicating that the work was done on the cheap.

Proving that you can’t write a coherent sentence really isn’t going to win you any customers

I’ve come across this kind of company time and time again.  The use of questionable techniques might be successful in raising your websites visibility in search results, but what’s the point of being found in Google if your content is so terrible that it is more likely to result in you losing potential customers?

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The opening paragraph from the Cheshire locksmith website

Seriously, this sort of content makes a business look plain stupid and will put far more customers off than it attracts.  My advice? Don’t be tempted to choose an SEO based on price alone. Riding high in SERPs is utterly pointless if your website content is lousy and stops people from using your services or buying from you.

If you are being offered SEO services at a price that seems too good to be true, dig a little deeper or you risk severely damaging your businesses reputation.

Key SEO considerations

  • Get more than one quote and compare what you are getting.
  • If a company is promising you a guaranteed prime position in search results this has to be balanced with other objectives, like engaging customers with good quality relevant content.
  • It is relatively simple to use black hat techniques to bump sites up the search results – these techniques are not just unethical, they won’t provide you with long term benefits and other considerations will often be totally overlooked.
  • There may be legitimate reasons that you are being offered services cheaply, for example a company may have a promotion on or might be offered reduced fee’s to new customers, so dig a little deeper if the price is very low.
  • High quality website content is crucial and will help to generate trust in your brand, a critical component in the decision making process, don’t sacrifice the quality of your content.
  • Poor quality copy as in the example above makes you look highly unprofessional and will have a negative impact on conversion rates; people won’t make enquiries, people won’t order from you.