Date Published: 2-May-2013 | Author: Nate Rodnay
In recent years, many unethical and low quality SEO providers have entered the SEO business and have exploited every opportunity to game the system. These hard selling style SEO providers are opportunistic businesses that are just looking for a growth area where they can quickly make money.
To be sure, as it becomes difficult to make quick money and as their negative track record increases by the day, they will look for another industry to make a quick buck. Needless to say, many websites have been destroyed by their association with such providers.
What can business owners and business executives do to avoid putting their sites’ credibility at risk with the search engines? The answer lies in first understanding where SEO fits in the marketing, advertising, promotion and web development space.
In our opinion, SEO broadly comes into the marketing area. Yes, there is some element of advertising and promotion but because of the segmentation and the analytics involved in defining the SEO strategy it is more closer to marketing than advertising. Once we understand that SEO is closely related to marketing, it is relatively easy to find a good SEO provider.
An organization that focuses its sales force on hard selling is very unlikely to simultaneously have built in them the ability to explain SEO practices in an easy to understand manner. Focusing on hard sell might indicate their priority to give lesser importance to training the sales force on helping the client by understanding their web situation and advising on a good solution. Due to the confusion over the search engine algorithms and the lack of awareness of how SEO works, it is far easier to close a sale by using hard sales methods. It is a totally different matter if the client will be happy with the service over the coming months after the contract is awarded.
We believe a conceptual and solution focused sales process is more suitable for SEO industry in order to identify good customers and for retaining them. Hard selling SEO companies should trigger a flag for any executive or business owner involved in the process of shortlisting a SEO provider.
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