If you own, operate or manage a business, you have most likely received hundreds of emails and phone calls from countries like India & Bangladesh offering SEO services and putting you on the first page of Google so all your troubles would go away. And these are just the ones that made their way through your Spam filter!
To understand this, let’s take a look at the journey of SEO and how often it has been searched on the Internet through the years
As you can see, it is being searched far less frequently in 2016 than it was back in 2004. This is more than likely associated with the fact that Google was advertising and marketing their brand very heavily back in 2004 to get more and more people using their Search Engine rather than Bing or Yahoo. They seem to have won that battle and essentially become the CocaCola of Search Engines.
Now, let’s take a look at WHERE most of these queries are coming from.
Even after accounting for the difference in population, it is curious that the searches for SEO are coming from countries where search engines aren’t actually used as often as they are in countries like Australia and the United States, especially to find local businesses.
The answer is because most SEO and Digital Marketing agencies based in Australia outsource their entire campaigns and work to overseas teams based in these countries. And several of these teams decide to market directly to businesses based in western countries as they realize the demand is high.
So how does it affect you as the business owner?
Links are a major part of the equation when it comes to Search Engine Marketing and improving your ranking. When your website is linked to another, it gets categorized as being of similar quality. Think of it as good neighbourhoods vs bad neighbourhoods.
When these links come from bad neighbourhoods (which they will if you have the same team working on hundreds of clients at a cheap rate), they will not only hurt your rankings but also damage your website’s potential for ranking in the future.
So if you have ever wondered why the SEO industry gets a bad reputation, it’s because SEO Agencies outsource their work to the overseas team, who build bad quality links to the website. The business owner is then left with a bad impression of SEO and a damaged website, while the SEO Agency moves on to find other businesses.
Moral of the story is quite simple. If someone promises to rank you for the services you provide, make sure to ask them if THEY rank for the services THEY provide.
At A.P. Web Solutions, we do not outsource ANY work overseas. Click here to see some of our rankings and testimonials.
If you followed Google’s announcements at all last year, then you have likely heard about the huge Mobile-Friendly update that hit in April 2015. For those of you that didn’t have Internet at the time, this update was when Google announced that they would practically be punishing websites that weren’t mobile-friendly by lowering their positions in the search engines. The main reason they did this is because they want to ensure the best possible user experience and since more and more people are now browsing the Internet on mobile devices, Google wants to make sure that websites that aren’t easy to navigate on the phone are not be shown in the first place.