Are Most SEO's scamming people

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davidcronk

Member
I remember a number of years ago I was posting some content for a business owner in Nepal who's company run treks to Everest Base Camp. It is a very competitive market segment.
He said to me he went through a number of SEO agencies in a neighbouring country and he was adamant that they had done absolutely nothing just took the money until he stopped paying.
I suspect that competition has cleaned up quite a lot of this but it is a little bit of a wild west industry.
 
You still see a lot of scams out there today. Some course/product/service providers produce things KNOWING that they don't work well (if they work at all). And you still see new SEOs posting in groups "I just got a client in the [name] industry. How should I rank them?" These charlatans give legit SEOs a bad reputation.
 
In all the years I've been doing this I have never thought about running my own course or even doing a course. Personally I don't think I know enough to run my own course and if I knew I was going to get the ROI in doing a course I'd probably do one, but there are no guarantees in life. So I will continue as a middling - Know enough to be dangerous to myself.
 
A lot of client's and business want immediate game changing results. It usually takes us 4 to 6 months to put real points on the board. Unfortunately most people "try" things out will little money and for little time. So sure it looks like a scam.
 
I have to somewhat agree with FI News Press Releases, especially depending on the market the client is in. It may take more time than they're expecting.

This can also lead to a common problem of not communicating expectations thoroughly, people will not often say that SEO takes awhile and also not tell them that the competition of the term or keyword they're trying to rank will also have major influences on the expected time to gt returns on your services / investment.

Are most SEO's a scam? Well Its hard to say, If you go and look at a local niche, just as an example, and look through all the sites with designed by "x" company in the footer, so you know for sure that the site has been SEO you can and will always find seo issues with the site, H1s badly optimized etc...

But I'm unsure if that's considered a scam? I think where we can get into a lot of trouble with this is in definitions. Your definition of scam may be the fact that they've poorly optimized the on page. But I may think it's because doing a simple site:"domain.com" and seeing blog comments that are backlinks for the site as a scam. (Not saying I do, just an example)

So it's hard to diagnose if someone is being scammed or not, we're also missing a lot of information like how much did the client pay for such services, what the discussed deliverables were. What did the client say the SEO could or couldn't do to their site etc...

Are an overwhelming majority of people being scammed? I don't think so, but are a lot of people being scammed? (20-40%) probably in the low 30's percentage wise.
 
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