Why Free SEO advice is going to cost you money

Details: Thursday, 14 April 2011 18:21; Hits: 422

The moment you realise you need some help to search engine optimise your website you are under pressure. SEO work takes time to deliver results and if you are in a position where your website is underperforming time is against you. You need to act fast because you are losing visitors, customers, money every single second of the day.

At this point (and I am writing from direct experience) what usually happens is that you hit the SEO forums and put there a question. This used to be a great way to get some reply and it still is when it comes to coding where the field is so complex and so wide that all coders (and webmasters) know that they will, at some point, need some help themselves.

On the basis of what goes round comes round they are prepared to be free with their advice and this usually works for them (and for you). In SEO however things are not so simple. For a start search engine optimisation is complex, detailed work but it is not difficult. This is exactly why the SEO advice we give you at Help My SEO works so well.

Because it is not difficult there is a genuine fear amongst experienced SEOs that each bit of advice they give out reveals an SEO ‘secret’ and diminishes their value and the potential earnings they can make. In addition, experienced SEOs have come about their knowledge through detailed experimentation on test sites where they try different techniques in different Google data centres (there are three international ones) and probe the Google algorithm for what is called in the business “performance differentials”.

It takes work, a lot of ingenuity plus some experience to actually do this correctly and the answers you get back as an SEO expert are not easily, or casually, shared in an open forum.

Amateur SEO advice
All this means that the only ones prepared to answer your question about any perceived SEO problem in the performance of your website are those who are amateurs and are struggling with SEO themselves and dabble in their website, making tonnes of mistakes along the way and learning as they go. Or those who know a little about SEO, mostly theoretical stuff and try to ‘guess’ solutions based on the extrapolated application of their knowledge.

This is meant in no way to disparage either group and, indeed, the web started out as an open community where information and even programming were openly shared and this is what most of us loved about it, back then.

But, if you need serious SEO help for your website this is not the way to go. Doing it this way is like getting a major toothache and going to a friend who had a tooth pulled once because you cannot afford to go to a dentist. Whether it will work or not will depend on the severity of your toothache problem and your pain tolerance levels.
Similarly, with your website, you will probably try some advice you will get for free in an SEO forum. Bearing in mind that each website is unique in its content, structure and positioning in the market it is already highly unlikely that someone has experienced he exact same SEO problem as you have.

SEO problems, however, do fall into general categories and you may be lucky enough that someone will have experienced something similar and they may have solved it. At this point you will get some SEO advice which you will most probably go away and implement and my guess is it will not work.

You will then go back and give more details of your SEO problem and someone will offer to take a look at your site (from the outside of course) and suggest something which, again, you will have little choice but to go away and implement.

By now you will be getting desperate. Forum replies can take as long as days or sometimes weeks to come about and you will probably spend valuable time you should be working on your website, cruising the net looking for answers and going to all the different forums.

In all this time your website will be slipping further and further down the search engine results page (SERP) and you will be losing more and more visitors, customers and money and, in addition, the SEO tinkering you have been applying, since it has not worked, may be raising some red flags on Google and even Yahoo! and MSN which will begin to take a closer look at a website which is now beginning to look like a spam site trying to manipulate their algorithms.

Professional SEO advice always costs
It is at about this point that most webmasters decide to bite the bullet and get an expert SEO professional in to look at their site and try to solve their SEO problem. Because they have lost money and they are spending a lot of money to get their website’s SEO problem fixed they also begin to ask about guarantees and try to ‘squeeze’ as much value as possible out of their SEO spend and this then begins to cause problems with the SEO professional who begins to feel that an amateur who messed their site up is now trying to take advantage of them by getting more than they paid for.

First let’s get a few facts straight. The moment an SEO professional looks at your site they are already under pressure because what they want to do is make it perform. Secondly in SEO work there are no guarantees. Google may run a vital algorithm update on day two of your SEO’s work. Two dozen of your competitors may up their SEO efforts to the point that they take over all the prime spots in Google’s top pages.

Two million more sites competing directly with yours might suddenly start up. All of this may happen at once.

The moment you get an SEO professional who is less than honest about this you should start to question what else they are being dishonest about.
The next thing to remember is that when it comes to SEO prevention is better than cure and free advice is suspect, no matter how well-meaning it might be.

If you really want your website to perform the way it should you need to learn about SEO yourself so that you can, at least, understand what the professional you have hired is doing and what you need to say in order to guide them properly.

At Help My SEO we go out of our way to give you step-by-step, plain English advice that blows away all the ‘secrets’ expert SEOs do not want you to know about. We do it because we believe in the web being the great equaliser, the place where you have to be able to find quality assistance, reasonably priced.

So, if you get into SEO trouble because you followed the advice someone gave you in a form somewhere you will have none but yourself to blame.