01.06.07

How I saved a customer from a $4000 Google scam this week

Posted in Articles, ECommerce, Internet Industry, Internet Marketing, Search Engines and SEO, Web Development at 9:45 pm by john

$3750 to be exact, is the amount of money I saved a customer this week because she almost got taken by an internet scam artist. It wasn’t Google (the company) that was scamming her, it was someone claiming they could get her high in Google’s search results. Read the whole story after the jump.

First, a note about my search engine services…

My company (Delaware.Net) offers Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services, which help web sites come up higher in search engines like Google and Yahoo. This is one of many services that we offer to help customers market the web sites that we build and/or host. Unfortunately, some of our customers are not aware that we offer this service (we are fixing that with our new 2007 marketing plan). This story is an example of how there are many SEO scam companies out there that will try to take advantage of you, and why you need to be careful when choosing an SEO company.

Now for the story….

I got a phone call from a long-time customer that is in the eye care business. We host their web site, and we designed it about 4-5 years ago. She said, “John, I got a phone call and a proposal from a company that says they can get me number one on Google under the words ‘Delaware Lasik’” (an important search phrase for this eyecare company). She asked if she could stop by my office to look at the proposal and to see if we could offer similar services. I explained to her that we are now routinely performing targeted search engine work for our customers, and we scheduled a meeting.

When she stopped by, she showed me the proposal from the company that she spoke with. The front page of the proposal said “Invoice”, and it was written using a basic Microsoft Word template. It looked pretty unprofessional. The quoted amount was $8,000. It then said that they were giving her a AAO (American Association of Ophthalmologists) discount, bringing her total down to $3,750. Naturally, the quote also had a deadline.
On the second page of the quote, was the scope of search engine services that she would get with this proposal. I could almost tell immediately without reading the page that this would be a scam, because the entire scope of work that she was getting was only 3 paragraphs of text. Here is where it gets interesting - the first paragraph said “client will get a #1 listing under the search term ‘Delaware Lasik’ on the developer’s web site“.
Did you catch what was wrong with that statement? It didn’t say that they would get her #1 on Google. It said that she would be #1 on THEIR web site. Obviously ANYONE could guarantee top placement for a search phrase on their OWN web site. I pointed out to her that fact as proof that this was a scam. The other two paragraphs in the scope didn’t offer much more. One paragraph mentioned that they would offer her support, and the other said that they would forward leads from their web site to her. The name of the scam company is “Einstein Medical”. I am sure that the AAO has no idea of who Einstein Medical is, so I intend to give them a call as well to let them know about this scam.
What was most interesting to me is how badly my customer wanted to believe that this scam is true. Even after showing her that it was a scam, she kept saying “but they said they could get me high in Google“. I replied “they may have said that, but what this proposal is stating is totally something else“. She then asked me if I thought there was a Google benefit to her being listed in their site. I told her that it depends on how popular their site is.

This begs the next question: “is a link on THEIR web site worth $3,750?”. Since my client was sitting in our conference room with me, I used a digital projector to show her some online tools that we use to accurately estimate traffic to any web site. A few years ago we would use Alexa.com for this, but there are now better tools than Alexa (we actually don’t recommend Alexa because it is now inaccurate). The results were pretty interesting. The scammer’s site was ranked at about 9,000,000 in popularity. Not good. So a link from that web site wouldn’t do squat for her. Looking a little more closely at Einstein’s site revealed that their web site designs were actually pre-designed templates that were imply modified for their clients. Not exactly a “custom” design.

Note: There is no such thing as a quick-fix to building a quality search engine campaign for your business

OK, so back to the point that my customer wanted this scam to be a reality - and bad. Why do you think she wanted it to be true? I think that more and more businesses are realizing (finally) that they MUST have a Google/Yahoo/SEO campaign as part of their marketing plan, but they simply don’t have the time that is necessary to develop a good search engine strategy. They need help. And they would LOVE to pay one fee to one company, and just show up number one on Google. While this IS possible, in most cases it is a fantasy without a fair amount of work. We recently performed some SEO work for a client and got them number on within Google’s rankings. How we did that is proprietary. So even though I CAN make someone number one in Google, I wouldn’t guarantee it because I am not Google. Only Google can guarantee what is number one in their search results. If a company ever promises you that they will get you the number one position, you should be wary. Marketing professionals just want the search engine part of their marketing handled by someone else so that they don’t have to worry about it. Typically, the people I meet that want this fantasy to come true are marketing professionals that have fallen behind when it comes to online marketing. They may be very talented at newspaper, TV, print brochures, billboards, door hangars, and other traditional forms of marketing, but when it comes to email and search engine marketing they are lost. They just want badly to be able to say to their bosses that the search engine stuff is “handled”.

For the next hour, I educated my customer about all of the aspects of a good search engine strategy. Both how to come up for free in the organic listings, and how to manage a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. She left very happy, and she now knows a lot more about how search engine marketing will help her business. She asked me for a quote to both create and manage a campaign for her with a web site overhaul, which we will do for her. And it will cost her less than she would have paid the scammer. $3750 may or may not be a lot of money to you, but I am sure that there are many other people out there that would fall for that scam. Then the money the scammers are making adds up pretty quickly. And for what? $3750 for putting a link into their own web site. Be careful selecting an SEO company.

Digg it | del.icio.us | Furl | reddit Permalink