25 Promises and Advice Given By Unethical SEO Firms

Ahh yes, we have all received e-mails from SEO companies promising the world for $199/month!  Unfortunately there are more unethical SEO companies out there than ones you can trust.  So if you are a business or organization looking for a reputable firm to hire, how do you know what to look for? or more importantly what NOT to look for?

Here are 25 red flags you should be aware of if a SEO company says:

1. We Promise First Page Rankings
2. We Promise #1 Keyword Placement
3. We Promise a Certain Number of Keywords to Rank on Page 1
4. We Guarantee x Percentage in Organic Traffic
5. SEO Can Be a Short-term Marketing Strategy
6. Pay Us to Get on Google
7. We Have a Special Arrangement with Google
8. You Don’t Have to Contribute to a Social Media Strategy
9. You Don’t Need to Worry About Website Content
10. We Will Replicate Your Site and Put it on Multiple Domains
11. We Will Duplicate a Page Hundreds of Times
12. We Can Hide Text by Matching the Same Color as the Background
13. Stuffing the Keywords in the Title Will Help
14. Automated Link Building Will Help Your Rankings
15. We Know the Exact Algorithm Google Uses to Rank Sites
16. Rankings Are Everything in SEO
17. We Don’t Need to Touch Your Website Code
18. We Can Take Articles From Other Sources and Put Them on Your Site
19. You Need to Pay Monthly for your Local Business Listings to Show Up
20. Visitor Traffic is the Only Thing to Worry About
21. You Have to Submit Your Website to the Search Engines
22. Reciprocal Link Exchange Can Increase Your Rankings
23. We Can Get Your Site Unbanned for x Dollars
24. All You Have to Do is Add Keywords in the Code
25. We Build Only Manual Links – Even Though They Are Automated