How To Avoid Snake Oil SEO Companies? Explained in Detail!

The saying “prevention is better than cure” applies to a lot of things, in this video our goal is to help you avoid being scammed by Snake Oil SEO companies. It is important to know how they usually operate and what you can ask them to determine if they really know what they’re doing. Finding out if SEO companies are legitimate can sometimes be difficult, so we hope that you watch until the end of the video to learn about techniques you can use to catch them red-handed.

Detecting Snake Oil SEO

How can you tell if you’re being scammed? Okay snake oil SEO is very hard to detect if you’re not tech savvy. You want to make sure that whoever is working with you, if you sign a contract with them that they actually can do stuff, not show you graphs they made. So that’s going to be how the snake oil SEOs actually get people in the first place from my understanding. They like design graphs in Photoshop or they take actual Google search console graphs and they edit them and then they showcase them to a business owner like yourself. 

How to Find a Legitimate SEO Company

The way to actually do it is ask for referrals, so you try to call the company you try to work with and the referrals to see if the phone answers, if they’re polite, if they’re actually talking to you back then it’s not a robot. You want to see if they have a YouTube channel, if they have social media, if you have related connections with these people on LinkedIn, if these people are real that you have on your LinkedIn connections and the same thing for any other social media you want to make sure that this is legit if they have an address Google it, like don’t fall into the scam of snake oil SEO because it can destroy your stuff. Seen many businesses that really suffered because of it and feel bad about it and just do some basic research, talk to those people make sure it’s the same people you are actually working with, see them at least in a video call and ask them for real time reports. 

What to Ask When Meeting an SEO Company

So the way you can do that you need to get access to your Google search console and set up a Gmail account if you don’t have one or if you have a domain set it up maybe with a Google ID and then you can get reports from Google about your website and you would literally be able to see the graph so nobody can trick you. Do a trial period maybe, be very very careful, be very wary, don’t let anybody scam you.

Know What’s Going On

Try to see what’s going on don’t just you know go ahead and change your SEO company, because also you might think it’s snake oil but it actually might not be it. Sometimes the case is that you have a very good SEO company but you have a bad sales funnel. I had clients that they’re simply, their phone in the store didn’t work for like six months and it’s like “I have nothing to do with that, you’re getting calls it’s nobody’s answering or the phone is overwhelmed with the calls, that’s your problem” you know. So don’t try to blame always, try and look and figure out what’s going on. You’d be surprised, I had a listing that simply got overwhelmed with calls and one of the secretaries just left a phone like that.

Do Your Research

Just do your research make sure you don’t sign those companies, don’t blame your current one because either way is bad, and then try to understand if traffic is growing. Two very good videos made by Google, one is by Miley Oya and the other one is just a generic video they have with illustrations, I’ll put them both in the description, and if you have any questions, you can put them in the comments.