Here’s something that is happening with alarming frequency in the website design & development business. More and more of the so called reputable website design & development companies are becoming unintentional frauds.
During the proposal process they display their previous work, show a timeline and costs and talk a lot about the user interface, navigation and good design. At some point, the recipient in this process (the client) asks about search engine optimization. The website design & development company, in turn, gives assurances that they, in fact do SEO, have the right analytics and can help them get to the top of the Google search pages.
And that’s where the “unintentional fraud” takes place. The truth is they can no longer do SEO at all. This is not to say they never could, but SEO has changed a lot over the last few years. Throwing up a few meta tags, making up a list of keywords (literally making them up) and letting the Google algorithms have their way with the site used to be all it took too transform a website into a search engine powerhouse.
Today, we are seeing business from clients who just paid tens of thousands of dollars on a fresh new website the year before after they’ve come to the realization that their former web company didn’t achieve any of there SEO promises.
SEO today is a highly technical, work intensive business. It’s not enough to ask a website design & development company if they “do SEO.” You need to ask what it is they actually do, verify their claims and ask for references to see what their past success was. If you don’t, you’re just an unintentional victim to their unintentional fraud.
