SEO Companies – How Not Working With the Right One Can Cost You Your Business

I flew into Las Vegas yesterday for the Stompernet, Live 10 event and as well as getting a free upgrade which is always a nice surprise, I was also lucky enough to sit next to someone really cool and interesting.

Dave is from Leicester in the UK and has owned 148 very successful businesses in his lifetime and is now happily retired.  Dave had some inspiring stories to tell about how he had bought bankrupt businesses and breathed new life into them.  He had worked in everything from construction to catering and had always made a real success of everything he turned his hand to.  A real life Dragon!

But his last business didn’t allow him to go out on a high.

Dave said the biggest reason for this business failing was because of putting his faith in an SEO company that ripped him off…. royally.

Dave ran what was at the time, Europe’s largest Interflora franchise employing over 100 people and he used to get all his business by advertising in the Yellow Pages.  His business model was simple, he would advertise in editions of the Yellow Pages all over the UK and would get huge amounts of telephone orders to deliver flowers.

Dave was savvy enough to realise early on that advertising in the Yellow Pages was losing its effect because more and more people were going online to find florists and flower delivery services.  He needed Local SEO Services.

Knowing this Dave got a website built for him. The deal was that the company he used would build the site for free and he would get charged for every visitor they brought him.  This sounded like a really fair deal as he didn’t have any understanding of ‘IT’ as Dave put it.

The trouble was that the SEO company didn’t have a clue what they were doing because they weren’t actually an SEO company or even a web design specialist.  They were a telecommunications business trying to branch out into providing web services for their clients.  Dave trusted them as they were a national well known brand, that anyone would assume knew what they were doing if it had their name on it.

Once the website went live, Dave’s call centre started getting jammed with calls from gardeners asking for advice, people trying to find garden centres and all sorts.  He couldn’t understand what was happening?

This was bad enough as it was stopping his actual customers getting through to him and being able to place orders.  The killer blow was when Dave got his first bill from this so called SEO company.  It was so high that he thought it was one of those situations like when you hear about a little old lady, living on her own who gets a gas bill for a million pounds.  There’s obviously been a mistake right?

Dave was wrong.

The SEO company had been getting him a boat load of traffic to his website, they fulfilled that end of the bargain.  The trouble was that it was so poorly targeted that when an internet searcher looked for something like ‘floral bedding plants’ his site ranked well and he got clicks that he had to pay for that were no use to him whatsoever.

Here’s what happened. Dave decided to fold the business because to him it was an insummountable problem as he didn’t know who to turn to.  100 people lost their jobs.

What a shame he couldn’t find an SEO expert that knew what precisely what they were doing, it could have been a very different story.