Note: Article originally published by us on LinkedIn in January 2017

You can find it here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/some-seo-people-lie-marketing-professionals-here-what-thomas-hormaza/

The Problem with SEO

There are good SEO people and some are not so good. The problem is that SEO is misunderstood and open to a thousand definitions. But the reality is that there is only one true definition of SEO – it works or it does not.

My SEO pet peeve (and an embarrassment to our profession)

When SEO people willfully exploit misunderstanding.

Unfortunately, it is easy to fool some Marketing people if they don’t understand SEO.

The worse of the worse SEO

I am sad when I see an SEO person fake their credibility by telling you they rank #1 on Google for USELESS keywords. Some keywords turn out to be useless because NO ONE searches for those words, therefore worthless to you.

Let’s say you sell cars.

Would you be impressed if an SEO ranks #1 for “Cars for sale”, yes you should be.

Should you be impressed if an SEO ranks #1 for “Cars with one blue door for sale”, NO!

You see the problem, you instinctively know that NO ONE searches for “Cars with one blue door for sale”. Therefore, the fact that a so-called SEO Pro ranks #1 on Google for that keyword does not mean anything.

How some SEO people exploit this

Some SEO people will deliberately work to reach rank #1 on associated keywords that appear to be very close to your business.

However what they are really doing is ranking on keywords that are related to your category, industry, product WITHOUT using the right words or combination that actual people search.

There is NO search volume. It is in fact like ranking for “unicorn with blue horn” – Useless to you and your Brand.

How to know for sure you are being told the truth about SEO

Please ask your SEO person to PROVE the value of keywords by using these free tools:

  • https://adwords.google.com (Keyword Planner Tool)
  • https://www.google.ca/trends/ (it even shows the related searches by geography)

The truth about SEO people

What you need to know.

The vast majority of us only care about good performance, we have worked hard to gain our knowledge we therefore wish to apply it.

In general, we only wish for all clients to succeed.

Unfortunately we do need to warn you that not all SEO people care about you or your Brand. Sometimes they even lie.

Please be careful!