There’s no such things as proper SEO, and there’s no regulation on who can call themselves an SEO professional. As a result, way too many under qualified self-professed “SEO professionals” are providing services and advice that’s just plain bad.

By now, you would have received the occasional spam email detailing a full plethora of digital marketing related services and of which — for SEO — you would most likely be quoted a very affordable sum of $249/month for everything but the kitchen sink.

Snake Oil Salesmen

The seasoned professionals in this industry would tell you that anything below $750 per month for SEO should be avoided at all cost for it’s likely propagated by snake oil salesmen, and possibly garbage as well.

The purpose of this article is to expose the lies that business owners are told by low-quality SEO firms. I’ll discuss exactly what those SEO firms are promising, what they are actually delivering, and why they won’t deliver a positive return on investment.

Bunch of Useless Tactics

If you were to take a quick glance of those proposals that these so called SEO professionals emailed you, you will notice a bunch of SEO “tactics” that may have worked years ago, but no longer have any positive value in the new, Post-Penguin and Post-Panda (Google algorithm updates) era of SEO. The most common, and most egregious misinformation perpetuated by low-quality SEO firms that I found in the other proposals was that thousands of new inbound links per month was a good thing.

While this would be true if those links were all coming from high-quality publishers with editorial review and unique, quality content, this would be simply impossible to do on a budget of $249/month, which is what one firm was promising.

Spammy, Low-Quality Sites

In reality, if an SEO firm is promising thousands of inbound links, it’s very likely that those links are going to be coming from spammy, low-quality websites that have no favor with Google (and will actually get you in trouble, these days). Common bulk link-building tactics to watch out for include:

• Mass website directory submissions
• Mass article directory submissions
• Social bookmarking
• Link wheels
• Profile links
• Blog commenting

These types of tactics worked long ago, but those days are long gone. Since Google’s Penguin algorithm update back in April of 2012, these tactics can actually hurt your site’s organic search rankings if they look spammy or manipulative.

All These Damage for $249 a Month?

And if you think that’s all that you’re getting for your $249 a month deal, here are the “extras” that these people would most likely include at “no additional charge”:

• Search engine submission
• SEO work (insert # of hours here)
• Local map and places visibility
• Onsite content writing

Now, for the uninitiated, search engine submissions are pretty clear cut these days, try googling for your brand or business and there you have it — it’s likely to be indexed, and if not you could most likely do it via the Google Search Console. As for SEO work, going by a preset number of hours obviously hinted at an inexperience SEO professional doing the work for you, for this is one area that is hardly quantifiable.

Local map and local SEO? Been there done that, possibly in one seating. And last but not least, don’t get us started talking about some of these “content writing or marketing” articles purportedly done by low quality SEO individuals under the guise of “content writing” — these are overstuffed keyword ladened articles full of grammatical errors, gibberish and provided no useful or insightful information whatsoever.

In Conclusion – Caveat Emptor

Now more than ever, business owners are bombarded with bad advice and the lure of cheap services with impossible promises. While several years ago it was relatively easy to manipulate organic search results with quantity-focused spammy tactics, those days are over. SEO success is no longer about specific tactics, but rather an overall strategy.