Don’t trust SEO services that sound too good to be true. The old adage is still true today. Success takes time and effort, not cheap get rich quick schemes. If you’re looking for local SEO, reach out to professionals who’ll do it right. Bean Media Productions is the first and best name in Buffalo SEO services, and we’ve grown numerous client’s reach to the best customers for them.
If you’re looking online for SEO services from an agency, you’d be wise to not trust something that sounds too good to be true. SEO is an involved, organic process that takes months of time and effort to build results for search engine result pages (SERPs). Ultimately, that leads to sustained and loyal customers, the key for your business to survive and thrive.
One thing you may hear about from a shady SEO “professional” is a “guarantee” to tank your competition and boost your ranks rapidly. They’re probably trying to get you to buy into their Black Hat SEO tactics (if not be scamming you outright). Remember that true, sustainable, organic success takes time and effort, and the best content is made for the reader first.
Why are these SEO services considered underhanded and black hat?
You’re probably asking, “what is black hat SEO,” and “Why is it considered bad?” Black hat SEO tactics are used to try and manipulate the search engines and violate their guidelines. They try to get your site ranking by breaching the terms of search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
You may see small improvements initially using those tactics. However, your site will get found out for breaking Google’s terms, and the punishments that search engines can leverage will tank your rankings. That winds up drying your organic traffic out because nobody new can find your website. The risks of using these looked-down-on methods outweigh the benefit severely. As such, SEO professionals choose not to even think about implementing them.
Let’s look at a snippet from Google’s WebMaster Guidelines on Black Hat SEO:
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
So, why do we avoid these underhanded tactics? Because the goal of SEO is to organically increase traffic for long-term, sustained online success. Black hat tactics can, and usually do, ultimately have the complete opposite effect.
Black Hat SEO Could Ruin Your Business’s Online Presence
A decline in organic traffic can lead to a decline in your business’s income. That could lead to firings, or maybe even complete closures of businesses. Your site could have been filtered either by the algorithm or due to manual action.
Also, black hat tactics could ruin your site’s user experience. One of Google’s recent changes (which we touched on here) was to start giving out page rankings based more on UX/UI than previously had been weighed. Earlier, Google had put a higher priority on being searchable by robots and the user experience took a backseat because they couldn’t really track it. With things like CLS, LCP and FCP (see more here) that’s gotten much better.
As we mentioned earlier, one thing you may hear is a promise to try and tank the rankings of your competition. This would be negative SEO, and it is another black hat tactic a conman will try and sell you. It would involve using that same idea of violating various search engine’s guidelines but on another site, instead of your own. If your current or prospective online marketing team is trying to talk you into using these black hat SEO tactics, those are major marketing red flags and you should cut ties immediately.
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If you’re looking for an internet marketing team, reach out to Bean Media Productions. Bean Media Productions is based out of Buffalo but we have global clients. We’re a full digital marketing team of graphic designers, SEO pros, video production experts and more. We are eager to grow your business the right way. Don’t forget to stay tuned to our blog and social media! Here on the blog we regularly post updates, guides and more that can help your business grow and thrive.
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