Of course not!

That’s just a catchy title to make you read this.

But I do think that some SEO companies are. I’ll tell you why…

Here’s what I discovered yesterday about one of them which still has me hot under the collar.

A colleague of mine is working with a client who contracted one of these “BIG SEO COMPANIES” to optimize his site and supposedly drive tons a new targeted traffic to it.

I took a look at the proposal, which was a bloody 35 pages long, only to realize that it was a giant sales letter in disguise. The “proposal” proposed very little for the client but certainly did talk a lot about how great the Company was. For the novice, non-technical person, it’s rather confusing and misleading as it cites all kinds of examples of high searched keywords in his niche with super high clicks, implying that he was going to get this kind of traffic.  Of course, that’s not what they were promising, but it certainly could have been easily misconstrued to mean that.

Reason being, very little “proposing” was actually being done. Only about 5 pages of the document had anything to do with the client. The rest was just boilerplate bullshit. (Hey, this is my blog and I can swear if I want to.)

Most of the work they proposed to do for him could be done in a single day, if not less. It certainly doesn’t require the 12 month payment commitment and a $25,000 price tag.

Yes! $25k for this, and that’s the entry level package. The middle package, which doesn’t include much more, is $35K and the top level package is $76K. Hard to friggin’ believe.

Now I’d show you this comparison chart, but it is copyrighted and confidential, so I don’t want to get myself into hot water over it, but suffice it to say, this is the lamest list of SEO services I’ve ever seen.

Don’t get me wrong…good SEO/SEM work is not cheap. It’s labor intensive and can bring a huge return for the client. But there’s got to be some serious meat in the work they do to warrant that kind of fee.

What shocks me more than anything about their service is what is NOT listed on the things that they do for that money. Even at the $76K level, the foundational stuff that I do in my practice isn’t even included, such as Web 2.0 properties, Social Bookmarking, RSS Feeds, Video creation and Submission, Pinging, and PAD Submissions, just to list a few. I do dozens of things each month for each keyword, so the list can get pretty long.

The reason I even found out about this is because after having contracted them several months ago, the client has yet to see any evidence of any work being done. He’s still not ranking anywhere on Google and no new traffic is coming in from any of the “supposed” new sources.

Bottom line: this guy got hosed! Big time. He’s locked into a 12 month payment plan, paid $5K+ as a down payment and won’t see any ROI from this.

Worse yet, his current website sucks and this SEO Company didn’t even address that issue and offer to fix is up for him FIRST. They just put in a couple of metatags and said that was all it needed. What good does it do to drive a bunch of traffic to a website that’s broken?

So I’m still really pissed about this.

But on the other hand, it’s encouraging to know that people are buying these kinds of services. In their defense, SEO/SEM can be very complicated and if you’re not familiar with all the jargon, it’s just human nature to believe the folks who are part of the big company. So, there’s a ton of business out there, but hopefully the majority of it will go to companies that really can deliver results and make their customers overjoyed by their work.