The desperation of “SEO agencies”: a tale of deception

So it happened, within 24 hours of Binary Digital’s AdWords campaign being launched I received a marketing call from an SEO agency. It was all very urgent, and I curiously went along with it.

Now the reasoning behind the AdWords campaign wasn’t actually to use it for it’s intended purpose, but we’ll get to that later. The idea of chatting about different techniques was something I was open too though, who knows — I may even learn a thing or two! So I curiously arranged a call for 4 o’clock.

As soon as I got off the phone though I began to feel a bit uneasy; “Where did she say she was ringing from again?”. The failure to provide me with a company name was the first alarm bell to ring.

In hindsight, another alarm bell should’ve been the refusal to send me an email detailing their services, responding with “well we offer bespoke services — so we can’t really do that”. Being able to send a canned email to a prospective customer about what you actually do shouldn’t be too difficult.

With this apprehension fresh on my mind, I decided to google the number — and I discovered a slurry of negative comments; it belonged to a company known as “It’s Cold Outside”.

Recently I was looking at a website for a client. His site has been SEO’d by the notorious ‘It’s Cold Outside’ company. There’s a whole host of disgruntled customers on the web that have complained about keyword stuffing, excessive link exchanges, cloaking and other tactics that are outside Google’s guidelines.

I opted to skip the 4 o’clock.

Everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, right?

By lunch time the next day I’ve missed approximately 15 calls from this company, and they’d rather transparently withheld their number on occasion too. So when I was walking to my local coffee shop and I received yet another call I decided to put them out of their misery.

I asked the friendly saleswoman where she was calling from, and explained the discoveries I’d made when I googled the telephone number the day before — making it clear that I didn’t wish to enter a relationship with ICO.

Oh.. Well we’re definitely not them. Don’t worry about that. I’d really like to ring you back when you’re in front of a computer and I’ll show you who we really are.

Despite the — rather emphatic — denial, there was a tone that was similar to someone delivering an in-joke. Needless to say, I felt even less comfortable than I had before.

I asked where she was calling from however, and was told “AdPeople”. I asked for an email so I could check the company out but this was — once again — glossed over so as to facilitate another sales call. I, once again, indulged — under the illusion that there was still a shred of hope that I was dealing with a trustworthy business.

Confirmation, like most good things, came with coffee.

Like any form of meeting, I prefer to go in to telephone conversations with some background and a rough agenda. So I fired up my MacBook and did some research on these “AdPeople”.

Funnily enough there was no one trading under that name in the UK, albeit there was a very reputable looking US agency with the name. I chanced adding a secondary “d” and googled “AddPeople”.

Well, she certainly didn’t lie —she wasn’t calling from “It’s Cold Outside”.. they’d rebranded since then, and were now known as “AddPeople”. Rather ironically they also seemed to have a bit of a search engine problem themselves:

Just to verify this wasn’t internet gossip or a bitter competitor, I looked first on Duedil, and then on LinkedIn to see what else I could find..

Close call.

Not only was my gut instinct about them correct, but I’d also dodged a bullet by engaging with a company who were dishonest from the very initial contact — and arguably even named their company dishonestly, piggybacking off of a legitimate agencies goodwill.

Subsequently, I returned to ignoring their calls — and after their automated dialler left me a voice message — I just blocked them completely. I’m sure they’ll withhold their number again, but I can deal with hanging up a few times a day.

I did learn a lesson though

Fortunately for me, I use Skype for my business number. It’s cheap, provides me with a landline number, and means I can forward it to my mobile phone when I’m not at my desk. Not to mention, it’s more user friendly than some of the enterprise solutions I’ve used before. Pretty neat, huh?

The real advantage of Skype is that I can filter out most of their (presumably automated) calls by attaching their number to a contact entitled “Spam”, and simply blocking the contact.

Had I not been able to do this though, this would’ve left me with a real dilemma — most businesses can’t afford to simply ignore their phones ringing. There’s even claims online that they ignore TPS regulations aimed at preventing nuisance sales-calls.

It’s a worrying prospect that they detected my advertising campaign so quickly, and they will surely have quite a degree of success with these tactics. That many people will unwittingly enter in to a contract with a company of such poor reputation, and one that is prepared to act in such a dishonest manner, is also quite a concern.

Having previously worked in an agency environment — albeit not SEO specific — I’ve had to deal with the fall-out where similar SEO companies have simply flooded the internet with poor quality backlinks. It’s not fun to fix, and it can be incredibly damaging to a business that relies on their internet traffic for revenue.

I think in future I’ll trust my gut to make these decisions a bit more..