Some of the SEO “experts” we encounter exhibit less than tasteful attributes. Having been inspired by The Oatmeal, I’ve taken the liberty of illustrating some of the bad SEO professionals.
I understand that I might be slightly hypocritical in this post. I’ve found myself displaying some of the characteristics below.
Big Words/Acronyms SEO
You may have caught yourself using jargon that might be over your clients’ heads. These SEO Experts may know the trade, they just lack the ability to communicate effectively with clients. If you notice that your client has a blank look, you may want to ask if they don’t understand something you’re saying.
Sparkling, White Hat SEO
Don’t get me wrong, white hat is the way to go in SEO. However, some incompetent SEOs may claim that their lack of linkbuilding is due to high moral principles. They put on a facade of “White Hat.” These SEOs either don’t get linkbuilding or they don’t want to put forth the effort to do it. Of course there are plenty of gray/black hat ways of building links. But other linkbuilding methods such as submitting a press release, creating quality linkbait, etc. are legitimate and great for SEO.
Conversion Expert Turned SEO
The Conversion Expert SEO is more uncommon. These SEOs somehow mistakenly believe that user experience is intricately connected with SEO. They carry the label of “Internet Marketer” but they only talk about conversion and design. The idea of increasing traffic rarely crosses their minds
Self-Proclaimed Social Media Expert
The Social Media Expert may have been an SEO who was drawn into the hype of Social Media. He tells the world that he is a Social Media Expert because he knows how to use Facebook and Twitter. He frequently talks about “going viral,” although he has no idea how to go viral. And sadly, he measures his effectiveness based on the number of followers and friends he acquires.
IT Guy
SEO is an IT thing right? Wrong. Unfortunately, the in-house IT guy thinks that SEO belongs to the IT department since it involves algorithms and coding. While SEO may require someone with a bit of HTML skills, it should belong to the marketing department and more specifically a “Search Team.”
Bad Grammar Offshore SEO
We get plenty of emails and comments filled with poor translation grammar. Do you really want someone who’s using a translation tool to do your keyword research? These SEOs may be cheap but not very effective.
Black Hat SEO
The Black Hat SEO should be avoided like the plague. He may get you fast results, but those results will quickly decline after Google notices the spammy tactics around your website. Black Hat SEOs will always take the easy way out and often do more damage than good.
Any more ideas?
Do you agree? What other SEO “Experts” should you avoid? Share your ideas in a comment.
Love the bad grammar spammer guy. I just barely looked at a blog comment from one of those that read:
“Hi, can you show how you work on my web, when i give you a new web then what is the profit of my..
Thanks,
with regards”
This stuff must stop.
Brilliant!
Awesome, I’m will be bookmark this for returning and twittering, also.
Well, Bill, I hope you’re being sarcastic. I almost trashed your comment.
Great piece, David!
Can’t help but wonder how many “SEOs” may have squirmed uncomfortably reading one or two of your examples.
IT guy. I’ve met a few. He’s the guy who thinks he can do SEO, design, programming, and on and on and on.
I’ll admit, I inadvertently get caught up in using lingo that can mean zilch to clients, initially. I’m getting better at it though! There are great articles out there about talking SEO to a non-SEO — I haven’t perfected that craft just yet.
Plus, the spam comments comic is dead-on. Nice. I got a chuckle or two.
Great list and presentation with The Oatmeal theme. I heard recently, “Just buy back links. That’s all you have to do.”
Nice one, Bill. I need to add the Backlink Buyer SEO to this list.
Hahaha…awesome post, David! You really quoted all sorts of bad SEO out there.
One thing: depending on the structure of the team or company, the SEO can be outside the Marketing department and could be inside the Product team…but he but he must necessarily know much about digital marketing. In this case, the SEO should have high experience in other areas such as design, development, and generally, will be the project coordinator. This structure is more complex because it needs to be much more integrated. It works well in small and medium-sized projects.
I think that people are confusing because there is no clearly defined roles… Disorganization!
Great point, Pablo. Larger complex companies require complex organization solutions.
My favorite is 1997 SEO. He’s utterly convinced that meta keywords are critical to ranking well.
Hey! I know him!
My first SEO audit at a new company last year had keywords referenced (albeit as a low priority) because the client demanded them. They were shocked when I said meta-keywords weren’t necessary.
i disagree that seo needs to be in the marketing department. i do agree that there needs to be a team though. i’ve worked at an agency and had to deal with marketing people who never knew how to get anything done (and no, i’m not a big words SEO – i hate those guys), and now i work in the web development department on an seo team in-house where we work closely with the program developers, design team and content developers – but also keeping close contact with the communications and mkt depts, and it works incredibly well. i know this post is supposed to generalize, but this is just my two cents on how seo does work if the team’s in development
other than that, very funny post!
Thanks, polyana. I agree with you. SEO is a branch of marketing. Perhaps it shouldn’t be under the marketing department, but it should be in some way connected to the marketing department, as you noted.
Awesome. Love this one. Let’s add one more: The Silver / Gold / Platinum Package Levels SEO. Because obviously any one of these packages will be a perfect fit for your company’s needs.
HAHA…this is a great write up. Can’t tell you how many times I run into people who talk just like one of the caricatures above. It’s funny though, I’m sure people who use these b.s. sales approaches convince the average business owner to work with them. Hopefully this post helps owners a little more intelligent with their decisions.
Awesome post, Davi. Nice post.
Thanks
Awesome Post …. just retweet and shared in facebook too.
Just loved the way it was written…..it clears all things.
Laughing – not at you but with you! Brilliantly written. As someone new to the SEO world, I appreciate the tips! Just hired an SEO company & I’m happy to see they didn’t make this list. I feel lucky!
That’s good to hear, Diane. Because the SEO industry is so saturated, you can find a lot of nuts out there.
David,
I actually laughed at the “Bad Grammer” part and sprayed my monitor with a mouthful of water.
On one point I would slightly disagree. In my experience I have found that well designed sites with specific goals in mind almost always preform better then their lesser counter parts.
I firmly believe that site performance metrics are used in some degree in ranking determinants even if it is just cookies. In more than one occasion I have been able to get significant results by doing nothing more than improving the users experience.
Thanks for the laugh (I really needed a good one today too)
Thanks Corey, I see your point about improving usability and conversion. However, In my post, I was referring to the guy who only focuses on conversion because he is either too lazy to do linkbuilding or he doesn’t fully understand SEO.
Scoville,
So many people use acronyms and techical jargon to impress or actually mystify a client into thinking they know what they are talking about. SEO isn’t black magic but shady SEOers want people to think it is.
Nice article.
great post. i am just going to avoid the entire industry from here on out.
I think SEO Jerk should be another one. You know, the self proclaimed experts, holier-than-thou types. That probably crosses between several of the types listed above, but they are certainly a special breed that deserves recognition.
Not sure if we’re thinking about the same. Is this the one who will ask for many ergonomy & design changes on your site “because I feel like Google will really prefer it that way”?
Hey NatC, Frankly, coming from a lot of web design experience, I used to be that SEO.
Very humorous take on the characters we meet and may even resemble at times.
How about the “I won’t even come to your office and eat a donut for less than $5000.00″ SEO.
Liked the whole post, but loved the “Bad Grammar Offshore SEO” bit: minded me of a real case study where the ‘offshore’ was instructed to target (engineering) ‘Lathe’ but when the first client SEO report was received, all the links were coming from websites ‘themed’ on coffee houses/suppliers. ‘Offshore-man’ had read the instruction to be (Italian caffè) ‘Latte’ – as you well can imagine, the client ‘frothed’ at that!
This is your best post by far. Screams The Oatmeal, but there ain’t a damn thing wrong with that.
The white hate SEO guy is every web development team’s seo package “Sure, theres off page, but we’d have to do something we are not specialized in, so screw it. Also, do your own social media”.
Holy cats and yammers mate, that was friggin’ classic.
VERY well done, and while I cringed a bit at the first one (as I KNOW I am sometimes unintentionally that guy) I also inwardly cringed at myself for checking that the text you used in the images was also in the “alt” attribute. Oof, I gotta go read a book or something.
Cheers for that post though, “much SEO funny in the happening now soon.”
Fantastic post. You are so right in the description of the different types of SEOs. I would add the PPC guy who thinks he knows SEO – mainly because he have not figured out the difference between SEO and PPC yet.
Awesome post, real funny to read. I come to the conclusion; it’s hard to put a label on yourself. I know for sure that I’ve said som of the stuff, when speaking to clients.
You might wanna add the SEO guy who allways talks about the future,and dosen’t want’t to do hard work, because “Google is gonna devaluate it anyway”.
/Jonas
Awesome…I liked the way you defined White Hat SEO “Some incompetent SEOs may claim that their lack of linkbuilding is due to high moral principles. They put on a facade of “White Hat.”
How about self proclaimed SEO’s who are actually Link Builders and fully rely on off-page activities, doesn’t know anything about how to do site evaluation, write effective tags or do the on-page site activities.
Regarding people who beleive SEO fall’s into IT or Marketing…I beleive SEO is the backbone of IT & Marketing both, SEO is something which comes in between, SEOs has to deal with, co-ordinate with IT & Marketing Deptt.
My 2 cent’s for this great post:-)
I can identify with the offshore SEO since I head up a team of them here in India. I could write a book about my experiences if I thought anyone would believe me!
I often refer to my team as data entry operators because while they can’t write a coherent sentence to save their life, no one can press CTRL-C / CTRL-V quite like them. Still, they like to be called SEO analysts for the look of the thing.
I can interview candidates who have 3 years of ‘experience’ (rapid ctrl-c / ctrl-v) and when I ask what Google Pagerank is they say it is calculated by the number of visitors to your website.
Offshoring your SEO can be tricky
Good points, but I would like to add-
a) All SEO can be considered Black Hat when you relate that to the position it is unnatural human behavior, and performed solely to get better search rankings.
b) Great SEO is winning the race and getting effective results. That means beating the existing competition. That cannot be done effectively without analyzing the competition and planning a strategy that will take advantage of their weak points.
c) Lastly, personality types does matter, but what matters most for anyone who uses SEO services is that they get results without:
i) Triggering search engine red flags.
ii) They are able to maintain their position in the rankings themselves after their contract with the SEO company ends.
Lastly, I think as more and more businesses use SEO services, those who don’t will be left further and further behind.
Thanks for sharing………….amazing post..
A self-proclaimed social media expert is a person who doesn’t know the depth of social media. Social media is more about interactions rather than connections. If your brand has large followers that doesn’t mean you are successful in social media space. Social media success must be measured in terms of follower engagement, effective conversations, customer satisfaction, influence, consistency, advocacy, referrals and conversions. Social media executives should create an online buzz with interesting social media campaigns. Social media is all about starting a conversation or being part of an ongoing conversation. Every organisation engaged in social media should have a social media measurement plan so we can measure the success of each social media campaign.
Regarding Black Hat SEO I have seen some of them .They are really damaging the whole name of the industry.
I would suggest new SEO’s to study each activity before they jump into pitfalls.
It really starts getting fun when you realize that the great ones are the ones who fit multiple categories, Ive met more than one of the following…
Big Words/Acronyms Social Media Expert SEO
The IT Guy Conversion Expert SEO
Bad Grammar Offshore Black Hat SEO
@streko – Just hire some mommy bloggers to do it for ya!.
Great insight, John. I’ve seen my fair share of the combinations as well. I suppose an idiot’s an idiot.
“an idiot’s an idiot” – So true. Just made my quote of the day! … lol
Brilliant post – I think many in SEO have themselves become personified in many of these stages through their SEO learning experience / on-going trial and error. Perhaps these idiots are not actually idiots, but actually stages of enlightenment muddied with ‘SEO rites of passage’
Or probably not, just idiots.
Good point, James. I’ve been in a few of these categories. Hopefully I can help some beginning SEOs skip some of the “stages of enlightenment.”
love it
I think that SEO should know about conversion rates, social media. Of course if you have an expert for social media and conversion rates in your company, than don’t worry.
What would be the best SEO guy? Is it someone who brings thousands of people to website and get 1st position and see it as success or is it someone who would say I have increase sales by 10% because of my efforts?
Love it! Though I cringed at myself at various places too
I’d like to propose the “Moon on a stick SEO” as in: “We guarantee to get you on page one of Google … [lowers voice and whispers into his hand] for any keyword that only you or I will ever type into a search box.”
Mark
Excellent post, I laughed my socks off. I liked the Bad Grammar Offshore SEO and have come across a few Big Word/Acronyms SEO’s.
Love it, David!
How about adding “Big Fat Liar Guy”? I run into this guy all the time. Outright “fibbing” about what can and can’t be done as well as looking at optimized sites and making claims of what needs to be done — that already has!
Keep the good stuff coming!
Great points and I love the graphics! All true points when doing SEO, so it’s nice to see standards for SEO! Thanks for the post!
If you split a SEO team, you’ll have all of those 7 idiots, lol!
Awesome post… Great explanation with beautiful words
Well after I stop laughing I think I’d better go and check on my meta tags. I like to stop by each day and say a few kind words to them. They’re not appreciated much nowadays – although they do have their uses – and feel sighted if I don’t give them daily attention.
I’ve heard that they like to congregate in large flocks so I may add a few more just to make them feel at home!
This is so true…brilliant
Great post. The bad grammar / offshore SEO point is particularly pertinent at this point in time.
I like the most is that link building is not a bad. Many people says that link building is black had method and they do not touch it . I agree with this
Of course there are plenty of gray/black hat ways of building links. But other linkbuilding methods such as submitting a press release, creating quality linkbait, etc. are legitimate and great for SEO.
Hi David,
Nice collection of idiots because your title of post is very compelling and Compulsed me to read.
Great post, love the artwork. . .
LMAO, I didn’t comment when this first came out, but I was talking to somebody about their site earlier today and let them know they had no title or meta description tag for all their pages/post, and I got “meta description, yeah, I don’t even know what that is” and I couldn’t help but laugh and think about this post. Funny, funny, funnny.
Let’s not forget the “results” guy – you know, I can get you to the top of Google, just look at my screenshots…
Nice! You rank #1 for the term “Puppy Poo Cleaning Supplies In Alaska”!
Thanks for the laugh. This post is both hilarious AND very true.
I would add another guy:
The “Experienced” Inexperienced SEO:
“Hey! I created a blog and installed the All In One SEO plugin, and also wrote some articles for backlinks. I know EVERYTHING there is to know about SEO, so please give me some money.”
Interesting, that seems to cover just about all SEO.
Couldn’t agree with you more…LOVED this piece!
And yes, I have one more type, the SEO idiots who ask for backlinks quoting outdated non-current SEO tactics that ain’t worked in years…
Read more about same from my own blog piece on JUST that kind of spamming SEO poser here –
http://www.canuckseo.com/index.php/2010/10/no-spam-seos-eh/
Jim
Golden. Love this…
Don’t forget about the guy who doesn’t even have a site of his own – and even worse, the guy who says he can’t show you any examples of his performance b/c his client list is “confidential.”
Nicely done.
Thanks for the great article often you find that SEO firms are a combination of many if not all of the above. I am a freelancer working from home and have found a really good tool to help you get started in SEO and learn at the same time its called DIYSEO.com
Maybe some of your newer readers might want to have a go on it and see if they can start with SEO there.
Great article, I have come across them all and this made me laugh.
So, then, which is the one you want?
You want the one with good (case studies) of sites they have already optimized, along with steps taken, etc.
Good SEO’s are not afraid to share their “secrets” because it is still hard work; I show clients what I do and even offer to train their marketing team.
True. I never recommend Black hat techniques of SEO to any of my colleagues or students.
I just lol’d a little when I looked at your site’s meta description. *facepalm*
@SEO_Canada Tell me, are you currently wearing your sparkling, white hat or is it hanging on the coat stand?
But most of these sound just like the content of seo.com.
That is so funny, I am going to have to pay you with a link from our blog. Nice work, I love the drool from the Bad Grammar SEO.
nice one mate …
hope I’m not seeing myself like what described on the article
I think I have met every single one of these SEO “experts”. Brilliant post.
What about the “newbe”
“does your website have metatags? It’s definitely the way to go. Google loves metatags, in fact the invented them. I will let your in on a secret… Have your heard about meta descriptions…”
I still bump into these people every now and then.
I enjoy it when people can laugh at themselves.
David you really nailed some of the personalities in SEO. Great job. My personal fav is the Bad Grammer SEO. I truly love link requests and articles crafted with this fine gibberish.
Organic kitty chow – I’ve heard it all now lol! It looks like a tough keyword for an IT guy, its got 223,000 results in Google.co.uk
Great article. lol
I like the pics of the different SEO experts to avoid
Having dealt extensively with “IT Guy” and “Bad Grammar Offshore SEO”, I’m very happy to say you’ve nailed them spot on.
Oh, Bad Grammar Offshore SEO, why do you vex me so?
I try to be considerate of them, but really, who would outsource their seo to someone who can barely form a sentence in English. I am constantly shaking my head at people who are so cheap they don’t even care if their seo “guy” can use the same language as the customers that they are trying to reach.
I would not anything for the time being as reading this post was worth every second of my attention. While it is hilarious, unfortunately there is a lot of truth behind it and these are the common pitfalls why many people are not satisfied with their SEO consultants (wannbee’?). Good one..
I usually give it to my clients straight “I may not know everything about SEO, but I know what works!”
Hello David,
Great post, almost all the descriptions you did are funny.
But I have some questions:
About the offshore SEO, are you one of those peoples who hate others just because they weren’t born in USA, Uk, Australia etc?
What if someone doesn’t know how to write and speak perfect English, does that mean he doesn’t know how to conduct a productive SEO job?
Also, I would definitely like for you to post a banner with the perfect SEO worker in your opinion
, maybe it can become a benchmark for the experts to aspire to and a guideline for others who want to find quality seo, in my opinion if you combine all the characters you said, that would definitely would be a SEO guru
I hope my questions aren’t to rough, being a new comer and all
.
Pardon my bad english!
Hi Alex,
In no way am I out to discriminate SEOs based on ethnicity or nationality. An SEO who can provide legitimate results, is a real expert, regardless of the language that he/she speaks.
However, comment spamming is never a good tactic — and the best way to get banned from commenting is to use poor grammar and punctuation.
It is extremely difficult to sell yourself to English speaking clients if your language isn’t up to par. Even if an SEO has brilliant SEO sills, many clients can’t see past the poor English. In many minds, poor grammar somehow denotes a lack of education.
With that said, I have to applaud your English, Alex. You are doing very well.
“Even if an SEO has brilliant SEO sills, many clients can’t see past the poor English.”
I’m Danish, but I guess that you mean skills and not sills
Great/funny post. I guess that working with SEO requires a bit of them all even the bad grammar SEO (many people who use search engines just can’t spell).
Thanks for catching that, Idestrup!
Great post David, good to see a bit of humor introduced to a subject which can fail to be humorous. I’ve come up against these people regularly with clients and it’s our job to point out the differences between us and these non SEO’s.
nice posts mister.
Thanks for the great article often you find that SEO firms are a combination of many if not all of the above.
i’m from indonessia
To be fair, I know plenty of native English speakers who can barely string together a grammatically correct sentence…and many foreigners whose mastery of English puts their native counterparts to shame.
Over time I’ve become more tolerant of problems with the possessive “its” vs. the contraction “it’s” or with a mix up of “your” and “you’re” simply because it’s so easy to make isolated typos.
But my skin crawls when I see people repeatedly writing things like “I no someone who can help” or referring to a “speach” he was working on.
You don’t need to go overseas to find people whose jobs depend on spelling words correctly, but who simply can’t do so.
Love this seven ghost illustrating.Those ghost really appear in this world and for sure these can be find in every SEO company. different people will play their different characteristic. But mostly what they need to see is result. No matter what method you using , what creative idea you using. As long bring large traffic,who ever make this will satisfied their customers. Sometime tricky way to get top rank is needed. Black Hat will appear….^^
Loved this blog – Very quirky little design too.
For many people SEO means Link building.As we all know Link building required lot of time and effort for getting permanent links specially Dofollow links.In fact its not easy to get natural links.Most of people make their site search engine friendly by building artificial links.Where is the concept of natural links which we can get by generating interesting articles or content.Is Google stupid.?
Amused to notice that there are some commenters here who fit within those 7.
What about the guys who repeatedly tell us that they can get us onto the first page of google, when in fact we know that we’re already at #1 in google.
You’ll have the material for a new, 10-experts-to-avoid post by now
I came across all of them and it did make me laugh, but I have to say that having perfect English is not a necessity, for me at least. Some of the worst SEO firms and freelancer are UK/ US based.
This is hilarious and so true! This also made me laugh. I think as SEO professionals, we always forget to use simply language to explain what SEO is and what we can do for our clients. Great blog post!
Social media expert is the best! I love when people tell me this.
But sparkling white hats are so pretty… And, And, the social media experts, well, have so many “followers” they must know what they’re doing.
Ha!
Good one, David!
Thanks Wes,
You’d think that when people call themselves “Experts” they should really know what they’re talking about.
Thanks for the great article.
It’s so creative and cute post.
For anything to be funny, it has to have an element of truth in it. Your article is hilarious because it is right on the money in so many instances. It makes you appreciate the legitimate SEO companies like SEO.com all the more. Thanks for the great article.
My absolute favorite is the SEO company or consultant that claims they can achieve ‘X’ {rankings, conversions, PageRank, etc } for their clientele and yet they have a PR Zero site and don’t rank for their own terms …
After that – I’m just plain amazed by the emails that start with ….
‘We are SEO company India from the I-Can’t-Even-Pronounce-It region’
Awesome Post…!! Some points that usually makes an Ethical Internet Expert find it tough to convince clients. As 7 Experts (Idiots) like them mis-lead most of the Clients to not seek genuine expert service.
Great, I thought I was the only one with the burden of exposing BSEO, LOL.
But, we can’t forget the person who has built a website, in 2000, with FrontPage and Dreamweaver, then they use a keyword tool, believe in antiquated techniques, and no comprehension whatsoever of machine interpretation principles, but they are a better bser than you, so the client goes with them, cuts you off, and they keyword ‘opal jewelry’ falls from page 2 on Google to page 13, and the “boss” doesn’t even have a clue. LOL
Then after she flips a concrete5, or WordPress veneer on the thing, she goes into an eating disorder clinic, and all the logos are named logo-xft44657-22.jpg, and 4 years later the poor duped former client is out on craigslist seeking another lost decade/2.
LOL, not
Sad but true. Only 7! I think you mean more like 70.
The SEO industry I know and love is now jammed full of charlatans.
I spend an awful lot of time for clients rescuing them from amateurish disasters and ‘Our marketing grad has had a go’, arrogant ‘you don’t need it’ coders and ‘seemed better value’ overseas firms armed with a script, glossary and a call centre and the consequential nightmares that ensue.
Interesting blog, that’s sparked some heated debate. Good stuff!
David… this was a great post! I got quite the laugh when looking at your graphics. Too good!
Where can I find an ethical gray hat SEO?
So here’s my favorite… the guy who claims he’s a “local search marketing expert” after taking a 1 hour class on claiming a business listing on Google Maps. These guys are everywhere!
Here’s another one… the SEO who’s website is built entirely in flash and believes that onpage optimization is keyword stuffed meta tags and hundreds of cleverly placed (small, same color as the background) keywords in the footer.
There are so many great things about this blog. There are so many true and funny comments. I have to say I love the calls from companies with a zero PR on their site that promise to get you to the first page on all the major search engines. One guy actually told me that they did not want to optimize their site because they preferred making cold calls. I tried to keep from laughing as I told him it makes sense. I hate having interested customers calling me and wish I too could work my way into the cold calling business.
I think the Oatmeal would be very proud of your post! It’s all true – every bit of it.
Haha, very entertaining read and I think you got them all dead-on
This is great! Very funny. I think I have personally met everyone one of those folks, again, in the last few months. Love the art, especially not just a white hat, but a sparkling white hat. Nice.
Now that is some hilarious stuff, I loved the “Bad Grammar Offshore SEO”, thank you, saw you from Alex Whaley on Facebook…:)
Not sure if KeywordLuv in here, thats why the keywords on my name…:)
The so called social media experts are everywhere, beware. Good read David
Ha! Thanks for the great post. Love the follow-up too. I am in no way an SEO expert, but my business is web design so I try to keep up on what’s good and bad and SEO best practices as it relates to what I do. But don’t worry…we’ve partnered with a real SEO company to handle SEO for our clients.
I think that “IT guy” is really common. I see what you mean about seeing a bit of yourself in a few of the ‘experts’. Great post.
aside from the great visuals, (I am still laughing) your article is spot on. Looking forward to more great articles
You write good posts, I am bookmarking this blog for return! Please makes business with me, I is real
Not only this article informative but a thoroughly enjoyable too. I really liked it a lot. The way you explained things in an illustrative and humerus manner is awesome. Keep good work.
I want to hit the wall when I get emails from bad grammar SEOs. And on top of that, you have people over here in the states who will go with them because they are cheaper. Then I tell them that they will be touching the content of their site with poor English. Oh well.
I totally agree, although I get plenty of emails and comments from stateside people who have bad grammar and poor spelling too. I’m just tired in general of all the people promising me such miraculous results in such little time.
Wow, this article was verry well written and I like the pictures a lot lot. I have met a lot of those people and they all made me laugh.
I personally love getting a call in the middle of the afternoon from someone who askes me three times who I am. He clicked on my PPC ad and just called me to tell me that he can’t find my site listed organically on page one of Google. They go on to tell me that I am paying for PPC ads and they would be free if I could get on the first page of Google as if he is letting me in on some closely guarded secret. He can get me on the first page of Google even tough he can’t get his own site on the first 10 pages. He goes on to explain there is something called meta tags. Wow I say, I think I will go change my meta tags right now and hang up.
Great “SEO types” analyzing! It is very funny and at the same time true and realistic.
Nice article with great information. Also, I like the graphics.
This is great, excellent stuff! Thanks for sharing! If only so many of the comments weren’t based on people that are really out there! Keep up the good work, thanks again, Peter
Haha! Funny graphics. Everybody is happy exept the Big Words/Acronyms SEO-guy. Why?
Haha spot on!
I live the social network guy talking about ‘goin viral’ frequently when they don’t even know how to ‘go viral’, haha!
Funny article!
Jeff
Excellent post, you must of been phoned up by the same sham marketing companies that phone me.
I love it when they start with ” Hello i’m bla bla bla of bla bla bla marketing, have you heard of Google?”
Nice blog and this article is really good. All sorts of funny people out there. An ideal scenario to learn what a really good SEO expert should not do.
Thanks David. Great topics. Easily find out and define Good SEO expert and Bad SEO expert.
Great posts, gave me a giggle. Especially the IT one, used to work with a guy who thought he knew it all and could only ever say “content is king” and “backlinks”…
Great article – very funny and original
There are a lot of guys claiming themselves SEO experts. With poor (English) language! I was just wondering how they can help me when they are not ‘really’ experts themselves.
Thanks for the nice post.
Like everything else in life – there are good professionals and bad professionals. You have to research the SEO company to make sure that you are hiring somebody that really knows what they are doing. Stay away from “SEO Experts” that have a new website and can’t provide you with references or trackable results. I hope this helps.
lol nice article. Im linking to this on my blog.
Hi,
You have done a really good job with this blog post. Like the last post from SEO Sacramento there are good and bad professionals in every field. The best advise we can give is go with the company with experience and do your research.
Great post.
However, I think that it’s important to stress that some of these aspects are important in SEO – but not if it’s your only focus area.
SEO is a bit more complex than the illustrated evangelists might think.
I love your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you make this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you? Plz respond as I’m looking to create my own blog and would like to find out where u got this from. cheers
“Self-Proclaimed Social Media Expert” – Hehe good one. Here in Denmark there are quite a number of those. Great post
You forgot a nemesis of mine…The Design, Developer, SEO!
So many businesses I talk to who are committing to a site build claim that they’ve found this ‘one guy who can do everything’ from design, development to SEO and social media. “They’ll even send a Google Analytics report to us every month!”
The approach is a bit like the IT guy, where they see SEO as simply adding a few keywords into the meta data!
Inevitably, I will get clients coming to me with their tails between their legs after 3-6months saying, “Help Us!”
I came across this article as I was looking for how a client is ranked for a particular search term. I read it and I had a good laugh as I think you have hit the nail on the head with this one especially the “Bad Grammar Offshore SEO” one. I even get emails from them saying how great they are at seo but the grammar on even their email is pretty poor.
I love the various descriptions of these experts, I find in most cases they’re exactly as described. Embellishing seems to be 50% of current SEO, trying to trick the search engines into results that aren’t organic or relevant. I’m personally tired of spam comments on my blog about “you site looks nice, add my website-we should be friend” from foreign randoms.
Your TITLE is really interesting… and I would say articulate!!
You don’t claim domain you are using you deserve it. I will book mark your website.But don’t go to IT guy please
I’ve got to put my two cents in on the conversion expert gone SEO, with latest updates from Google, conversion may not be the target but user experience factors do have an affect on ranking in the SERPS. Things like bounce rate, CTR, how long a person is on the page, etc. These are site metrics Google looks at, the likeness of the site, click bait. Which also all pertains possibly to user experience and conversion on the site as well. In my opinion this is a good thing, because now optimizations are collaborating effectively together.
I can only agree, that the It Guy is very common. Nice illustrations!
Great article – illustrations are hilarious!!
Another surprisingly common type to avoid is the article spinner. Article marketing is a valid and powerful tool for SEO, but too many people want to do it “quick and dirty”–which means paying an amateur a dollar a piece to write an article, then putting it through one of those “salad shooter” programs that spins out multiple variations of it programmatically.
Well written post. As an SEO with 8 years of experience under my belt, the thing that amazes me is just how many people go into the search engine optimization field. The thing about SEO though is that it is subjective to a large degree and is what I would term more of an ‘art form’ than an ‘exact science.’ So there are naturally going to be differences of opinion on some main SEO topics. Since no SEO knows what the Google ranking algorithm parameters are (reportedly over 200 factors) then we are to a large degree left to GUESS and to surmise on how to proceed.
What an SEO fun, David :p Just sharing stuff. I personally get lot of emails bragging great SEO services and the good thing is – Some of them has got copied stuff from my own website. I got few cold marketing calls and the guy didn’t know what’s the difference between adwords and SEO.
Great to see some humor in SEO.. You’re in my reading whitelist
This is a great post, but the funny thing is that I know SEO professionals that fall in one or more of these categories. I think I just found an outline for my next brochure.
When I was hired as an in-house marketer for our company they already had the “IT SEO guy” hired as a third party. I kid you not he said “if you don’t understand programming, you’ll never be a good SEO…” in a condescending tone. Well, 4 months later one of our sites got slapped by a Panda update because of his “seo programming prowess”. STEER CLEAR folks!
This article cracked me up! But it also resonated very true.. I have encountered a few of these ‘idiots’ before and you hit them spot on.
Exactly the one I run into all the time, the designer/SEO guy. Usually I check back a few month later, and get the customer when they see that nothing happened.
Criticizing bad SEO isn’t going to get us anywhere. Next time, work on things to hold us accountable.. standards.. and you’ll be providing an actual service to the entire industry.
IT guy is better, if wrong code can fix, and edit for website standard
Very Funny! I love the Bad Grammer Offshore Seo. I always find it funny reading the dozens of emails we get monthly asking to outsource our seo. Shockingly, their writing skillls get better and better.
lol, ok the the "Big Words" SEO guy is someone iconic of 90% of the LinkedIn group leaders – the guys who either start the group topics and make 75%+ of all the comments. The funny part is how much they argue about how one guy's SEO stuff works wonders and the other's is a scam – funny because they are both right half the time and just having a pissing contest. They got so heated one time that the other was threatening to sue the other – good gracious.
True that! I thought I was the only one thinking that about those SEO "experts". Great article David. You tell them! Best regards!
Bad gammar is what caused much problem because people will not understand what you are trying to express or the worst, they get misunderstanding.
Ha-ha! A very nice post and ironic too. My weekest point is social media so far:)
great post!
To be an expert in Online marketing niche you have to have some knowledge of everything but a deep knowledge of marketing and user experience.
I laughed like nobody’s business when I read this article. Yep, the 7 listed SEO experts are definitely ones to avoid. I wish I am my own expert when it comes to SEO & SEO instead of just writing keyword-rich web content. It takes longer time to rank clients’ websites.
This is entertaining and also useful post for every SEO to consider. I usually receive bad grammar comments on my blog. They may be fall not only once but twice or more of the definitions above.
The IT Guy might as well also be called the “buddy/brother/husband” who knows how to do EVERYTHING, but for some reason hasn’t actually done ANYTHING. Just love running into and having to compete with the unfulfilled “buddy deal”.
You have to remember that you are in control of their online business, therefore should run their site by good business ethics. Most businesses will have a straight forward approach to their clients, your SEO should follow a code of conduct that in by no means will endanger or harm the online business. Most clients need to understand SEO in a simpilfied manner so that is clear to understand, they are not going to deal or be willing to pay a web or SEO company if they don’t understand what they are paying for:)
Bad Grammar Offshore SEO Guy is my favorite. He spams my email inbox all the time asking to partner with me. He claims to add value to my clients, but I can barely understand what he’s saying.
@Chris Help,
You meant something like this? =P. My quick reply is always hitting the spam button.
3. To increase Traffic to the Site
This gave me a chuckle, nicely done dude.
I agree with @Paul Dumas…the IT/brother-in-law Guy is the toughest one to overcome. Being family, it’s very hard for the business owner to take our word over their family member’s.
Another tough one is the “IT Consultant” who gets involved knowing nothing about web development and certainly nothing about SEO. As soon as you hear that you’re going to be working with a client’s “consultant”, beware!
Thanks for the funny post…
Well talking about bad grammar SEO guy. That’s me!
When you have bad grammar + bad thinking, then you got: SEO SEM INTERNET MARKETING ROY CONVERTION specialist (“please give me link, i will increase my seo”).
Good “they are direrent” post!
But i think everyone of us have some portion of 7I (7 idiots).
I love this article, its so funny yet sadly true!
Oh, my, guilty as charged, with a little bit of several of these (and from the other article with 12 more). Gotta stay humble, keep learning, keep plugging away, keep up with trends. And, um, try not to put these hats on.
Thus here’s our favorite… the guy who promises he’s a “local search engine marketing expert” following having a 60 minutes type about declaring an enterprise listing on Google Roadmaps. These guys are everywhere!
Here’s an additional one… the Search engine marketing who’s site is made completely within thumb along with believes which onpage marketing is key phrase loaded meta tags and also numerous skillfully put (tiny, identical color because track record) key phrases inside footer.
Great article and advice David…..
Great post David.i like the way you analyzing the SEO idiots(I MEAN ‘EXPERTS’).
What I don’t get is why they have to phone/email to let you know about their services – if they were that good wouldn’t they be on the first page of google?
Excellent post David, and still 100% relevant almost 2 years after this article was written!
I hope that more SEO clients stumble across this, as it would help them a lot to distinguish the cowboys from the good ‘uns.
I never cease to be amazed at the “Bad Grammar Offshore SEO” pack, who are now “smartening up” their mass blast emails with English names as their email profile, and then a blatantly non-English name in the signature. The best I’ve seen thus far is 3 different names in one email (Email from: “English name #1″, Introduction as “Hi my name is “English name #2″, and then a non English name in the email signature at the bottom!
To add to the hilarity, they are spamming an SEO company with poorly written offers of SEO services: “We get you page 1 Google”. That’s very kind of you to offer, but I’m afraid you’re attempting to sell cake to a baker.
I do love how they polish off the disaster by quoting the “CAN-SPAM” act.
CAN-SPAM, but can’t spell.
I love the IT guy! I’ll always remember the IT guy that asked if using the keywords tag was enough content for the page to rank. Yup–that’ll take care of it!
All are of Indian Style, Actually, Indian SEO companies charge the clients and pay their employees just for doing spam on the web!!
I also got paid for that, But Now I don’t do that, will not do that at any cost!
Stephen, I loved your article on this @ZDNet. I will be following.
Hey, thanks so much! I appreciate that. =)