There are usually two types of SEO providers, ones that are terrible and ones that are really good. There is also a vast difference in the price of SEO providers. One would guess the cheap SEO providers are terrible and the ones that are really good are expensive. Not the case but there is a strong perception that outsourced SEO from certain countries particularly India is terrible. Our job was to objectively examine this perception and see if it holds true. The objective was to examine if Indian SEO “in general” is of a much poorer quality that SEO provides in Australia and New Zealand. We have from client feedback sensed there was a perception of poor quality SEO coming from India and we wanted to without any prejudice have a fair comparison to see if this perception holds true or is based on bias. Let’s take a closer look.
What we did was ask two simple questions to see if the SEO providers where employing sound SEO Practices.
1) How many links can you build per month for $200 and for $500? SEO previously was heavily focused on link building in volume. Today adding poor quality links will harm a sites rankings and no good SEO provider should be pricing SEO based on adding lots of links. It is an outdated practice that has no room in quality SEO today.
2) Can you guarantee page one rankings? Again Google has come out and officially said no SEO provider should ever guarantee page one rankings. This is absolutely true. Can a brilliant Doctor guarantee absolute success, no. Can a brilliant lawyer guarantee and absolute victory, no. Can a stockbroker guarantee a profit, no. An ethical Digital Marketing Expert will also never guarantee page one results as it is totally unethical.
So what did we Do?
We contacted 50 Indian SEO providers and asked these questions. We contacted 15 Australian SEO providers and 15 New Zealand SEO providers asking the same question. I fell of the chair with the results.
Our Findings
48 Indian SEO providers guaranteed page one results. They were absolutely certain of it. Not only did they guarantee page one results, many actually predicted when the page one goal would be achieved quoting time frames like, “it will only take 4 weeks, it will only take 3 months”.
Of the 15 Australian SEO providers four guaranteed page one results. Three of those four SEO provides were of Indian origin or Indians living in Australia. Three of the New Zealand providers guaranteed page one results, interestingly two of those providers were also of Indian origin or Indian’s living in New Zealand.
When we asked how many backlinks per month for $200/$500 again 46 Indian providers were very happy to build large number of backlinks for $200/$500. Some even said the money offered was not enough and to get better results and more backlinks more money would need to be invested. Scary.
Six SEO providers in Australia and five in New Zealand would receive payment for adding large numbers of backlinks per month. The same providers that guaranteed page one results had no issues with charging for backlinks.
Conclusion
Again we must stress that we have not contacted every single SEO provider in India but this is a reasonable sample to suggest a huge amount of SEO providers in India are using very unethical SEO methods that will damage a websites rankings and are completely unethical. The worst thing we noted was they kept saying that they are “white hat/white label” SEO providers when clearly they are not. Based on the providers we approached Indian SEO is not of poor quality it is terrible and there is a marked differences between their practices compared to most SEO providers operating in Australia or New Zealand.
For affordable Digital Marketing and Ethical White Hat SEO we offer a very competitive price and work/learn from leading industry experts in Australia, UK and the USA.
Author: Rod Sinclair
Digital Marketing Expert