Rip-off #2: Talk rubbish
If you want to sell garbage SEO services, it is important to understand that most of your customers have no idea how SEO works or what you do. This means you can bamboozle them with made-up jargon.
My particular favorite, used by one of the largest SEO agencies in the world, is to talk about "capturing percentages of the search space." I recall reading with joy the line in one of their reports to a client:
"The site has successfully captured 10 percent of the search space for this retail sector."
This is pure genius! It sounds great, makes the client feel important and powerful, makes you look good, and yet it communicates absolutely nothing. Let us examine this work of genius in more detail and see what we can learn from it.
We see that the client has captured 10 percent of something called a "search space." The client presumes that this means search engines. But which ones? All of them? Unlikely. Some are very small, and many of them do not work in English. Does this include national variations of major names, such as Google.za (South Africa) as well as Google.com? So to talk of search space is meaningless unless it is defined. What does capturing 10 percent mean? Is this 10 percent of the results? How could anyone calculate that? How many pages are we surveying? Are all positions of equal value? Is No. 1 worth the same as No. 10? Or No. 100? Does this mean the client site is listed 10 times for every 100 results? And how many pages of results were reviewed?
You see the genius? Without a definition of what 10 percent means, how that number was calculated and which search engines are included in this "search space," the client learns nothing, yet manages to feel good.
Should the client actually ask for definitions of the search space, you can just throw him a list of search engines. However, if the client asks how you calculate 10 percent, things get difficult. The best defense is to hide behind intellectual property rights by telling the client the formula is part of your unique expertise (see Rip-off #3).
Another lovely piece of made-up terminology the above-mentioned company uses is to distinguish between crawl maps and site maps. Everybody knows how to create a site map, but only this company knows how to create a crawl map. In fact, since there is no such thing, only this company even knows what it is (and it's not telling). Having convinced the client a crawl map is important, the client will discover that none of his technical staff know how to create one, or even what one is. This proves the superior expertise of the SEO company and forces the client to use its services. Of course, you must never supply a crawl map or explain how to make one. Instead, you must tell the customer that it is proprietary technology that you cannot reveal (see Rip-off 3).
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