Has a so-called SEO expert or SEO agency guaranteed X amount of traffic to your website or guaranteed X percent of a traffic bump to your website in a super fast time period? Don’t walk away, RUN!
This is yet another example of a churn-and-burn game, but with this one, they might be able to legally keep your money.
Think about it, how can they do that? What is the consequence if they fail to do so? What might they do to ensure they get paid no matter what?
Untargeted traffic is easy to get, it’s called spam when bots flood your website. If it isn’t bots, then I bet it is people overseas working for practically nothing to drive unrelated traffic, or building spammy clickbait links (which is considered blackhat SEO) to your website that you can’t even service or take advantage of even if you wanted to.
Examples of how SEO companies or freelancers can guarantee website traffic include:
- You only offer services in the U.S. or Chicago but you get a huge traffic bump from India or Myrtle Beach.
- Or you sell adult diapers and they are sending traffic to your website for kid’s electric ride-on cars.
How will any of that help you? It won’t. It will just confuse search engines and the people viewing your website, ultimately killing your Google ranking, reputation, and business. But from the scammer’s side, they produced what they said they would, so they can keep your money. This is known as a churn-and-burn scam which is basically a numbers game where they don’t have to keep you on as a client because they have plenty of victims to run through. Some won’t even realize they were scammed. They might think it just didn’t work well or that it will take longer than expected to kick in and move on.
This guaranteed website traffic scam distorts your analytics data and hurts your marketing efforts because it signals that your content or call-to-actions need to be reworked since it isn’t converting. When in fact, you are just getting the wrong traffic from most likely a fake audience, or at best, the wrong audience that will just bog down your server and trigger a landslide of other issues.
It will annoy your sales team because they will spend a lot of time following up on these bogus leads instead of real leads, or no leads at all which impacts their commission. If you are a marketing director, all you are going to do is make your boss mad and confused because they will be wondering where all their money went and why there is no return on investment. Especially, when you have to now spend more money figuring out how to remove all those bad links and filter out all that bad website traffic from reports. How are you going to explain why there was so much website traffic in one month and a huge drop the next month?
Don’t fall for this guaranteed website traffic scam. It won’t be worth it, trust us. We have fixed this problem for some of our clients when they came to us practically begging to get them back to where they were before they fell prey. Then, once we get back to square one, we can start doing proper organic SEO again to accomplish what they wanted to in the beginning.