It seems that companies are turning to outsource overseas more now than ever before. I have been asked to evaluate and train many of these companies, and I’ve found they have a lot to learn. Now I am not here to slam outsourced work. I am just giving my view on what I have come across in the last 7+ years in digital marketing.
Outsourcing in many cases comes as a result of filling a need. It could be that a company doesn’t have the resources to bring the work in-house, or it could be that they feel search marketing is search marketing, and the cheaper they can get it… the more they save. They couldn’t be more wrong.
For example, just about every overseas company I’ve dealt with for link building does link bombing. They go after major terms and target them all to the homepage. That’s not the worse part. The worse part is the sites the links are coming from are totally unrelated. They come from link farms and link pages that are already filled with thousands of links.
All the customer sees is the site’s rankings improving and continues with the service. The problem is, eventually, the site gets caught and then penalized. Who suffers? The client obviously. The outsourcing company’s response?…. “We do this for all our clients, and no one has been banned before; it must be something else.” Many of these outsourced companies have very basic knowledge of SEO and online marketing and couldn’t tell you what was wrong regardless. If they could… they’d know what they were doing was wrong.
Social media is another area where the low price lures people into thinking that the cheaper, the better, as long as someone is doing it. I’ve seen outsourced companies create profiles and not even create them around the company name or main key term. They aren’t targeting the right demographic and can’t really tell you the value of their service.
These overseas companies don’t even know how to use customer email addresses to find them on social networks. Why reinvent the wheel? You have a customer base and an email list; use it.
Content marketing is another huge problem. With English being a second language, content creation is fair at best. This is your companies image on the line. People reading that content may buy based on what they read. Is the content accurate? Is it written well? If you don’t know… you may be doing more harm than good. Good content marketing involves lots of unique content and going after terms that are relevant to your site. If all links in the articles are going to your home page and they are all different and unrelated terms, this is being done incorrectly.
The point of this is to make people aware that just because a service is 
cheap doesn’t mean it’s better. Not to say paying more is, but do your research and ask questions. Many small businesses get cold-called or emailed with big promises for little cost. What many small businesses don’t realize is that bad SEO and marketing can waste their money and hurt their rankings and brand. Think about it..someone with more experience will charge you more but will do a better job and in most cases faster. Or, you can pay less over more time and still have it done incorrectly. Then you have to pay someone to fix the mistakes. That doesn’t sound cost-effective to me.
Unfortunately, some companies prey on small businesses and their lack of knowledge and take advantage of it. While others genuinely think they know what they are doing, but really don’t. Educate yourself. Know the basics and get involved. You can always hire a search marketing consultant to oversee the process. I’ve been hired to train overseas companies on best practices. It might be the best solution for companies looking to outsource.
If you’re thinking of hiring an SEO Analyst & Lead Generation Expert for your business, then you can contact me or call on +1 (872) 588-7528.
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