We had quite a disturbing call from one of our free link partner website owners this week regarding an unpleasant experience they had with a so called SEO company in December last year.
They had a slick salesman calling them from he said an SEO company. We pointed out most likely they are not as they are merely reselling Google Adword spots for specific key phrases.
They agreed to take part in a 30 day trial for an agreed specific key phrase for their business having recently updated the site adding new pages of content and wanting to give the made over website a boost in the rankings. The company charged them £100 for 4 key phrases for one month in Google’s adwords area, with a guarantee of a first page position for all of them, too good to be true? Find out............................
Having made a verbal agreement with the salesman and paid over the phone using a bank debit card, they then received another phone call from a lady apparently from their head office reviewing and confirming the key phrases and duration of the campaign. At this point the first problem comes to light. The most competitive of the key phrases agreed with the salesman is not available and never was! Instead similar phrases, less competitive were agreed. Our client reconfirmed with the second caller that this was to be a trial for 30 days only to monitor the activity for their website. The lady said that this was the position and even gave our client an e-mail address to use to cancel the campaign.
The agreed campaign in Google adwords commenced, initially with the wrong text and URL of our clients website, but this was corrected by our client who e-mailed the company’s technical department, again mentioning that this was to be for a 30 day trial of their services only. Our client told us that within the first 10 days or so of the campaign often he would find his website not appearing on the first page of Google’s sponsored listings for his 4 search phrases as had been promised by this company. Again he e-mailed the technical department on a couple of occasions to point this out and was assured it was only a temporary issue and that the website would appear again later, he felt the technicians were rather irritated he had pointed it out to them! Nice attitude there.
Unfortunately our client received no extra business from being in the sponsored listings of Google for the agreed key phrases, primarily because they were too narrow not attracting enough searches per month to have any affect. This of course is why this company was able to offer him 4 key phrases in Google’s sponsored listings for a month for just £100.
Times must be hard in the World of Google Ads resellers because after the failure of his short 30 day campaign and loss of £100 our client wrote the matter off to experience and thought no more about the campaign, other than to make a mental note, won't do that again! Imagine then how he felt this month when the company’s accounts department rang him to say, "You owe us another £100 for your January campaign". Our client protested explaining that this had been agreed and confirmed as a 30 day trial at the beginning of December and that as it had not been successful he had decided not to pursue it further. The man in the accounts department then becomes aggressive demanding immediate payment of another £100 by credit or debit card. He further claims that our clients e-mail to confirm the 30 day trail was not acceptable as they didn't accept e-mails as written cancellation of their campaigns. Furthermore if our client didn't pay up they would hand the account to a debt collections company. Quite rightly our client tells them he's heard enough and that he is not happy with their sales tactics, service or attitude.
The message here is clear we think. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is! If a telesales company call you offering you these spots in Google on a 30 day trial, don't buy unless they send you a contract stating the duration of the campaign before you buy it. These shady operators are out there unfortunately and the advice we have given our client is to report them to Google as the company claim to be resellers for Google Adwords.
