As a business owner, how often have you received phone calls and/or emails from someone trying to sell you “Google Rankings” or “Ranking your website #1 in Google”? Our guess is probably multiple times per week! The question is, why are so many small-to-medium sized businesses constantly bombarded with these scam phone calls or emails?

To help understand how these scammers work, we first need to look back into the past. Once upon a time (15+ years ago), the Google search engine was relatively primitive. It was quite an easy task to build a website and then simply stuff the pages full of hundreds, if not thousands of keywords. The verbiage on the website would not make any coherent sense to an actual person browsing the site, but that was not the goal back then! In other words, it was REALLY easy to manipulate Google and get a website to “rank” in a Google search for almost any keyword imaginable; with very minimal effort. The goal was all about rankings and beating the competition to the coveted #1 spot in Google for a specific keyword. Nobody was even remotely concerned about what would happen once a person actually clicked on your website, the rankings were all that mattered!

Fast forward to today and things have changed (for the better). The goal of a website today is not all about rankings, but conversions. This means not only getting people to click on your website from a Google search, but we want them to perform a measurable action such as making a phone call or filling out a contact form. When we talk to clients about Digital Marketing services, we stress the importance of focusing on conversions, not rankings.

The other fact is that Google’s search engine has become much more intelligent and advanced in the past 10 years; making it no longer possible for people to “trick” or manipulate the search results. Many still try to do this, but it will ultimately fail. The bottom line is, NOBODY can control how Google ranks websites except for Google themselves. There are thousands of factors that Google takes in to consideration when ranking websites in their search engine. While Google does provide a set of guidelines for best practices in helping your business perform better in their search engine, the methods they use to determine rankings are their own trade secrets and are not privy to anyone.

So why do scammers still use the term “Google rankings” when trying to trick businesses owners into paying them? The simple fact is that most businesses don’t have the time or resources to understand how the modern Google search engine works. There are also decade-old perceptions of Google that still exist in the minds of businesses; “All I need to do is setup a website and start adding keywords to get ranked right?”. These are the things that make business owners susceptible.

Many scammers also impersonate themselves as representing Google. They will sound very convincing and use scare tactics to get business owners to send them money. Common phrases we’ve heard include “You need to pay (a certain amount of dollars) to maintain your Google rankings or else they will disappear forever”. Other scammers will claim to be calling from Google and can get your website ranked #1 for a certain amount of money. There are literally thousands of different ways and methods in which these scammers will try to convince unsuspecting business owners to send them money.

What can you do about this as a business owner? Well for starters, there is no surefire way to prevent these people from either calling or emailing you. Businesses of all sizes and industries (including us at New Adventure) receive these types of solicitations; sometimes on a daily basis. Below are some examples. If you receive any of the following (or similar), ALWAYS disregard them!

1. A phone call or email from someone claiming they are representing Google and try to sell you a business website along with Google rankings.
2. A phone call or email claiming that they cannot find your website online and will try to sell you “SEO services”.
3. A phone call or email stating that they found “issues” with your website in Google that are preventing you from achieving “top rankings”.
4. ANYBODY that claims they can guarantee you rankings of any kind in the Google search engine!

If you’re a business owner, we hope this article has been useful in helping you identify potential Digital Marketing scams. If you receive these types of phone calls or emails, always use your best judgement and if it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is a scam! If you are ever unsure, feel free to reach out to us and we can help you determine if something is legitimate or not. Please be safe out there!