The great SEO rip-off – don’t sign a contract: I have a better idea

Do you get a lot of people trying to sell you SEO? I get regular emails – and another agency which has the misfortune of me for its chairman gets people ringing to sell it all the time.


The sales idea is to make you feel a pathetic no-hoper because you’re not at the top of the rankings. It reminds me of the Great CRM Rip Off, and before that the Great Database Rip-Off, not to mention the Great We’ll Build You a Pretty Website That Couldn’t Sell Shit If It Tried Rip-Off.

They all work on the safe assumption that many marketers feel they should have one of these shiny things without knowing what they’re for, let alone how they work.

My partner takes great joy in probing these SEO rogues on what they actually deliver. It soon becomes apparent that the answer is not a lot.

As he says, “Poor fools. I don’t think a lot of them know what direct marketing is let alone what a direct marketing agency is. The thing is, SEO/SEM has become this mystical dark art which practitioners don’t like to reveal their methods about. I have noticed huge numbers of businesses signing up to ridiculous deals where they commit to stupid sums of money for very little in the way of work.”

He then adds, “If I’m honest I’m probably a bit jealous that there are people making money for doing nothing – something I’ve always struggled to do.”

What’s happening is that lots of people are signing up for SEO contracts where the “SEO agency” does little more than a few tweaks to their site in the first month and then sits around until they get rumbled about 18 months later.

If you’re interested, here’s a new and original approach. It is called A Fair Deal


For £900 a month you get an IT graduate working full-time on your site – optimising the copy and code and building links with full monthly and instant online reporting.

You can sub divide this into chunks of 40 hours. So you can buy 40, 80, 120, 160 200, etc hours a month.

And the results are extremely impressive. They have never yet failed to get anyone onto page 1 of Google for any keyword within about six months.


If you want to know more about this, two people at EADIM (which I cease promoting after the end of tomorrow) will be talking about SEO. One is among the the world’s leading authorities. The other is the man who put together the fair deal I just referred to.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

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