Businesses like offering packages and people like buying them. The package deal attracts customers to a company while allowing the company to sell inventory they can’t use or that’s just lying around anyway. Consumers like packages because they feel like they’re getting a deal — what they really want, plus a little more. But what if someone offers you a package deal for office furniture that includes “a free manual typewriter!” Do you really need that? If someone gives it to you, won’t it just take up space? Eventually, wouldn’t you just get rid of it? What if a customer saw the typewriter and thought you did all your work on that instead of a computer? What would they think of your company and your business practices?

When it comes to packages for Search Engine Optimization, many of the so-called “deals” and offerings are similar — they include services you don’t need and some practices that actually ruin your search engine ranking instead of improving it! The worst SEO packages are actually con jobs hiding behind Internet technospeak that most businesses owners simply don’t understand.

Let the Business Beware

For example, many of the techniques used by SEO packagers to create links to your website are akin to spamming people’s e-mail address. While the links and posts are sent to blogs and social media, most people and companies that receive these items consider them straight out spam and advertising. Is that the reputation you want with potential clients? Should Google think you’re a spammer?

Other techniques are actually on search engines’ “hit lists,” and if your website uses these methods, your ranking plummets after the search engine applies a black mark to your site address. How does this work in real life? One GFX client noticed that a business competitor quickly jumped to a number one search engine ranking, knocking our customer down to number two. An investigation of the competitor’s methods revealed that an SEO firm was involved and using a shady technique to boost the other company’s ranking. We encouraged our client to just wait and see what was going to happen. Within the week, Google recognized what the competitor’s website was doing and the web address was essentially banished — buried under every other business site in that town.

How GFX Does SEO

Just like any package deal, some of things offered are actually useful to you. As mentioned here, however, some of them can be worse than a waste of your money. The GFX approach to search engine optimization is completely different. Study and experience has demonstrated that our process consistently produces improved results for GFX clients.

First we perform an assessment of your website: do you make use of good SEO practices, are you missing certain elements that search engines look for, or does your site apply techniques that are now considered worthless or even SEO “toxic”?

Next we determine what keywords are commonly used to find websites like yours. Do you make liberal use of these keywords in your page text and descriptions?

Then we investigate whether your website uses genuine content or if your pages are copied from someone else’s website. This step is especially important, as the original contributor gets far more credit from search engines than the copyists.

There are also many other backend steps we take that the casual reader doesn’t see, but that appear in your website architecture. Basically, we know the techniques that lead to success and we determine which ones your website already includes and which ones it desperately needs.

Figuring Out the Cost

After our staff has compiled this report, we present you with the tasks that will directly produce results  and definitely expose you to a greater number of Internet customers. The cost to complete all tasks is discussed and based on your monthly marketing budget and your own company goals, we can assess how much time and effort should be dedicated to SEO each month in comparison to other website priorities. When those tasks are completed we reassess the status of your website using a host of research tools we’ve created and present the results.

What you get through this process is an improvement in your search engine rankings without the threat of “package” costs that simply continue forever! Mainly this is because we direct our efforts to exactly what you need and praise your site for the things you’ve already accomplished. With GFX methodology, your ranking will improve and the changes will have long term effect — not short term consequences.