If you own a septic company, you've almost certainly gotten a cold email or phone call promising to get you "to the top of Google" fast. Some of these offers are legitimate. A meaningful number are not. Here's what the not-legitimate ones tend to have in common, based on patterns documented across the SEO industry.
Red flags worth knowing
- A generic "we noticed your site isn't ranking" opener. Sent to thousands of businesses at once, with no specifics about your actual site or search terms. A real audit references your actual Google Business Profile, your actual competitors, and your actual town.
- Guaranteed page-one rankings. Nobody controls Google's algorithm, including Google's own employees. A guarantee usually means the target keyword was chosen because almost nobody searches it — technically "ranked," practically worthless.
- Claims of being a "Google Partner" for SEO. Worth knowing plainly: Google does not run a partner certification program for SEO services. (There is a Google Partner program for running paid ad campaigns, which is a different service entirely.) A claim like this is either a misunderstanding or a deliberate one.
- Robocalls about an "expiring business listing." Google Business Profile listings don't expire in the way these calls imply. This is a pressure tactic aimed at owners who aren't sure how their own listing works.
- An unusually cheap "everything included" package. Real content, real technical SEO, and real link-building all take real time. A price far below the market range for all of it usually means something in the bundle isn't actually being done.
What to ask before you sign anything
Ask for the specific keywords they'd target and why. Ask to see one real, verifiable result for a business your size, not a logo wall. Ask what happens to the website and Google Business Profile if you cancel — if the answer is that it disappears, you're renting a listing, not owning an asset.
Where we stand on this, plainly
We don't guarantee rankings either — anyone who does is telling you something they can't actually back up. What we can tell you honestly, during a free audit, is what your specific market looks like and what's realistic. If that's not what you're looking for, that's a completely fair reason not to work with us.