When a business undertakes a search engine optimization program, whether done in-house or outsourced to an SEO service, most of the attention (and rightly so) is focused on the business website. This is the one aspect where there is a sense of control: once a website is released into the wild, the company will have to see how their site fares against all the other websites, whether the other sites are using ethical SEO tactics. Or not.

Other than changes made to the company’s website, it is often assumed that the company, and if you are using one, your SEO service, have no control over what appears in search engine results. However, this is usually not the case. Often you or your SEO service can have a direct effect on search engine results by monitoring your competitors and reporting them to major search engines when the SEO techniques used on your site fall outside of what is popularly It is known as ethical SEO. (Note that while I think the word “ethical” is thrown around too often, “ethical SEO” has become the standard phrase to describe white hat techniques, which is why it’s the phrase I use throughout the Article).

main competitors

To begin with, let’s define competitors. Almost every company has at least a handful of other companies that they consider to be primary competitors: those that sell the same products and services, that are similar in size, and so on. It is important that the SEO efforts (or lack thereof) of these competitors, whether they use ethical SEO techniques or not, are routinely monitored. If they have not contracted their own SEO service, or if they have not started doing SEO in-house, you will have the peace of mind of knowing that the use of this channel, for the moment, is yours. If your competitors start an SEO campaign, with or without an external SEO service, you can learn a lot about their sales and marketing tactics by evaluating the key phrases they are targeting. And you can also investigate if they are using ethical SEO practices in their campaign.

Your competitors online

It’s important to note that search engines are unlikely to decide only between you and the top competitors you’ve listed. They will consider any company that matches your particular needs and that appears for your search term. This is why your criteria for an online competitor should be expanded to encompass any business offering products or services like yours that outperforms you on any of your specific key phrases. If your in-house staff or SEO service not only continuously monitors your search engine rankings, but also analyzes the companies that appear above you in search results, you can often identify forward-thinking competitors you were previously unaware of. : Your main competitors. in the morning.

violations

This brings us to the key issue of ethical SEO. Search engine optimization is still a very new concept for most businesses. Even the most respected companies can make mistakes in this arena, either choosing the wrong SEO service or trying to avoid hiring an SEO service entirely by bringing it in-house with well-intentioned but unqualified people. For example, the German BMW site was temporarily removed from the Google index for using landing pages, which is not considered an ethical SEO practice. It stands to reason that your competitors aren’t immune to breaches either.

bad companies

There are some very notable examples of savvy, established businesses hiring an SEO service that put them in a worse situation than before they went for SEO, for example, by removing their site from major search engines for violating the engine’s terms of service. . Not long ago, there was a highly publicized example where most of the clients of a Las Vegas SEO service were penalized. Almost all of the customers stated that they were not informed that the company was not practicing ethical SEO and that they were therefore at risk.

SEO companies generally fall into two camps: the so-called “White Hats” (those who use ethical SEO practices and will never knowingly violate a search engine’s terms of service) and the so-called “Black Hats” (those who do not use ethical SEO practices). practices and will try to unravel the latest algorithms and exploit any loopholes to achieve rankings at any cost). Neither approach is invalid: it is not illegal to violate a search engine’s terms of service. Also, black hat techniques can be quite effective. However, the tactics are risky, and anyone hiring an SEO service that wears a black hat and does not use ethical SEO practices should definitely be aware of this risk up front.

internal resources

Companies are often tempted to avoid hiring an SEO service by doing SEO in-house, and the project almost always falls to an already overstretched IT department. The problem with approaching SEO from a strictly technical mindset is that the strategies employed, such as targeting key phrases, will not necessarily be in line with the objectives of the marketing and sales departments. Also, an IT resource will usually approach SEO from a purely technical point of view, without knowledge of ethical SEO practices, and this can lead to problems. Penalty is a very real possibility, and it’s hard to get back into an index once your site has been taken down.

Supervision

A complete SEO service will monitor not only the handful of competitors you deem crucial, but also the sites that appear higher than you for any of your chosen search phrases. This can be somewhat controversial, especially for any SEO service or webmaster using tactics prohibited by the search engine’s terms of service. However, many white hat SEO service companies consider it an obligation for their clients to routinely monitor any competitor’s sites found on the engines to ensure they are using ethical SEO techniques.

There’s a reason all the major search engines have a form to report sites that don’t use ethical SEO tactics and violate their terms of service so that these sites can later be penalized or removed. Spam filters can’t catch all violations without removing a lot of good sites as well. Search engines trust their users to help keep their indexes clean and free of sites that are not using ethical SEO tactics. There are many techniques for spamming an engine, too many to list. However, a good SEO service not only knows what all of these techniques are, but also knows how to identify them when they see them so that they can be accurately reported to the engine.

The ending turned out

Business is business, and your interests often go directly against those of your competitors. When you report a website that does not use ethical SEO, it is very likely that it will be removed. This means there’s one less business to worry about in the online realm, at least for now. If the site in question outperformed yours, you also get the added benefit of seeing your rankings improve as infringing pages are removed, provided of course you’re using ethical SEO techniques and avoiding infringements yourself, or you can being reported by a competitor of yours or your SEO service!

The engine also benefits from users reporting violations. Engines don’t like it when people try to cheat their indexes, as they may show up pages for certain search terms that aren’t actually relevant to those terms. Clearly, search engines understand this benefit: if the engines thought they could remove all spam themselves, they wouldn’t provide a reporting system. Supporting such a system, after all, is not free. Actual people employed by the engine must visit the offending pages to confirm that they are not using ethical SEO tactics.

In the notable example cited above of the company penalizing most of its clients, the owner of the SEO service in question was quoted as saying, “Google can kiss my ass. This is the Wild West.” You may be right, maybe it’s the Wild West. But there are a lot of new sheriffs in town, and they wear white hats.