Is SEO a Scam? How to Combat Sneaky/Misleading Sales Tactics - Unsolicited Email/Phone Call Pitches

Transcribed using Descript

Danny de Hek: Hello, beautiful people. How are you doing? I'm Danny de Hek. Thank you for pressing play and listening to my video. I got to be in the New York Times. I got a whole page on Danny de Hek busting Ponzi scheme that they called me the Crypto Ponzi Scheme. Avenger, what a name. And that means I've actually gained some followers while people who subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Danny de Hek: So thank you so much. If you're one of those people, and you may not have seen my videos before, I record them like I'm live streaming. And then I upload them later on. I don't like editing much. I'm also dyslexic. So if you read my show notes and look at the timestamps, cuz you might wanna jump forward to the part you wanna watch, then you might find some spelling mistakes.

Danny de Hek: And I really love people who comment on my videos. It's your your choice. You can comment on this video and tell me what you think and if you hit the thumbs up button that tells YouTube you like my videos and it sends it out to the masses. And then I can help name and shame these people that are running Ponzi scheme.

Danny de Hek: And that's my main goal. My goal at the moment is to be a full-time YouTuber and it's not easy becoming a YouTuber. So I really value having you here. Now I'm gonna tell you a little bit of a story about something that happened last Friday that was before I was famous in the New York Times. Had a young fella from an SEO company telephoned.

Danny de Hek: Now, if you've got a small to medium sized business and you have a website, you're probably experiencing the same thing I'm experiencing. You get in emails every day from people. I delete these emails. The same people email me in two days time asking me if I had a chance to read their emails. So when someone tele phones me based in New Zealand where I'm from and claims that they can do the SEO for my website and don't really understand my business or have they really researched my business it really annoys me.

Danny de Hek: So this is the splash screen that we'll be doing today, website design and development companies. Sorry I said that wrong. Website design and development SEO companies. Are you being exploited? Is SEO a scam? Now I'm pretty aggressive to anyone that claims they can do my SEO, but. I take a lot of my SEO for granted because I have some good practices when I'm doing new content now I am everywhere.

Danny de Hek: If you go to deek.com, you'll see that website that actually gets between 17,000 to 50,000 page views on a monthly basis. I had a real big spike last Sunday when I was in the New York Times, but that's a lot of traffic and a lot of other people I know will be lucky to get 10 to 15 people on their website every day.

Danny de Hek: So what happened? Young guy rung me up and he told me he was from such and such company, like I should know the name of the company and I, I didn't hear it, but it sound official, but I didn't know who they were. Next thing he tells me that, he asked me a question, he said, Have you heard of the government incentive for blah, blah, blah, blah?

Danny de Hek: Something to do with, It sounded like he was saying he was either from a government department, Or there was a government scheme where the small to medium size business may get some funding. That's what it sounded like to me. And it was well read. Next thing I said, No, I, I haven't, And he asked me if I'd like a 15 minute free website appraisal.

Danny de Hek: And I said, Look mate, I don't need your SEO. Actually, I think you're scamming people by ringing them up and selling them SEO packages. He goes, Do you realize that your website is on page eight of the search engines? Tell Danny d heck that his website is on page eight of the search engines. Just a word of advice.

Danny de Hek: So this is my outdoor website and as you can see, that is actually me in the middle of nowhere with a backpack on and I have an outdoor shop. That's me again. These are my photos, Not all of them are. And here's some of my products. So I said, You know, that website that you see in the search result that's coming up in page eight actually sold $36,500 worth of sales last year in 12 month period.

Danny de Hek: And I said, You don't know anything about my business. And if you sold me a SEO package with five words, cause that's what they normally do, you would actually harm my business more than bring more traffic to my website. So just to give you a look, you'll have to lodge your screen if you wanna see this properly, but I've done $36,000 worth of sales.

Danny de Hek: I'm just gonna rattle off some figures for those people who have Shopify websites, I know what these means. . First of all, I'm up 20% from the year before, which is really good. My average sale was $80. I had 501 orders. And if you go down to the bottom here, it tells me that sales attribute to marketing.

Danny de Hek: So I got $15,200 worth of sales from marketing organically. That means I got, oh, I have to work that out. $21,000 worth of sales from organic traffic. Now, there's a whole lot of clever stuff in there that I'm not gonna tell you about, but I only sell products to New Zealanders. And that's pretty good.

Danny de Hek: And to be honest, I do drop shipping for a living and 45% of that is actually profit. So if you want any help doing drop shipping, let me know and reach out to me and I'll tell you how to do it. So the young fellow was Tom and I really got stuck into Tom. I told him to go get a job and at the end I told him, I yelled down the phone and said, Get off my phone.

Danny de Hek: I'm so sick of it. And then, then I'd started, I thought I'd research Tom and I would see who he is. Would you believe I found a camping store with his phone number on it. And I'm thinking the guy that rung me telling me that my camping store isn't ranking and it's on page eight of the search engines.

Danny de Hek: And just for example, if you search for NZ Outdoors in the Google, I actually come up number one and I know that people aren't searching for phrases. That he thinks they are. And if I had five phrases that they normally say as a package and I was coming up on top of the search engines, it wouldn't mean I would generate any more sales.

Danny de Hek: So I'm this actually, Tom is a, is a frigging awesome guy and I liked him. I've got to know Tom and his method. So first of all, I thought Tom was working for the company that owned this website. This is his hobby website. So he's taken a lot of initiative and he set himself up a little drop shipping website.

Danny de Hek: But at the time I couldn't remember the name of the company he was from. And I'm thinking if this is the type of websites that EO. As producing, then he's got no show of helping or bettering anything I'm doing. And just while you're there, if you are looking at a website like this, these images aren't unique and you should have unique images, but you can right click on any image on the internet and go search image with Google Lens.

Danny de Hek: That's if you're using Chrome and what it will do, or go to Google and say, this image has a footprint, let's go find to see where it is. And here we are. It is that image. These are all images of Alibaba and these are rooftop vehicles. And he's basically doing drop shipping as well. And there's the same photo.

Danny de Hek: And if you come down here further, you'll see other photos as well. So this was really interesting to me. And if you look, click on the About Us page. There's a nice little story in there about him wanting to basically make your holiday better and all these images that you can see. I actually just copied images and I'm, this paragraph might be his, but this whole website isn't gonna perform very well in the search engines, and that's probably why he is not selling any of these.

Danny de Hek: I can look at this website and say, I'll eat my hat if he is actually sold. One next thing, I did a search for a the phone number again, I found another website and I found a website that does website development and also SEO packages. And now I'm thinking, Oh, so this is the company that he was calling me from, but this is a 22 year old guy who set up two websites of his own because he's having a go at becoming a website developer.

Danny de Hek: Now, I take my hat off to you, Tom, because you remind me of me when I was young. Now, this image that you see in the background is actually one and a half megabytes, and it's a p and g, and that takes a long time to load faster. Your website loads. The higher it will rank in the search engines. Now, just before I get off my high horse, I'm actually finished on explaining the back of the story as I've got a pie in the oven and the buzzer's gonna go off in five minutes, so I'm gonna get onto the next part of the meeting.

Danny de Hek: So anyway, I went to ring back Tom, not knowing where he is from and who he was, and I wanted to say to him, How can you ring me up, mate? I've just yelled down the phone at the guy. How can you ring me up and tell me you're an SEO when I found these two websites you have done. Anyway, he blocked my number.

Danny de Hek: He blocked my number because I told him never ever to ring me again. He did the right thing. Anyway, so I, I searched for his phone number, I found him on WhatsApp and I sent him a few more messages and I said, Can you please get your boss to ring me? Meet Kevin. Kevin is the most amazing person I've ever.

Danny de Hek: He rung me up and addressed all the issues I had and I can see why Kevin has 25 people up to 25 people working for his company at certain periods. All depends what job. He doesn't employ 25 people, but when he gets a job, he's got a lot of contractors he can bring in to do certain things. This guy really knows how to run a company and he explained that Tom was a little bit shaken after talking to me on the phone and obviously he rang the wrong person.

Danny de Hek: But between Mark and myself, we really did discuss, you know, is SEO needed and is is a scam and what services. Does he provide and why? Because I was telling him I just can't stand these companies that ring people up all day long. Cause often what happens is you go to a website development company and say, Look, I want a website designed.

Danny de Hek: And they'll say, How much? And you say four. And they'll say four and a half, $5,000. You get your website and you're all excited and you sit there waiting for it to come up in the search engines and nothing happens. So then you go back to the search engine company and say, Why doesn't it rank up in the search engines?

Danny de Hek: And then they say, Oh, you need to spend money on an EEO package and I'll probably charge you anything from 500 to $2,000. And then they may even encourage you to spend a monthly fee. Now, if I was ever going to use a company to do my SEO, honestly this company I'm about to introduce you to, I would recommend their services.

Danny de Hek: And this is Kiwi. Kiwi website design.nz. Now, I'm not being paid for this at all, but I really gave it to one of their staff members who was a lead generator. I, I had a guess that the guy was young. I, I didn't realize I've explained my story, but the young fellow was awesome. He's having to go developing a website of his own.

Danny de Hek: He's gonna learn. The only way you're gonna learn how to be good at SEO is by having it go yourself and find out what works and what doesn't. You can go to these SEO companies and you can you know, spend a ton of money with these guys and get nowhere. And honestly, if you think that your website, what you really wanna do is you wanna go to these website development companies who claim that they can have you coming up when you search for a certain term and you wanna gauge the results.

Danny de Hek: that they, you get after they've done some work. So for example, if you went to a company called Evil Genius Stock Code nz, I've just done an hour and a half's worth of tickling up. Cause I noticed that that company had no SEO. And I said to my mate, who owns the business? You've got no SEO. So go in there, get a couple of hours work done, tickle up the website.

Danny de Hek: So it's got it's keyword friendly. But you know, when I construct a website, I make sure the images are named. I make sure the content is on each pages. And these website development companies that charge you for a five page website and eight page website, you, they must think I'm crazy. I used to develop websites that were over a hundred pages.

Danny de Hek: Now I used to have 45 different rental car companies that used to use my services and I was doing 98% of all their internet advertising and they all wanted to come up in the top. of the search engines. A lot of strategies are needed to actually have that happen. So I used to start writing itineraries about, so when people were hiring rental cars and they wanted to go from say like Christchurch to Auckland, they would be searching for the activities.

Danny de Hek: They would stumble across the website, and then they would have advertising wrapped around it. A bit like driving down the road and seeing a billboard advertising a rental car for horror or a jet ski or a boat for her. When you're on holiday, you the same sort of thing really. But I'm not gonna get into that today because this is actually a podcast.

Danny de Hek: And this podcast was when I met Mark and I must say I have the utmost respect for Kiwi website design. They they looked after. They just did everything right and I had to eat humble pie and I may be a bit gentler on the next person that rings me up and offer me a ceo, CEO package. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna press play.

Danny de Hek: The buzzer is about to go off. I'm gonna grab my pie. I'm gonna go cook myself dinner, and I'm gonna let you listen to this podcast and when I come back, I hopefully won't interrupt you much. Also, I'm gonna have a jewel screen, so when they're talking about different things, I will bring up another thing.

Danny de Hek: So I, if you hit the full screen mode, you'll be able to watch and see all the graphics on the screen. So here we go. Meet Mark. Lovely guy. So the question here is, are you being exploited by these SEO companies? Do they actually do a good job for you? And is SEO just another scam, or is it getting low hanging fruit?

Danny de Hek: The first five minutes, I apologize, I'm probably a bit tired and grumpy, but you'll see the whole conversation really pans out. So here we go.

Mark Magcaling: I'm so impressed, Danny, by the way. Honestly, like, I don't know. I know it's been weird that how we met, but like after I looked at your profile and how you've set up everything, it's very impressive.

Danny de Hek: Oh, well we try, You learn every day . So it is a learning curve. I mean, yeah, I just I lost my business to Covid, so I used to have a business networking company, tried to move everyone onto Zoom and it was just really hard. Yeah. And so then I thought I'd start doing online workshops and cause I, with my business network and I used to do tutorials.

Danny de Hek: Mm. And they were quite cool. And so I thought I'll make them into workshops, but no one wants to do workshops. Everyone's too busy. . Yeah, that's right. So I got a whole lot of gear and here I am and now a YouTube and a podcaster and all sorts of things, which I never thought I'd do. So just gotta make, try to make money out of.

Mark Magcaling: But like from what I know about the industry, right? Cause I follow it quite closely. Like the thumbnails, the way you've set up the podcast and the YouTube videos, the workshops, the website, it's all aligned with everything that everyone preaches about. So, and it's very, that I've seen anyone in New Zealand do it, you know, So you, you're very early

Danny de Hek: on in my opinion.

Danny de Hek: Oh, well, we'll give it a go. I've got I was in the New York Times on Saturday. I got a, in the printed edition. I dunno how I, I did that, but it was so awesome because that's sort of like starting to get a bit of recognition for the work for your brand. Hey, for the brand, for Danny. The brand. Your brand.

Danny de Hek: Yeah. Well the nickname me, the Crypto Ponzi scheme. Now I'm waffling on a wee bit here, so excuse me for that. But if you want to go into the description of the video and they'll put timestamps so you don't have to listen to me waffle on however, The start of this is showing, I've never met Mark before.

Danny de Hek: I talked to him on the phone for about five, 10 minutes originally on the Friday. And they said, Let's schedule the time, Let's do a podcast.

https://www.dehek.com/general/ponzi-scheme-scamalerts/is-seo-a-scam-how-to-combat-sneaky-misleading-sales-tactics-unsolicited-email-phone-call-pitches/