If you’re planning to build a website for your digital campaign or want to have a website for business purposes, then there is one thing that you need to be wary of: scammers. In the digital world, there are a lot of fraudsters, and one of the leading centers of their modus operandi is digital marketing. As business owners, we want to ensure that every penny we spend, including for digital marketing, is well spent.
Still, scammers will lure you into a false sense of security by letting them help you with digital marketing and then just run off when they have the money. They are pretty sleazy, and unfortunately, there are a lot of them out there.
If you want to avoid being scammed by fraudsters claiming to be digital marketers, it will help if you know the most common digital scams they usually plot to steal money. Here are some of them.
Business Directory Scams
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Do you remember the Yellow Pages catalog where you can list? Where you can find countless local business listings within your local area? Well, this marketing concept is still being used today online, and it’s one of the most common methods to get your brand out there on the internet.
Business directories have come a long way from the Yellow Pages. That said, there are a lot of sites out there that put out business directories. However, not all of them are created equally.
In short, not all business directories are going to be relevant to your business, which is why one thing that scammers do is that they make you pay for “relevant” business directories. Still, in truth, they will just put your business somewhere unrelated.
While this is already bad, listing your business in the wrong business directory can put your brand in a bad light and even ruin its reputation if you’re not careful.
SEO Scams
SEO has been booming lately, and many more businesses are focusing on it for a good reason. SEO is a massive boost to your Google ranking, and if you have a good SEO campaign, a lot of traffic will generate to your site, leading to more leads and profit. However, this is all done organically, and it takes a lot of time, and this is where scammers go in.
Digital scammers would promise you to have your website do a quick turnaround and have it on the first page quickly. As mentioned earlier, SEO is done organically, which means it will take a lot of time simply because the algorithm wouldn’t allow your website to be on the top rankings that fast. For your website to be on the first page, you must generate relevant content, traffic, etc.
There are a lot of US-based digital marketing agencies online, and most of them are reputable ones. However, if you’re trying to target a demographic from a certain location, it’s best to get a local agency. But why? That’s because local SEO agencies are much more aware of the trends of that particular area, allowing them to use strategies that can generate a lot of traffic from the target audience.
For instance, if your business is based in Texas, find an SEO agency that offers digital marketing services in Austin, Dallas, and other cities that you can turn to.
Social Media Click Farms
You might have heard about this in a documentary recently. This kind of scam has been trending lately, not just because a lot of businesses have been duped by it recently, but because a lot of social media “influencers” purposefully use this, which is a story for another day.
Many businesses have been guilty of focusing too much on social media recently, and while it’s not a bad idea per se, you are also prone to social media click farms.
Social media click farms give your page and post a lot of engagement, especially likes or hearts on Facebook and Twitter, respectively. While that may seem reasonable, it’s terrible since not all those likes and hearts are honest. These social media click farms have a basement full of phones programmed to click on your posts, shorts, and pages automatically. It will expose your brand in a bad light, and Google will potentially blacklist you.
“Poor” Website Performance
Another scam that’s all too commonly done by scammers is the “poor” website performance scam. They will try to drown out the client with all this jargon and technical terms and say that you have a lot of technical issues on your website.
If they manage to convince you to have them look at your website, they will come up with an imaginary issue and charge you money before they fix the issue, only for you to realize that nothing’s wrong and you have been scammed. Not only that, but by letting them look into your website, they can also steal your data for other nefarious purposes. Now that’s what we call a double whammy.
Final Words
If you’re computer savvy enough for a business owner, you might have already heard of and encountered these kinds of scams. However, for those business owners that don’t have a clue about digital marketing yet, these scams can sound too convincing and honest, which is why many people are still being scammed by them today. But with proper knowledge through research and a little bit of reliable, professional help, then you’ll never be scammed by these schemes.
