How NOT to Pitch SEM Services in 10 mins: Internet Advancement
January 25, 2007
Yesterday I had the displeasure of receiving a phone call from a pushy SEO salesman named John from Internet Advancement regarding a client’s site that I am currently consulting for.
Before I begin, you may be wandering who exactly is Internet Advancement?
Meta Keywords are the Key to Good Rankings ~ 2 mins
Before John had properly introduced himself or I had time to ask, he began to proceed and tell me that my client’s site was in immediate need of attention for online success. He then went onto to say rather loudly that many of the meta keywords tags on the site had errors and rectyfying this was the key to getting ranked well in Google.
(Sneakily ) Find Clients at Yahoo Directory - via new submissions ~ 4 mins
I calmly asked John to slow down and let me know a bit more about his company and where he had found my client’s site. He gave their url and informed me that he found the site on Yahoo! Directory – What’s New and then went back to telling me that keywords is where it’s at!
My naturally calm nature was being severely tested and I politely notified John that I thought he was old school and that cold calling from America was not appreciated. He then yelled back that meta keywords tags were not old school and that he had success with helping over 6000 sites to prove it!!!
Selectively Cold Call Clients… it’s better than SEO! ~ 6 mins
I then asked for examples of keywords that Internet Advancement ranked for. John then angrily asked me whether I was listening to him earlier when he mentioned that they carefully select their clients from paces like Yahoo! Directory and do not need rankings to acquire customers. Evidently rude and an SEO Jackass to boot! But wait there’s more stupidity…
Submit Repeatedly to all Search Engines… get ranked in 108 days! ~ 8 mins
After some strong disagreement, John ups the anti and goes all out for the hard sale. He becomes even more vocal and confidently informs me that they have the ability to submit the site to all the search engines several times a month. I replied that the site was already indexed and that we preferred building up inbound links to get crawled frequently. He then let me know that I had got it all wrong and re-submitting would help with rankings and not just how often a website got crawled.
I could not take anymore, it had gone from being humorous to quite disturbing – hanging up was the only way out.
Offer to Call back in 108 days whilst being hung-up on ~ 10 mins
John, pleeease don’t call back!
Comments
One Response to “How NOT to Pitch SEM Services in 10 mins: Internet Advancement”
Got something to say?
RSS
Wow… that’s truly sad, but at the same time I can’t help but laugh. I’m surprised you were able to tolerate his stupidity for a whole 10 mins… kudos to you!