Monday, July 07, 2014

What web marketing "pros" do: Buy traffic from China

I'm pissed. At midnight last night, while doing research for our class project, I learned the truth about what the "professionals" do for SEO. In between promises of organic results and "building links" for keywords, I was receiving reports showing how traffic to our site had improved significantly. Overall, I was actually pretty pleased.

However, last night, with only a few seconds of time, my world was shattered.

It was on the first page of Google Analytics. 75% of our traffic was coming from language "zh-cn." I knew that "cn" looked like Chinese but wasn't sure. I thought it might have been European as my wife does get a few calls from Europe from time to time but I didn't expect it to be 75%. It turns out it was Chinese and I got a little excited.

"We should make a Chinese language version of the site to cater to our audience!"

That thought lasted for about 14 seconds before I realized that the visitors were only on the site for about 3 seconds compared to 1min 40 seconds for US visitors.

Hackers?!

No. I'm pretty confident that the pros I am paying money to are scamming me by paying for traffic to boost the numbers when they send the reports to us.

This is a sad, sad industry but I am not a sucker any longer!
Simon

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